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Comment by rman666 | Hacker News Reader

No! Im still lovin’ Firefox:-)

How is their Android app? Been debating trying them out again.

I love their Android app, actually found it better than chrome on Android. Plus they have the same sync features across browsers on different devices. That is honestly the Reason I switched to Firefox about 18 months ago. Chrome at the time (still might), was slower and worked less well on Android.

I use Firefox Focus/Klar for everyday Web surfing, and Firefox beta for websites where I need to be logged in (quite rare actually).

It's great to know that every site I visit now can't track me (easily). It's like a have a fresh new browser every time. I recommend them both.

On Firefox beta, I also have installed uBlock Origin, Cookie Auto-delete, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere and Decentraleyes. Quite happy with my setup.

I use it and like it, and they'll be rolling out an update somewhat soon with a complete makeover of the rendering engine (switching to GeckoView from whatever they have now), so I'm hopeful that rendering will get faster.

I like it because:

- syncs with desktop Firefox - has extensions (I mostly use Bitwarden and an ad blocker) - interface is nice to use - available in F-Droid

It's fast enough for me, though I haven't used mobile Chrome for years, so I guess I don't know what I'm missing.

The switch to Geckoview is for Firefox Focus, which previously used Blink (the Chrome rendering engine).

Standard Firefox for Android has used Gecko from the start. It is gradually being upgraded using the Quantum improvements, but the rate of change seems slow. I thought that the emphasis on multi-threaded processing in Quantum would be particularly useful for mobile, because the single threaded processing capability of mobile (and particularly non-Apple mobile chips) is very limited, but there don't seem to have been massive improvements.

I think it’s a shame they relegated Servo to a research project, integrating Servo into Gecko has been long-winded, and the most important target of porting a parallel/multi-threaded layout engine isn’t even being discussed. Frankly, given their $500m budget, their core mission of browser development, and the massive importance of mobile, they probably should have pursued both Gecko and Servo at the same time. Even if Servo only supported flexbox layouts it could be very useful as a wrapper while wider compability was being pursued. The emphasis now is on WebVR, which seems not very relevant to the mass market.

The Servo team is very active.

Unfortunately, it's trying to hit a fast-moving target, and that's really hard. Which is the reason for which I believe nobody else is currently pursuing any new web engine.

I also used Firefox on Android for a pretty long period, but to be honest I ended up moving to Brave.

I run Nightly so I get the improvements quickly, but even with that Firefox is still far behind Chrome.

- Firefox does not have a JIT for 64-bit ARM (AArch64). Didn't benchmark but this does make a difference.

- Running a extension based ad blocker seems to degrade performance and the difference visible on a smartphone SoC. I think Brave has it written in native code and deeply integrated, and it seems to perform without making things super slow.

- While I can't judge on the UI (actually I miss the tab gestures on Firefox), Firefox often glitches like not loading custom tabs, page search getting stuck and some others. This was quite stressful.

- The sync is super glitchy. It can easily be days outdated unless you trigger it manually.

if you're concerned about performance, why would you use nightly? i've never benchmarked the difference between other people's release, beta, and nightly builds, but i know at my day job the daily builds are likely to have performance regressions that won't necessarily be fixed until beta or release.

Because it's also the first to get major rewrites. The Stylo CSS engine used to be Nightly only, and Nightly is basically the only channel you can test the latest Quantum components.

There are no real improvements coming to Firefox Nightly on Android. All the real action is happening in Firefox Focus with GeckoView: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/wiki/Release... and in Fenix: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix

Fennec (Firefox for Android) is basically in maintenance mode.

FWIW: Firefox Focus Nightly is a much better implementation of Gecko on Android than Fennec ever was, with the caveat that Sync, sessions, or extensions are not available.

I use an Android without Google Play Services. Firefox (Fennec on F-Droid) probably isn't as fast as Chrome, but it's very usable. Being able to use desktop addons like uBlock is great. I haven't found any compatibility issues with the websites I use.

In the settings there's an option to add a 'Quit' button to the menu, which will clear all cookies / history / etc. when you quit FF using menu->quit (so your session is still saved if you just go to the home screen and come back later). IMO that's better than Firefox Focus, which has adblocking and ephemeral sessions built in but doesn't let you have tabs.

I use the mobile Firefox on stock Android. There are certain issues like emails from Gmail not showing up correctly. But that's a minor pain compared to the adblockers and other features that I can use.

Works very well. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for at least a year now. Latest version is great and I recently noticed it even supports Firefox extensions (at least some of them!), which I don't believe android Chrome does.

It's far, far better than chrome. It even has the same extension mechanism so you can get ublock origin on you mobile device as well.

I also use firefox on android. It's really good.

Browsing on ff on Android right now. I think its great. Probably once a week I see a site that I have to use chrome for, but other than that small inconvenience, Firefox is great.

It's really good, I'm using it now, but Google deliberately cripple the UI on it unless you use a user agent switcher.

There's a specific plugin for it, Google Search Fixer.

I'm using Firefox Focus on Android as my only browser for a year now and it's great!

Same and it works with unlock origin.

It was a bit tougher a year ago but recent versions are spot on, I've largely forgotten it's not chrome as it just stays out the way.

It's very good. Brave Browser is also quite good.

I have been using it for years, I've never had any reason to use Chrome on Android at all. :)

Firefox Android is more important than the desktop version as that's the only way to have uBlock on mobile.

We are the minority at this point.

Unfortunately so but I’m happy with it here.

Firefox FTW, since it's completely open source.

Since no one has mentioned it yet, please also try firefox lite on android its 3.5MB and very usable. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.ro...

Looks like it's only available to some countries in Asia [0]. I've been using Firefox Focus on my phone (uses Webkit under the hood), since regular Firefox is too slow.

[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/get-started-firefox-lit...

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