Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Firefox can't really exist on iOS, only a shell on top of apple's browser engine.

For what it's worth, there used to be a "full" Firefox for iOS, about 10 years ago. Apple blocked its release, though.

The rendering engine is largely irrelevant to me as a user on mobile. (Though of course having the actual one would be better.) Firefox sync is the meat of the deal.

> Firefox sync is the meat of the deal.

Firefox sync really is neat, but be aware that for the last several years it has had a security flaw, one which the Firefox team has no interest in fixing (in fact, they consider it a feature!): your passwords and other private data are encrypted with your Firefox Account password. That would be fine so long as a) your Firefox Account password is truly secure and b) Mozilla can never see it. Unfortunately, they can: they serve an HTML page to log in to your Firefox account, which loads JavaScript from their servers. At any point they can start serving JavaScript which sends all passwords to their servers.

What is so very, truly disappointing is that they used to have a great, easy-to-use Sync security system which was immune to this sort of attack, but they removed it.

Anyway, I cannot advise using Firefox Sync for private information anymore.

What is your threat model in which somehow Mozilla's ability to serve you JavaScript is a problem because they might use it to attack you, but Mozilla having written the entire program you're running isn't a problem?

They can almost-indetectably target an individual user or group of users at any point in time in the former case while the latter case would leave traces in e.g. git histories.

I trust Mozilla to write Firefox and I trust Debian to package it. I do not trust Mozilla to be trustworthy on a live and ongoing basis.

Sure if you don't want modern browser features like web worker, addons, and updates.

Agreed, sync is a great feature, but last I checked iOS content blockers only work with Safari, not any other apps that use WKWebView. So stupidly, I have both Focus and Firefox on my iOS phone, but only Safari can use the Focus content blocker. It’s pretty terrible.

I find it super odd that Firefox Focus doesn't let you sign into Firefox Sync. I would just use that browser for everything.

Have to used a local VPN from AdGuard to circumvent it and sometimes it glitches.

AdGaurd looks like a Safari content blocker and not a VPN to me.

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-ios/overview.html

AdGuard Pro, the paid version, uses the VPN interface to block ads.

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-ios-pro/overview.html

Personally, that's enough for me. I've been using Firefox on iOS for at least a year or so, together with Lockwise (their password manager).

Does Lockwise support easy import/export of passwords from/to other password managers? I'd like to use it, but I really don't want to put all eggs in one basket.

Can I associate one login/password pair with multiple domains?

I don't think it supports import or export. One login can indeed be saved and used over multiple subdomains.

Firefox without addons is like pizza without tomato sauce. Sure you can do it, but...

You don't enjoy the occasional white pizza? I'd say it's more like pizza without cheese...but you can do that too. Tomato Pie's are pretty good every now and then. How about pizza without toppings? Some restaurants even call toppings add-ons.

I think of it more like supporting a local pizzeria. Firefox gets me 100% there on my desktop and using it on iOS sends Apple some sort of number that I prefer using it over the stock browser.

I still remember Firefox around its version 1.5, where you literally couldn't use it without extensions, even some basic things like Tab Recovery was only available through them.

A thing that annoys me is that any browser in iOS except Safari doesn’t support getUserMedia to allow camera access to do things like scan qrcodes from the site. I'm wondering if it's an artificial limitation Apple imposed to encourage people to use Safari.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com