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Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

I guess complaints are aimed at Firefox's desktop browser but mobile Firefox browser is pretty good and they are the only mobile browser that I know of that supports third party extensions. That fact by itself should be a killer app for Firefox mobile browser.

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I've been using Firefox mobile browser on my not that old Samsung Galaxy S21FE for one year or more, and I can confidently say that the performance is awful. I often see delayed app loading (the navigation layer loads while the actual webview is still transparent) [1], it has a high memory usage and often caused the system to terminate another app that runs in the background at the moment. Rendering issues are also a thing. It often glitches and flashes white when opening/closing the on-screen keyboard and it blinds me for a second if using at night.

But I keep using it because I use the sync feature and it sucks less than chrome.

[1] https://files.catbox.moe/aqhh3e.mp4

On my 3 year old Samsung Android phone Firefox mobile works fine and I don't have any issues. Try reinstalling the app or restarting your phone.

On iOS everyone is still stuck on WebKit.

Also EU seems to be bringing light at the end of the tunnel on this one. Like with alternate stores, alternate NFC payment, alternate standard apps, etc. EU is seriously amazing on this, in my view.

Normally I don't like governments stepping in for this sort of thing but good fucking God Apple has been such a poor steward of their platform that it's actually creating problems even for people who don't use it. This is one of those situations where it really is necessary.

Considering that this platform exists since what, over 10 years, I think the EU gave them a fair amount of time to get their shit together. By now, it's clear they won't or do not want to, hence EU stepping in.

I hate over-regulation, especially made by people that have no clue about the market they are regulating, but as you said, I think in this case it's more than warranted.

Yeah, understandable. The problem for me is the desktop app sucks. I need both for browsing sync, passwords and adblock and 3rd party search. Brave works best for me on Mac and iPhone. Most of the extensions I would use are built in, but I dont think it fully supports 3rd party extensions. I am not sure, is that possible on iPhone?

Orion (which I believe is made by the same people that developed the Kagi search engine) supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions though it's still at the experimental stage. More importantly, I believe firefox on iOS is still backed by WebKit and thus does not support regular extensions either.

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