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Comment by tored | Hacker News Reader

Yes, you have to ask yourself why everyone is using V8 as their JavaScript runtime and not Mozilla’s equivalent or why every alternative browser is using Chrome as a foundation.

Or XUL wasn’t packaged as cross platform GUI framework.

And then of course the Firefox mobile fiasco.

My guess is that the engineering and management don’t interact. Two different companies within the same company, no coherent vision.

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What FF mobile fiasco are you speaking of? I am using FF mobile happily and have been for years. I haven't noticed any issues with it. Was there a business level fiasco or something?

One objective fiasco is the inability of FF on Android to keep multiple tabs in memory. Older versions were capable of it without issue, ever since the tab unloading feature, Firefox has been reloading tabs at the slightest pretense.

Switch apps? Tabs get reloaded when you're back.

Lock & unlock phone with Firefox in focus? Tabs get reloaded

Switch tabs in Firefox? Tabs get reloaded...

I wish I was just ranting, but all of the above happens with a single active tab loaded...

That is interesting to me because that isn't my experience. I just tried the lock screen for example and I couldn't get any of tabs to reload, foreground or not. I'm on Android 10 running on a Moto G7. Maybe it's affected by vendor settings?

Quite a few devices experience this though. For the record, I use an S9, and used to have 50+ tabs with no issues on older versions of Firefox - now I cannot have one tab remain open without a reload if I lock my phone with Firefox focused and turn unlock it a minute later. And that's with Firefox explicitly exempt from each and every kind of battery/memory etc. "optimization" by Android...

Here's the issue itself on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12731

Doesn't happen for me. OnePlus 8 with Oxygen OS 11.

The one thing I really miss in FF mobile is the opposite.. Pull to refresh or another gesture that accomplishes that. The current two tap option is too slow.

I no longer have a need for that, my Firefox ALWAYS refreshes each and every tab whenever I look away from it for 5 seconds, so maybe it's a feature?

Cannot reproduce. Android 9 on Nokia 8.

What I meant was the Firefox phone, the hardware plus the Firefox OS, not the mobile browser, sorry for the confusion about mobile vs phone.

They banned all add-ons and have been slowly whitelisting them back.

All of them written in C++.

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