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Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

Firefox on Android is NOT amazing. For MANY YEARS the user agent included the exact model of your phone. They seem to be incompetent. (Edit: this is a bit harsh, and to clarify, directed at the company and not any specific people in their employ.) Exactly what Google wants -- plausible deniability when it comes to monopoly, but an awful alternative.

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Firefox on android can run ublock origin.

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.

Absolutely. I was an Android user for years and got an iPhone as a gift in 2022. On Android, I used Firefox with uBlock Origin. Mobile web browsing is not the best experience regardless, but that made it tolerable.

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.

There are adblockers for iOS - I’m using 1Blocker with Safari. Genuine question: Are the iOS adblockers limited in some way that make them inferior compared to what you were using with your Android phone?

The only adblocker I have used is uBlock. I don't really know how adblockers work for Safari, it doesn't seem obvious. I don't like installing apps, and it seems that they are mostly apps?

Yes - from the user's point of view, they are apps - you have to download them from the app store.

I use ad guard, vinegar and wipr on iPhone safari and browsing is fine

There's Brave on Android fwiw.

Brave is still just a fancy Chromium reskin, I'll use any other engine than Chrome if it's even remotely possible

I think the main thing is the point is the adblocker is in there. And as another poster pointed out, they do use the webkit engine, but they can do lots of things besides that to improve the browser from “reskinned safari” like lots of people seem to be claiming.

That's fine, but that is moving the goalposts. GP said that Firefox is so good on Android because it's important to have ad blocking, and Brave meets that need just fine.

Brave has similar anti-privacy/adtech built in

They even market it: https://brave.com/brave-ads/

..on their search, not the browser. That's like saying Safari has "anti-privacy/adtech builtin" because Google is their default search engine. You just switch to a search engine of your liking.

No it's not. It's slow and buggy. You can also use an adblocking DNS like AdGuard and have adblocking system-wide. Yes I know uBlock blocks a bit better but DNS-blocking suffices. Also, there are other browsers with integrated adblockers based on Chromium.

It's not "a bit" better. uBlock can tell a difference between seeing an ad from network X and going to the website of network X. It can block ads hosted by the owner. It can allow you to click a tracking link from an email while still blocking ads on the target website. Finally you can unblock something as a one-off without disabling the system for the whole device/network. The quality difference is huge.

Not ever had Firefox for android be slow and buggy for myself! I've been using it in place of chrome on my phone for a good year. Honestly everyone keeps talking about how FF is "slow and buggy" and it has NEVER given me issue :/ why is my subjective experience so different to your subjective experience?

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.

There could just be a difference in hardware. I'm a Firefox user but there is a noticeable difference, just not one that matters much on a top tier soc

Loading JS heavy pages like Twitter on Firefox Android is way slower than Chromium based. Very noticeable on 2019 hardware, less so but still on 2022 hardware.

Ah, fair point. I'm on a pixel 6, so I have a privileged perspective that like 90% of smartphone browser users don't have because fairly new and fast SoC with a good amount of memory. I hadn't considered how much a difference that makes, because conceptually in my head "it's just webpages!" like we're still in the early 2000's

That hasn't been my experience at all. It was Firefox that made web browsing bearable again on my old android device.

But is completely Firefox fault? Some companies just test compatibility and optimize with Chrome in mind, forgetting that sometimes some browsers (Firefox as well) dont respect some standards. Or even adding some features only available in some browsers.

Yes, is not as bad as it was in the 90s or 2000s, but is still a common issue

What's the user visible tradeoff between "an average page is so laden with advertising and tracking nonsense that it loads slowly and is covered with crap, but that crap all renders real fast" vs "JS renders at 1/10th the speed but only the stuff you want to look at?"

Honestly Twitter has become a downright hostile browsing experience on any browser and any hardware. It's probably on purpose to make you use the app.

I use Firefox on a ~2020 era Android, and not even a particularly great one at that. Works fine for me aside from a very few badly written sites, and certainly not any shower than chrome.

ublock makes sites like imgur usable. it's trivial to add a nice rule that deletes all those login via social media buttons just as one example of what the hosts file can't do.

You've been downvoted but I would like to echo this comment.

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.

> It is especially terrible if you are not in the habit of closing open tabs and just open new ones.

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?

No, it's happened on two different phones over the last 2+ years. And two completely different phones, Xiaomi and Pixel.

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.

There's an option to turn off the inactive tabs feature.

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).

It's just par for the course for Firefox users to deny any problems with the browser and blame it all on Google. Not to mention the history revisionism on why Chrome beat Firefox. I was a huge Firefox fan with a heavily customized browser and then Mozilla removed everything. The biggest enemy of Firefox is not Google, it's Mozilla and their incompetent leadership. They need to focus on their Android browser ans invest heavily because that's where the biggest user base is. I don't want them to abandon Gecko, but it's clear that Mozilla can't keep up.

Nope, for me it includes the Android version but no device model information.

They fixed it after the issue was present for MANY YEARS, exactly as stated.

OK, so it was NOT amazing for MANY YEARS, but now it is ;-)

The other day I found out my mobile user agent string also included the kernel build version. Way to see which, if any, exploit would be effective for the device's patch level. Thankfully it has a spoof option so I now use that to send a correct, but slightly stripped, UA string

I keep thinking I should switch to Firefox but the current ux is just so comfortable

There is also this issue

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...

>...directed at the company and not any specific people in their employ.

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.

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