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Comment by laurent123456 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Mozilla has a clear vision of what they want to achieve. They've been randomly removing features, or even plain butchering their products (eg the recent Firefox mobile update) for several years, and all they probably achieved is to lose more and more users.

Yet with their tiny market share they aren't exactly in a position to lose users.

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I actually really like Firefox Mobile. The old Firefox on Android was a dumpster fire. But I'm one of those types that used to use Firefox Focus as my main mobile browser. My main concern on a mobile browser is that it's so difficult to deal with cookies and tracking etc. Firefox Focus really earned my trust there and I like that the new Firefox Mobile is continuing that.

My only real "complaint" is trivial and it isn't really their fault--it's that there are some dumb websites/apps that require a pass through Chrome to login and I haven't found a super quick way to do that (it's not difficult but it used to be super easy and obvious in Focus).

My main complaint about Firefox mobile is the menu locations - three dots on the upper right, hamburger on lower right, page select on bottom. With the issue being that there's nothing intuitive around what lands in the dots or the burger, so I not-so-rarely find myself randomly clicking on one or the other looking for e.g., the share menu.

It doesn't stop me from using it, but it's annoying.

Hmmm, I have my toolbar on the bottom and don't have anything in the upper right at all. Dunno what that could be. The location of the toolbar (menu/address/etc) can be set top or bottom in preferences (Settings >> Customize >> Toolbar).

I have my toolbar set to auto hide to maximize screen space for reading and bottom works better for me because when you scroll to the top, the hidden toolbar reappears at the bottom before pulling further to refresh. It seems like hiding/unhiding the toolbar at the top would be super annoying because it would either jump over the top of the page or jerk the page up and down under my finger as it hides/unhides.

(FWIW: I'm on a Pixel running Android 11 so dunno if there could be an Android version level or manufacturer overlay issue causing your menu to split, or maybe it's an iOS feature)

I used Firefox on Android on my tablet and it was perfect for my needs. Since the change, I went from using it every day to never using it. The reviews on the play store are brutal now.

The problem with Mozilla is that there aren't giving users what they want: Empowerment. Instead Mozilla wants the empowerment for themselves and to heck with giving users any control over the experience.

The reviews on the play store are extremely positive

After the switch the reviews were extremely negative. Now looking at recent reviews it's like 50/50. There are still some people complaining about the new UI but you're not going to keep doing that months later. Those people are just gone.

The rating is increasing so the positive ratio is far higher than 50/50. There was an extremely vocal minority who left lots of negative reviews after the switch, and yes many of them may now be gone. But clearly new users are happy with it.

For several years now it has seemed like every notable change in Firefox has been about removing a reason to use Firefox instead of Chrome. (There are certainly reasons for the opposite case, including but not limited to the fact that every single website is certainly tested to work in Chrome.)

Now, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since before it was called Firefox, and I'm quite used to it and unlikely to switch to anything else, but boy are they (at the Mozilla Foundation) trying hard to make me.

One could almost hazard a guess that Google has people inside Mozilla deliberately sabotaging the browser, to drive people to Chrome, while keeping Firefox around for the sole purpose of avoiding anti-trust lawsuits...

Not sure why you are being downvoted, this seems like a pretty plausible explanation. Certainly better than any other I have seen.

Google doesn't need to do that. Between mozilla's management and general hard, thankless work developing browsers.

For instance, Chrome loses to Edge and Safari, on metrics like memory or power consumption.

Does that mean Apple and Microsoft have infiltrated Google Chrome team?

Depends. Is Chrome team actively working on making their browser worse?

Is Firefox? It definitely doesn't seem so.

The more options you support the harder is to fix/change things.

A side effect of using the Vimperator extension for many years was that it provided a stable interface unaffected by upstream UI tweaks, while still benefiting from other feature and security updates. I couldn't imagine switching away from Firefox for any reason, but when Vimperator was no longer supported, I realized I didn't like what remained and evaluated alternatives. Eventually, I stopped installing Firefox on my machines because I no longer open it.

I've gone from a diehard Firefox advocate to not even recommending it to friends and family for exactly this reason. The amount UX churn and functionality regressions over the past half decade is absurd and a huge turnoff.

Exactly this: recent Firefox mobile update. It is the worst happen to software I like to use and I use it on daily basis. It went bad. And I don't understand why they removed so many helpful features. It is time to (again) depart from Firefox and choose Chromium again.

Please don't. Anything but Chrome based browsers. Chromium based browsers already have a monopoly, giving Google a huge weight when it comes to the web.

so firefox

Unfortunately yes. I really do wish we had more options.

I guess the other option is WebKit which is now independent from Chrome so has influence over the direction of the web.

The other option is IE --- I will continue to fight its deprecation because it still works damn well for the majority of non-JS sites, and MS continues to release security updates for it (contrary to what a lot of propaganda is saying.) Of course it doesn't have all the (site-facing) features of other browsers, and especially Google's behemoth, but I'm of the opinion that the web is already too bloated and needs to stop "moving forward" anyway.

(My main browser is IE. My secondary one is Firefox.)

ie doesn't even properly support flexbox. it works because people are taking special care to work around it's various bugs, for now.

That's what I meant by not having as many site-facing features. But, as someone who has written and used quite a few very usable sites when HTML4 and CSS2 was the norm, maybe it's not really a problem; and writing simple code and not trying to trendchase is good for both accessibility and browser diversity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313

It's not about the tool but how you use it...

Hey, I was around in times of not even having inline-blocks at our disposal too. It was horrible and I don't want to go back to it. I mean I don't even disagree with you entirely, but I don't really think flexbox or grid (which I know ie supports if you're willing to do the whole thing twice in two different syntaxes, which I'm not) is just a cherry on top, if anything they should have existed years before they did. Especially these days with responsive layouts being a thing, and if you don't want to just cheat and use javascript/browser detection to do it, they are pretty important to support different devices. That's where IE support can really step on your toe

by the way, I read that article at the time and opened my site in safari 6 on an old second generation ipod, and it worked hilariously well. Believe me, I'm not part of the problem, but I still can't wait for ie11 to fucking die so I can just write my layouts without having to worry about it's various idiosyncrasies, and finally use grid without impunity.

Doesn't Microsoft have an end-of-life date set after which they will only support Edge? It seems like the IE horse is guaranteed to drop out of this race.

How about NetSurf? (Doesn't use the engines from Chromium or Firefox or WebKit etc)

https://www.netsurf-browser.org

After the Firefox mobile upgrade, I dropped Firefox on all platforms and switched to Vivaldi. So far it's pretty good. It's Chromium based too, can sync settings, passwords, etc. to all platforms and, important for me, has a built-in ad blocker on mobile (unlike Chrome).

I completely disagree, I think the new Firefox mobile is great. It's significantly faster, and while there were initially some problems with the extensions I was using, they're all supported now.

Which Firefox is that? It seems to me there are more of them than Nokia had OSs back in the day.

>butchering their products (eg the recent Firefox mobile update)

This still stings. The Firefox mobile update was a huge step down in every way.

Hard disagree, it's an improvement in nearly every respect for me.

I want to agree, I really prefer the new layout, but everytime I open a link from another app it just hangs for at least 30 seconds and I am not on a resource constrained device.

I have no such experience on several devices and android versions. Perhaps clear cache / reinstall and see if that helps clear the bug? Otherwise it might be device specific.

I'm also surprised to see this strongly negative feedback.

For me, Firefox/Android is something I've always wanted to use very badly, because I'm a staunch Firefox desktop user and wanted the bookmarks sync, but I kept reaching for Chrome because of the superior performance and UI refinement anyway.

The major upgrade of Firefox/Android made it dramatically better on those fronts for me. And now that UBlock is back, I think it's ready for a serious attempt at switching. It definitely wasn't before.

What are some things they broke/dropped?

Lots of little things that might not matter much individually, but still add up significantly when taken together:

- tabs can't be reordered any more

- bookmarks/history/recently closed tabs/top sites... are more cumbersome to access

- no "recently closed tabs" for quite a few months after the initial release

- bookmarks always force-open a new tab

- search suggestions needlessly take up more space (apparently by design, because these days information density is baaaaad), so you can't see local history/bookmark results without closing the keyboard or scrolling down

- using a search engine other than the default one requires two extra click at least, whereas previously they were directly accessible at the bottom of the screen

- Can't install search engines any more, instead you manually need to enter the correct search URL, which isn't fun (and then the manually created engine is of course lacking a proper icon)

- bookmark keywords and keyword searches aren't supported

- you used to be able to open a new tab by simply tapping the "tabs" button twice because the "new tab" button in the tabs list was suitably aligned – this is no longer the case (at least with the URL bar in classic on top mode)

- the tab queue for tabs opened from other apps doesn't exist any more

- the share sheet – you used to be able to share a URL to Firefox and then directly bookmark it or send it to another Firefox instance via Firefox Sync without having to actually open the URL in Firefox locally. Now you can't – any shared URLs are automatically opened and you need to wait for the full browser to actually load before you can bookmark/send the tab (and then you also need to close it again)

- view page source doesn't exist, not even if you manually prepend view-source: to the URL (supposedly there's an addon that works, but due to the blasted add-on policy you can't actually install it)

- can't view/browse local (HTML) files any more

- can't install themes anymore

- various small bugs introduced by the fact that this was a total rewrite

- despite having to rewrite the whole UI from scratch anyway, they didn't fix the "XKCD" bug and make long <img "title"> attributes scrollable instead of truncating them

- and probably quite a few more things I'd notice if I was actually regularly using the current version…

And of course the whole add-on thing: Even on the previous iteration of Firefox, the Webextension API implementation was somewhat half-hearted once you got to APIs that required special handling on the Android version, and the fact that this was a total rewrite hasn't helped in significantly expanding the coverage there, because instead the dev time largely had to be spent on re-implementing things.

Then there's of course that absolutely infuriating policy of only allowing a very limited selection of add-ons to be installed (unless you're on Nightly and jump through about half a dozen hoops, and even then you can only install the current version (and only the current version) of add-ons actually published on AMO). If you're lucky (or basically only using uBlock), maybe your add-on needs are actually covered by that, but the long tail of unsupported add-ons starts very early.

This also makes life more difficult for add-on developers (even if your add-on is actually one of the selected few), because you can no longer permanently install a testing version of your add-on or heaven help distribute a Beta version to your users (no, not even on Nightly and not even if the add-on is signed) – the best you get is temporary installation as long as your phone is connected to your computer and that's that.

Thanks! Fantastic reply.

They dropped support for every extension sans 5-6 of them. And some of the extensions were incredibly useful.

They got 18 extensions on android now. Including Ublock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere (by EFF), BitWarden, NoScript.

They don't have the main one I care about, and you can't install external extensions (not from their website).

Actually you can. You need nightly and you need to setup some account and set your extensions there. This is just so they can show you that they still work and they have disabled them because reasons. Nicely played.

I'm not sure I understand, you mean I need to use nightly and I need to publish the extensions to AMO myself? Neither of that is going to happen.

You don't need to publish the extensions, but you need to choose the extensions that you want to make available to Firefox. The instructions are here:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

The stable version of Fennec F-Droid (a fork of Firefox for Android) also supports custom extensions through this method if you don't want to use Firefox Nightly:

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

I want to use a non AMO extension

You can use any plugin you want on Nightly.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

It's just that they're not guaranteed to work yet due to all the changes they made to the browser engine.

Before if I was on a page and wanted to go to a site pinned on the homepage (i.e basically all the ones I use on mobile) I just had to click on the address bar which would display the homepage and I could click it, now it doesn't work, it shows nothing instead (why?) and god do I still hate it.

Also not exactly related the the new version but tab sending from desktop to mobile is basically not working these days.

>I don't think Mozilla has a clear vision of what they want to achieve.

Nope, they are obsessed about how tabs and [x] button look like. Is that 6th big change on the panel in 5 years?

I use Firefox Beta on android. One can change about:config options to improve pivacy. There is something called 'encrypted client hello', which was discussed here on HN, which lets me access many blocked sites in my country.

I use the about:config options in this guide [1] plus enable encrypted DNS and encrypted client hello in about:config (on FF Beta android).

A few days ago, there was an HN page showcasing a cool webpage which can read the position angles of your phone (whether it's flat, inclined etc in detail). That page works well on regular FF Android. But on the FF Beta with the config options enabled as above prevents the page from reading the angles. I also have telemetry upload disabled on FF Beta, but maybe a bit something is still uploaded, idk.

[1] https://restoreprivacy.com/firefox-privacy/

Edit: If one trawls through some recent past threads, one can see that FF cares about privacy. They have official extensions to isolate sites (or cookies?) to prevent tracking, on desktop. (Facebook Container and Firefox Multi-Account container). They are working on something like per site isolation by default (Project Fission [2]). Yeah Chrome has it but then they try to log you into the whole browser when you just wanna log in to gmail. And they are not doing something scammy plus impactful like AMP, FLoC [3] like Google. These AMP links are everywhere, many times it looks like it's the official site link.

[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Project_Fission

[3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

The device angle can be used for fingerprinting. I suspect that resetting the “ privacy.resistFingerprinting” preference to “false” will fix the device angle website.

Yeah that's what I meant. The page not working is a feature.

Oh. I mistakenly thought it might be a new bug. :)

I'm not very mobile savvy, but I use FF on mobile what did they mess up? I'm using 86.1.1 (Build #2015794881)

Extensions, there's a whitelist of about 10.

Ah. I only use uBlock Origin on mobile so that explains it.

They have a very clear vision: drive as many users to other browsers.

Things tend to go that way when your major sponsor is also the owner of your main competing product.

Or you know, there is a bias towards the negative for some backward-ass reason and there is this much engagement over some random clickbait UI feature, and almost none about actual technical advances in the renderer and the like that happen regularly, which is kind of saddening on HN.

It would be nice if the community would have more acceptance towards the last remaining browser fighting the good fight, with the many welcome, recent (!) advancements regarding privacy.

This is a 100% failure by Mozilla foundation management.

They are non technical people who only care about own salaries and sjw issues, while ignoring their core product.

Meanwhile the developer team does whatever they want: they mostly do greenfield projects that are used to boost their CVs. Those projects get 0 users and usually are cancelled at 70% completion so nothing hard needs to be done anyway (no bugfixing which is unsexy work).

Here a developer probably does not want to code the compact option (or possibly: does not know how to do it) so they just want to remove it. Because the new firefox motto is "fuck our remaining users". Mozilla management does not care.

Then they will wonder why firefox has a 3% market share.

I have never used FF mobile, but so far no one has gone into detail about what changed about FF mobile that made it so much worse. Can you elaborate a little?

There were a number of major changes that were poorly received:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/26/firefox...

Perhaps the most disruptive change was that the update was not compatible with the vast majority of extensions. Given that, for "power users", the ability to install extensions was THE killer feature of Firefox for Android, this change was controversial.

I still use Firefox 68.

This is what I've come up with off the top of my head, and if I was actually regularly using the new version, there'd probably be quite a few more things to add:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26470454

Honestly I really like the mobile update, the interface feels more intuitive and modern. The only complaint for me is the "recommended" plugin restrictions.

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