Things about the new Firefox browser for Android
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
- The address/search bar is much much inferior. Much less relevant results now come up first. When typing the domain name of a site I visit daily said site will come up low on the list, needing to scroll, while some autocompleted address I've never visited once will be on top.
- Extensions are not supported. A single supported extension does not count.
- The thumbnails are removed from the tab list. Not a huge loss but I had gotten used to it
- Popups each time you close a tab use up unnecessary screen space. Also they often just stay there.
- The address bar is now at the bottom. Change for the sake of change.
I don't know if all of these issues will transfer to the new Firefox, but I wish they would have brought in the engine changes only. Current UI is fine.
This can be changed in Settings > Toolbar > Top.
They -don't- support extensions yet, but they did make it approachable for people like me who simply won't browse the web without an adblocker.
But from reading this they will ship the update to everyone before all extensions are ready? That really sucks for me, because I also use a password manager and a bunch of userscripts on my current mobile ff.
The whole point of extensions is they allow anyone to add functionality, not just selected parties. It is not clear at this point whether or not Firefox will make true extension support a priority.
This new Firefox for Android is shaking up to be far more limited than Chrome's Web Store which is almost as notorious for removing content as Apple's App Store.
This was just recently fixed! The "undo closed tab" toast now hides itself immediately when you switch to a new tab.
Is this a Chrome thing? I thought it was just a user-hating web design thing.
A lot of news sites seem to have a topbar that becomes invisible when you scroll down and reappears when you scroll up. I can't stand this. I want to scroll a particular line of text to the top of the text pane. I don't care where the top of the text pane is. I don't care whether the topbar is visible or invisible. But adjusting the topbar's visibility in response to scrolling makes it actually impossible to scroll the text to where I want it to be.
Also, my experience with buttons on the bottom with larger phones is that frequently you end up trying to extend your thumb and hitting a button with your palm, so YMMV anyway.
I agree. It's also very minor, but one feature I miss from the old Firefox is being able to scroll the address horizontally. Now you have to tap on it, which opens the keyboard.
- Extensions are not supported...
Edit: maybe I misread the article. Do they mean that they're going to replace the old Firefox with Preview in it's current state? It would definitely be horrible if they pushed a downgrade that removes extension support (even if they plan to add more support later).
AFAIK they're adding the extensions API used by all extensions, but they're going incrementally by trying to support APIs used by popular extensions first. They even said they plan to add more extensions soon. Ideally, once the extension API is solid they'll allow you to install from the addon store (like old Firefox). It would be awful if they only allowed you to install they're recommended extensions.
> The thumbnails are removed from the tab list...
That was a nice feature. The icon beside tab names is pretty big, maybe they could add an option to make it even bigger and show a tab thumbnail.
> Popups each time you close a tab use up unnecessary screen space...
Agreed, although I like being able to undo if I accidentally close one. I much prefer the way the old Firefox did it (basically the same thing, but a slimmer banner touching the bottom of the screen). Hopefully they improve this somehow.
> The address bar is now at the bottom...
As someone with a large phone I appreciate this, but if you don't like it you can change it back to the top in settings.
The most important feature for me ist the tab queue, which allows one to open tabs in the background. My whole mobile web-workflow depends on this feature and they did not implement this, which makes Fenix inferior for me despite the improved performance.
If you also depend on this feature, please chime in on Github: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/470
Everyone keeps saying this, but I haven't experienced it myself, and haven't seen any objective evidence for it. On objective benchmarks that I've tried, Preview is maybe 5-10% faster at best. Subjectively I haven't noticed a difference.
They also slowed down the GUI animations to the point where it's visibly slow to me (and maybe a little janky too?). I prefer the older Firefox for Android for that reason alone. (Then again that may just be a personal preference: I switch the Android animations to double speed in the developer options.)
Totally agree with you on the rest of your complaints. They all ring true for me, individually and together.
At best I could imagine that Mozilla is privy to internal metrics showing that some overwhelming proportion of users have uBlock Origin as their only extension, which I could absolutely believe. Still, what sort of timeframe will it take to support the remaining addons, and why couldn't the new browser have baked on the nightly channel for a while longer until extension support was completed?
I would not be surprised if "_the_ adblocker" was actually Adblock Plus.
Mozillas own FAQ on the subject, with many more questions in the comments there: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/02/11/faq-for-extension...
If you don't want things to break occasiinally just use normal Firefox not a pre-release
> At that time, other add-ons will be supported (although there’s a chance that some of the ones you currently have installed will not be supported.)
I don't know what else you can expect? That add ons will never be deprecated?
>I don't know what else you can expect? That add ons will never be deprecated?
I thought we went through the whole round of destroying support for non-WebExtensions so that we wouldn't have to do this ever again.
This update will initially include support for one of the most popular extensions..."
Having support for exactly one means you don't support the others. They also say "Additional extensions will be supported in subsequent releases", which implies they aren't supported initially. Also supported by someone's link to https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/02/11/faq-for-extension..., thanks for that.
It's phrased in a way that avoids saying outright what they are actually doing (dropping support), though.
And they're going to restore extension functionality, so the power users who depend on extensions can keep the current version and wait if they wish.
I put the odds of that somewhere around the same as the odds that GNOME Screensaver will ever support any of the xscreensaver demos it claimed it would … which is to say, I'm not holding my breath.
Unfortunately, web browsers are one of the few applications where "keep the current version" is not a viable option. Web browsers are very exposed to every web site they visit (including code injected by ad networks), and once a new version is released, many serious vulnerabilities on the previous version are revealed (for instance, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities... is the list for Firefox). Keeping an old version can be a serious security risk.
Fuck this is so frustrating.
Does this just enable all scripts loaded by that site, or does it allow filtering by domain the scripts themselves are loaded from?
E.g. when browsing site.com you want to allow site.com (and often sitestatic.com or something), but still not allow doubleclick.net even though it's loaded by the same page.
It's generally better to use ublock origin on it's own than to use ublock origin with umatrix or ublock with noscript. Mainly because ublock origin comes wiht neutralising anti-adblock scripts that would get blocked if you combine it with a separate script blocker.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/706xrr/umatrix_vs_...
Here is a good tutorial on how to use ublock origin in advanced mode.
A classic example of the baffling transparent corporate bare-faced lie. Nobody is going to believe it's ready, so why on earth say that?
Another bitter thing about this is that as much as the new Preview UI is slicker, it's actually browsing noticeably slower on my Google Pixel.
The reason I've heard is that the new GeckoView architecture requires piping each and every WebExtension API through a Java layer (that naturally doesn't exist on desktop). So it's some amount of manual work per API entry. The definition of the MVP only included critical extensions like reader mode and uBlock. And there's still a fair bit of other work remaining for the MVP, so nobody can spare time for noncritical tasks.
Whether that's the right definition of the MVP, and how many resources we'll be able to spend on it post-MVP (especially post-layoffs)... your guess is as good as mine, I'm going by the same public info you have.
Extensions are a pretty important distinguishing factor of mobile firefox, though.
Can't things be a work in progress?
The issue is when you push a work in progress as a replacement for a finished solution
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla but not on our Android browser)
I don't see them listed in about:crashes though, so I'm unsure how to follow up about them.
From there GitHub project it doesn't sound like the only thing that won't meet feature parity in the new version.
That being said I am using nightly preview and am really enjoying it and would recommend it.
And if you still want all those extensions you could always fork the current version like waterfox.
Anyway, I dont use firefox due to speed but as I dont want any of google products on my phone, regardless of how fast they are. It is not about speed. It is about having some dignity within survailance capitalism. And I am filtering everything trough mitm proxy so I dont need ublock. For the fingerprinting part... I wont update untill they fix this mess.
Of course I usually have JavaScript disabled.
It's such a questionable decision. I understand that addons take a while to support, I understand for most users it's still an upgrade since they don't use extensions, I understand that at some point you need real users instead of just beta-testers. But they're taking a huge step backwards for user freedom. It's a bad look for Mozilla.
I'm disappointed. I wish they'd develop the apps in parallel until they had actual feature parity. Even if the old version of Firefox got pushed to a separate app; I'd be fine uninstalling Firefox and reinstalling 'Firefox Classic' from Mozilla. I feel like they don't really understand what the community response to this is going to be.
See: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/706xrr/umatrix_vs_...
(I would also suspect, without concrete evidence, that an average default mobile browser user has more valuable data on their phone - Firefox seems like the browser of choice for the same sort of refuseniks who would still do most of their online banking and what-not on PC only rather than installing their bank's app)
It's not like they're "removing" it, they rewrote half the browser and not all of the APIs are hooked back up yet. They're going to be added back eventually.
A lot of corporate communication wizards might be required to dress this up as something else than direct removal.
For most users this is a distinction without a difference.
It's a Preview release for a reason. Mozilla aren't exactly pulling a KDE 4 here.
Given that any changes have to work their way through the Beta channel, too, there's not much time left for landing changes in Nightly that will still make it into the first Release version... so the first official Release version that will be pushed out to everybody will indeed be in an unfinished state.
Breaking people's experiences and worfklows in an extreme way is demonstrably not high on their list of concerns.
Collections would be ok if it kept the old UI of a 2x4 grid. Instead I get to see 2 sites at first, and have to scroll to see more. If I close a tab, I'm not able to use the bottom 1/4 of the screen for ~2 seconds while the undo popup hangs out. This means even more scrolling. This decluttering really sucks imo.
The other annoying thing is that the upgrade starts up with an empty collection screen. The upgrade should have created a default collection populated with my 2x4 grid for me. Come on Mozilla, stop giving me paper cuts like this.
I imagine collections were the driving force here. If the new behavior (collections) were shipped separately, I imagine they would have certainly migrated installations to have a default `recents` collection that users could then easily delete (or migrate and maintain manually)! What a nice situation that would have been as everyone would have gotten exactly what they wanted.
If the new UI were tested separately, I can't imagine it would have gotten positive feedback. But maybe I'm just an old grump and most people like it better? It seems like shipping the UI change as a separate feature would have easily identified that the grid view was something a lot of people liked.
To make such changes, commercial products I've worked on did these steps:
1. test with some users in 1:1 sessions
2. incorporate the feedback (or consider dropping the alternative, if most all feedback was negative)
3. implement metrics
4. launch to 0.5 - 1% of users. See metrics AND feedback.
5. incorporate feedback
6. gradually launch to more
7. at some point, remove the old way
I agree it's hard to do these with volunteer work. That's how some hard issues are never solved, but Gnome gets new apps or rewrites on existing apps with almost every release -- that's the fun work. It's volunteered, so take it, or leave it, or DYI, or pay somebody.
PS: I've reached out to a few Mozilla staff via LinkedIn with a proposal for a new commercial product, but nobody replied. Anyone has a contact there? Proposal: A Google Suite alternative for businesses, provided by Mozilla both as a cloud service and on-premise. Dual licensing, AGPL and Enterprise: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17czxzh20c8ouhrX-iZPS2BH8...
Also, it would be available as a cloud offer, which Nextcloud doesn't seem to have.
Well, everyone who has at least Android 5... which excludes about 10% of the android landscape[1].
Most of these people probably still haven't upgraded because they a)can't afford it or b) use their devices until they're broken and will not buy a new device simply because it's newer.
I understand the move, but still, Mozilla has to communicate this in the right way and not "Everyone will have to update and if you can't, sorry for you, not our business"
The problem is, of course, manufacturers who refuse to support their phones with updates for more than a couple years. Many 6-year-old phones work just fine (some needing battery replacements at some point), but any 6-year-old phone that hasn't had updates in 3-4 years sadly just shouldn't be used if you value security at all.
The root of the problem is that phones have so much proprietary hardware with closed source drivers that prevent the end-user from keeping the OS up-to-date like we can on PCs. If I wanted to, I could put a completely modern version of Linux on a 15-year-old desktop and it'd work fine, assuming the hardware's still fine. But with phone OSs you're completely at the mercy of your phone's manufacturer for OS releases, and so "six year old smartphone" necessarily means "smartphone missing probably at least 2-3 years of security updates and multiple OS versions behind the latest". It doesn't have to be that way, but that's the world phone manufacturers have created for us, and they have no incentive to change it.
I don't think any high end devices have user replaceable batteries and the battery is likely to be very degraded after 6 years of use.
I've been considering getting one and that's one of the things that's held me back (I use Firefox as my browser on my current tablet I'd be replacing)
> This update will initially include support for one of the most popular extensions on Android, uBlock Origin. Additional extensions will be supported in subsequent releases
... if it supports exactly 1 extension, it is absolutely not "extension-ready"!
No user-facing advantage yet, sadly.
I find the attitudes about extensions and UX in general to be evolving in a strange way. People used to focus on the 80/20 rule, make what 80% of people want to do easy, and the remaining 20% possible. But now many people seem to be saying "if most people don't need it, it's not important." But that just takes products down a path of diminishing ability that is dictated by a few UX people and the personas they test with, and when we're talking about a general purpose product like a browser it means fewer opportunities for anyone to create and use innovative features.
Releases are available through an official F-Droid repository as well as GitHub. It is a very well run project.
My wishlist: 1. collections syncing to my Firefox account and desktop Firefox 2. a menu option to move a page from private mode to normal mode where I'm logged into things; right now I copy/paste the url 3. (sadly) an easy way to open the current page in Chrome.
The biggest issue I've run into is some app sign-in flows that roll through the browser or webview break when using Firefox private by default. I switch Chrome to the default temporarily to work around this.
There's also a bug in Android (official and LOS) which I've encountered many times related to location detection in certain always-on GPS apps, causing a systems freeze and a reboot. This sucks, but it's a bug with Android, not with the application itself.
The Android/LOS peeps should really take a look at this though. I don't expect this to be the only app that can cause this and with some severe bad luck the crash might even be exploitable.
a) when closing a tab the option to revert that action gets stuck most of the time on my screen and it's hard to get the timing right - if you do it too soon you gonna actually restore the tab but if you do it later it'll stop working and just disappear
b) downloading some attachments creates 0byte or incomplete file in my download folder, not sure what's going on there
I also use Firefox Focus for links from external apps.
> We do a staged roll-out before publishing APKs. As far as I'm aware neither are at 100% which is a requirement for posting the builds. The APK is available from automation in the meantime if you want: https://firefox-ci-tc.services.mozilla.com/tasks/index/proje...
I already switched from Nightly to the Release version to continue using extensions.