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Comment by swinglock | Hacker News Reader

Extensions is the ONLY reason to use Firefox on Android. It's not good browser compared to Chrome on slower Android phones, apart from being customizable.

To me it's even the single biggest reason to use Android over iOS as there's no full featured browser on iOS.

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> Extensions is the ONLY reason to use Firefox on Android.

Well, no. I don't want to use a browser that is developed by an advertising company, and I want to encourage the development of more than one web rendering engine. But yes, killing extensions would be a major regression in Firefox's usability.

True, me neither. But politics aside, it's the only technical reason, for me. I'd rather switch to iOS and Safari than Android and Chrome, which I will consider.

> Well, no. I don't want to use a browser that is developed by an advertising company

... on an operating system developed by the exact same advertising company?

If there was a viable competitor, I would consider using it. There isn't.

There is. You just don't want to spend the money or use the phones/tablets from said competitor.

iOS is not a competitor for my needs.

iOS doesn't allow you to use other browser engines.

I'm personally a big fan of iOS, but coldpie's (and others in this thread) needs seem to be in third party browser capability that doesn't exist in iOS so with that, I wouldn't recommend it to them. I don't think it is a matter of spending money on competitor's devices so much as competitor's devices don't meet their needs.

It'd be acceptable if we could run code on it, as root, like we actually own it.

iOS doesn't allow anywhere near the level of customization that Android does, nor does it allow 3rd party browser engines at all, however there's Sailfish OS and maybe the Librem 5 soon.

postmarketos is beginning to support cellular capabilities. You may not have to wait a whole lot longer.

LineageOS[1] exists, and it may as well be a non-GNU mobile distribution of Linux with support for Android apps like Firefox.

[1] https://lineageos.org/

I've given up on custom ROMs. There's always only an extremely limited set of devices that are supported, and those devices are EOL rather too quickly, forcing us to use custom builds from someone not directly affiliated with the project.

To be clear, not one of the Android devices I've purchased have ever had official support. I'm using a Samsung a8 at the moment.

I hope the custom rom community finds a better mechanism for providing better device coverage.

Custom ROMs are rarely developed for Samsung devices these days because Samsung locks the bootloader and makes everything extremely difficult. Buy a device that is more developer-friendly like a Nexus, Pixel or OnePlus and you'll see a much larger selection of custom ROMs.

The last Nexus was released 4 years ago. The two pixel models and the OnePlus 7 make 3 choices of currently manufactured models.

Are you aware of a current model phone that is officially supported by lineageos?

lineage always supports google devices (pixel)

Their docs only list the first generation Pixel:

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#google

The Nexus 5X isn't supported (yet?) by the latest version of LineageOS (16).

The "Linux" kernel even in something like LineageOS is heavily forked and in practically every case relies on userspace binary blobs for critically-important functionality. It's a far cry from what you can run on PC's, although postmarketOS is moving towards that goal. BTW it's not like Android itself is to blame for this, since other varieties of embedded Linux (by and large) are the same deal; the buck stops with SoC- and embedded-hardware manufacturers.

To be fair, the new Firefox Preview (aka fenix) seems to go a long way towards changing that. I agree that they damn well better release with extension support (and I think they will), but it's pretty reasonable to get the core browser stable first.

Give Kiwi Browser a shot on Android. It's a fork of Chrome with all the google tracking removed and fully supports Chrome Add-ons. I love it and it's fast (I was a long time Firefox on Android user but it just got to slow to use).

Chromium fork with closed source patches? No thanks.

You do you [1]

[1] https://github.com/kiwibrowser

This is just for show. [1]

>No. The browser is not fully open source like open in open source. It is a common myth and misconception about Kiwi Browser.

>Damn, 1 commit and nothing else but keeps updating and releasing apks? Looked into the issues and scarcely seen replies.

>I think this repo is just to show that "hey, I provided the so-called source code (even though not fully open-source as said above) so trust me and install me" thing.

[1]: https://github.com/kiwibrowser/android/issues/30

The way you share quotes sounds like you personally have a problem with the browser :D

Kiwi was started as a fun+independent project, then more and more people asked access to some source to be able to develop their own hacks (new tab page, extensions, bottom toolbar, import/export bookmarks, AMP, etc) and they are shared when the devs ask politely.

At the end of the day, if you use Samsung, Kiwi, Fennec or Yandex, what matters is to understand why the developers are doing their project, what do they get from it (not necessarily money), and what are the influences around. The source-code is one indicator, and, unless you actually have reproducible builds (and only Fennec has them from all the mentioned browsers) you have to use your intuition.

Sorry, I've just copied the first two replies.

>unless you actually have reproducible builds (and only Fennec has them from all the mentioned browsers) you have to use your intuition.

F-droid does independent builds. Even if it's not reproducible, I trust them more than over some random developer.

Well, that's what I say, Fennec is your only option. For now, there are no Chromium-based browsers on F-Droid (except the WebView-based browsers, which ironically, runs on proprietary software as well in the background). If you find one truly open-source and reproducible Chromium browser, I'm intrigued, but as far as I know, they all pretend to be on F-Droid (= fake external F-Droid repo) but are not done by F-Droid team (which is sad). The closest I found was https://gitlab.com/thermatk/Unobtainium but still depends on proprietary code as far as I know.

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