4 ms·

The last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA. The navigation bar on the bottom is an interesting expiriment but still I quickly moved

by icefo 6y ago

The last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA. The navigation bar on the bottom is an interesting expiriment but still I quickly moved it back up. The new tab layout is worse. Each tab need much more space so you can display about half the number of tabs on the same space. The top sites when you opened a new tab also disappeared. It seems you can put bookmark or something to replace them but the top site feature was really good. I'm likely to want to visit sites I visit the most and that used to be a touch away

anonymousab 6y ago
> The last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA They had it as a separate app, as it was (seemingly) a rewrite that uses GeckoView. So having less features and unstable features was somewhat expected for users that went out of their way to install it. Naturally, a lot of the old features weren't supported, and some were likely feeling like unmaintainable legacy code in the old version (Fennec) to begin with. So a rewrite may have made sense, for where the products were at and where they wanted to go. At least, in my opinion. But for whatever reason, they decided that they had reached an acceptable level of feature and usability parity as to replace the old version with the new one (Fenix) in the play store. Somewhat forcibly moving all of the current users onto the new browser, silently for auto-updaters and update-all-ers. The downgrade path for those who want or need the old version is... well, I didn't see any documentation when I googled, so presumably it's "install the old APK and hope things work". It's a cynical and somewhat egotistical approach to software development, disappointing to see from Mozilla and yet another entry on the list. At this point, I would not be surprised if they find the idea of the extension whitelist - rather than a more open platform as is the desktop and was Fennec - far too appealing to move away from in the future. That's somewhat doom-and-glooming, but many months ago I had thought they wouldn't end up trying to shove Fennec users onto Fenix in this way, and yet... here we are.
m4rtink 6y ago
Also they basically removed the tablet mode - here I am with a 10 inch tablet and no tab bar, no back button on address bar & no keyboard shortcuts, perfect! :P More things the dropped in lates "stable" Firefox for Android: - save as PDF - print support (!!) - downloade manager - full URL display - about:config (!!!) - extensions (other than 9 extensions they carefully cherry-picked)

by icefo 6y ago

anonymousab 6y ago

> The last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA They had it as a separate app, as it was (seemingly) a rewrite that uses GeckoView. So having less features and unstable features was somewhat expected for users that went out of their way to install it. Naturally, a lot of the old features weren't supported, and some were likely feeling like unmaintainable legacy code in the old version (Fennec) to begin with. So a rewrite may have made sense, for where the products were at and where they wanted to go. At least, in my opinion. But for whatever reason, they decided that they had reached an acceptable level of feature and usability parity as to replace the old version with the new one (Fenix) in the play store. Somewhat forcibly moving all of the current users onto the new browser, silently for auto-updaters and update-all-ers. The downgrade path for those who want or need the old version is... well, I didn't see any documentation when I googled, so presumably it's "install the old APK and hope things work". It's a cynical and somewhat egotistical approach to software development, disappointing to see from Mozilla and yet another entry on the list. At this point, I would not be surprised if they find the idea of the extension whitelist - rather than a more open platform as is the desktop and was Fennec - far too appealing to move away from in the future. That's somewhat doom-and-glooming, but many months ago I had thought they wouldn't end up trying to shove Fennec users onto Fenix in this way, and yet... here we are.

m4rtink 6y ago

Also they basically removed the tablet mode - here I am with a 10 inch tablet and no tab bar, no back button on address bar & no keyboard shortcuts, perfect! :P More things the dropped in lates "stable" Firefox for Android: - save as PDF - print support (!!) - downloade manager - full URL display - about:config (!!!) - extensions (other than 9 extensions they carefully cherry-picked)