Comment by rrobukef | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrobukef | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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".

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