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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

Taking users away from Google is still a big ask. Google has been thoroughly anti-competitive in this space - they deliberately downgrade the experience in non-Chrome browsers across many properties. For example, typing "GOOG stock" in Chrome/Android brings up a whole lot of details not found with Firefox/Android. There's no technical reason to do this, and they should be pulled up for abuse of monopoly power. Google search itself was better on Chrome till recently, though it's caught up now on Firefox/Android.

Add: I've been a Firefox/Android user for a while now - and with ad-blocking the UX experience and battery life is much better than with Chrome. I encourage everyone to try it (with ad-blocking) for at least a week. Personally for me, Firefox on Android is a bigger deal than on the desktop.

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Just downloaded Firefox on Android following your advice. I'm a heavy firefox user on the destkop, but I rarely think about installing firefox on my cellphones since 1. Firefox in Firefox OS was slow and it gave me a feeling that firefox was not for mobile (but I guess it's not true anymore) 2. The fact that Chrome is the default browser and I generally don't install many apps.

The fact that it is the default on Android makes the game very unfair.

> The fact that it is the default on Android makes the game very unfair.

The EU is already looking into this, and other antitrust issues with Android and even Google Search in general.

> Firefox in Firefox OS was slow and it gave me a feeling that firefox was not for mobile (but I guess it's not true anymore)

I genuinely don't understand how Firefox on mobile is slow. I hear this complaint often (along with the complaint of Firefox on desktop not being able to run certain websites, which also never occurs to me), but for how much I try, I never managed to make Firefox on mobile (android) slow. There were a couple of days not long ago (we are talking weeks) were after an update the browser did get indeed a little slow, but it was still usable, and it got fixed very quickly.

I use the hell out of my Firefox, both on desktop and mobile. I abuse it in all sorts of ways, and I am extremely demanding of it, yet it never breaks a sweat. Right now I have more than 100 tabs open in my Firefox on android - can't tell the exact number because when the 100th tab is opened, the number just becomes an infinity symbol - which is nothing more than average for me, I can easily get to 350, and it still opens and loads up instantly (at the time of the performance problem mentioned above I had ~260 tabs open).

Am I just lucky? Do the performances/usability change so vastly from phone to phone and person to person?

Firefox on Android has a notable scrolling delay which drives me nuts. iOS guarantees that the point where your finger first makes contact remains under that finger as you scroll. Most good Android apps can deliver on this promise 99%, but for some reason, Firefox on Android does not.

Firefox on Android here; Can't reproduce the delay, everything seems fine.

An advantage to using Firefox Mobile is google search results suddenly become free of AMP crap

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