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Comment by boringuser2 | Hacker News Reader

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boringuser2

Unfortunately, the "browser", for lack of a better term... sucks.

It was released as a preview in 2019 and has barely made appreciable strides since.

The team is so semi-competent that they have added and broken and disabled pull to refresh more than once now.

Add-ons have been on life support ever since they were introduced.

If I fullscreen a video, my browser minimizes.

Battery usage is abysmal.

Speed is noticably worse than any chromium fork.

Of course, I don't think I could do any better, but I'm not producing a browser, nor have I fired any engineers despite not having particularly reknown engineering chops as a company in recent memory.

This software is just terrible, especially because this failure isn't in a vacuum, it actually cements chromium as a monopoly of engineering competence.

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When I read comments like this, it really blows me away. I don't have anything near the experience you are describing. I've used Firefox on Android for a while now with UBlock origin doing it's job as it should. It doesn't kill my battery or run sluggishly. I use it for YouTube and browser-based YouTube is missing some live stream features, but that is by Google's design.

This is clearly someone who is not a user. Probably gave it a try 4 years ago made a list of dislikes, uninstalled, and stuck with the criticism.

>Speed is noticably worse than any chromium fork.

My experience is decidedly the opposite, and the single reason for that is uBlock Origin. The principal way to make websites load fast is to make them load less garbage. Fast browser engine is nice but not even close to proper content blocking (e.g. uBlock's JS defusers or DOM rules).

But extension capability is great overall. For example, you don't like how HN styles downvoted comments in unreadable light grey on light grey? Just add a user CSS extension and use this filter:

    .c5a, .c73, .c82, .c88, .c9c, .cae, .cbe, .cce, .cdd { color: #222; font-style: italic; }

I haven't used chrome in years, because while all those things are partially true, ublock origin makes them pale into insignificance compared to the eye sore I am otherwise subjected to.

What I really want is to use chrome for PWAs and something that is essentially Firefox reader mode for actual web documents.

I love Firefox reader mode! It's genuinely really helpful, especially on sites that 'optimise' for mobile by making it nearly unusable with their fancy font scaling that, without fail, always overflows off the page.

One thing I've noticed is that sticky divs of most kinds (e.g. the bar at the bottom of Twitter.com, sidebars on news sites, etc.) horrendously crush the performance.

But if you kill them, by zapping with ublock or using another extension or bookmarklet, the performance is instantly a lot closer to something like the Chrome or Brave apps

It has been like this since Fenix launched, so at this point it makes me need to assume that it's some sort of fundamental limitation of their architecture. It is rather unfortunate.

That has not been my experience. I was trying Firefox and their various preview products on my Android once in a while for years. Every time I would bounce because of painful performance and bad scrolling.

The latest incarnation... well it can choke on YouTube videos once in a while and you have to force kill it. And it does eat more battery than Chromium browsers.

But the current state is the first time I've found Firefox mobile version usable as a daily driver.

Maybe it's just phones have caught up - I'm on a Pixel 7.

But the point stands: vanilla FF mobile is now good-enough-for-me, and extensions make it wonderful.

I can't get over the bugs and slowness when I can just load up Brave that has a great ad blocker and dark mode setting.

Nothing else is really relevant to me on mobile.

Yes one aspect seems for sure to be that it requires a lot more memory than Chrome, so on old budget phones it's likely to remain unviable to use it

I've used Firefox on Android for many years, and while I don't agree that it's terrible I do think it's worse than it used to be.

Around the same time as the extensions support was disabled, they removed a lot of features I liked and added some features and UI changes that still annoy me. It's a bit sad.

My experience is mostly positive.

I have not tested battery life, but it is acceptable to me, as is most of the performance.

I can confirm the full-screen video bug - I just tried watching a video on the New York Times site, and full-screening with Firefox is completely hosed, where Chrome works fine. I have Decentraleyes and uBlock installed as addons.

I've been using Firefox android since I got my android phone (6mo ago) and it's been just fine. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing?

It was the easiest browser option with adblock, which pretty much sealed the deal for me

I'm using Firefox on Android daily as my only mobile browser since Google tried to force tab groups on me. It could be faster, but other than that I don't really have any issues.

I use Firefox Beta daily on Android. Works without complaints.

I have used add-ons with it for the past years. The ones you really need, like uBlock Origin, have always been there.

> If I fullscreen a video, my browser minimizes

Man I have this, I have a very popular phone model, how can this not be fixed in years.

There was no need for that "redesign". None. There is a distinct possibility that older Firefox could be in use today without issue. People must learn when to just leave certaon features alone.

As somebody who worked on the Gecko side on this, there absolutely was a need for a rewrite.

Not to sound like some sort of Pale Moon absolutist, but, I feel like the frontend changes were too much. And 3 years without Firefox biggest selling point is painful. It hurts. It really hurts. The only reason I haven't sold my soul and dignity to Chromium is that Iceraven lets me use μMatrix.

It had to be rewritten. Essentially there was no formal interface between the frontend and Gecko, and it had turned into a sluggish hairball of a monolith. We redesigned Gecko on Android to be embeddable (GeckoView[1]) and so a new frontend had to be written. That part was absolutely necessary.

The rest of the debate is just about the UX, really.

[1] https://geckoview.dev

It wasn't just a "redesign", they replaced a significant chunk of the internals. And the new version is much faster and more responsive than the old version.

> Unfortunately, the "browser", for lack of a better term... sucks.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I've been using Firefox and Firefox Focus for years and if anything it's always been fast and ultra reliable.

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