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Comment by firebot | Hacker News Reader

> where we’re the only major Android browser to support an open extension ecosystem

Uhm, Kiwi browser is Chrome-based and supports Chrome-extensions on Android and has for years. It's pretty great.

According to their github repo, it was last rebased with chromium version 105.0.5195.24, which was from August 2022. Using a 15 month old browser seems hilariously insecure.

https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next

I use Kiwi, I take the risk for the ability to run my own extensions (though I use a two-fisted approach where I use Chrome for deep accounts). It's a shame it's not updated more often, it's an open source project I would support.

You are vulnerable to the webp exploit (https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-4863)

Yes, but everyone else is vulnerable to not being able to run extensions. As mentioned, I just use it for news & general web site surfing, no accounts.

Mine states 120.0.6099.26, which was released a month ago, https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2023/11/chrome-beta-fo...

Your user agent string or the actual browser code? The former is notoriously just set to whatever makes websites happy. An easy way to test is see if a current feature actually works as expected e.g. https://jsfiddle.net/fxc9a8uc/1 "test1" should be green at the top right.

It's also possible that they updated the code but didn't push the changes to the repo, which I guess is better than running 15 month old code, but also is kinda suspicious because they're not honoring their commitment to open source.

I just tried this on Android. "test1" is green on Chrome 120 and Firefox 121, black on Kiwi 120.

While I respect Kiwi for implementing extension support, they've often fell far behind the upstream Chromium codebase and they're significantly smaller than even Firefox for Android. So I don't think they'd really be a "major" Android browser.

Then again, Firefox could easily be said to not be a major Android browser either!

> they've often fell far behind the upstream Chromium codebase

I don't pay consistent attention, but these are the version numbers I currently see:

Kiwi: 120.0.6099.26

Chrome: 120.0.6099.110

Kiwi has historically faked the version number to prevent websites from telling you to update your browser. I would assume that number is not legitimate.

You're wrong. You can check the latest builds on the GitHub, it's not a secret.

I wouldn't say that far, maybe a month. It gets regular updates.

Historically, it's gotten much further behind, but they've gotten better recently.

I was about to be like, "Yah well is Kiwi a 'major' browser?" Then I looked at android browser share[1] and realized that Firefox certainly isn't either.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...

I wonder if there's a large overlap of people using Firefox on Android and people blocking StatCounter. I thought I'd look up Mozilla's public telemetry stats to see if they have any addon info, but I couldn't find anything about Android at telemetry.mozilla.org without a login…

How does Opera have 3-4x the market share of Firefox? Is it installed by default anywhere?

Personally speaking, I would love to switch to Firefox just to use uBlock Origin, but this picture[1] shows Opera's killer feature.

It's a screenshot of today's old.reddit.com/r/all. You can see how you're able to read all of the text vertically, without having to scroll sideways, because it wraps perfectly to the current pinched zoom level. No other browser works this good on Android, and reading stuff is my main internet use case. Try seeing how that website looks on any other browser, it's ridiculous how unusable they are.

[1] https://files.catbox.moe/5t853c.png

I was a longtime Firefox on Android user until the extension situation got increasingly fragile and complicated. I've been very happy since switching to Kiwi. It's faster, more frequently updated, and supports all the extensions I want. Highly recommended.

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