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Comment by fireattack | Hacker News Reader

To me, using Firefox on desktop is easy. It is at least on par with competitors, if not better.

Firefox on Android on the other hand (the one the author worked on), IMHO, is simply an inferior product.

This is kinda understandable due to their small team size (and it looks like they're overworking too), but what I didn't get is why they kept revamping it. I don't have a clear timeline, but in my recent memory they at least did it twice.

Also, plenty of "great features" for some reason stay in beta/alpha/nightly forever. This is particularly obvious if you visit /r/Firefox on Reddit frequently; you see "oh for that, just use beta/nightly version!" as answers for help/feature request threads too often. It's like they never finish these features to push into release channel.

Anyway, it's getting harder and harder to stay using Firefox on Android. Especially after they essentially killed the extension ecosystem in Fenix.

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Inferior to what? I have yet to find a browser that blocks ads on Android as efficiently as Firefox+uBlock.

Chrome. It's just my personal opinion as a user, based on my own use case. Can't really detail, but mainly various UX issues. It feels unpolished.

As for ad block, I use DNS based blocker apps like adgarud on my phone.

I agree! In my case, I additionally use NoScript as well with both the mobile and desktop browsers. It's such a great experience.

DDG browser is pretty good on Android.

Brave

It's inferior to... Firefox!

The old version of Firefox for Android (Fennec) had several important features that never made it into the rewrite. I understand they wanted to address architectural issues and improve performance, but the net result was that one day you opened up an app you'd been using happily for years only to be presented with a buggy, more limited alternative that was barely recognizable.

Things are a little better now, but you still can't print, install arbitrary extensions, save offline in reader mode, and more.

Agreed. Firefox is the one Android app I have blocked from auto-update. Waiting for the newest version to be better than the previous version.

Brave is excellent at blocking ads by default (and based off Chrome). Its tracking prevention is a double edged sword: lots of sites with reCAPTCHA make me prove I'm human, because Google can't leverage any browsing footprint to guess that I am credibly human. It's inconvenient but a welcome reminder of how profiled normal web users are.

I was with you up until a couple of months ago. But IMO the latest versions have caught up with Chrome. They've sorted the performance (scroll performance and UI) issues with the new "fenix" version. The tab switching works great now. And the latest (stable) version even supports pull-to-refresh. Add extension support to that (notably ublock) and I've made it my default browser (and that's on merit, not for ideological reasons).

> And the latest (stable) version

Is Fenix even officially released? It's still called "Firefox Nightly" on Play Store AFAIK. This is kinda one of my point: when would they actually use it as Firefox proper if it's already mature?

Yes! Plain "Firefox" on the Play Store is Fenix these days.

Performance on Fenix is possibly even worse than Fennec for me. Every time I switch to a different app and back to Firefox it has cleared the page out of memory and needs to reload it (and my phone has 4 GB of RAM). Fun times if you need to copy a 2FA code and then go back to the browser.

Then there's the other weird issues. The bottom 5% of the page or so usually doesn't really render correctly (especially if it's a pop-up like a cookie consent box), but scrolling up and down a bit fixes it, usually, if you're fast enough to press whatever button you wanted to press there before it glitches out again.

I care about the open web, and ad blocking is still a killer feature to me, but if I were an average user there is no way I would accept a browser with so many major issues.

The need to reload thing is probably not Firefox's problem. I was annoyed by that too on android. But then I disabled battery optimizations for the android app. It's kinda a hassle because I have to disable it in 2 or 3 places. The 'don't kill my app' website helps [1]. Now it's working fine. I could keep many 10s of tabs open even for a day without reload.

I think that bottom 5% issue is fixed now, not sure.

One annoying problem is that sometimes it jumps around the page when collapsing comments in sites like HN.

Another problem is occasional random crashes when private browsing. Only on android. Anyone else here have the same problem? 99% of times, I send crash report. Hope they fix it. Or maybe it's a problem with my phone?

Love Firefox though.

[1] https://dontkillmyapp.com/

One of the features I think is unmatched in other browsers is Firefox's ability to search open tabs on your other devices, and also to almost instantly send a tab to another device. I mainly use it from mobile to desktop (when I stumble on a site that I feel may be risky to let it run all scripts on a mobile phone).

That is a very useful feature! FYI both Chrome and Safari have their own implementation of that, though it requires using the vendor's login system (Gmail; iCloud).

I wanted to make Firefox my default Android browser, out of principle. After 6 weeks, I uninstalled it and am back in Brave.

The Firefox address/omni bar seemed designed to lean 90% toward a search engine search, even if I had completely typed in the hostname of a previously visited page and hit "Enter". The cynic in me guessed this was deliberate to reap referral commissions from Big Search Engine. Pissed off, uninstall

I agree with you that the defaults are annoying. With the latest Firefox on Android they simplified almost everything, but the address bar still has a staggering 9 options in settings! Personally I turned off all options except autocomplete urls, search history and search bookmarks. Now it works like I expect, again.

Yeah, I also find this annoying.

But there is a setting to change this behavior: Options / Search / Show search suggestions ahead of browsing history in address bar results

The default for this should probably be off, not on.

> "oh for that, just use beta/nightly version!"

Like for accessing abou:config sigh

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