I feel like Firefox might actually regain marketshare if it can ship on iOS. Firefox on Android has a decent claim to be being better than Chrome at this point (largely because you can't run extensions on Chrome).
Firefox is better than Chrome on Android, but it doesn't have the market share to match.
For any day-to-day browsing, I use Brave with the cryptocurrency bits turned off. I used the "Fennec" version of Firefox for Android for years, since my first smartphone in college, but by the time the GeckoView-based rewrite was released, I just got tired of the poor performance and reduced battery life compared to Chromium. Only one anecdote, but Firefox felt more jittery and made my phone much hotter than Chromium did.
After the UI overhaul, where (IMO) they tried to copy a Chromium-style interface, I ran out of any non-ideological reasons to use it over Chromium-with-an-ad-blocker-built-in.
I'll plug my main mobile browser which is now Samsung's internet. I gave it a hesitant try after being disappointed by FF and I'm positively surprised. The UI customization options are even better than Firefox.
“The information we obtain in this manner may include, identifiers associated with your devices, types of devices, web browser characteristics, device and operating system type and characteristics, language preferences, clickstream data, your interactions with Samsung Internet (such as the web pages you visit, links you click and features you use), dates and times of your use of Samsung Internet, and other information about your use of Samsung Internet.”
https://developer.samsung.com/internet/privacy-policy-us.htm...
Thank you for spreading this.
Sigh
Do not use it if you rely on accurate color reproduction. Expect a decease in usability (dark text on dark backgrounds, light on light) on reading some sites.
Only things that still bother me on FF is not having access to all extensions and not having pull to refresh.
About not having the full extension catalog available out of the box: it's pitiful, but if you're determined to install non pre-allowed extensions, you can do so using Nightly and with a custom add-on collection. See https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio....
I only have "Scroll to hide toolbar" and "Swipe toolbar sideways to switch tabs"
This is in Firefox 108.1.0 which is the latest.
I know you can mess with Nightly to allow other addons but I don't really like using nightly to be honest. This feature should really be in the mainline too.
Firefox is currently superior to Chrome on Android, yet the market share is abysmal and irrelevant. I don't see why swapping the browser engine would grow market share, other than wishful thinking.
Surprisingly, that's not enough to be competitive with the browser that's already installed on people's phones.
So no, Firefox still doesn't support extensions on android and hasn't since they disabled them years ago.
THIS is why people like me don't use firefox on android and use chromium-based browsers instead. At least, they let me install the add-ons I want.
That's the complete list, yeah. It's utterly ridiculous and insulting.
You can get around it by making an online collection of extensions with a Mozilla/whatever account, but you can't install from files.
I largely agree, it doesn't meet my bar for "supports extensions" :/ hence at the very least "significant step down" - that much is at least not contentious.
Left hand, meet right hand.
To this day, swathes of people who were involved in this effort (some of them very prominent) are utterly convinced that it wasn't the demonstrably bad idea that it really was, but more like a case of just plain bad luck in the marketplace. Meanwhile, they sat by ineptly as ChromeOS became much more successful for the laptop form factor than FirefoxOS ever was on any device and Electron started charting its ascendancy with more and more non-mobile apps jumping aboard over time.
So congrats to the corporate geniuses who pissed away the head start that Mozilla as a project already had and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing even when it became clear that there, in fact, was tons of interest in a cross-platform framework for desktop/WIMP apps, contrary to management's insistence otherwise. It's a masterclass of incompetence that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should.
The rest of it, yeah. Absolutely agreed. Electron not having a Firefox equivalent in particular strikes me as a major, multi-year... not oversight, that's far too polite. Self-ostriching? I'm continually astounded beyond words. The market is massive, and nauseatingly ripe for competitors.
So you can't innovate on that, at least meaningfully. If you want the browser with best website support, then you'd go with Chrome. If you wanted your bookmarks from your desktop to be in sync with mobile bookmarks, then most likely you are going to install Chrome, because most likely you had Chrome on your desktop (as it is the most common desktop browser).
Also, an apple policy change to lifts the restrictions for non-apple apps to not be extendable, is a different beast entirely from allowing custom web rendering engines.
They have to come from the app store, which greatly reduces the number of plugins available compared to FF, and subjects them to the same strict policies as their apps.
iOS+Chrome users already do this, it would just change iOS Chrome's backend rendering engine.
Let's start with the facts. Firefox market share has been chronically flat with little to no change for years, as the global mobile browser market share [0] has shown even with Android having browser choice for the user.
Hence that, it also suggests that even if Apple did the same thing, it would just further cement Chrome's dominance on iOS. Firefox on mobile is shrinking into irrelevancy.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...