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Comment by sombremesa | Hacker News Reader

Weird that this person doesn’t even consider Firefox, the only browser that lets you have Adblock and other addons on mobile (but not on iOS, sadly).

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I switched to firefox after NEVER using it before when google started forcefully logging me in.

Honestly, i havnt missed it all. Firefox on mobile is awesome - plugins work! Plus, no longer does google know where i am anymore. Its ability to track and suggest ads to me is pathetic.

> no longer does google know where i am anymore

i doubt it - they probably know just as much from extrapolation off other data points, even if the browser data point is gone.

My one gripe about Firefox mobile is that "pull down to refresh" and other common gestures don't work. Unless I'm missing something, there aren't settings available to enable this.

Is this some kind of patented behavior that Mozilla is afraid to implement?

That we have to worry whether "pull down" is patented shows how far the patent system is from fulfilling its promise.

I was curious, so I just looked it up.

"pull down to refresh" is patented by Twitter:

https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/4350826/twitter-pull-to-r...

And Firefox implements the feature in Nightly (this is an old thread, so perhaps it has already landed in mainline) :

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/nzfcak/why_do_we_n...

On Android, "pull down to refresh" exists, and (I think?) it was enabled by default.

(I find it a little obnoxious actually, as I frequently accidentally hit it trying to scroll back up)

> plugins work!

Only certain ones from their recommended program. Add-on support on mobile is still very limited from what it could be.

Not certain with this, but it might be a limitation of the Play Store rules. You are not allowed to publish some sort of App Store on the Play Store, which the Firefox Extension Store would kind of be.

Does firefox let you install extensions without contacting Mozilla servers? I'm not sure how the extension signing works, but it may fail the same reason they're leaving Brave.

Well they're being hosted on Mozilla's servers so no but FF doesn't in any way require a connection to Mozilla's servers to function.

You can host extension on your own server. Fireox will display a security warning when you try to install them, but that is it.

It doesn't, depending on your definition. You get them to sign it (given the speed - 5-10 minutes for a medium sized extension - it seems automated) and then when they click to download the signed xpi file it prompts them to install, saying "[domain] would like to install [extension name]." This is the same prompt you get in the official Mozilla addons site.

You can turn them off basically except their "rapid release" releases - and even then, you can get unbranded Mozilla-compiled builds that can unlock the functionality (on desktop).

Google has something to do why the Android Firefox is crippled: before Firefox 68 was released, the Google reviewers actually rejected it owing to the addons system. (Yes, I know Kiwi browser exists. I don't understand the reviewers' logic but here we are.) Fortunately, FF 68 is an ESR release and was able to stop-gap the issue by releasing security updates (which aren't blocked by Google). Unfortunately, this is the reason Mozilla is only shipping "recommended addons": Mozilla has individually reviewed it because Google will penalise Mozilla if there's a malicious addon on their store. (Note that I won't shield Mozilla on the "Daylight" updates: I hope that they just continue Fennec rather than they rewrite it but personally it's fine.)

Can unbranded Firefox check for updates now?

Who cares? Also, you can manually download and install an extension if that is truly killing off your privacy.

Also, their bio says they are an "open-source enthusiast". You would think they would at least mention Firefox, even if they said "I'm on board with Firefox's mission and transparency, but it's slow" or something.

Personally, I use Firefox out of principle.

Kiwi Browser has extensions on Android and not just few cherrypicked liked Firefox, whole design of Firefox on mobile is just horrible

Bromite and Brave have built-in adblockers on Android. Kiwi is a Chromium fork that let's you install addons.

Opera and Vivaldi both have ad-blocking and tracking prevention by default

Opera has sketchy, for-profit owners. Vivaldi seems like it has better ownership.

Not the only one - Orion browser lets you have addons on iOS.

I find it strange that on threads about Brave people promote Firefox and vice versa, whether it's a positive or negative article. Free software isn't a competition and if it were Mozilla lost to Chromium a long time ago.

That’s why we should prefer Mozilla, because it is an actual independent implementation of the grossly huge web standards, not dependent on Chromium?

Without it we loose the standard part of the whole web, and it will be “whatever chrome does is the standard”.

Free software is not a competition, the fight for the freedom of the web certainly is. The mozilla guys are the ones consistently being on the users side and are often pushing back on proposals from Google and others (e.g. FLOC) in the various standard committees. Without a significant marketshare (it's already bad enough as is) their voice will just be ignored.

> this person doesn’t even consider Firefox

* Firefox main income is the competitor, Google

* Firefox sent telemetry to Google servers after first start

So am I, it doesn't feet in my degoogled life.

Setting can be disabled, and for example the debian build comes without telemetry.

Is this also true for Debian-based distributions? Anyways, users on Mac and Windows usually download Firefox directly from Mozilla and are therefore affected by the aforementioned telemetry.

Seeing the market share of Desktop Linux I'd hazard a guess that those users are in the majority.

Guess nope, 'cause Mozilla doesn't allow patching at all.

Edit: tried to download debian package to check their patches, but failed: https://packages.debian.org/sid/firefox

So proofs are welcoming.

Debian's Firefox is patched.

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