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Comment by williamscales | Hacker News Reader

This is just the new Firefox mobile user interface, right? I've been using it for quite some time in the nightly builds. It took a few minutes of adjustment the first time I saw the interface, as everything has been moved to the bottom of the screen. But this is actually fantastic for mobile usability, because you no longer have to reach all the way to the top of your screen to get to the URL bar or tab switcher.

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.

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I'll disagree. There are too many regressions in the new UI (FF/Android Beta, 80.0.1 over regular FF/Android 68.0). I use FF everywhere exclusively and that includes on my tablet, where keyboard and mouse shortcuts are totally missing; not even ctrl-T for a new tab. The UI breakage and uncanny valley only seemed to increase when I checked out Nightly to see if things got better there. Also, while I understand why a phone friendly layout takes top priority with meager dev resources, the loss of the "desktop-like" layout on the tablet is kinda painful on a tablet. A cursory search about these things is that Mozilla simply needs to focus on the major points first and edge cases like tablets will come later.

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.

uh, you could do the "add site to home screen" thing in the old version too.

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)

The biggest thing I've missed is that pull to refresh doesn't work, and it's such a basic tiny little thing it drives me crazy every time it doesn't work.

I tap in the bottom-right corner to open the menu and then tap the refresh button, which is in the bottom-right corner of the menu. So basically don't need to move my thumb at all. Much more convenient than pull-to-refresh in my opinion.

I cant understand how 2 taps in precise location are more convenient to some people than one short swipe anywhere on screen, but to each their own I guess

On my phone, pull-to-refresh doesn't work in Chrome if I only do a short swipe. It seems to reject anything shorter than 3cm or so. And that's only if I'm already at the top of the page.

Maybe someone could write an extension to implement it... Oh.

Pull to refresh has been implemented, but still needs some polish before being released. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/9766

> The loss of extensions is unfortunate, but not surprising, given they've been gone from mainline Firefox for some time.

What are you talking about? How have extensions been gone from mainline Firefox for some time?

He's talking about the really powerful ones, the xul based ones. Not this farce we still have today. When addonpocalypse happened was the day Firefox started to die.

> When addonpocalypse happened was the day Firefox started to die.

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.

Feature parity is impossible. Webextensions are intended to take away possibilities like altering the UI or calling out to external programs. So webextensions will never ever be on feature parity with XUL addons. Also, changes to webextensions are proceeding at a snails pace, suggesting that Mozilla doesn't really intend to get anywhere close to working support for e.g. keybinding remapping or anything like that.

If you are waiting for more powerful webextensions, abandon all hope. Change is not coming.

> 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.

Firefox mobile never supported XUL extensions, AFAIK; this was a different breakage.

Fennec had support for XUL extensions. I did add-ons review for some time and it's... interesting what some people try to slip through, and how they react when caught red handed.

Did that exist outside of Maemo? I don't remember ever seeing XUL extensions on Android...

Yes, Fennec for Android had "classic" add-ons. Eg. Adblock+ was a port of the desktop version.

Sounds intriguing. Would like a (anonymized, if necessary) writeup.

One example: an add-on tried to wrap the existing XPCOM component that is responsible to create http(s) connections with their own. That was very much not ok in general, and had nothing to do with the stated purpose of the add-on.

When asked for an explanation, they claimed it performed better (it didn't).

There's a Toolbar setting for whether to have the bar at the bottom or top. It's under Settings > Customize.

The new tab button will stay at the bottom; so if you put your toolbar back to top, you will travel the entire height all the time.

Great for tablets /s.

You are correct.

Do you used favorites? How do you go through a list of you sites of interest?

I had bookmarks. Now I put those in collections. It's worse for going to 1 specific site, but great to going to many sites at a time (think HN, twitter, newspaper and weather, all at once when you start your day).

Oh, yes, maybe that is the pattern I should adopt.

So it turns out to open all sites in a collection, you need to tab the 3 dots next to the collection name and then choose "open all sites", which you then loose in your huge list of tabs that you had already opened to get to the "start page". Are the devs using this themselves even?

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