I thought firefox on ios was just safari with a reskin because apple doesn't allow other browser engines on their phone?
Firefox on android is amazing with its plugin support, though I still prefer their pre-2021 UI
Firefox on android is amazing with its plugin support, though I still prefer their pre-2021 UI
I can't speak to the problems behind the scenes though, and they certainly merit attention.
I keep thinking I should switch to Firefox but the current ux is just so comfortable
The internet is unusable on mobile otherwise. But go on and let google continue to 'wow'you with their amazing ad tech.
Firefox on android IS AMAZING.
Meanwhile chrome/chromium is the one which is most likely to cause me GPU driver crashes, but that's because I use it for fun VR and "let's see how big I can make textures" experiments. Generally it manages a higher frame rate than FF in that context with stability as tradeoff.
Yes, is not as bad as it was in the 90s or 2000s, but is still a common issue
I use Firefox mobile daily, I occasionally have to switch to Chrome for some things. I choose to continue using Firefox Android because of the ability for greater privacy.
Firefox android is slow and buggy.
It is especially terrible if you are not in the habit of closing open tabs and just open new ones. As a concrete example, it often seems to run out of memory, causing issues such as Reddit not being able to load videos. They tried to fix this by more aggressively moving older tabs to an 'inactive' tab area, but it didn't work.
It at least feels badly written, saying that as an experienced developer myself. However, I know browsers are one of the hardest things to make, so perhaps it is just averagely written. But it is nowhere near Chrome's level of competence.
The new UI is awful too, I still hate a lot of design decisions and feel it was a bad mis-step. The old UI was just better. Again, I emphasise I use the browser daily and I say this with plenty of time to get used to it.
I just closed a bit over 2,000 tabs on my old phone because I was switching phones. I recall reading a couple of other comments here in HN and seeing a couple of comments in reddit of other people having thousands of tabs open.
Slow and buggy has NOT been my experience.
I use uBlock Origin addon though, maybe that's the difference? I bet resource-hogging ads could be an issue.
Edit: I also had "studies" turned off. Perhaps you were in a study that was testing something that caused those issues? (That's why I don't like default "studies" or A/B testing.). Or maybe something else (physical or software) on your phone is damaged/defective, perhaps even your installation of the Firefox app got borked?
I do wonder how you know you closed 2,000? The UI displays an infinity symbol over 99 tabs. If you had so many open, most of those would have been moved to inactive. The inactive tab section doesn't have a count and has a button you can click to close all.
Makes me sort of wonder whether you are actually using it.
Trying to "share" all of them will crash Firefox, so I manually select 100 and share those, then close those, repeat 20 times (which is how I know how many tabs I had open).
They even market it: https://brave.com/brave-ads/
The worst thing about the iPhone is the web browsing experience in Safari. It's awful. The ads totally ruin it. The rest of the phone is fine, I still prefer Android but that's most likely just because it's what I started with.
To address this, we will measure Telemetry Coverage, which is the percentage of all Firefox users who report telemetry. The Telemetry Coverage measurement will sample a portion of all Firefox clients and report whether telemetry is enabled. This measurement will not include a client identifier and will not be associated with our standard telemetry.
Even if you turn telemetry off it will still call home
https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/08/20/effectively-measuri...
They are the same thing, until you get to the upper levels, that own the place ie 'take full responsibility'. We are fa-mily. Until the shit hits the fan.
It is. It does avoid some of the tracking/ad content, so I guess it does do some things somewhat differently. But if it's such a scourge, add a favicon.
BTW, I've never seen this, and I regularly use Firefox on iOS to test.
* Tabs get stuck frequently, and can only be revived by closing, then undoing close.
* Can no longer access about:config in release builds
* Bookmarks got demoted in favor of Pocket, can no longer set bookmarks as default home page
* URL autocompletion got dumbed down, first on mobile and then also on desktop
* etc.
* Never had this tabs problem
* I can see about:config
* Bookmarks are fine and there's no mention of Pocket. Bookmarks show up ON the homepage, but yeah not being able to set a bookmark / any URL AS a homepage is a bit of an annoying feature lack
* URL completion works as I expect it to, although it does bug me how it strips the protocol from the URL so I have to manually type in `http://` for plaintext sites even when I've visited them before; depending on who you ask that is considered a "security feature" but kinda annoying. Other than that, I start typing in a URL and it shows me suggestions from my history followed by option to use my preferred search engine to search it.
All in all, I've not really felt FF (even nightly) be particularly different or unstable to using chrome.
Second comment I've made in this thread where I'm replying (ever so helpfully) "Huh, but it works for me" so I'll stop now :-). I promise the Mozilla Foundation aren't bribing nor blackmailing me.
Considering I didn't even realize it said Pocket the first time around, I think bookmarks are more prominent over Pocket, so I don't see bookmarks being demoted in favor of Pocket.
Collections are still there, but they've made it easier to use regular bookmarks too, so now Firefox for Android just has two versions of bookmarks in it for some reason.
Entirely unrelated to Pocket, as far as I know, except in the general sense of Mozilla having bad ideas related to bookmarks.
How? For me the closest thing I can get is "recent" bookmarks, but if you didn't bookmark a page recently it shows nothing at all, not even a link to all bookmarks, on the new tab page