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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

So many people complain about Firefox (current) being "slow", "clunky", have "bad performance" etc. I feel like I'm the only one who is completely fine with performance of this app? I've switched to FF on android fully 3 years ago, first on a phone with SD821, now with SD855. I realize that these are flagship SoCs, but I see people with high-end phones complain about it too. As a control - I also use old and modern iPads with stock Safari. I honestly don't get what the complaints are exactly, it opens as fast as any similar app, all UI controls are responsive (there are some animations, but they are intentional), scrolling is always smooth.

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No I feel the same I'm using Firefox mobile since years in middle class Android phones and have absolutely no complains about performance.

Same for Firefox on Linux btw.

I share your opinion.

BUT, I am also using uBlock Origin with Javascript blocked by default. This makes a huge difference.

Otherwise the current Firefox mobile is considerably slower for me than Chrome, especially on uncached sites. Haven't tried Preview yet.

same here, also chrome sandbox is specially useful for me, due work

I think it works fine as well, especially as adblocking (which already works for some time now for me?) removes a lot of load - I think in raw perceived speed, Chrome might still lead on adfree-sites.

More recently it also stopped crashing with a lot of tabs "bookmarked" (and does not loose them on a crash).

If you think Firefox for Android is fast, have you tried Firefox Preview? It's like twice or three times faster.

Sadly, Firefox Preview is not currently free software, which is a showstopper for many. In particular it cannot be obtained through F-Droid:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/162

There is an unofficial repo, if you simply care more about using F-Droid/de-Googling than it being free software, specifically.

https://gitlab.com/rfc2822/fdroid-firefox

Thanks. I haven't downloaded it to check, but from the GitHub issue I mentioned above that repo just contains a copy of the official Mozilla .apk, which contains com.google.android.gms and com.google.firebase. So it's not so good for "de-Googling".

I'm a lot less interested in the mechanics of using F-Droid than I am in the no-malware guarantee that F-Droid effectively provides.

Yes, I've installed it half a year ago and tested for some time (couldn't switch due to lack of adblock). It is very cool, OneUI-like interface, dark theme, a lot of small improvements. But speed? It is fast, about the same as current trunk FF, maybe there are less or shorter animations but overall it feels exactly the same, maybe it is faster by few percents but I can't see it as a user without using benchmarks. Normal FF is fast on my phone.

PS: I just checked - uBlock is available in Preview, woohoo, I can try it more now :) . Strange that it is the only addon available in my app, no NoScript, Badger and HtttpsE there (latest version).

Yup. I use Firefox as standard browser on my phone, and even on an antiquated Samsung tablet (galaxy tab 3, Android 4.2, dual core and 1GB of RAM) with some extensions, and it's perfectly functional and usable.

Perfomance has always been good for me but there are a few bugs that made me question if I should keep using it.

On mobile, for example, I sometimes get blank pages when trying to visit a website and it will stop working until I restart the phone (internet is good because any other browser works). It is very rare to happen but it does.

I've been using it on SailfishOS through Android emulation and even there it's fine. This is on thoroughly mid-range phones.

For me it is worse than any Chrome based browser with an ad blocker such as brave (there probably are many in the play store). Slower, clunky, janky... Maybe if you don't compare it to another browser it seems like a good experience, but it really is not.

Also good luck tapping on a small link in Firefox mobile, tap targets are bigger in Chrome than in Firefox.

Tap targets are hell. On certain forums I like to open comments by using link in the comments number below the post and they register once in 2-4 tries usually. That I need to check in other browsers, I thought it was bad everywhere.

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