To any Mozilla/Firefox developer reading this. I try to convert people to Firefox. The number one reason people switch, by far, is because mobile has add on support. So I say to push this front and center in marketing (I know this is a preview). People are reluctant to switch their desktop browser because chrome pretty much has the same features. But it they switch their mobile browsers they also switch their desktops to take advantage of the full feature suite.
And to anyone trying to convert your friends "mobile supports ublock" is usually all I have to say.
Edit:unblock == uBlock Origin (sorry, on my phone)
We're certainly aware of how significant ad blocking extensions are. This release required a great quantity of features with only a six month timeline until now.
We already support a very limited set of the WebExtensions API to offer features like Reader Mode. Rest assured that more features will land in the coming months.
If you're a developer and you want to help us, our Github site is at this link. We mark easier issues with a Good First Issue label. We also need help with translations, documentation, and even getting issues filed.
> We're certainly aware of how significant ad blocking extensions are. This release required a great quantity of features with only a six month timeline until now.
A usable night mode e.g. invert the topbar icons and change the white screen you see before the page loads combined with an existing dark theme would be an easy feature to implement and would put it miles ahead of other mobile browsers too. I presently have to use Swift for Samsung to overlay a proper black theme (with white icons etc), but still get bright white when loading pages.
Strongly seconding. The one and only reason I bothered to switch from Chrome to Firefox on Android was because I could install uBlock Origin on it. It's also the reason I installed Firefox on my wife's smartphone, and why I keep recommending it to friends and family members.
(Of course, some time later I realized what "extensions enabled" truly means, and started using other extensions I have enabled on my desktop browser too :).)
I moved to firefox on mobile explicitly because the context menu has options I use. Google Chrome dropped almost all the options, and annoyed me to know end. IMO Mozilla is the only option to keep the web free. Google won't even remotely have your interests even in mind for the changes they make.
Please listen Mozilla. Firefox is the only browser that works as intended for me, on mobile. Cookie AutoDelete + uBlock Origin and Dark Reader. What a blessing.
I wish iOS version had addons to block ads. (I know Apple doesn't allow that) I still use it because of the synchronization and because Firefox is awesome. :)
Not that I want to defend them, but it does have a nice side effect that web developers must run their sites in some browser other than Chrome (even if they ignore Firefox).
There have been enough divergences between Webkit and Blink that I wouldn't consider them the same engine anymore, just like I wouldn't consider WebKit and KHTML/KJS to be the same.
non-chromium browsers only matter if the owner in question actually has any incentive to give users more control. Apple exercises even tighter control over their software than Google.
Firefox matters not because it's "not chromium" but because it's firefox, a non-profit dedicated to an open web.
> Unlike Firefox on Android, Firefox for iOS does not support browser add-ons. Additionally, it uses Apple's Webkit rendering engine, rather than Mozilla's Gecko.
I also think they should fix zooming and un-zooming with the Mac trackpad for desktop Firefox. I had someone switch and they were so used to zooming in using the trackpad, they couldn't stay on Firefox. There is a 3rd party extension that fixes this, but should it not be built-in?
I feel like this is a running joke at this point. I've been waiting on this since getting a mbp in 2003. I swear it has been under development the whole time. Or, at worse, blocked by rendering engine updates. People always seem hopeful the next major rendering update will make it usable.
Bug opened seven years ago. It looks like the only real updates in the last year are a non-dev advocating for it.
Good to hear it's getting some attention behind the scenes. I'm a little sad the driving factor is probably just mobile. Given that it already seems to work in the mobile Firefox Preview, apparently using gecko, it gives me a little hope we may one day see this on the desktop.
How do you mean? I wasn't aware the assistant really did anything with Chrome. Certainly it renders some search results using the android webview. But otherwise, it launches any pages you click in whatever browser you want. Inside of Chrome, what assistant features are there? The voice recognition is part of the keyboard so all apps have that. Genuinely not sure what you're referring to.
Hmm I see. I think I was getting confused since I searched for browser app in settings and ended up setting browser app as well as Voice and Assist app as Firefox as they are in the same submenu.
If I choose Voice and Assist app as Firefox instead of Google then active edge, Ok Google does not work. May be I could just try setting browser app to firefox.
Let me give this combination a try for a few days. Browser is firefox and assist app is google which as you say still renders some links in android webview.
I'm aware that I'm reaching a Cartago-delenda-est situation here, but since I see some mozilla devs here I must ask: Is there any news about the deal breaker bugs that are still keeping thousands of people from moving to firefox on OSX?
I'm referring to the bugs that cause extreme CPU usage and as a consequence extreme heating and battery usage, mainly on macbooks with retina screens set to "more space" resolution.
I work in a whole building full of developers where every single mac user has stopped using firefox due to this issue, yet there seems to be a deep disconnection between how prevalent the issue is and the priority it seems to be assigned.
I hope I'm not coming out as an ass here, I'm just sad that I've had to move away from firefox and to see all my coworkers also moving to chrome.
Oh, that's why that kept happening on my Macbook pro? I thought I was loading a broken site or had too many tabs open like I always do.
For me adding "Auto Tab Disard" [1] (a Firefox equivalent of The Great Suspender for Chrome) has reduced my FF memory/CPU footprint by 10x. It defaults to 10 minutes which is usually long enough where you've mostly forgotten about the tab, then it will refresh when you focus on it. A feature fortunately becoming native to FF.
I never have the previous performance issues anymore.
I just switched to the current Android Firefox a few weeks ago and I must say I find it very hard to go back to Chrome. uBlock and Dark Reader make the phone browsing experience a remarkable amount more pleasant.
Chrome's general UI interaction is definitely more polished and snappier all around, but browsing mobile with good ad blocking, and not getting blasted in the face by stark white pages more than covers for Firefox's warts.
It should probably be noted that this Firefox Preview they are announcing doesn't yet have Add-On support.
But I agree, uBlock Origin makes the mobile web far less painful. Also, I'll point out that you want to be using uBlock Origin, not uBlock. As I recall, Raymond Hill (the creator of uBlock) decided to hand over uBlock Firefox to one of the contributors to offload some of the maintenance burden but then the new owner immediately started trying to monetize it which prompted him to create uBlock Origin.
Last time I checked, Raymond Hill's website didn't even have a donation button. This is an incredibly generous stance for him to take but if he doesn't want money himself maybe he could collect funds for a charity. I really feel I owe someone for this software.
One thing he (rightfully) points out is that the real power of ad-blocking solutions comes from the community-maintained blocking lists. In theory one could manually block every url they run across, but in practice we can use these tools (or a tool like pi-hole) almost effortlessly.
It's free (libre) software; you don't owe anyone. Eventually you will encounter a bug or translation/documentation error in some free software; taking some time to fix that would help everyone. And so would making software to fix a problem and then releasing it under a free license.
It might not happen in the near future, but chances are eventually you'll get to contribute something. And even if you don't, just accept uBO as a gift from a nice person.
You're probably right but, as a member of that demographic:
- I use Firefox, and have done continuously for a long time. I don't intend to switch to anything else, despite being very unhappy with the experience in many ways, as I consider it to be the "least worst"
- I genuinely believe there are very easily achievable low-hanging fruit that Mozilla could implement that would at least please a large swathe of their target demographic. Namely, not talking about privacy and then slapping Google tracking into everything they do. I understand that there's a revenue stream there, and a balance to be met between economic survival and ideal conditions, but this particilar issue is a deal tipped too far towards defying the point of the exercise.
Perhaps I'm in a bubble and this is just my "single issue", but shouting about privacy and sending all that data about their users to Google seems a fairly large deal to me.
They do use Google Analytics on their websites but they do have a contract with Google that explicitly states that Google cannot use any of that data for tracking ever for any reason at all. Would make Mozilla rich if Google violated that.
Other than putting Google Analytics on all Mozilla properties as sibling commenters have already mentioned (link to info on that here [0]), there is also the following:
- as I mentioned in another comment, Firefox Preview comes with Google as a default search engine (not a huge issue) and with "search suggestions" enabled by default (which sends everything you ever type to Google).
- Even if you disable search suggestions (or change provider), Firefox has a built-in feature called "Google Safe Browsing" which collates every URL you visit and sends bulk reports to Google. This feature is only disable-able via the "here be dragons" about:config area.
- then there's Google Location Services, which sends your WiFi router SSID, SSIDs of routers in range, and hardware details, to Google. This is less clear cut as Mozilla's use of this service has been on-off over time, and varies per device. See[1]
This amounts to far less than "slapping Google tracking into everything they do", which reasonable people would interpret to include just using the browser. Reasonable people also understand that performing Google searches sends data to Google.
> Google Location Services, which sends your WiFi router SSID, SSIDs of routers in range, and hardware details, to Google. This is less clear cut as Mozilla's use of this service has been on-off over time, and varies per device.
Mozilla has made a significant investment to try to get away from this by building the Mozilla Location Service. In the meantime it's a straight tradeoff between quality of user experience and information leakage. Experience shows that degrading the user experience for some invisible and small privacy benefit is not a winning strategy.
"One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe."
I'm with you on this one. I don't think mozilla is as privacy oriented as HN would make you think.
* They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone
* They silently served modified installers to a small subset of users downloading firefox which sent all browsing data to a 3rd party by default.
* Disabling experiments used for pushing the mr robot ad does not disable "normandy" - which is practically the same thing and they used to push new certificates once their old ones expired and broke addons recently. This feature is hidden in advanced settings.
And then as you say, using google analytics everywhere (giving google data), painting google indirectly as evil while having it as a default engine and collecting google money.
> I don't think mozilla is as privacy oriented as HN would make you think.
> * They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone
I assume you're talking about the "mr robot" thing here as well. One can accuse it of being many things, but it wasn't a privacy violation, as no data was sent (or planned to be sent) to anybody, either to Mozilla or any third-party. (It was silly, an abuse of studies, a source of worry for those who monitor their list of add-ons for suspicious items, and a strategic error.)
I'm not sure I agree. I think everything users want is achievable. The current Firefox allows addons and ad blocking via addons. The Fenix update improves speed and adds some new features. Both the current and the new undermine Blink dominance and serve to support a more diverse, collaborative open Internet. All of these things are attainable in one browser, and I think that would satisfy most users.
I have been using Firefox on Android since 2013. It's been constantly improving. I am so glad that it exists so that I am not forced to use a browser (Chrome) that doesn't respect me or my privacy and has every incentive to fuck me over.
I used it in 2013 and found it constantly degrading with each update. They removed a major feature to reflow text to fit your screen nicely, worsened the UI, and other things I don't remember anymore. After using an old version for a while, I tried another browser, and holy crap that was 10 times faster as well as being customizable the way I was used to from Firefox desktop. Not open source, not as featureful (no add-ons), but that was so much better. Since then I switched to Lightning: even fewer features, but open source, very lightweight, and great UX.
Whenever I raised issues with Mozilla about things that degraded, it was always either talking to a brick wall or a wontfix. They made the decision based on one person complaining about it being the old way, implemented the change, and no matter that other people liked the old way, it wouldn't be changed back or made configurable.
I then tried to compile Firefox for Android myself and cherry pick only security updates, but that was enough of a pain in the ass that I gave up on it.
The current version of firefox for android works very well and doesn't feel noticeably different from chrome on a several year old phone.
The newest version mentioned in this article actually feels faster than chrome although I'm not crazy about the new ui it is usable without difficultly and a work in progress.
Have you tried other browsers? I must say that the effect has gotten smaller since I got my second Android phone about a year ago (yes, the first lasted 2013-2018), I think because the webview component itself just got more bulky, but it's still very noticeable how slow Fennec is (Firefox from F-Droid) compared to a bare webview browser.
I still have Fennec (Firefox from F-Droid) installed, I didn't notice any major changes since I stopped using it. I use it when there is some web application that expects a modern browser and the webview can't handle it.
But then, I also didn't think 57 for desktop was a big update. For me, it made zero speed difference (Firefox has always been fast on my laptop), on Linux with vertical tabs there is almost zero UI difference, and the only new thing was having to throw out all add-ons with the bathwater. Somehow, it seems I always experience things differently from other people.
It's not comprehensive, but I prefer the strategy of publicly releasing the information as they have it available, even if it means it often raises more questions.
Even if they don't have the entire transition planned out, I think it was important for Mozilla to communicate their Android dev focus was gonna shift to GeckoView, from existing apps, to allow external devs, and customers to have a better plan, even if they don't have the add on strategy and timeline fully fleshed out.
The alternative is waiting a few months to know any of this was happening.
> I think it was important for Mozilla to communicate their Android dev focus was gonna shift to GeckoView, from existing apps
Focus has already shifted for quite some time, though - the current Firefox for Android ("Fennec") code base has already been in maintenance mode since the end of 2017, i.e. over 1½ years, including a few months at the start of 2018 were almost nobody was regularly working on it at all other than watching Bugzilla for any immediate priority bugs and reacting to those in case any happened.
They said they were "currently" finalising their transition plans in February, so I think it's reasonable to assume that the plans have been finalised by now.
Same here. I do not know why the heck Mozilla is tiptoeing from just hiring Raymond and making uBlock an integral part of firefox.
Note that they already included something similar, which is SafeBrowsing(TM), that is maintained by google. Technically, it is exactly the same concept. But uBlock is actively request by 99% of their users, while safeBrowser(TM) fingerprinting is mostly disabled by half.
I think the better comparison than SafeBrowsing for uBlock would be Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default. This uses data maintained by Disconnect.
Not really. Advanced users can selectively disable Javascript/frames/media etc on a per-site basis. Also the user has the control to allow trackers on site they care about and know the consequences.
I am sorry but tracking protection on mozilla as it is now (only enabled by default on private windows, and hapening with no user knowledge/information/learning oportunities) is a lame clutch.
What's the difference of shipping a feature off, and shipping with support for an extension (on both firefox and Google's chrome store sites!) that can be installed? At this point we are just discussing semantics. Install vs Turn on.
Pure speculation, I wonder if their contract with Google forbids them from having ad blocking as part of the browser. At least if I was a company paying another company millions of dollars I wouldn't let them block my income stream in their product.
uBlock Origin and uMatrix in particular are fantastic addons, but I think the UX is still too much for the average casual non-technical user.
I wish they'd focus more on getting the UX of containers up to snuff. They are almost there, but still far enough away to make addons like Multi-Account Containers (MAC) something I cannot recommend to my parents.
Here is what I mean: Suppose I want to keep my use of example.com separate in it's own Example container. How do I do that?
1) Click the MAC icon in the toolbar, then click the "+" button.
2) Enter 'Example', pick an icon or color, then click okay.
3) Open a new Example container.
4) Navigate to example.com in the Example container
5) Click the MAC icon in the toolbar, then check "Always open in Example"
6) Close the tab.
7) Open a new tab, and browse to example.com
8) Click "Remember my decision"
9) Click "Open in Example container"
This is nuts. I can't recommend this workflow to anybody.
Anyone remember when Firefox extensions broke recently? I thought it was a rather horrible experience.
If the new Firefox Preview can natively block advertisements, whitelist sites, disable third party cookies, prevent and hide social trackers, block anti-ad-blockers, etc. etc. then I agree that extensions are kind of useless, and I understand Mozilla's point.
However, I see the lack of extension support detrimental to my freedoms as a user, since it means I no longer can control what the software hides for me, nor what it broadcasts about me to the abyss of waste that is the advertising industry; I will have to trust the browser, and the lack of extension support is a rather untrustworthy property to begin with.
The big flash announcement is to get early adopters for testing. There's no reason to delay testing until the MVP is ready, as long as testers remain aware that Firefox Preview is a preview that shouldn't be expected to already have all features implemented.
It's just that, for me and a bunch of other people, we would be happy to test a preview if we could compare it against our current browsers. We can't, because
advertising is an abomination that destroys the utility of the internet
Same here. I was so happy to see this and I just went ahead and installed it in a heart-beat. Tried to find the addons page, couldn't find it, found your comment instead and uninstalled it in the next.
I hope they add support for addons otherwise there isn't much use for it at least to me.
I really feel like this should be the top comment; losing addon support in FF on Android is about the only change I can envision that would cause me to stop using it. It's great as it is, and there is no amount of tinkering they could do to it that might possibly make up for the loss of addons.
uBO is the main reason I use Firefox on Android, as well.
With that said, what sites are you visiting? It could be that I simply don't visit sites with any ads, but I gave a few of my daily sites a spin in Firefox Preview and didn't notice any ads.
Agreed. I hastily installed FF Preview and then immediately uninstalled it when I couldn't find where to install uBlock. They shouldn't have launched, or made an announcement, without some form of adblocking (native or plugin).
I understand that it's a testing release, but they stand to lose out on many testers and users. While I am perfectly willing to be a guinea pig and use this as my daily driver, I am passionately unwilling to browse with ads (especially on a mobile device where data is more expensive).
I am likely part of the vast majority of potential testers/users. There probably won't be a "hey, we support plugins/blocking now" announcement and, even if there will be, it probably won't be as visible as this announcement.
Did you actually try it on a website with lots of ads? I've been using focus for the last 6 months or so and the tracker blocking also blocks many ads for me. Also there is blockada which blocks ads system wide.
I would also appreciate if they worked on restoring the original addon capability they had up to 2016 (where you add keyboard shortcuts) before they go showboating.
Firefox was kinda slow sometimes with too much JS on the page on my old phone but still overall usable, and that was a J3 (replaced just last week), so I'd say that's pretty good. Great and lag-free on my s10+ so far. Not convinced optimization should be a priority over features and addons.
If there is one thing I miss from current mobile Firefox, it's text reflow. Opera mobile did it perfectly.
I want to be able to zoom in or out and have text reflowed to the screen width. This makes the web magnitudes nicer to use on a small screen. No cut off lines, no 10 lines per screen. Just convenient freedom over the primary tool we interact on the web: Text.
Don't bother sending feedback to the email address mentioned in the blog: it bounces.
We're writing to let you know
that the group you tried to
contact (firefox-preview-feedback)
may not exist, or you may not
have permission to post
messages to the group...
So how is this new Firefox for Android different than the Firefox I have installed on my Android right now? Will I automatically get upgraded to this when it rolls out or is it a separate product? It would be nice to have that explained on the page/blog post.
I'm a happy user of both Firefox Focus and Firefox mobile, I don't know what could they improve but I'll give it a look.
About Firefox focus, I love to have it as default browser when opening links, it gives me a lot of confidence to know that the session will be completely destroyed afterward. I'd miss it if it were to be discontinued.
Just yesterday I thought it is really annoying that mobile browsers put the address bar on top, even worse if it is moving in and out. That way it is impossible come close to a native look and feel. Now FF puts the address bar on bottom. Quite a suprise but I think it is a pretty smart change.
I love the address bar at the bottom. It feels so much better on a mobile device. As a whole, this version is much nicer to use than the previous versions.
My two main gripes are the default search engine and telemetry. Both of these options should be set by the user on first launch. I don't want to use Google and I don't want to send data to Mozilla.
It's an unbelievably untapped aspect for differentiating browsers. However, instead of the address bar what would be the best experience would be to have navigation buttons on the bottom. Speed dials, back and forward, tab management should be front and center and at the bottom, since that's actually what you're using the most when browsing on mobile.
I can't understand how UX designers come up with the idea that putting stuff on the top of the screen* is a good thing, and even keep reiterating through that. That's an honest question, anybody knows what's the motivation behind that?
* or, places that are hard to reach for most users
In addition to familiarity as others have mentioned: when you scroll a site, it feels natural to "scroll away" the UI on the top. If you have UI on the bottom, and you want to hide it when scrolling, that doesn't feel as natural.
Legacy design and use patterns. The top of the screen used to make more sense than today.
Mobile-first design really hasn't taken hold for many UX web designers (and/or the organizations haven't adapted). Relatively speaking, large phones where it's difficult to reach the top weren't popular until recently. Even mobile apps are just starting to put navigation towards the bottom.
One reason I like FF on Android better than Chrome:
The Chrome user agent has your device model, even in incognito mode.
If you have a relatively rare Android device in your market, I think you can be tracked fairly uniquely on that alone. I was creeped out when I discovered this.
Not fond of the bottom address bar, I guess I'm not used to it because I always tap the top-right corner to switch tabs... I just need to get it in my muscle-memory, not a big deal. I still cross my fingers this will be configurable at some point.
My main gripe is that I feel like bookmarks are now a second-class citizen in Firefox Preview, they're not as accessible. I could see my mobile bookmarks right on the new tab screen in Firefox, now I have to press â‹® > Your Library > Bookmarks and then click the bookmark I want.
4 clicks, while it took only one (or two) before with bookmarks as the default panel on my homepage on Firefox "classic".
Funnily enough, top-address-bar has been one of my two biggest UX gripes about Android FF. Especially since iOS FF has the bottom adddress bar (which seems like a UI decision independent of their reliance on Safari's engine), and is so much nicer to use.
With you on the bookmarks though. Especially since they're putting this new "Collections" feature front-and-centre but it seems to have no integration with Your Library. The whole "Tab Groups", etc. paradigm has been tried time and time again: the reason it never sticks isn't because it's a bad idea, it's because it's never integrated with idiomatic browser features.
Bookmarks have become even more first-class now - just swipe up from your address bar anytime. Try it now ( in the Firefox preview).
Also, I feel the opposite regarding the address bar position - give it a few days, you'll absolutely love it. Edge on Windows Mobile had the same position, and it was a very nifty and time-saving UX. You can now use the phone one-handed more easily, even for small-handed people.
> Bookmarks have become even more first-class now - just swipe up from your address bar anytime. Try it now ( in the Firefox preview).
Swiping up seems to only give me the option to share and/or bookmark the page, and in Fennec those things were already possible through the main menu, so not much of an improvement (though I suppose swiping might be a little easier than precisely hitting the menu button).
Actually viewing my bookmarks has indeed become more cumbersome, though, and that is what your parent comment is referring to: In Fennec bookmarks were accessible through the about:home UI, which appears both when opening a new tab and when tapping the URL bar to enter URL edit mode, both of which feel quicker than "Open main menu -> Open library -> Open bookmarks" in Fenix.
Some feedback: If you are going to market your browser as privacy focused, it has to block ads by default. As far as I can this one does not block ads at all. Good initial experience but please block ads.
>If you are going to market your browser as privacy focused, it has to block ads by default
A privacy-focused browser should care about the privacy part of the online advertisement, which is tracking. Completely preventing the site from showing any ads is a different feature.
Considering that advertisements are a common vector for installing spyware and malware, I think adblocking and antitracking are two sides of the same coin.
No, these are not the same and oughtn't be conflated. I'm perfectly happy seeing ads that aren't targeted to me personally based on my browsing history.
Ads on, say, Stack Overflow or HN or whatever, that target nerds ("great hosting!", "3d printing tech!", "legos!") would be perfectly doable without tracking each of us personally.
I'm a huge fan of the navigation bar on the bottom. I've missed it since I had to give up Windows Phone. It's hard to believe that neither Apple or Google ever added the option. I can't think of a single reason it would be better on top, It's simply harder to reach and less usable.
Most of the time it feels great already (sometimes it freezes for a few moments), but does someone know how/if it is possible to add Progressive Web Apps to the desktop with this Firefox for Android Preview?
I love containers, but the lack of ability to sync them really annoys me. Every time I get a new computer (or re-install, or setup a VPN to test with, etc) I have to manually create all my rules to always open my bank stuff in a special container, and always open my work sites in their container, etc. It seems like these rules should just sync.
Totally agree. I've also had it just completely forget all my "always open in container" settings in the past. But that hasn't occurred recently, so hopefully those days are over.
Me too - there doesn't even seem to be a way to generate a file that you could open on another computer? Having them sync via Firefox would be really good - even more so on mobile.
Me too. It is classic Mozilla. They have such big blind spots. Even after the certificate debacle, which wiped containers for some people, they still appear to have no plans to sync them.
I can't get it to work with my custom certificate authority (which I use to analyse traffic coming from my phone every now and then to see if any apps are leaking personal info). Also, though I know better, I also have some intranet services running with a certificate signed by that authority because the domains are dynamically generated and I can't automate my DNS to get wildcard letsencrypt certificates.
Normal mobile Firefox has their own cert store, so you can import it by clicking a link to the certificate and hitting OK. Other apps use the system certificate store so I have imported my certificate into there as well. Sadly, it still doesn't work.
My specific use case may not be very common, but certificate authorities in BYOD companies aren't uncommon either. I can't use this for my daily driver until I can import my certificate :(
The new system is very interesting though, the idea of separate browsing behaviours between devices can be a game changer if they implement it smoothly.
Thanks, I just subscribed to the issue. Seems like it's blocked by a Bugzilla issue that didn't get updated in five months. I guess it's gonna be a while until I switch browsers.
I've been using Firefox Preview for a while and I like it, especially the bottom navigation bar, but one thing that I hope survives from the old app is the tab queue, which sends links opened from other apps to Firefox in the background without stealing focus from the original app. To me it's a game changer on the level of tabbed browsing and I don't know why all mobile browsers don't have it.
I agree, one of the best parts about FF on android was the queue. I hate the clicking a link, and it forces you to task switch right then to that link. I like to read things, click for more info, and then follow up when I am done. I rate it higher than add-ons and ublock (I use a DNS server that filters out many ads for me already, https://www.nextdns.io/ )
Wow, this preview is incredibly good! I was not expecting such a good quality from a preview app (given how bad some of the other tries from Firefox have been on Android).
And you know what absolutely clinches it for me? That you moved the address bar to the bottom!! Just like Edge on Windows mobile - that's the best position for address bar IMO.
I also hope you do something about better battery management on the android app.
I've been using it and it has been actually pretty good. It already has Firefox Sync and ability to send tabs to different devices. Only thing I miss is the ability to open tabs in background. This was my favorite feature in the previous Firefox for Android.
Does anyone suffer from degrading image/video quality on some websites while using Firefox Android? I have this issue with Facebook. I don't want the Facebook app installed on my phone (mostly to block notifications and for privacy reasons) so I access FB via Firefox but images look terrible and every video I click opens in a separate tab instead of in-page (at least I can download it tho).
Only solution I have is using user-agent switcher to change my UA to either Chrome or Firefox for iOS (which is what I picked to keep Firefox in my UA) but this breaks other stuff on some websites.
Question is, how to get Facebook and other sites to stop serving shit quality to Firefox users? How is this fair?
One option is to attempt (despite of all of the obstacles they might put in place..) to increase Firefox's market share, perhaps by spreading the word about privacy concerns and/or ux benefits.
Another might be adblocker-esque trusted and shared community-maintained lists along with an add-on (does this exist?) for per-domain user agent mocking. Hopefully with enough adoption (i.e integrated into ublock) that it reduces the value proposition of investing the time.
Thirdly, continuing to call out the companies who do this sort of thing.
I've been using Firefox on Android for about a year now, and it is great, except one major problem. Google news site (news.google.com). News I believe uses my entire phone's RAM and starts swapping (I am totally guessing, does Android use swap?) because the app will become unresponsive for about 2 full minutes while the page is rendering. Closing and re-opening a tab in this state actually breaks the app FYI (all other tabs freeze as well). Scrolling will give low resolution visuals below the fold. Horrible experience on google news. Actually all google properties are PAINFULLY slow. Is that on purpose Google? I got around it by installing Firefox Focus, and that seems to load google news quite fast, but Focus is like a permanent incognito mode, so that is quite inconvenient in itself. So now I just use Focus for google news and regular Firefox for everything else. Hopefully there will be performance improvements to come. My phone is an older Huawei Honor 8 so maybe I should just buy a new one... but the infrared on it is so great!
Memory management on Android is awful. My music player routinely gets killed; I've tried all options available to me to prevent this.. It's just too difficult for Android to work out "you're listening to music, even though there's no visible ui, so I won't kill it". I understand that there is a whitelist of music apps which don't get killed - so intractable is this problem - but the one I use (Rocket Player) isn't on it.
The killing isn't actually the fault of Android itself, but the smartphone vendors that try to push the battery time metrics to the max. Battery management from Android isn't that bad actually, but the vendors will always find a way to fuck it up. I really liked this insight from "Zombies, Run!" developer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18901006#18902273
In my case I usually have actually nothing else running and my phone has 4GB of RAM so I am at a loss. I just tried Firefox Preview on Andriod with google news, and it loaded in about 2 seconds. So far so good!
Wow. Just tried it out and it is fast! It feels more than just 2x as fast as the regular firefox mobile on the same device.
Now just add proper settings (no settings menu yet to disable thirdparty cookies) and add addon support (ublock, skip redirect, cookie autodelete) and I will switch immediately even with smaller bugs
Cool, how about working on that mobile browser you already have? I've been using it for years and it's good but apparently the lack of progress on it is because they abandoned us users of it to focus on this thing.
When quantum came out addon capability on mobile severely regressed and never recovered. This issue to support the context menu API has been open for TWO YEARS.[0] I just want to be able to long press an image and reverse image search it like I used to, is that so much to ask? Yes, there's an addon to do it through the addon menu and then tap the image but it's not the same.
The amount of work to improve Firefox for Android basically meant a rewrite was needed, hence Firefox Preview being the eventually replacement when it's fully ready
We had many discussions around this. The Firefox for Android code base was not in a great condition to maintain backwards compatibility as well as accept a new rendering engine and all of the new Android Components we wanted to introduce to unify of our code bases for different Android-based products.
TL;DR: There was too much cruft built up.
Work should move faster now. We substantially grew our Android team in the last year.
I hope that works out then, I'm just frustrated with the state of mobile as it's been since the regressions. As someone who still thinks dropping XUL from desktop was a mistake (and maybe even mobile now that devices are more powerful) I wish it could've just stayed how it was but I'll just have to make the best of it.
Can they please provide a way to close all tabs instead of always having at least a blank one open. I'm probably just OCD on this but it's the most annoying thing I found about Firefox on Android compared to Chrome when I start using it.
Mozilla should do a deal with Huawei now when the trade war is raging. Hard Chinese money, desperate for a high quality Chrome alternative browser, might be better than wishing Google keeps paying for the default search engine spot.
Feedback : When you are making a new Firefox for Android, please fix this small problem but personally a big annoyance : I should not need to open a whole new page before trying to open a new tab. Just add a plus button next to the address bar, that's it. Currently the workflow just disturbs me in all Firefox browsers for mobile - you have to click the tabs button, then the 'Plus' button (or click the settings menu and then the new tab - both require two taps with some delay, for something that should be just one quick tap).
I'm confused about your comment, just was pleasantly surpised by testing this new Firefox Preview, that only one click was required to open a new tab:
1) Tap the tabs button
2) You're already on the new tab, so either
a) Search in the search bar: this opens your search results in this current new-tab (you can also type an address there and search see your recent history)
b) Click on one of the links saved in a "Collection": this opens in this new tab.
Yup. Even though in Firefox Android 'regular' that's at the same page, as you noted it's not always that fast, especially for low end phones. But with this new Firefox Preview even the Plus button is not at the same 'position', and the new page opening up with animation takes even more time.
See my other comment, the "+" button is useless is Firefox Preview, there's not a single use case where you need it. It was probably added for people who didn't notice that the address/search bar is already here, or with "muscle memory" of searching for a "+"
At the time you opened the tab menu, you're already in a new tab.
Horizontal space is somewhat of a premium though, especially if things like reader mode or buttons provided by addons as available in the current Firefox will return to the URL bar once more. And the current design for Fenix doesn't help in that regard by having quite a bit more white space - the tab counter and menu button take up approx. 50 % more width than they do in the current Firefox.
> In order to have a strong foundation for the next generation of mobile Firefox browsers and put all our efforts and resources in GeckoView, work on Firefox Focus will currently be on hold. Don’t worry though, you can still keep using our privacy browser, Focus, as well as our current Firefox for Android.
I think this is a typo, and meant to say that Firefox for Android development is on hold, not Focus.
Not a typo; we had not formally announced that Focus was on hold while we bootstrap the Firefox Preview / GeckoView / Mozilla Android Components ecosystem. Now we have. :)
You are not currently able to Sync to a custom server in Firefox Preview. Doing that requires access to about:config which is not set up in the release version.
Firefox sync is amazing and one of the reasons I never got hooked on chrome (I tried using it for a full year). I often do research on iOS for coding related topics. Send tab to device - boom, it’s there when I need it and I’ve got my text editor open.
With a new look and UI, a walkthrough maybe warranted. Took me a while to find the bookmark button. And the color scheme on the button itself is not as intuitive, does not present the idea on first viewing whether a page is bookmarked or not. But overall, looks great and works fast too. I am sure more devlopments are yet to come.
For now, looks promising to be a challenger to the Chrome monopoly.
It seems highly unlikely that Google cares enough about suggestion data that they'd pay more for suggestion traffic than for just the searches.
It is much more likely that users expect search suggestions to work out of the box and some will bounce if they try a new browser that doesn't do that.
Now if they could just fix Firefox Mobile's abysmal tab management. Chrome Mobile's tab screen is a stack of pages in the Z-axis with the one closest to the user being the most recent tab and so on. Firefox Mobile's is a grid with the number of rows and columns being variable depending on screen dimensions. Figuring out which ones you opened in what order is not immediately apparent. It also suffers from the frankly amateur Android programming mistake of varying the swipe limits directly with the width of the screen, so going from portrait to landscape on a 19.5:9 phone screen means dismissing a tab suddenly requires you to swipe over twice as far as it does in portrait mode.
More than once I've found myself saying "oh my god, go away!" after trying and failing three times to swipe an unwanted tab away before remembering I have to drag the damn thing halfway to Timbuktu to dismiss it.
> Now if they could just fix Firefox Mobile's abysmal tab management. Chrome Mobile's tab screen is a stack of pages in the Z-axis with the one closest to the user being the most recent tab and so on. Firefox Mobile's is a grid with the number of rows and columns being variable depending on screen dimensions.
You can change it to a linear list easily. Settings -> General -> Compact Tabs.
Personally I strongly prefer the way Firefox does it. The order is actually pretty simple. Left to right, top to bottom is oldest to newest.
...which does nothing to address the problem of inconsistent UI experience because the setting doesn't affect landscape mode so now it's even less consistent.
Like others have said, uBlock Origin ( or solid alternative; uMatrix, etc ) at this point is a prerequisite for any browser.
I am not testing something that puts me in danger and throws me into the festering garbage dumpster that internet is these days without it. It's like testing a car that doesn't have brakes yet.
Pi-hole at the DNS level, ublock origin and fingerprint protection at the browser level.
If the latter two are missing because I'm testing a beta browser which is very likely to a) deliver them and b) help defend against a chrome monoculture, I feel alright about sshing into a VPS to update pi-hole and then taking it for a spin.
Tell me how am I supposed to test add-ons on this Firefox as a developer before the release then.
Edit : And again, most of my work if not all related to Firefox, I do on the Nightly build. I expect things to break, but this preview ( of which there have been builds for a while already ) is a non-starter.
Add extensions support and disable telemetry/remote-control by default (pushing updates where you control the code is remote control, don't even try to argue against that one).
> disable telemetry/remote-control by default (pushing updates where you control the code is remote control, don't even try to argue against that one).
They shouldn't be sending me to the Play Store ITFP.
I can't use Play because I've got no GApps in my phone, so I can't try their app unless I find a copy "somewhere" and convince myself it hasn't been poisoned. I got a reasonably up-to-date Firefox through APKPure, and later on after watching that 35C3 talk [1], I unzipped and grepped all those saved .apks to find the APKPure app itself and Firefox and LingoDeer had the same traces of Facebook's SDK in them. So that's off the table, huh? The ones that I saved from older phones after having gottten them through Play were all fine, but I can't update those without grabbing another phone and letting Google ... play in it. <ducks>
Just the other day I asked the Waterfox team for an apk and an md5sum, for the same reason-- though I'd settle for the md5sum alone! But Mozilla has resources WF can barely dream of, and it apparently intends to be a champion for privacy, so this is kinda sad.
Still no pull to refresh. They really don't want users to adopt their browser. Literally every single other mobile Web browser supports it.
Yet Mozilla has some ideological stance that it breaks web interaction (with what, the 0.0001% of browser that target Firefox above Safari or Chrome on mobile).
I've been using Preview as my main mobile browser (switched from Firefox Focus as my main when Mozilla announced they've abandoned Focus).
The things I miss:
* Firefox Focus had a very quick way to send a page to a different browser "Open in " and I'm pretty sure it actually just listed the browsers there in the menu. None of the hassling with the share menu that takes forever to load and forever to search through. I really hate using the share menu on android. Somehow it's gotten even worse and side scrolls now. I don't want to sign in to my Google account in Firefox on android, but if you set firefox as your default all the login redirects go there. I think on Focus you could just tap "Open page in Chrome" and it would just punt it along and everything worked when needed.
* Lastpass app annoyances. Lastpass just matches the Firefox app itself rather than the site I'm viewing. Which is annoying but not a huge deal. I'm not sure whether lastpass worked in Focus though. Focus was like a staging area before going to a full browser.
Overall I'm pretty happy with Preview. I really liked using Focus though where it worked like a "firewall" where I could decide whether I actually wanted links opened by other apps to go into my browsing history or not.
I really liked the way I learned to use Focus and I'm sad it's been abandoned. It was like "Open all links in Private mode first and then decide if you actually give enough of a shit to go further". Focus was small and easy to learn to trust.
Pull-to-refresh certainly is catching on (I expect my smartphone-addicted parents will discover it within the next 5 years), but I can also understand if there are some reservations about implementing it.
What should happen when the user is interacting with the Android device via a non-touch input device, such as a mouse with a scroll wheel? Scroll-wheel-up-to-refresh?
One of the worst edge cases is on sites with infinite scroll. Having to scroll up 47 pages in order to refresh is not great. It is also nice to refresh a page without losing one's place on it. For these reasons, I would like to see the refresh button remain, even if pull-to-refresh is implemented.
I've never wanted that. I really don't think this is the one think holding back firefox popularity on mobile. But luckily, firefox on android does support extensions:
Android is the standard, more or less, for touch interfaces. They have significantly more devices than ios, and no other touch device is more than a blip compared to those two.
And to anyone trying to convert your friends "mobile supports ublock" is usually all I have to say.
Edit:unblock == uBlock Origin (sorry, on my phone)
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