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gbrown

Firefox mobile on Android with uBlock origin is currently a vastly superior experience to Chrome.

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And the Redirect AMP to HTML [1] addon, I enjoy my AMP-free life.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

Thank you! I didn't know this AMP redirect extension existed. Installing immediately!

And you can redirect any website (say, a news site to an archive.org copy) with the Redirector addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

This is an amazing find. I hate AMP sites.

Thanks you so much!

There are also a couple of link-cleaning add-ons that are really nice if you want to reshare links opened through, say, Facebook

(not on mobile, so not sure which one I'm using)

Ad blocking on android really is Firefox's killer app. I'm surprised it isn't more popular just because of this.

I think a lot of people don't realise it's there. Isn't Chrome installed by default on most devices?

Average Joe users don't know about it. Mozilla never advertised the 'no ads on mobile' feature at all.

From a selfish POV isn't it better as an adblock user that other users don't use adblock? Then they unwittingly subsidize your pleasant ad free experience.

I get what you mean, but I wish more people used Adblock so that more sites would be forced to switch to contextual non-surveillance advertising. I'd get to support sites more while maintaining privacy.

As more people switched to contextual ads, the ecosystem for it would also improve and rates would hopefully increase (for smaller sites).

What makes you think that ad blockers wouldn't also block contextual ads?

Because adblockers depend on things coming from 3rd party ad servers doing instant auctions for ads based on user profiles. They do it client side because the latencies involved vs doing it server side are far less.

With non-surveliance based ads, they can make the ads completely indistinguishable from normal content in their CMS and make it look like first party content and server side based. And since the user info will be minimal beyond an IP, it will mostly be content based vs. user based. They can even do things like podcasts & youtubes videos do with sponsorships that come with the content.

They don't do it because it doesn't make as much money as the current status quo and would require more work to integrate if it was offered.

From a selfish point of view, I care more about the benefits to me brought by Firefox having a bigger market share and Mozilla having more influence on the development of the web, than the benefits brought to me by other people looking at ads.

I can second this. Along with "Popup Blocker (strict)" and "HTTPS Everywhere", the web is a lot less annoying. But Firefox on Android has some basic issues: the tabs go dead/unresponsive on some JS heavy websites.

Why do you need a strict popup blocker? I honestly can't remember the last time I got a popup ad, but there are useful popups every once in a while (oauth logins, etc). It seems more annoying than anything.

Some blogs have scripts that hijack clicks.

I found Firefox + uBlock almost unusable on my Pixel 2XL and use Brave. But I'm glad the options exist at all... I just wish more hardware was more open at Manufacturer End of Live (when they stop updating). So that third parties could continue support better. There's definitely a need for right to repair laws at this point.

What kind of issues did you run into? And how long ago was this?

I use FF Nightly with uBlock Origin on my Pixel 2 XL in addition to Blokada, and it works just fine.

Was probably close to launch, almost 2 years ago now... I've been pretty happy with Brave overall, and also found Firefox UI a little frustrating by comparison so didn't worry too much to retry since.

Could very well be better now... I've tended to try FF on most platforms about once a year as my main browser. I do tend to test in it for dev though. My current app doesn't really have a mobile target (mainly deals with scanned images, so desktop is primary).

FWIW, coming from Chrome, the Firefox mobile UI was very frustrating to me also for about two weeks 'til I got used to it. Now it feels familiar and seamless.

Thanks for reminding me about this. I kept thinking "Google Chrome on Android is unbearable because of all the ads", and your post reminded me I could do something about it. Just installed Firefox + muBlock Origin. Thanks!

I've been using Firefox mobile for years and really love it. It's always been a vastly better experience than Chrome. I usually use DNS based adblockers on my phone though; AdAway+rooting via magisk.

Gesture tab switching (swiping on the top bar) is the killer feature for me. I use Firefox but with great sacrifice, because swiping is so ingrained in my workflow.

Without rooting, you can use the VPN blocking provided by AdGuard. It has some paid features (like ad blocking in apps), which it sometimes reminds about, but otherwise I am happy to use both Chrome and Firefox for Android without advertisements.

Check out Blokada. It's a free open source app that does the same thing.

I really want to switch for this reason, but I've naively come to rely on Chrome's saved passwords feature. What I really need is a tool to migrate my saved passwords from Google to Firefox or some other service.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/switch/

You can easily migrate to any of the browser independent password managers: 1Password, BitWarden, LastPass, etc.

lastpass has a lot of import / export options as far as I remember, so that might be a good place to start... but once you get them imported you should be able to export them to another service easily enough.

ive moved to bitwarden a few months ago and it is far superior and a lot less bloated than lastpass.

Is there a way to increase the font in firefox? Maybe an addon? That is my only gripe with it. I know I can use Reader mode and even increase the font at the OS level but I would rather not do that.

Does it exist / work on iOS?

No, other browsers on iOS are basically wrapping Safari. If you want ad blocking on iOS, you have to use an app that uses the content blocker API. My favorite is 1Blocker X, which seems to be pretty well reviewed as well.

As mentioned in another comment, iOS doesn't allow extensions. But Firefox Focus works quite well, and comes with a content (ad) blocker. Any content blocker you enable in Settings.app is used by all browsers.

i prefer Firefox Focus

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