Firefox for Android is a mess, and something needs to change

That's a bit harsh. Every point they raised is valid: the UX changes have been weird and inconsistent, the lack of history searching is frustrating etc

I still use ff, I certainly won't be using Chrome as I appreciate my add-ons too much.

> I should write a "I'm perfectly happy with Firefox, happier than I would be with any other browser" blog post and see if it gets any attention.

And here I was thinking the post missed a lot of issues maybe I should create another blog post.

Stop defending something that really has issues. This fanboy behaviour ends up hurting the very thing we love.

I'll push back a little bit on this.

To preface, I have also been at least reasonably happy with Fenix on Android, although I am frustrated that the add-ons are still limited. I don't feel like I have a lot of friction, the UI works well enough for what I need it to do, and I have pretty much no desire to switch to another browser. And I regularly get annoyed at the level of scrutiny and amount of bad-natured criticism that Mozilla gets. I think it's part human nature, part meme, but I see people throw complaints at Firefox with a level of vigor that they can't seem to muster for browsers that are clearly far, far worse. And I've seen those same people ignore some of the legitimately fantastic stuff that Mozilla has been doing, some of it inside of Firefox.

All that being said, I didn't get any of those bad feelings from this article. The criticisms seemed fair, and it felt to me that the author was speaking out of genuine concern and desire for Fenix to be better. I didn't feel like the author was going out of their way to complain.

More importantly, as someone who is generally a lot more bullish on Mozilla and Firefox than other people on HN, and as someone who honestly still trusts Mozilla quite a bit, the complaints about closed designs and lack of community involvement in some parts of the browser ring true to me and I empathize. I trust Mozilla a lot, but I do really wish that they didn't make these kinds of design decisions that came so far out of left field with so little community input. They could do better here, and it is a worrying trend.

It is weird for a browser to have this many tab switcher redesigns, and to have so many of them received so negatively.

I do recommend people use Firefox on Android. I think the average experience is going to be better than the author describes, particularly if users aren't on nightly. And having support for Ublock Origin is a killer feature, and not just for privacy. The mobile web is borderline unusable for me without a good adblocker.

But... a lot of the criticism here is valid, and I hope that people at Mozilla look at it, and in the best case scenario, I hope maybe this kind of criticism leads to more open, thoughtful design where community input and involvement happens earlier in the design process.

I've found the Firefox tabbing experience much nicer on mobile. Chrome wrecked their UX recently, sometimes new tabs become circles at the bottom (that don't obey the tab button) and sometimes they become big squares at the top that are under the tab button. The two types of tabs are confusing as hell.

And sometimes the big square tabs have little squares inside them so you now have tiny circles inside little squares inside big squares and this 3-dimensional tabbing is just nuts. 1 dimension is enough.

I have two complaints for Firefox Mobile (Android.

1. `about:config` is disabled on Stable branch, if you want to access it you need to use the Beta branch. Why is that the case? You don't see the same arbitrary limitation on desktop.

2. It seems to have issue loading a page randomly from time to time, and even trying to reload or open a different URL doesn't work, kinda like as if the tab itself crashed and became unresponsive. I haven't found a cause yet, and I don't know if I'm the only one.

I'm happier with android firefox than I would be with any other mobile browser, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have issues. The biggest one for me is that bookmarks are almost unusable. You can't search them, you can't see or edit tags, and you can't re-order them.

I fully agree with you, but I have to admit I am not a mobile "power user", my usage pales in comparison to desktop usage.

But my only complaint is what I'd call a bug that I haven't reported. I have a custom search engine on the desktop, where I for example can rewrite e.g. "x leo whatever" to "search for whatever on leo.org", and I can call this via a literal https://example.org/leo%20whatever - but I can't get firefox to accept that I enter a url with a space, it will never open my own "https://example.org" with the params, it will always search google for "example.org" even if I prefix it with https:// - this is maddening and maybe I just haven't found the switch to remove this stupid omnibar trend. Oh, and the url bar at the bottom is weird, but I'm not even complaining.

I like how the top reply to your comment is two complaints about firefox.

FF on android WAS a great browser. If it never existed before and you tried current version then it would be OK but lacking some important features and you could hope it would gain those features soon. Knowing what features have been removed since the FF was first released, it's hard to call FF great, good or even OK. And maybe you don't need or use those removed features...until you do need them and they are suddenly not there...and other browsers still have them or have gained them. After all that it becomes clear why FF is down to 1% and browser share and still sliding down. With that level of mismanagement it will either disappear or become unusable in not too distant future.

My major problem is that the rewrite in 2019 broke nearly all the addons and ones I use haven't been fixed.

I don't have download notifications neither with its own download manger or the external.

Everyone's been gradually removing user empowerment features from browsers for years. I wonder if they just want us to get used to no or only a few curated extensions.

original promise: Firefox for Android, like Chrome but with infinite extensions written by people just like you for people just like you

new promise: Firefox for Android, underinvestment in UX you'll definitely hate and 12 potential extensions exclusively approved by a committee of parasitic boomers too far gone to be competitive on the contemporary labour market.

Absolute garbage. However way this cut, one team or otherwise, they clearly didn't have the SLIGHTEST clue about the primary value prop of their main product for its users. Today's Mozilla is organizationally incompetent, and I genuinely worry (user for decades) that this time it truly is beyond rescue. That the situation on Android has persisted for almost a year already tells you all you need to know: Mozilla appears not to even possess the nervous system to respond to the obvious pain and misery of its users from that disastrous Android UI rewrite. They seem utterly deaf and dumb, almost like it were already a cadaver. Reminds me of Yahoo

thanks so much, didn't know there is any way now.

Simple Gesture works amazingly well and you can avoid the tabs menu all together with it.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-gestur...

It just mustn't collide with the "pull down to refresh" so you might want to remap the gestures not to include down without an up before.

---

Now I just need to find a way to quickly open new tabs in fore- and even more important: background. Long press for anything frequent is just infuriating.

Not sure how much it might help you, but I'm able to print from mine by "sharing" a page to an app for my printer from firefox mobile, but I'd definitely like a proper printing option instead.

why not screenshot or save it? It's not like the content is different.

Yeah, the Save as PDF feature was handy and its absence from the current Firefox for Android feels like a regression. I hope they add it back.

- GitHub issue for printing: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/10217

- GitHub issue for Save as PDF: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/3709

I experienced that too, but I wrote it off as a keyboard issue since it stopped happening after I switched from AnySoftKeyboard to FlorisBoard. Which keyboard are you using?

Another annoying thing with the urlbar is when searching something (at least with Google).

Say you have set Google as your default search engine and you type 'giant books' in the urlbar (sans the quote marks). It will show that results page from Google. But say you want to look for giant books _only in your country_. So what I usually do is to add '.co' (or your country's suffix) after the '.com'. You'd tape on the urlbar, scroll until you find the '.com' and add the '.co'.

But nope. It won't let you modify the URL. For some weird reason it keeps showing the query string you originally typed, in this case 'giant books'. I haven't been able to find something that lets me modify the URL when searching something. In the example, I need to type 'google.com.co', retype the query string and search again.

My personal reason for beginning the post the way I did is because of the ease of misinterpreting someone's tone when the communication is only textual, and that you lose the extra context you might gain when being able to hear someone's voice.

I'm not angry at Mozilla because of the frustration I feel when trying to use Fenix as intended. I only wish that there was some way we could have a stable alternative to Chrome on Android with support for WebExtensions, and there appear to be several issues preventing that wish from coming true.

And I do not want to seem like I'm trying to attack anyone by trying to explain why I felt the frustration I did. I personally believe that declaring my intentions in a precise manner upfront is a reasonable step to take for a post like this.

Resume Driven Development

Moving away from Fenix does not mean that I no longer believe that advertising is universally harmful for the people who are constantly subjected to it. As I mentioned in my post, I am still a user of Firefox on desktop, and I wouldn't think of browsing the modern web without an adblocker anymore. The problem is that Fenix in its current state is too immature for me to use in a practical, day-to-day manner. That does not mean that Fenix cannot be improved in the future, and I absolutely believe that Mozilla is capable of doing so if they restructure their priorities.

I am concerned about the future of Firefox as much as you are, and that is the reason I wrote this post. I wanted more people to know of Fenix's issues so that it can ultimately become a better browser.

>the last truly free alternative to a browser built by ad grubby organisation

Is it? Considering Mozilla gets most of their money from Google, I find assertions about their independence on very thin ice.

Also, the idea that discussing Firefox's problems is "ruining it for the rest of us" is absurd. People care about Firefox and are being vocal about the problems so that they might get fixed. The people being silent about Firefox's problems are the ones that no longer care and have long since moved on.

Or, bear with me, use a fork of chromium and get google to give you their labor for free while using a piece of software that serves you first and foremost.

I also don't have complaints but then reading the thread I realized I'm on version 68. Apparently some of the issues are regressions introduced in newer versions.

nice try

Is there any more context to this? Because the tweet is vague and assuming it's about posts like this seems like a bit of a jump unless you've got further info about it

The way things are going, Firefox will have to drop their rendering engine for Webkit. What they're doing now is unsustainable.

That person doesn't work at Mozilla or on free software at all anymore. It was a bad tweet, but it's past the time to reasonably hold that against Mozilla.

Mozilla has a lot of problems, and it would be better to blame them for the problems that are still around rather than a bad tweet from months ago by someone not employed at Mozilla any longer.

Hello that is me. I left almost a year ago. I posted that as a joke after years of abuse and it was directed towards those abusive community members. I had no ill will towards users. In fact, users are why I stayed so long and tried to improve the product. I agree with some of the criticisms in this post. The fact you’re still using me, the most public facing woman on the project, as a scapegoat and target for your frustrations is predictable but sad. In general targeting one dev will not get you anywhere.

You might consider that when you start bashing the Firefox developers personally, they are much more likely to just stop working on Firefox entirely than to listen to you. Realize that most engineers working at Mozilla are already giving up some amount of money to do so relative to what they could earn at FAANG.