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Comment by m45t3r | Hacker News Reader

The Register makes some of the most clickbait titles in the area.

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.

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I am one of those vocal users, though I don't consider myself one. It was the first time I ranted about an update or UI behaviour.

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.

I didn't use many add-ons, but I miss the home page thing which had my most used sites. (I don't see the point of the tab collections. I don't want to nor have time to do many things at once when I'm using my phone – I want to do one thing now.)

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.

Wow, the misfeature of removed URL editing is surprisingly annoying. Completely surprising if you've been using browsers before for any time.

I cant confirm that. I just tried it on my phone and I can edit URLs. Even after searching for something else first as the above poster mentioned.

Reproduced!

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.

For me it works. When I tap the address field after opening a search result the URL is shown and editable.

Part of the behaviour is still present. I use DDG to search. When I search (e.g. "test"), I am unable to edit or copy the query URL.

Since the original comment there has been an update. A random bug is possible as well: I had edited URL's successfully before.

Some more:

- 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

> 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

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.

You're right, the "+"-icon is on the bottom (which is even worse). I got it confused with closing a tab, the tab-list starts in the middle of the screen.

> Can you dismiss (most) of my arguments in this post?

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".

> 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

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.

>A small but vocal number of users complained

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.

Never attribute to sneakiness what can be attributed to not wanting to maintain 2 versions of one app until 100% feature parity. There isn't really direction to give for a path that doesn't exist.

Removing the whitelist would be a trivial amount of work.

Sure but not everything works yet which is not a trivial amount of issues but for nightly it is the near term plan https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034

Not everything works yet, but with the whitelist, virtually nothing does. Removing it would still make a lot of extensions work without breaking anything.

>no-downgrade path approach like this speaks volumes about Mozilla.

You can downgrade, just forgo Play Store -- and you will have to setup all over again, first uninstalling the darned 79.

You can downgrade but you have to redo all your configuration.

Unless something has changed recently deleting Firefox also deletes anything you ever downloaded with it. Be very careful about this.

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.

I keep all downloads/media on the sd card only.

well I didn't know it was coming and my workflow went to hell.

As far as complaints about the UI go, I agree with you. It's fine, and you can keep the URL bar at the top if you want to, that's why it asks you for your preference after you update.

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.

You are oh so right, but I'd like to add that that bookmarklets don't work at all. That was a very unnecessary loss and has screwed things up big time for me. I can no longer add bookmarks to Pinboard.

> you can keep the URL bar at the top if you want to

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.

I couldn't believe they would block about:config just like that. That mindset is completely unacceptable.

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.

It's not essentially broken though, because you can toggle the settings I know of perfectly fine without breaking anything.

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.

> This mindset is exactly why I'm starting to lose interest in Mozilla

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.

What's better about bottom navigator bar than top?

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.

Bottom navigation bar works great for me because it's easier to use with my thumb.

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?

No, Mozilla did not have to choose. They could have offered both as options! They could have allowed the end consumer to control when to upgrade (some would go quickly, some would wait until their key extensions work available). I'll admit, the majority of people will upgrade only when it's the default.

Offer both as options takes costs for development. Allow users to keep old version is insecure.

I don‘t have any issue with the bottom nav bar. But where the heck is the „back“ button? It can‘t be that hard to put a back button there...

Does your phone not come with a back button? How do you navigate "back" in Android? The lack of back button seems to be a common complaint, and I just can't understand it. EDIT: "I just can't understand it" means I'm evidently lacking information about how other people use their phones, so I'm hoping someone who does understand can explain it to me.

No, you are completely right. Android has a back button in the main UI. Even better if the gesture navigation is activated. The browser does not need to copy that.

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.

I get that feeling but android does not have the full functionalities either. If you do a longpress on the backbutton in either browser on either platform, you will get your history. I don't think android has that longpress for the backbutton.

Previous mobile FF on android had this functionality. They removed it with the update.

Long-pressing the back button to get the history actually works in the Nightly version. I didn't realize that the Stable version doesn't have this feature.

> How do you navigate "back" in Android?

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.

The issue is probably me, by using non-Android stuff most of the time but having an Android tablet. So I have a „back“ button on my iPhone, on my Desktop Firefox (and Chrome and so on), but I can‘t have one on my Androit tablet.

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.

The toolbar on the bottom is easier to reach on big phones. But also you can decide whether you want it on the top or bottom in settings so it really isn't a big deal.

Losing extensions really does suck, but you can at least install a lot of the big ones like uBlock, Dark Reader etc.

You can move the URL bar to the top, but you can't move the "new tab" button to the top.

Recommendation: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid

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.

Hello, I have found one android browser based on Chrome that have extension (addon) support : "Kiwi Browser". https://kiwibrowser.com/ note: Its extension store is the Google Chrome Store.

Caution : the last update is from a long time ago. See also the Roadmap text at this page : https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src

> A small but vocal number of users complained

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).

>(in the same way that I dunno if the opposite it true).

You can read the reviews of the latest version in play store...

Oh boy, I did now. That's quite sad.

> A small but vocal number of users complained

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".

> I am going by the complaints from users in the Play Store ratings.

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"...

I suspect that "A small but vocal number of users" is majority of Firefox Android user.

the new ui is no improvement its just different. just broke all my flows for no reason. the only reason i use firefox on mobile is that i can use ublock orgin. also the "messages from mozilla" that appear after updates are spam. I dont care to hear your political opinions no matter if I agree with them or not. you are just a company. nobody cares what "you" think.

Have you considered NextDNS.io for adblocking?

It's a life changer!

If you use a Firefox sync account and then switch browsers after they have detected you haven't logged in to the account for a while they will send you actual spam trying to get you to switch back.

Mobile Firefox 79 is the worst update Firefox has ever had since it used to be called 'Mozilla Suite'. That includes removal of xul and what not.

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.

Collections would actually be a useful feature if you could also access them easily from the desktop version of Firefox. Can't think of why they wouldn't have added them to the desktop browsers at the same time except for fear of them competing with Pocket.

Microsoft Edge also has collections and you can access them from the mobile and desktop browsers.

previously there was similar stuff with the home page and it worked with a single tap. Collections have to be expanded out like list fashion.

While I like new droid FF and can wait without much discomfort for the rest of the features, please let's not use term "vocal minority" ever again. Why? Because it sucks to be on the receiving end of it while having a valid problem. "Shut up, you are vocal minority and don't matter" - I saw replies like that in some unrelated cases, and from moderators even. This is extremely frustrating. Thank you and sorry for the offtopic rant.

"Vocal minority" is a perfect description for a real modern communication issue. Cheap, instantaneous communication allows for people to communicate about anything instantly which is good! But this also allows for people to both complain about anything and receive positive feedback, and for others to have a warped sense of priorities since they mostly see feedback from people who complain about everything all the time. See twitter mobs and "cancel culture." These people don't reflect the majority.

I'm not talking about twitter mobs obviously, I'm talking about discussions about technology on tech forums or subreddits when any complaint (blaming the company who developed certain software) gets shut down without even comprehending the problem, purely as a "vocal minority = irrelevant". Oh well, I guess that idea is not yet ready for the masses. More people need to experience the frustration first hand.

> the new interface is very nice

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.

> Now, the new interface is very nice (bottom navigator bar FTW)

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.

You don't actually use the bar that often, so having it at the bottom doesn't improve much. In fact, it will mostly be in the way.

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.

> ...but most users are probably pretty satisfied with the update.

Am I only one to see Firefox reset the search engine to Google with this Android release?

This did not happen to me. Still DDG.

Happened to me. Not the first time a Firefox update does this either.

I think that this is the main reason they still update Firefox. Also tried to add a custom search engine in config, it crashed.

It converted DDG to Google for me.

I was also disappointed that Pinboard and Cookie Auto-Delete add-ons aren't supported.

> So what happened? A small but vocal number of users complained

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

> and this bought a completely new interface too.

The new interface is almost universally hated if the store comments are any indication.

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