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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

It's a great browser for Android. You get superior ad blocking and background video playing, extensions like dark reader...

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If you use Google (even occasionally), don't forget to install the Google Search Fixer: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

Google broke image search recently too.

Thank you for this! I wondered why image search is barely usable on mobile Firefox - turns out it's just Google hampering the competition!

And soon, thanks to the European Union, it's going to be great on iOS too.

Now browsers will be allowed to use their custom engine (they were forced to all use Safari up until now), so thank you EU for the new DMA!

This assumes vendors will bother if only EU users can benefit. Maintaining two significantly different branches is a lot of work.

Mozilla has had like 6 or more "branches" (we call them ports) already going so if one more makes sense, it's not a big deal.

I imagine it's going to be a long road ahead. Our regulators first need to get Apple to cut the bullshit before any of this can materialize.

On the contrary. Chrome will push out Safari on iOS. Lazy web devs will do the rest. It will usher in a glorious era of Chrome/Google/Alphabet dominance, with Google accounts becoming unavoidable. All hail the personalized ad!

I use it for 95% of my browsing, with exactly the extensions you mention, but I do have to recognize it's stability is rough at times. Every now and then I run into a site that fails hard, crashing the entire UI on my Pixel 6 Pro.

Admittedly I haven't tried disabling extensions and finding the root cause. I just switch to Chrome for that task.

Interesting. The only issues I've found in the past few years is that running multiple profiles and using the picture-in-picture pop-out sometimes causes a missing cursor or small pop-up window.

No doubt Chrome's more modern stack and hefty resources help in ironing out hardware-specific quirks.

I use Firefox on mobile every day (with uBlock Origin and Tampermonkey extensions), and I don't recall it ever crashing on me. Pixel 6a, and a Xiaomi thing previously.

Same, Firefox on Android is extremely buggy for me. I experience frequent crashes because I have too many tabs open at once. Multiple times per day, I have to restart the app because the theme will bug between light and dark, which makes some of the UI text unreadable. And sometimes when I restart, I lose some of my most recent tabs for some reason. Very frustrating, but Firefox Sync and extension support are essential for me, so I deal with it.

By the way, I actually use Fennec from F-Droid and not Firefox from the Google Play Store, if that matters.

FWIW I also use Fennec from F-Droid and I'm getting very slow behaviour and crashes with lots of tabs open (between 10-30). I don't have the theme change or tabs missing though.

I've been meaning to try different Firefox distributions though because switching away from Firefox isn't really an option for the reasons you've stated.

Oh that's interesting, glad I'm not the only one. Maybe I will try the Google Play version instead.

I use Firefox Focus on Android. I don’t really care for most articles I open on my phone, usually a quick look will do, so whenever I close it or it automatically closes all tabs I’m not in the least worried.

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