Firefox Android Build that caused issues is working as intended
theregister.com
theregister.com
The real ones is that Firefox Quantum is finally out for Android (Firefox for Android jumped from version 68.0 to 79.0), and this bought a completely new interface too.
Now, the new interface is very nice (bottom navigator bar FTW) and the browser is much faster, but it lost some features and there is a limited number of extensions available for now (Mozilla seems to be manually approving them).
So what happened? A small but vocal number of users complained and we get this news from The Register like this was the worse mistake ever. It is not.
Sure Mozilla could have managed this update better (losing settings seems pretty bad for example), but most users are probably pretty satisfied with the update. I couldn't use Firefox Android before (too slow compared to Chrome) and I was using Nightly (and afterwards Beta) just so I could get the performance improvements since the browser is so much faster. And also the new interface looks fantastic.
Can you dismiss (most) of my arguments in this post? https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=24160559&goto=threads%...
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The recent mobile Firefox is worse in every way that matters to me:
° Breaking recent add-ons (for the few add-ons that exist). I added a close-tab icon to compensate for the bad tab-ui. It's gone now.
° URL-bar hiding is wonkey. Some overlays disable hiding due to recent phising attacks. Now, for overlays, it is always present and hides the bottom of the page. This is very annoying when links are hidden behind the bar.
° URL bar (2): where have my bookmarks gone?
° URL bar (3): no more editing the URL if anything was *ever* searched in the current tab. Instead it edits the search. The URL is inaccessible.
° After 'Open in new tab' there is an annoying delay for 'Switch' again hiding links.
° Tab selection is just bad now. Preview is broken. If anything is displayed, it is often the image of two sites ago, even if the page has rendered.
° Tab selection (2) no more moving the tabs?
° Tab selection (3) why waste so much space? Using only 80% of the screen. And every tab wastes two lines and a half of useful space. Why is only the domain shown? Why not truncated or cut in the middle?
° Tab selection (4): newly opened tabs are hidden, you always have to scroll up as the current tab is always first, older tabs are lower.
° about:config is broken. Certificate error. Certificate error is broken too. Thus no disabling reader mode.It also starts up a lot slower than the old one, and there's a bug where sometimes a page will just stay white and I have to flick back and forth between tabs or restart it to get it to load.
But I do notice there's less delay when clicking on a link from a page, so that's nice I guess.
- In the previous version when you search something in the URL bar you could long tap the search suggestions to insert them into the URL bar for editing. Gone.
- To open a new tab you have to open the tab selection with the icon on the top (or bottom) of the screen and then tap the "+"-icon in the middle of the screen. In the previous version you could just double tap the icon.
- No way to create a new search shortcut from a search box on a website. You have to manually enter a URL containing a %s. No way to search with POST forms.
- They removed the option to hide the microphone icon in the URL bar
Out of curiosity, how come you have ‘+’ in the middle of the screen? Standard behavior for ‘material design’, which FF seems to follow for me, is to have such floating buttons at the bottom right.
> They removed the option to hide the microphone icon in the URL bar
That appears to be back, at least in ‘Nightly’. There's a toggle called ‘show voice search’ in the search settings.
Apparently search interferes only with some URLs: 0) Copy this url: "https://forums.spacebattles.com/forums/worm.115/" 1) Search anything (I use ddg, load the page completely) 2) Tap the url-bar. Notice no url, just the search. 3) Remove the search, "Fill link from clipboard" appearch, tap it. 4) Tap the URL-bar. The original search appears again. Unable to edit copied url.
The search stays present as long as the URLs with the same behaviour are entered manually, from history, or pasted. Most urls reset the behaviour. I have three from different domains. One is a top-level URL, the others are not. The top-level of the example does not have this behaviour.
Since the original comment there has been an update. A random bug is possible as well: I had edited URL's successfully before.
There's a sort of a workaround: if you long-press on the URL bar when the page is displayed (not when typing in it), you can copy the address.
Though of course the behavior you describe is weird if you're already away from the search page.
Probably I can't, but I am not interested. Nothing that you cite bothers me so why should I work to disprove you? Like yourself said, this is what matters to you, not me. For me, the performance and interface changes brings much more value than what you put in your post, and I did use old Firefox but really was forcing myself to use it since I don't like Google hegemony. The new Firefox is for me a mobile browser that is finally a joy to use.
However, this is not my point. The Register does makes clickbait titles and clickbait articles. Of course this update broke some workflows (https://xkcd.com/1172/), but instead of getting data and saying that "new Firefox update broke this and that workflow, Mozilla is working to fix it" (this is assuming a good editorial asking for Mozilla input before publishing the article, not a tabloid like The Register), what we actually got is "Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build".
You can use this to rationalize-away every regression in every piece of software. Enough "well, they're just edge case loud power users" papercuts may eventually prove fatal.
A to-hell-with-your-workflow sneak update, no-downgrade path approach like this speaks volumes about Mozilla.
EDIT: Sneak insofar as no clear communication about how much functionality users would be (potentially permanently) losing, and no directions on how to avoid that outcome. The play store rollout has certainly been inconsistent but that's probably more on Google's end.
You can downgrade, just forgo Play Store -- and you will have to setup all over again, first uninstalling the darned 79.
Also there is no way to clear the list of downloaded files, there is only a 'delete' button, which if clicked deletes all your downloads. This is particularly annoying if you start downloading something only to find out you already downloaded it (i.e a podcast), the download history tab is the only place to cancel the download, but if you've used firefox for a while the tab is so slow to load that your download has often completed before the tab has loaded.
The lack of addon support is annoying though. One addon I often use (Hide Fixed Elements, to get those annoying popovers to disappear) isn't supported and I still notice it missing every day. It seems to me that a browser built for customisability just isn't finished without the complete addon pack. They could've kept Fenix in beta but decided to launch with missing features regardless.
Wnat I'm also missing is about:config support. It exists but has been disabled in stable branches on purpose "in case people break their browser". This mindset is exactly why I'm starting to lose interest in Mozilla.
The UI looks great and the performance improvements are very welcome, but to say the bad news is all "just a vocal group" goes too far for me. Firefox users, especially on mobile, are mostly just "the vocal group". Everyone else is on Chrome already.
But it seems to be a bit more complicated. See https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/i51k0q/mozilla_cou.... about:config is not blocked just because of configurability and the usual danger of breaking something, but because it is essentially broken. Still, it's the wrong decision. Users can just reinstall if the app breaks, and there is no blame on Mozilla in that if they showed a warning before, as they do on the desktop.
Yes, theoretically you can break the connection between Firefox and GeckoView but that's got nothing to do with enabling eSNI or setting the behaviour of user installed certificates.
Sort of, but it's clearly not designed for that. The tab switcher slides out from the bottom of the screen and has the "new tab" button at the very bottom.
To navigate to a new page, I now have to tap the top of the screen, then the bottom of the screen and then the top again.
Ah, the eternal Windows 8 loop of failure... Don't give users options because they are stupid. I just hope the layoffs didn't paint the future for Mozilla.
I honestly have no idea which one is better, but after having it at the top (and all other applications seem to have their menu/nav on the top as well) for YEARS, it's a very hard sell to my muscle memory.
Faster is good, disabling my extensions simply sucks. Extensions were the main reason I use firefox on mobile at all.
Now I'm looking at obscure browsers like Kiwi just to get working extensions on a mobile browser.
I think Mozilla had to choose to either wait a long time to get full extension support and miss the train, or release early. I am also unhappy with not having the extensions I use, but I think this was the right choice. They plan to support the whole extension API eventually. Also aren't they the only ones who support extensions on Mobile?
Losing extensions really does suck, but you can at least install a lot of the big ones like uBlock, Dark Reader etc.
This is a fork that seems to be popular (enough to show up first in my search). It looks and feels like the Firefox I lost with 79. Firefox Sync brought most of my data back in minutes.
So I‘m the one that usually swipes (that somehow doesn‘t work either...) or click the back button (because that‘s what I‘m used to do). Even feeling dumb not realizing there‘s this „back for everything“ physical button on Android, it feels unnatural to me to use that one.
That's the "leave this Activity" button, personally I strictly don't use it navigating within an app because it's never clear if it's been overridden or not.
For mobile browsers, I always use "open in new tab" so I don't need to go back and can avoid guessing.
But Firefox Preview had a bug where often enough the back functionality did not work. I hope that is fixed, if not that might explain some of the complaints.
Citation needed
> but most users are probably pretty satisfied with the update
Citation needed
There's no way for you to know those statements are true, besides wishful thinking (in the same way that I dunno if the opposite it true).
You can read the reviews of the latest version in play store...
Yeah, I am going by the complaints from users in the Play Store ratings. It is pretty clear that the number is not big (the score on Firefox is still pretty high), but the complaints are very focal saying "this is the worst update ever".
> but most users are probably pretty satisfied with the update
And yeah, this one I don't have any backup, this is why I said "probably".
Even if the number there is small (which I'm not sure, "small" compared to what?), you can't look at one place and make such a global strong statement. There are many other places for people to voice their opinion, Mozilla forums, chat, social media or, well, here.
> this one I don't have any backup, this is why I said "probably".
Probably is not a synonym of "maybe" or of "I don't know"...
It's a life changer!
I recall updating on the July 31st, it crashed 4 times in less than 70mins on random pages. It lost all its bookmarks, virtually all add-ons, 'home' page, tab thumbnails, removed/reset search engines, etc. Instead, it added totally useless collections. Ah yeah - added Facebook there too, since I just have it disabled on all levels, incl. DNS.
>A small but vocal number of users
Downplaying it like that, insulting long-time users just to score points on HN is weird and unneeded. Look at the latest version reviews on Play Store.
I've downgraded to 68 and I'll keep using until it becomes totally unusable (likely in couple of years or so). The process of finding proper downgrade/compatible version, setup and all took couple of hours as it's necessary to uninstall and wipe it all, else 68 installation would fail.
Microsoft Edge also has collections and you can access them from the mobile and desktop browsers.
For me the interface is a regression in every way, except for the ability to select bar location (I have it at the top, but the choice is nice).
A lot of it can probably be polished out, but I struggle to see what improvements it brings after a potential post-polish.
That said the performance improvements are nice, and it'll stay my primary browser on Android.
Maybe if you have a large phone or short fingers but beside this bottom bar there are only disadvantages in the new UI, like no bookmarks in the new-tab-page. Or the additional movements/tapping you have to make to open a new tab. It's like the designers never even used the previous FF.
> and the browser is much faster
Maybe if you mainly visit shitty javascript-bloat-sites like twitter or reddit but for me there isn't much difference in loading times. The small initial pageload-speedup is lost by the time I need to scroll over all the new advertisements I previously never had to deal with thanks to uMatrix.
> but it lost some features
not just "some features". It lost _everything_ that made it better than chrome. Now there is just no reason for mobile FF to exist anymore.
> A small but vocal number of users complained
How did you measure that? I see mostly complaints and a few people who are happy because of the bottom URL bar.
Bookmarks on the other hand are used often and the new updates requires 3 clicks to get to them (previously 1).
So this is a classic case of UX designer not knowing how people use his software and just doing changes he thinks are cool.
Am I only one to see Firefox reset the search engine to Google with this Android release?
I was also disappointed that Pinboard and Cookie Auto-Delete add-ons aren't supported.
That small number of users is basically everyone who installed Firefox on Android
There is (was) no other reason to use it over competitors
> and I was using Nightly
I still am
And used original Firefox because extensions
Now it's just a slower (even if less slow than before) clone of Chrome
My personal extension used by hundreds of people (but mainly me) doesn't work anymore, so I have no reason to use Firefox anymore.
Simple as that.
Iḿ not complaining, I'm just switching back to Chrome
I can block ads and trackers with blokada and it works for any app on my phone
The new interface is almost universally hated if the store comments are any indication.
New Firefox: (go to settings to enable non-default search engines to be displayed) Best case: tap the address bar, enter your search term, press return or one of the non-default search engines and then return.
The problem is that after adding a custom search engine, it ends up at the bottom of the list, meaning that in order to select it after typing my search terms, I have to scroll down, causing the keyboard to collapse. After selecting the right search engine firefox doesn't search automatically but rather I have to tap the address bar again and then press return. So, where in the past I had a "tap, type, tap, (search results)" experience, now it is "tap, type, scroll, tap (bottom of screen to select SE), tap (top of screen into the address bar to get the keyboard back), tap (bottom of screen [return key on keyboard]), search results"
I very much would like to go back to the old behavior.
Opening new tab before: Tap tabs icon on top. Tap open new tab icon that appears in the same place(essentially slow doubletap)
Now:tap tabs icon on top. Tap new tab thats on the other side of display (I tried getting used to having navigation bar down, but the pageload progress bar should have stayed top. When arriving to page and looking at the top its completely out of my peripheral vision)
Opening certain links in app. Not only was outrageous that mozzila said "nah" to ability to always open certain links in app (in the name of seamless web experience), so when opening a reddit link on slow and highly datalimited connection I had to wait until page starts loading, then stop load to not consume data (but not too soon, or open in app icon doesnt show), and then click the icon to open link in app. Now I have to tap the menu first to get access to open in app icon. Forcing me to add another tap (or three if I want to stop the pageload too) everytime I want to do something that should be user settable in the first place.
Also, can anyone explain me why closing the tab view now requires two swipes down instead of one? (Or one rly long one, granted, but still...) And the fact that the thubnail (main visual cue as to what tab it is) is now smaller is also getting on my nerves
Some pages are super jitery when I try to zoom them as a main big image loads (and few seconds after). Wasnt issue before.
There are more things that annoy me, but cant remember them in the heat of the moment, might edit this later.
And ofcourse, cant use old version because they know best whats good for me.
Im about to start looking for another browser soon, would welcome suggestions! (Ability to run ublock is neccesity)
You can long-press the tabs icon on top, which is slightly more convenient. (No, it's not obvious.)
> Im about to start looking for another browser soon, would welcome suggestions! (Ability to run ublock is neccesity)
AFAICT the only other open-source android browser that supports ublock origin is Kiwi Browser.[0] It used to heavily lag behind upstream chromium, though — I don't know if that's changed.
for some reason the automatically most used link don't work, I've to pin websites to the new tab area, but then they're static, and have to be maintained
it a page timeouts the description text is so long the retry button is out of screen, and that test doesn't scroll itself, and your stuck going into the hamburger menu because something as common as drag down from top too reload isn't supported here
oh and the update also forgot all my settings about min and max font sizes
It's like we used to have a "search bar" and when you wanted to "search" for something you used the "bar" designated for that purpose...
And since this "bar" had a designated purpose, it was also super-easy to configure, at will, for that express purpose without things getting confusing, cumbersome or complex. It really was pretty damn good.
But nonono. Chrome wanted to leak every single thing you typed into the location-bar straight to Google anyway, so clearly we should get rid of the search-bar and do that too.
What on earth was the FF-team thinking?
It's virtually impossible to search for anything without sending your search string to google. Yah right Mozilla is "privacy focused".
How are you supposed to use search autocomplete with any other search engine except your default?
I understand mozilla wants a spike of search revenue with settings reset, making address bar unusable.
Autocomplete works for me in the nightly (at least for DDG) so if it doesn't right now, it'll be fixed eventually.
It's possible though exceedingly cumbersome. You select the search engine first, then type the query. If that doesn't work with the default settings of displaying the engines right away, it certainly does if you turn off ‘Show search engines’ in settings and go via the button. Wikipedia auto-completion finally works for me.
However, I can't say that this UI is better than the old one for the default case of not caring about non-default-engine completion.
She is very angry at the lack of user-respectful UX around the change.
She said to me all the choices suck, and it has the flavour of "for your better enjoyment... we broke you" type communications. Not "we're sorry" but a belief "but you want this" when directly, specifically she doesn't and didn't
* No way to manage the landing page favourites order. An issue in fenix, but no indication of intent to change.
* Default shifted to "speedy read-y down-the-bottom-y"
* Tabs replaced by the counter of pages open.
* It was anything but "principle of least astonishment"
The delivery of better tracking protection? Thats great.
The unexpected UI changes? They suck. No amount of A/B testing can help you in the communication of "this is better" if you don't actually try to communicate.
Mozilla already broke our extension (Almonit extension) in browser a few weeks ago, when they changed default behaviour unannounced, without supplying (yet) an alternative solution. We actually had to found out about this change because people started to complain.
Now our extension was removed and is impossible to reinstall after this upgrade. It's highly frustrating because we're trying to build a stable user-crowd here, and it's impossible to do if the user experience is being hurt so badly every few weeks.
On the positive note, the people in Mozilla's Add-ons Matrix room were super positive and helpful. The problem was that there's not much that they could really do.
Step 1: Replace a working app with a shinier UI with less features than the original
Step 2: Promise to add missing features in the future
Step 3: Put off adding missing features existing users want. While adding features "prospective users" say they want.
Step 4 - Repeat steps 1-3 a few times (rewrite, remove features users use, add features non-users want)
Step 5: Retire the product citing low usage
I mentioned that it worries me back then and that nothing good can come out of the Chief marketing guy becoming CEO.
Today what we see is the result of that. Yandex browser on android has more chrome extension support than firefox for android.
This isn't just about Mozilla as a company. It's also about how we as a community supported Mozilla in becoming that company and now being surprised at why it does the things that it does.
Obama made a speech not too long ago about not to conflate people doing good things with being good in all situations. The only people always seeming to be good are the ones groomed to be politicians without ever sharing a bad opinion in public.
This would prevent monetization-led programming, creating a hierarchical company with a product & engineering management organization creating an average well known adventure of "how to make more money"
Maybe there's a time to call them interested in an open web but this specific release is a big step away from their former principles. A browser should be an user agent.
Their principles are probably, just like in any other company, primarily marketing and we should evaluate them just the same as we do other companies.
Every time Google centralizes an ecosystem we do call that out. It's usually a power grab. We should do the same in cases in which Mozilla does it.
I think that the open extension ecosystem on desktop Firefox is save as long as Chrome on desktop still has somewhat open extension support.
On Android there is no chrome extensions, hence there's no competitive advantage for Mozilla to keep them - which probably made it all costs and no gains.
... which is probably the moment they're out of the window, if principles are no concern.
I think it's a dilemma. If Mozilla can't do it Firefox deserves a better organizational structure that enables the product to continue to work as a gateway to user autonomy and software freedom on increasingly closed platforms like Android.
For me, there were three worrying changes:
1. The end of Netscape
2. The end of the Suite
3. The end of XUL
And now, I think:
4. The gutting of important development teams to refocus on ... VPN service reselling?!
This is exactly where Microsoft was with Apple in the 1990s, before Jobs returned. Is there some way to break this cycle?
Which resulted in the famous four product matrix.
And then once stabilised, innovate around their core vision - appliances (Jobs always wanted the Mac to be an appliance) that are a delight to use.
Which resulted in the iPod.
How would that apply to Mozilla?
Core strength - development platform for the web? Core vision - open and privacy-safe information sharing?
The iPod was an unsolicited walk-in concept previously offered to Philips and Sony
Based on a few GitHub issue and Mozilla discourse responses, it seems like the whitelist approach is here to stay.
https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/add-on-support-in-new-firefo...
and the relevant GitHub issue, which was locked due to too many people complaining:
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/11308
which was closed and moved into this issue, which was locked immediately as this change is... rather unpopular, as is their proposed solution:
Ah, executing the famous Netscape strategy, are they? If they were attritioning users already, I shudder to think what will happen with almost no extensions for a few... Weeks? Months? And, if the article is right, also a good number of stability issues.
As soon as they do, there's really no point in using firefox anymore. Especially since they seem to give zero fucks about my workflow, I give zero fucks about them.
Seems like getting parity would take a year+
So I guess they decided it's worth dumping the current code base to focus on the rewrite.
In the FAQ they announced a few features "within three weeks" which for me is the thing about "most frequent pages" being shown on a new tab. Quite a habit of mine to use that ...
This seems to be a filter issue, please submit cases to filter list maintainers.
Note that "Ignore generic cosmetic filters" is checked by default in Firefox for Android, it's something you may want to toggle.[1]
* * *
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Filter-lis...
they gradually remove features essential 1-2% of the userbase and now they're getting to the point they have no users at all
the main reason to use Firefox over Chrome on mobile is the extension support, and now that's gone too
>the extension support, and now that's gone too
That's not quite accurate.
From "Firefox for Android upgrade FAQs" https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-upgrade...
Supported add-ons (note: currently, a limited number of Recommended Extensions are supported.
Here's the list: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?recommended...
Things like uBlock-Origin etc are there, so I'm happy.
Allowing only extensions monitored by Mozilla is against the great free internet spirit that Mozilla was functioning under till now.
If I want only monitored stuff I may as well switch to Google...
I was thinking this to myself. I use firefox on android because I have a set of addons that I refuse to browse the web without. If firefox can't run the addons I want, I might as well switch to the builtin browser instead.
Corralling power users into a separate app version ala Nightly now comes across as a vain attempt at creating a longterm offramp to avoid backlash.
It really makes you think "what's the point?" about it all.
Come back and let me know how that works. :) Maybe you've forgotten the cesspool that the web has become, with all the crappy adverts and popups. I'm just glad I can run ublock-origin, the rest I'll wait for a bit.
I feel the same way.. I would suggest to a have a LITTLE patience. They'll most likely get more extensions going forwards or people will fix the ones you use.
I would have upvoted you, but as requested, I downvoted you instead.
I my most used sites were simply available below the address bar after tapping it, that would be really helpful to me.
There are a few other issues that annoy me:
- tab management is a bit of a mess relative to the previous version. I seem to end up with the same websites open in many tabs because the UI for selecting an icon from top sites or collections always opens a new tab. IMHO that's a UX failure and something that needs rethinking.
- Neither top sites or collections are part of the normal bookmarks or synced to my desktop browser. This seems like an odd choice to me as bookmark syncing works great. I've repeatedly lost collections by switching to different versions of firefox preview, firefox nightly, etc. This makes me reluctant to buy into the feature because I know I will lose all collections at some point again.
- Page caching is way too aggressive. It's not acceptable to show days old versions of a website in a new tab. Yet, this happens to me on pretty much all news websites and blogs that I visit. Including HN. I have to reload freshly opened news websites to get the current version. To me this feels like a bug and I hope this is not actually intended behavior (that would be seriously misguided).
- The back button history does not stop with the opening of the tab (which is what I expect). With HN, if I repeatedly hit the back button I get back to the login screen I used months ago. The old browser would go back to the main screen so I could open up a new tab. IMHO that behavior is nicer.
- You have to be really careful manipulating collections via the touch screen. I've repeatedly deleted sites from there by accident because I wasn't scrolling perfectly straight or trying to open the site. Swipe to delete without confirmation is broken UX. Really annoying and it seems overly sensitive to this. Every delete I've done this way was unintentional.
Despite this, I kind of like it because adblocking (aka. the #1 use case for extensions) works great and I also enjoy privacy protection, which on Android normally is kind of a bad joke with Google tracking your every move.
If this is with collections, apparently it's intentional: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/10417
I just bought a printer a few weeks ago and was happily printing from Firefox, but now it seems the entire feature is gone. As a workaround, you can share the page from Firefox to the Mopria app, but I think that rerenders the whole thing in Mopria's embedded Webkit view, which might not always work.
But people with printers are probably a minority, so according to the prevailing line of thinking it doesn't matter. Why would anyone ever want to do anything that's not commonly done by at least half the population?
I see it as many steps back from the old experience. I hesitate to recommend this new mobile version to anybody.
They claim this is "the most private mobile Firefox so far". But DNS-over-HTTPS is disabled. There is no way to enable or configure it because there are no network settings at all in the new Settings page. DoH was a simple solution to government censorship in my country. Now, users will probably switch to Brave because it has a built-in VPN.
The UX too irritates...
1) I use the android navigation bar at bottom to jump to Home or switch apps or lock the phone. FF in light theme mode takes over that area with a white background making it impossible to use white-on-white buttons. I had to switch to dark theme just to be able to see those buttons.
2) The top sites list uses smaller icons with website titles as captions. If a website uses the title "Breaking News", that becomes its caption. It's difficult to tell from the favicon and such titles what site it is. The captions are single-line cropped with ellipses making it even more difficult to guess which website it is.
What I don't understand is why the release was rushed with such drastic changes instead of some kind of UX A/B studies to get feedback over time. Their reddit sub is rather hostile to any feedback and reminds me of stackoverflow nastiness. It's almost like Mozilla is trying to shed its user base.
“Their” Reddit sub is not an official forum any more than this HN thread is.
I have this problem too and I am using the default phone configuration. Its bizarre that professional Android developers would make the extra effort of breaking the navigation buttons on a product that is unfinished because of time constraints.
This doesn't happen for me on Android 10, and I haven't seen such a mode on any screenshots, so it seems to be a bug. Neither the new nor the old version have options for ‘fully-full-screen’ display where the top and bottom bars would be hidden.
However, Mozilla isn't known for speedy fixing of bugs—probably doubly so with its current troubles. So I wouldn't raise hopes up even if this behavior is reported in the tracker.
The loss of extensions is unfortunate, but not surprising, given they've been gone from mainline Firefox for some time. There are some webextensions available now, including ublock.
On the plus side, the webview capability is wicked cool and I have several PWA's "installed" to my home screen. I'm really enjoying that.
I understand things will improve with time. It's just a bit of a rocky experience right now.
and in the new version, enabling the (very cool, by itself) "Open links in a private tab" setting does guess what to PWA's (but only if a tab for the specific PWA does not already exist, because of course)
What are you talking about? How have extensions been gone from mainline Firefox for some time?
That was a devastating blow, but I still had hope in their statement that the Addon ecosystem will build up back again and most features will be implemented in WebExtensions. Unfortunately that doesn't really seem to be happening, not at any good pace anyway.
A lot of the newer "replacement" addons as still buggy af, don't have feature parity with what the XUL addons had years ago, and seem to be relatively poorly maintained. I remember the flurry of blog articles from really passionate and disappointed addon writers back then, leaving the scene, and it looks that did have an effect - most of the newer addons (the long tail ones, not the mainstream TST or uBlock type ones) are of lower quality or are by companies that are trying to hook you into their service using the addon as the bait. I've never seriously considered Brave before, but it looks like it's time to start looking into it.
If you are waiting for more powerful webextensions, abandon all hope. Change is not coming.
Firefox mobile never supported XUL extensions, AFAIK; this was a different breakage.
When asked for an explanation, they claimed it performed better (it didn't).
Great for tablets /s.
> This marks the last Android release with extensions/add-on support.
A lot people called it FUD, but we can see they took an extra 9 months or so, supported just a few extensions, then replaced what worked with a low feature version.
And users are angry. Yep.
Can't say I'm surprised.
In reality partial extension support was already there + expansion of support on stable on full support on nightly on the near term timeline at release https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034, the switch on stable FF happened in Q3 2020, and they changed stance after all of the feedback.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/top-and-botto...
Without these three, its jarring to use Firefox for me. But there is no other user in the world with my browsing habits. After including the most used extensions, Mozilla is showing no interest in getting more extensions. It's quite frustrating.
https://archive.newpipe.net/fdroid/repo?fingerprint=E2402C78...
I built this in 2 hours, and obviously I never intended it for anyone else to be used, so it's just a tiny greasemonkey script, a golang webserver and a nodejs crawler running along nicely. No official addon or anything.
Greasemonkey is super useful for this kind of personalized stuff.
Unless you mean selectively delete?
I'm convinced if ff weren't screwing up on mobile containers would become as popular as adblockers as well.
I still use ff on mobile but it's mostly because I don't know what would be better, not because I like it. There's a huge chasm between mobile and desktop.
‘Stylus’ is the popular open-source alternative.
Fit to width, for text reflow.
Bypass paywalls.
Au-revoir-utm
No coin
Redirect amp to html.
Disable webrtc.
Extensions don't work, and last time I tried (a month ago or so) custom search engines weren't working either. I use Firefox on iOS just so I can sync and use my custom search engines.
I get that the new Firefox is faster and better, but don't break functionality people relied on, even if temporary. And if you do that, then release it under a different freaking name.
Either way, I don't think that being surprised is the problem. Having a browser update break extensions is the problem - I would bet a lot of people only use FF because Chrome doesn't support extensions (I know that's why I use it anyway), so essentially the update is breaking the only important functionality.
Thankfully, I don't have automatic updates enabled, so I can still wait and see how broken this really is and how long it will take to fix it.
The only reasons I use FF are extensions and that it's not Chrome. The former is mostly gone. The latter is enough to keep me around for now but it's getting old.
https://git.droidware.info/wchen342/ungoogled-chromium-andro...
Why make using bookmarks, a core piece of any browsing experience, so much harder?
What's the functional difference for a typical user between a 'collection' and a folder of bookmarks? Collections aren't on desktop, so now I need to bookmark and add to a collection.
The menu containing 'open all links' in a collection is hidden until you expand said collection, then click on the newly revealed menu button. This whole update reeks of "UX" department needing to justify their jobs by making unnecessary changes.
1. Collections show up on new tab 2. collection items are remarkably easy to accidentally deleted,with no confirmation or undo functionality.
Reminds me of Firefox reading lists... which also disappeared and I hardly noticed.
Also the three plugins I regularly use worked when I got the release pushed to me (more than a week ago).
I wish they were more careful. FF displayed a warning about the change ~a month ago and you could opt out by disabling FF updates. There are bad things about this change, but this is just not true.
[1] https://www.slashgear.com/firefox-daylight-update-revitalize...
They already did it for beta users before and I lost add-ons, their settings (and can't even remember some names).
I don't know, I like having a back button on my browser I guess?
As someone who uses "Firefox" since the Netscape Communicator days it's sad to see all this unrevealing.
What's wrong with just using the Android back button in the browser? I find it quite intuitive to use.
Do the Android Firefox developers even actually use their browser?
But really, if the navigation bar is at the bottom I don't need an extra back button anymore, the system's back button is right there below.
Didn't have any crashes yet so that would probably change my impression, but so far it's been great.
Perhaps I'm missing something. Is it not possible to install other app stores?
If you are a vendor of apps, it is hopeless. Approximately zero consumers will be using any other app store.
I just wish Mozilla had done a better job at rolling out the change to existing users.
ma porco...
Keepass2android on same devices was flawless, so says family as well.