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Comment by spijdar | Hacker News Reader

I know this probably won't be a popular opinion, but I have to disagree with this. I use Firefox on all my "general purpose" computing devices, but I only use Firefox on Android for recalling the passwords I have saved on my Firefox/Mozilla account.

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.

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Unfortunately I have a similar experience with FF on Android. A more jittery experience and a bigger batter drain than Chrome, even without any extensions installed.

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.

Samsung's internet has a misguided "feature" where it will change some colors but not others when night/dark mode is active.

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.

Note that the Samsung Internet privacy policy is awful. They collect:

“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...

If you hadn't replied with this, I would have.

Thank you for spreading this.

Thanks for the heads-up, this is pretty bad indeed. There's truly no escaping the fight between convenience and privacy.

Sigh

The rewrite was pretty bad yes but it's good again now. I never use chrome anymore on my Android devices.

Only things that still bother me on FF is not having access to all extensions and not having pull to refresh.

"Pull to refresh" has been in Firefox for Android for years. See Settings > Customise > Gestures.

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....

Huh, I don't have Pull to Refresh under Settings > Customise > Gestures. I wish I did.

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.

I would advise against storing passwords in a browser vendor sync service. Bitwarden, 1Password, etc.. are the tools for that specific job and function across all major browsers and even some native GUI shells.

Why the caution?

How would you explain the benefits to the average person? This doubles the number of parties they need to trust and usually means adding a subscription service so it seems like a tough sell.

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