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how we can have Firefox thrive and grow Not that anyone is asking me, but I think the mobile browser is a limiter. No matter how much I like a given desktop br

by ip26 7y ago

how we can have Firefox thrive and grow Not that anyone is asking me, but I think the mobile browser is a limiter. No matter how much I like a given desktop browser, I like bookmark & password syncing more. Unfortunately for me I find the Firefox desktop browser is first class, but the mobile browser is not. As a result it's almost immediately ruled out. I've never seen anyone else mention this so I might be a tiny minority.

Miraste 7y ago
You're not alone, Firefox mobile is practically unusable. But! For a while now, Mozilla has been putting all their development effort into Fenix (Firefox Preview on the Play Store), which has all the speed and responsiveness main Firefox doesn't, plus a better UI and general slickness. It even has limited extension support in the alpha, which should make it to the release version very soon. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for a few months now and it's great. There are still occasional bugs, but it's finally a legitimate Chrome alternative.
- noisem4ker 7y ago
  >Firefox mobile is practically unusable. I vehemently disagree. With support for add-ons including uBlock Origin, it's one of the very few usable browsers on mobile.
  - Miraste 7y ago
    I was using Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin, and I found that Chrome with no adblocking was a better experience. Page loads, scrolling, zooming, and the other interactions were so slow they counteracted the advantage. That said, new Firefox mobile is way faster and the nightly build already has uBlock support. Best of both worlds.
    - mtrower 7y ago
      Slow? I don't find it slow at all, and my phone isn't exactly top-end; what kind of hardware were you running on? (I don't use uBlock on mobile, but I might go look into it...) My only complaint is that it doesn't integrate quite as well as Chrome, but I don't think that's Mozilla's fault.
      - Miraste 7y ago
        I tried it on a Galaxy Tab s5e and an LG v35, which have last year's mid-range Qualcomm chip and 2018's high-end chip respectively. On the v35 loading was slow, and sometimes it would crash or make all my tabs blank until restarted. On the tablet it couldn't even scroll down a page without lagging. I haven't run into any other apps that do this on either device. Zooming was always laggy and a bit off--bad acceleration curves or something--enough that they've redone it from scratch for other platforms instead of trying to fix the code. There's a reason Mozilla is rewriting the whole thing.
        mtrower 7y ago
        That's crazy =( That LG v35 outspecs my BlackBerry KEYone by a good margin, and Firefox is just as fast as Chrome for me. Which is to say, snappy. I read more details about your performance problems in another comment, and it sounds horrible; I can't imagine anyone using that. Sounds like a nasty bug, I guess..?
    - ATsch 7y ago
      I had extreme response time issue on my old phone. I recorded my screen, and I measured a reliable 3-5 60Hz frames between the touch indicator and the page scrolling. Chrome reliably had just 1. Things got a bit better over time, but unfortunately the thing that eventually fixed it was when I got a new phone. Now I get around 2-3 90Hz frames, which is still worse than chrome, but far less noticeable. I have not measured "New Firefox"/Fenix/Preview yet, but it does feel like it's a bit closer to chrome.
    - CannisterFlux 7y ago
      I'm not too bothered about ublock - I already run blokada so the worst adverts are already blocked at the network level - but being in Europe I can't manage without the I don't care about cookies add-on. Whenever I've tried other browsers - Chrome, Brave, DDG - having to click "I accept" on every single webpage to remove the "This site uses cookies!" pop-up is really tedious. I hope the Firefox on Mobile add-ons support doesn't just start and end at ublock origin.
  - gibspaulding 7y ago
    I agree. I'm hoping FF mobile continues to receive performance improvements, but personally I'd put up with a lot worse to avoid adds.
  - scoutt 7y ago
    I read that Firefox cannot be used with uBlock on iPhone. For me Firefox adds nothing new to my mobile experience with Safari. Unless I am wrong, which I hope I am.
    - feanaro 7y ago
      Why do you hope you are wrong if it adds nothing new?
      - scoutt 7y ago
        I hope I am wrong (or better, I hope what I read is wrong) so I can use Firefox with uBlock on my iPhone (I use Firefox on desktop). AFAIK, you cannot install uBlock (or any add-on) on Firefox for iOS.
        Miraste 7y ago
        Sadly you're right. This is Apple's fault: they refuse to allow alternate browser engines on iOS, so iOS "Firefox" is really a Safari web view with some Firefox buttons on it. Chrome and other browsers have the same problem.
- mrich 7y ago
  What problems are you having with it?
  - Miraste 7y ago
    With Preview or with stable? Preview has a couple of minor bugs, like radio button popups that don't go away when I switch tabs, or the "undo close tab" toast not disappearing, or downloads resulting in empty files sometimes. Annoying, but not dealbreakers and I'm confident they'll be fixed soon. My issue with stable is that it's slow. Everything about it is slow. Pages that load immediately in Chrome take double digit seconds in Firefox. When they do load, scrolling lags my finger and jerks around, and zooming is noticeable unresponsive. The acceleration curves feel off too. On my mid-range tablet performance is so bad it gives me a headache.
  - Jach 7y ago
    For my own experience, it's this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1374570 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1374570 On heavier sites it's inevitable that it will crash. Years ago Chrome/Chrome Beta also had this problem (the root cause is with the phone hardware/android) but somehow they managed to catch it and not bring down the whole browser app. I still use it despite the other main drawback (being slower than chrome beta on heavy sites, like say twitter) because I like my uBlock and tab-sync, but every so often I get so annoyed at it that I avoid it for about a month until Chrome even with basic adblocking via Blokada makes me mad enough to switch back.
  - bash-j 7y ago
    My biggest issue with FF mobile (android) is sometimes when you open a link from a different app, it opens in an existing tab navigating away from a page you already had open. It should always open a new tab. So I might open a link in my email app, then when I tap the back button on the phone, the expected behaviour is it will close the tab and return to the email app. Instead I'm finding it navigating back to the page that was open previously on the tab that was already open.
    - everybodyknows 7y ago
- atonalfreerider 7y ago
  "practically unusable" is a hyperbolic statement. I use the mobile browser every day.
- zaat 7y ago
  Say what? It's the only browser I use on mobile for years, can't say I have faced any issue, not major issue, didn't face any issue, apart from very rare stuff that were fixed, can't even remember which. Plugins support is lacking, that is true.
  - Miraste 7y ago
    Really? Huh. I'm surprised other people's experiences have been so different. There are tons of forum complaints about the problems I've had. There's even an official faq about all the tabs going blank [1], which tells you to restart the browser and hope it goes away. Mozilla themselves gave up on the whole codebase two and a half years ago and started work on Firefox Preview/Fenix instead [2]. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-displays-blank-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-display... [2] https://www.xda-developers.com/mozilla-transition-users-from-firefox-to-fenix/ https://www.xda-developers.com/mozilla-transition-users-from...
    - feanaro 7y ago
      FWIW, my experience is exactly the same. Zero problems, snappy, supports uBlock Origin, does not contain Google spyware and I therefore vastly prefer it to Chrome. When I first heard of people complaining that it is atrocious, it was as much news to me as it is to you that it is excellent in my experience. I agree it's a weird phenomenon.
- thayne 7y ago
  I've been using firefox preview for a few months now and love it. My only complaint is that even though it is set up as my default browser android still insists on using chrome to open some things, such as results from google assistant. But that's hardly Mozilla's fault.
Jestar342 7y ago
I'm syncd on all my devices with Firefox. Android devices and Linux devices. Plugins, bookmarks, containers.
Scarbutt 7y ago
Mozilla really dropped the ball(too late) on mobile, did they think mobile wasn't happening and it was just some temporary thing?
- sjwright 7y ago
  Actually the equal-and-opposite thing was more true. They picked up the ball so hard that they believed they could compete with Android with an entire Mozilla mobile operating system. A lot of effort was wasted.
  - Scarbutt 7y ago
    Was referring to the browser, they didn't had an android or ios version until very late in the game. Maybe firefoxOS caused that delay? don't know.
    - jamesgeck0 7y ago
      Firefox Mobile came out in 2010 for Maemo. There were more mobile operating systems at the time, and it was less clear which one was going to win out. Mozilla lead with support for the most open option. The Android version was released a year later, three years after (the frankly pretty unappealing) Android 1.0 release. It was within months of Opera's Android launch. Hardly "very late."
Zardoz84 7y ago
I switch to firefox mobile like a year ago and I find the experience far better that Chrome. Why ? uBlock-origin
noxecanexx 7y ago
You're not alone. No matter how much I hate chrome, I've never been more displeased by an app as I am with Firefox's mobile app. We might see a new one though based off firefox preview so hopefully I can make the complete switch soon

by ip26 7y ago

Miraste 7y ago

You're not alone, Firefox mobile is practically unusable. But! For a while now, Mozilla has been putting all their development effort into Fenix (Firefox Preview on the Play Store), which has all the speed and responsiveness main Firefox doesn't, plus a better UI and general slickness. It even has limited extension support in the alpha, which should make it to the release version very soon. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for a few months now and it's great. There are still occasional bugs, but it's finally a legitimate Chrome alternative.

noisem4ker 7y ago
>Firefox mobile is practically unusable. I vehemently disagree. With support for add-ons including uBlock Origin, it's one of the very few usable browsers on mobile.
- Miraste 7y ago
  I was using Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin, and I found that Chrome with no adblocking was a better experience. Page loads, scrolling, zooming, and the other interactions were so slow they counteracted the advantage. That said, new Firefox mobile is way faster and the nightly build already has uBlock support. Best of both worlds.
  - mtrower 7y ago
    Slow? I don't find it slow at all, and my phone isn't exactly top-end; what kind of hardware were you running on? (I don't use uBlock on mobile, but I might go look into it...) My only complaint is that it doesn't integrate quite as well as Chrome, but I don't think that's Mozilla's fault.
    - Miraste 7y ago
      I tried it on a Galaxy Tab s5e and an LG v35, which have last year's mid-range Qualcomm chip and 2018's high-end chip respectively. On the v35 loading was slow, and sometimes it would crash or make all my tabs blank until restarted. On the tablet it couldn't even scroll down a page without lagging. I haven't run into any other apps that do this on either device. Zooming was always laggy and a bit off--bad acceleration curves or something--enough that they've redone it from scratch for other platforms instead of trying to fix the code. There's a reason Mozilla is rewriting the whole thing.
      - mtrower 7y ago
        That's crazy =( That LG v35 outspecs my BlackBerry KEYone by a good margin, and Firefox is just as fast as Chrome for me. Which is to say, snappy. I read more details about your performance problems in another comment, and it sounds horrible; I can't imagine anyone using that. Sounds like a nasty bug, I guess..?
  - ATsch 7y ago
    I had extreme response time issue on my old phone. I recorded my screen, and I measured a reliable 3-5 60Hz frames between the touch indicator and the page scrolling. Chrome reliably had just 1. Things got a bit better over time, but unfortunately the thing that eventually fixed it was when I got a new phone. Now I get around 2-3 90Hz frames, which is still worse than chrome, but far less noticeable. I have not measured "New Firefox"/Fenix/Preview yet, but it does feel like it's a bit closer to chrome.
  - CannisterFlux 7y ago
    I'm not too bothered about ublock - I already run blokada so the worst adverts are already blocked at the network level - but being in Europe I can't manage without the I don't care about cookies add-on. Whenever I've tried other browsers - Chrome, Brave, DDG - having to click "I accept" on every single webpage to remove the "This site uses cookies!" pop-up is really tedious. I hope the Firefox on Mobile add-ons support doesn't just start and end at ublock origin.
- gibspaulding 7y ago
  I agree. I'm hoping FF mobile continues to receive performance improvements, but personally I'd put up with a lot worse to avoid adds.
- scoutt 7y ago
  I read that Firefox cannot be used with uBlock on iPhone. For me Firefox adds nothing new to my mobile experience with Safari. Unless I am wrong, which I hope I am.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    Why do you hope you are wrong if it adds nothing new?
    - scoutt 7y ago
      I hope I am wrong (or better, I hope what I read is wrong) so I can use Firefox with uBlock on my iPhone (I use Firefox on desktop). AFAIK, you cannot install uBlock (or any add-on) on Firefox for iOS.
      - Miraste 7y ago
        Sadly you're right. This is Apple's fault: they refuse to allow alternate browser engines on iOS, so iOS "Firefox" is really a Safari web view with some Firefox buttons on it. Chrome and other browsers have the same problem.
mrich 7y ago
What problems are you having with it?
- Miraste 7y ago
  With Preview or with stable? Preview has a couple of minor bugs, like radio button popups that don't go away when I switch tabs, or the "undo close tab" toast not disappearing, or downloads resulting in empty files sometimes. Annoying, but not dealbreakers and I'm confident they'll be fixed soon. My issue with stable is that it's slow. Everything about it is slow. Pages that load immediately in Chrome take double digit seconds in Firefox. When they do load, scrolling lags my finger and jerks around, and zooming is noticeable unresponsive. The acceleration curves feel off too. On my mid-range tablet performance is so bad it gives me a headache.
- Jach 7y ago
  For my own experience, it's this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1374570 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1374570 On heavier sites it's inevitable that it will crash. Years ago Chrome/Chrome Beta also had this problem (the root cause is with the phone hardware/android) but somehow they managed to catch it and not bring down the whole browser app. I still use it despite the other main drawback (being slower than chrome beta on heavy sites, like say twitter) because I like my uBlock and tab-sync, but every so often I get so annoyed at it that I avoid it for about a month until Chrome even with basic adblocking via Blokada makes me mad enough to switch back.
- bash-j 7y ago
  My biggest issue with FF mobile (android) is sometimes when you open a link from a different app, it opens in an existing tab navigating away from a page you already had open. It should always open a new tab. So I might open a link in my email app, then when I tap the back button on the phone, the expected behaviour is it will close the tab and return to the email app. Instead I'm finding it navigating back to the page that was open previously on the tab that was already open.
  - everybodyknows 7y ago
atonalfreerider 7y ago
"practically unusable" is a hyperbolic statement. I use the mobile browser every day.
zaat 7y ago
Say what? It's the only browser I use on mobile for years, can't say I have faced any issue, not major issue, didn't face any issue, apart from very rare stuff that were fixed, can't even remember which. Plugins support is lacking, that is true.
- Miraste 7y ago
  Really? Huh. I'm surprised other people's experiences have been so different. There are tons of forum complaints about the problems I've had. There's even an official faq about all the tabs going blank [1], which tells you to restart the browser and hope it goes away. Mozilla themselves gave up on the whole codebase two and a half years ago and started work on Firefox Preview/Fenix instead [2]. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-displays-blank-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-display... [2] https://www.xda-developers.com/mozilla-transition-users-from-firefox-to-fenix/ https://www.xda-developers.com/mozilla-transition-users-from...
  - feanaro 7y ago
    FWIW, my experience is exactly the same. Zero problems, snappy, supports uBlock Origin, does not contain Google spyware and I therefore vastly prefer it to Chrome. When I first heard of people complaining that it is atrocious, it was as much news to me as it is to you that it is excellent in my experience. I agree it's a weird phenomenon.
thayne 7y ago
I've been using firefox preview for a few months now and love it. My only complaint is that even though it is set up as my default browser android still insists on using chrome to open some things, such as results from google assistant. But that's hardly Mozilla's fault.

Jestar342 7y ago

I'm syncd on all my devices with Firefox. Android devices and Linux devices. Plugins, bookmarks, containers.

Scarbutt 7y ago

Mozilla really dropped the ball(too late) on mobile, did they think mobile wasn't happening and it was just some temporary thing?

sjwright 7y ago
Actually the equal-and-opposite thing was more true. They picked up the ball so hard that they believed they could compete with Android with an entire Mozilla mobile operating system. A lot of effort was wasted.
- Scarbutt 7y ago
  Was referring to the browser, they didn't had an android or ios version until very late in the game. Maybe firefoxOS caused that delay? don't know.
  - jamesgeck0 7y ago
    Firefox Mobile came out in 2010 for Maemo. There were more mobile operating systems at the time, and it was less clear which one was going to win out. Mozilla lead with support for the most open option. The Android version was released a year later, three years after (the frankly pretty unappealing) Android 1.0 release. It was within months of Opera's Android launch. Hardly "very late."

Zardoz84 7y ago

I switch to firefox mobile like a year ago and I find the experience far better that Chrome. Why ? uBlock-origin

noxecanexx 7y ago

You're not alone. No matter how much I hate chrome, I've never been more displeased by an app as I am with Firefox's mobile app. We might see a new one though based off firefox preview so hopefully I can make the complete switch soon