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Comment by sabellito | Hacker News Reader

I use FF Android every day, including watching videos, and haven't noticed the "unstable garbage pile". Are you being hyperbolic?

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Me too. It's my main browser on Android for years now and it works great.

Have you actually tried a different one lately? I tried Vivaldi and was astonished at how much snappier it is. No more weird crashes on launch. No more Desktop Mode button that breaks if you hit the Back button. No more failed attempts to dismiss a tab because using your phone in landscape mode made it adjust the swipe length to six damn inches long.

I haven't tried other browsers lately. I agree that FF is less snappy compared to Chrome, for example, but I have a fast phone. I haven't experienced those issues you talk about - maybe it's just my luck! I particularly like the ad-blocking abilities of FF.

I still use Firefox for high-risk browsing like porn or piracy, but for regular browsing the adblocking built into Vivaldi or Brave works just fine.

Interesting that you'd bring up Vivaldi. I think I tried it on my phone a few years back and it worked OK. But on a PC or Mac, it's the most bloated and slow piece of software I've seen. Which is a damn shame, because it has a lot of unique features.

I agree fully. It's quite nice on mobile, though. I especially like being able to automatically hide the status bar while in landscape mode to maximize vertical space. There's also the advantage that, as a Chromium-based browser, the Assistant command "read aloud" works.

I reinstalled Chrome recently to test a website, and it felt so much faster. It really surprised me.

Still, I won't browse the web without uBlock Origin, so Firefox is here to stay.

Well it's useable, I use it as well, but definitely worse then before this "new" version. And I want the extension support back.

Install Fennec using F-Droid, it's firefox with more extensions than what firefox for android allows. Are they ever going to re-enable other extensions on firefox android? Firefox used to be synonymous with "awesome list of helpful extensions".

I've had the opposite experience, switched to Firefox on Android after the new update because of the better performance and UI. Limited extension support is annoying, but if you get it from F-Droid or use the nightly version, you can enable a hidden setting that lets you install any extension you like.

On Firefox Nightly, I randomly get tabs that break and show an interactive version of the previously switched-to tab until you restart the browser, dragging a text handle to the left of a Hacker News comment crashes the entire browser, etc.

Then stop using nightly.....

Nightly is the only build where you can use extensions, which IMO is the reason to use FF on mobile :(

I'm using extensions on regular Firefox 106 for Android.

If I am correct we can only choose few extensions including ublock in ff(except nightly?

Breaking news, unstable version is unstable.

Sounds like you're having problems with WebRender? Maybe it's unhappy with your graphics card or something. Definitely worth filing a bug and attaching your about:support.

I used to have much more minor issues that are somewhat similar to what you describe, but they've been fixed for the last year or so. (I run Nightly all the time, on Linux, and generally have remarkably few issues with it.)

Have you compared it to mobile chrome? Chrome feels so much faster.

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