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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else worried Firefox on Android is becoming increasingly unusable? How well supported is it my Mozilla I wonder.

I often find pages render as blank pages until I refresh, and scrolling will often hang for multiple seconds. I was playing "Jackbox Games" (which is played via the web and PC), and I found those of us on Firefox found the text boxes were broken. Just downloading PDFs was broken for several weeks, and the official advice was to switch to the beta version of Firefox for Android.

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Firefox on Android has been solid for me, perhaps it's an extension issue? I've definitely run into extension issues on mobile that don't exist on desktop.

I also only run two: Dark Reader, and uBlock Origin. It's uBlock that I find causes rendering issues on some releases of the Android app, but I haven't seen that happen in a while.

The only thing I do find painful was the app redesign removing the feature to clear all tabs on close-swiping the app. You can clear all tabs by selecting 'Quit' from the menu, but it's a hassle. I wish we could drop the forced tab persistence when closing the app as a setting, like used to be the case.

> It's uBlock that I find causes rendering issues

uBO just does what the filters in the filter lists dictate, so when you see specific websites broken as a result of uBO enforcing filters, best is to report these cases to the list maintainers so that this can be fixed for all.

I'm not running any extensions, so that can't be the problem (unless lack of an ad blocker is killing performance)

(Mozilla employee, though not working directly on mobile)

Mozilla is invested in Firefox on Android for the long haul. We landed a complete re-architecture this year (Fenix). It hasn't been completely painless -- for example, as you seem to have experienced, we've had to split our development time between working on the new engine and maintaining the old -- but Fenix is already better than Fennec in most ways and is significantly easier to improve moving forward.

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2020/01/17/a-brand-n...

I'm still stuck with the old Firefox for Android until extensions are generally supported. I'm really looking forward to that though, because other than extensions the new one looks great.

Same here. Is this slated for a future release? If so, do you know which one?

I've been trying to find an authoritative source to signal when Android FF will support extensions (that previously worked but no longer do) -- any tips much appreciated.

You can see if it works for the extensions you care about -- https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

I wouldn't describe that as "support" quite yet, but it's worth giving a shot to see if it works for you.

You might be able to answer this - are containers coming to Firefox Mobile at any point? That's the main thing that would make me switch from my phone's default browser.

I'm very unhappy with the new FF mobile. The user interface is worse than before in every(!) aspect. There's not a single improvement. And everything feels slower. And there is no offline browsing. On a mobile browser! WTF?! And there is no way to save websites. On a mobile browser, which has very limited connectivity due to its nature.

This is just sad. There was a time when I was happy to read about a new FF version for the desktop. Now I'm just waiting that they will ruin it like they did with the mobile version.

I'm completely the opposite. Always had firefox installed on my phone, but it was just too slow and buggy before. When the new FF mobile came out as preview it pretty much became my only browser. I've used chrome maybe max 3 times last month. It's way faster in my experience. Ad-block works great (one of the issues I had with previous FF on android, extensions would easily bring it to a crawl), and I like how they reworked the UI, I still can't believe nobody thought about putting the location bar on the bottom before.

I do also see the blank screen rendering from time to time. However, I have encountered similar things on chrome as well, typically a refresh fixes it. There are some webpages that really don't seem to want to render on FF mobile though (not sure if because of UBO or something else), that's the only time I switch to chrome.

> I still can't believe nobody thought about putting the location bar on the bottom before.

This turned out to be a surprisingly big deal to me. Every time I have to use Chrome for some reason I am bothered by how out of the way the location bar is. I think some other browsers have tried to put it at the bottom, but none that are as popular as Firefox or Chrome.

I agree. The Tab interface is unusable. new FF opens lots more new tabs than the old one. But the list is less readable, less usable, and closing tabs is a chore (!) because there is a list-slide-animation that makes you miss the next X to close and you have to wait for the f-ing animation to finish. Bookmarks are inaccessible, you only see a few on the new-tab-page or in an unordered mess as search results when typing something in the address bar. A loading indicator is missing and loading often hangs for a long time or clicks don't register. I'm seriously researching alternatives, the status quo is hell.

Changing it so that you can't see your bookmarks when typing into the address bar is infuriating. It means if I want to go to a bookmarked page I have to close the tab I'm on (because I really just want to use that tab and I'm done with it) then open a new tab then the bookmarks show up.

But they're not actually the bookmarks are they? They're pinned sites which are different in the browser versus desktop. And they're not collections. There are too many "bookmark things"

The download thing killed me and almost forced me to switch. Very frustrating and it shows how much mobile Firefox is a second class citizen.

I used Firefix on Android from the beginning, just like on desktop, but the recent changes pushed me over the edge. It's hard to find a suitable alternative, right now I'm switching between Vivaldi and Kiwi. The current state of Firefox on Android makes me feel really sad.

I agree, the current iteration of Firefox on Android feels half baked, and it makes me sad. I wish they'd make it a first class citizen

What's intriguing to me is no primary password support on FF Android and yet it allows sync with FF protected with a primary password.

DDG using Webview with built in ad-blocker seems to be the fastest android web browser I've ever used. I wonder whether it uses Chrome's data compression.

But FF Android supports extensions, at least most used ones and I hope with support for more extensions its adoption could grow.

No primary password support? What do you mean? Bitwarden via Android autofill framework works great for me with FF.

I believe Mozilla renamed master password to primary password at some point; it's the password used to encrypt the internal password storage.

The master password which you use to protect other passwords in FF Desktop is not necessary/available for FF Android.

I've had issues with blank pages and scroll hanging occasionally in the years I've used Firefox on Android, but it seems like those issues have become less common for me lately with the last couple updates. Though I also did a big purge of my tabs lately (getting down to 10 from over 200) and I wonder if that decreased the amount of issues.

I use Firefox on android, want to keep alternative to chrome alive. I like it, it isn't as nice to use as chrome but works well for me

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