Hacker News Reader

Comment by chockablocker | Hacker News Reader

Everybody is moving to mobile and almost nobody uses Firefox on mobile. However, Firefox mobile does support extensions. Is that something that could emphasized? However, Firefox speed on mobile is much slower than Chrome. That should probably be improved upon.

For desktop there's not much of a distinguishing factor left. Chrome is good enough. I like Firefox for the privacy, but is that enough of a distinguishing factor for regular (less privacy conscious) folks?

View on HN

I'm a FF fanboy but I have moved to Vivaldi for mobile. Two issues persist for me on FF mobile, even the nightly version:

* Scroll lag/tearing on many websites which doesn't occur with Chromium engine

* Reloading of tabs when I return to them, vs. leaving them as-is until I request a reload. This is abominable behavior.

So I installed Vivaldi and then blocked the domain on my pi-hole to prevent the daily checkins the browser attempts.

FF implements what they call 'smart sizing' on Android. The basic principle is the larger the amount of disk space available (on Android they use disk caching) the larger the cache size. You can inspect this dynamically on your device in 'about:cache'.

I am violently critical of FF's current direction but to be fair to FF the reloading of tabs is a compromise to deal with how little disk space there usually is on Android (because the OS itself hogs large chunks of it in most Android devices).

I use firefox on android. Its frustrating at times. It doesn't integrate well with android stuff like opening up in apps I think. It takes me to the app store or doesnt even open in apps. Google stuff like looking at reviews doesn't work in firefox.

There's an addon for making the Google pages work as they do in Chrome:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

Oh wow interesting, thanks! Cant believe this needs to even exist though...

I just assumed this was because Android ignores your default browser setting for special cases. Is this an FF problem or an Android problem?

Ff on mobile with uBlock origin is IMO awesome.

I switched angrily to Chrome on mobile ca. 4y ago, but came back ca. 2y to give it a 2nd chance and I'm not missing Chrome.

Firefox Android does support extensions, Firefox mobile arguable includes iOS - which does not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com