Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

More importantly, Firefox for Android has a brand new UI (and more): https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/25/introducing-a-new-f... (GeckoView, picture in picture, Enhanced Tracking Protection, persistent private mode, dark theme…).

The most awaited version in years.

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269156

View on HN

Not sure if you tried it, but for me it was an absolute shitshow. It "upgrades" your settings, so if you then downgrade the app, everything is lost (as you have to uninstall + manually install the old apk). In my case it also decided to reset overridden settings to "defaults" (search engine, save passwords etc.), plus about:config was gone and the homepage cannot be set to bookmarks anymore. I uninstalled it and went back to the latest 68.x, and am now looking for a new browser on Android, possibly one that doesn't treat me like an idiot.

Oh, and add-ons are no longer really a thing. There are only about 10 "officially supported" add-ons. I had to install Fennec from f-droid instead, which is annoying as it is both slower and has some frustrating bugs (for example, you can't customise your search engines properly, so if you select text and then try to launch a search on searx, the query is discarded).

This! And when are we going to get uMatrix back? The one must-have add-on.

I hadn't heard of Fennec, does that let you install add-ons that use the somewhat newer WebExtensions API? Specifically I'm curious if this one I made would work,

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reveddit-real...

Fennec is, as I understand it, an older version of Firefox for Android that is no longer supported by Mozilla. I guess it must be more libre or not use Mozilla branding, as it is available in the F-droid store unlikel the normal version. It's a version of Firefox for Android that does indeed support all add-ons, with the caveat that some interfaces might be difficult to use on mobile.

It breaks my heart to say this, but I agree completely on the 'shitshow'.

I've been using FF as my main driver for over ten years, and on mobile every second I've been able to.

I fail to come up with a thing they didn't ruin with this new "revamp everything".

- The home page is worse

- THEY BROKE THE BACK BUTTON.Like seriously, you could get your tab's history and jump back more than one page. Now the long-press does nothing

- Oh, breaking the back button doesn't end there. Previously you could close your current tab with Back, and FF would either close the tab or go to the FF start screen. Now, all the tabs are left open, and I have to go manually to my tabs list and close them one by one. Why?

- probably something else. Or maybe I'm just too angry at my Ol' reliable workhorse so suddenly cheating on me :(

Edit:

- It's also slower than ever, I've never had any qualms about FF for Androids speed until now.

The tab history should be back in version 80

> THEY BROKE THE BACK BUTTON.

This is Google's fault for breaking enhanced back functionality with gesture navigation. Native Android 10 phones can't enable the two button pill nav either so your only choice is the soon to be obsolete three button nav.

One more thing: you can't get a desktop-style tab bar on top anymore, instead you are forced to use the tab button to open the view with all your tabs on it.

Previously you could go to Android Settings => Developer Options and increase 'Minimum width' / 'Smallest width' which would make the phone think its screen was physically bigger, making it so that the Android UI elements were no longer hilariously large and making Firefox switch to the tablet view with the tab bar, well before the point where the UI got too small to use/read.

I figure it'll be a number of years before Android updates make FF 68.x stop working, and while security updates do happen I doubt any of the websites visited by the types of people on HN are going to be compromised and running exploits for old Android FF versions. Plus you have the Android permissions/sandboxing stuff.

Slower than ever? I don’t use a browser on my phone all that much, but I’ve used Nightly on my phone for ages, and tried out Fenix as soon as it supported uBlock Origin. I found it very substantially faster on JS-heavy pages, e.g. the Reddit mobile site was almost twice as fast, across the board, and faster still in places. (I use Firefox for Android for ideological reasons and because it supports extensions, not because it’s fast, because it hasn’t been in the past. I have no idea how it compares to other browsers now, because I never run any other browsers on Android.)

I'm on the Beta channel and using this for several months already, even since on the preview. Can't say it's perfect but I'm getting used to it pretty fast, like 2 weeks. Have no complaints since, and it feels snappier subjectively.

Nothing, and I really mean nothing, pisses off users more than revamping a UI without offering the choice to use the older versions as well. People put a lot of time and effort into learning a UI, breaking that just for kicks is utterly irresponsible. Some of us have work to do, a browser upgrade should never come with a mandatory major UI change.

I use Firefox on Android and got a push notification about those changes coming. I sort of rue the day when it comes because last I heard it removes the feature that I most care about: being able to not load images when not browsing on WiFi. Do you know if that's part of this release or a later one? I only offhand some HN discussion a couple months ago that mentioned Firefox for Android changes which included that.

It's very much not an ideal solution, but uBlock Origin lets you block large media elements (and reenable them temporarily or on a site-by-site basis), which might help.

I have been using firefox since day one and before but at the moment I disabled automatic upgrade on my phone and do the upgrades manually to keep the latest version.

I wish I had done that, as now there is no easy and safe way back. They have 'downgrade protection', because downgrading corrupts your profile. Have to create a new one if you still want to go ahead.

Same here.

> The most awaited version in years.

Is this the version that only supports 5 extensions? Because in that case it's also the most dreaded version in years.

It's up to 9 now!

Hotly anticipating the blogpost submission telling me why all these changes were absolutely necessary and anyone who doesn't like it is wrong.

Firefox UI is getting worse over time. It's trying to do too many confusing things.

Why can't we have constant UI for a long period of time? Like HackerNews (I know, apples and oranges) but the point is - changes should be scrutinized to death before implementing them, especially when it comes to UI.

Stop changing stuff just for the sake of following UI trends.

The new UI is awful. I've been trying to figure out how to like it in the previews but the bookmarks are just totally broken and I can't figure out how you're supposed to use it. I just want some pages I can go to easily. The saved tab group thing where it randomly loses them is not a substitute.

It's definitely faster but I can't stand to use it for very long.

I really like it: snappy with modern design and the extensions I use. It loads faster then the previous version as well.

Linked article says it will be available starting August 27.

I got that about a month ago, hmm. Linked article says north america august 27th, so maybe slowly rolling out?

Which contains an option to collect marketing data, which I had to manually opt out. Mozilla really lost my trust with this one, paired with the recent lay-offs and the re-orientation. I will not recommend Mozilla Firefox anymore, sorry.

Looks a bit better, lacks features compared to the previous one.

Now I can't share links to other devices without first opening it in Firefox. In the previous version it worked just fine.

It's horrible. Completely unusable on the tablet, requiring moving from one side of the screen entirely and switching tabs takes a bunch of taps now and is very awkward. Much faster though in general on the upside.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com