49 ms·

Firefox Android Build that caused issues is working as intended

115 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

williamscales 6y ago
This is just the new Firefox mobile user interface, right? I've been using it for quite some time in the nightly builds. It took a few minutes of adjustment the first time I saw the interface, as everything has been moved to the bottom of the screen. But this is actually fantastic for mobile usability, because you no longer have to reach all the way to the top of your screen to get to the URL bar or tab switcher. The loss of extensions is unfortunate, but not surprising, given they've been gone from mainline Firefox for some time. There are some webextensions available now, including ublock.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > The loss of extensions is unfortunate, but not surprising, given they've been gone from mainline Firefox for some time. There are some webextensions available now, including ublock. Firefox mobile never supported XUL extensions, AFAIK; this was a different breakage.
  - fabrice_d 6y ago
    Fennec had support for XUL extensions. I did add-ons review for some time and it's... interesting what some people try to slip through, and how they react when caught red handed.
    - Steltek 6y ago
      Did that exist outside of Maemo? I don't remember ever seeing XUL extensions on Android...
      - fabrice_d 6y ago
        Yes, Fennec for Android had "classic" add-ons. Eg. Adblock+ was a port of the desktop version.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Sounds intriguing. Would like a (anonymized, if necessary) writeup.
      - fabrice_d 6y ago
        One example: an add-on tried to wrap the existing XPCOM component that is responsible to create http(s) connections with their own. That was very much not ok in general, and had nothing to do with the stated purpose of the add-on. When asked for an explanation, they claimed it performed better (it didn't).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- teekert 6y ago
  Do you used favorites? How do you go through a list of you sites of interest?
  - ajot 6y ago
    I had bookmarks. Now I put those in collections. It's worse for going to 1 specific site, but great to going to many sites at a time (think HN, twitter, newspaper and weather, all at once when you start your day).
    - teekert 6y ago
      Oh, yes, maybe that is the pattern I should adopt.
    - teekert 6y ago
      So it turns out to open all sites in a collection, you need to tab the 3 dots next to the collection name and then choose "open all sites", which you then loose in your huge list of tabs that you had already opened to get to the "start page". Are the devs using this themselves even?
- fooey 6y ago
  The biggest thing I've missed is that pull to refresh doesn't work, and it's such a basic tiny little thing it drives me crazy every time it doesn't work.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    I tap in the bottom-right corner to open the menu and then tap the refresh button, which is in the bottom-right corner of the menu. So basically don't need to move my thumb at all. Much more convenient than pull-to-refresh in my opinion.
    - cecja 6y ago
      a good pull-to-refresh can be triggered wherever on the canvas.
    - MaxikCZ 6y ago
      I cant understand how 2 taps in precise location are more convenient to some people than one short swipe anywhere on screen, but to each their own I guess
      - yorwba 6y ago
        On my phone, pull-to-refresh doesn't work in Chrome if I only do a short swipe. It seems to reject anything shorter than 3cm or so. And that's only if I'm already at the top of the page.
  - akdor1154 6y ago
    Maybe someone could write an extension to implement it... Oh.
  - staktrace 6y ago
    Pull to refresh has been implemented, but still needs some polish before being released. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/9766 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/9766
- Cyphase 6y ago
  There's a Toolbar setting for whether to have the bar at the bottom or top. It's under Settings > Customize.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    The new tab button will stay at the bottom; so if you put your toolbar back to top, you will travel the entire height all the time. Great for tablets /s.
    - Cyphase 6y ago
      You are correct.
- Steltek 6y ago
  I'll disagree. There are too many regressions in the new UI (FF/Android Beta, 80.0.1 over regular FF/Android 68.0). I use FF everywhere exclusively and that includes on my tablet, where keyboard and mouse shortcuts are totally missing; not even ctrl-T for a new tab. The UI breakage and uncanny valley only seemed to increase when I checked out Nightly to see if things got better there. Also, while I understand why a phone friendly layout takes top priority with meager dev resources, the loss of the "desktop-like" layout on the tablet is kinda painful on a tablet. A cursory search about these things is that Mozilla simply needs to focus on the major points first and edge cases like tablets will come later. On the plus side, the webview capability is wicked cool and I have several PWA's "installed" to my home screen. I'm really enjoying that. I understand things will improve with time. It's just a bit of a rocky experience right now.
  - cmm 6y ago
    uh, you could do the "add site to home screen" thing in the old version too. and in the new version, enabling the (very cool, by itself) "Open links in a private tab" setting does guess what to PWA's (but only if a tab for the specific PWA does not already exist, because of course)
- shock 6y ago
  > The loss of extensions is unfortunate, but not surprising, given they've been gone from mainline Firefox for some time. What are you talking about? How have extensions been gone from mainline Firefox for some time?
  - kikokikokiko 6y ago
    He's talking about the really powerful ones, the xul based ones. Not this farce we still have today. When addonpocalypse happened was the day Firefox started to die.
    - sundarurfriend 6y ago
      > When addonpocalypse happened was the day Firefox started to die. That was a devastating blow, but I still had hope in their statement that the Addon ecosystem will build up back again and most features will be implemented in WebExtensions. Unfortunately that doesn't really seem to be happening, not at any good pace anyway. A lot of the newer "replacement" addons as still buggy af, don't have feature parity with what the XUL addons had years ago, and seem to be relatively poorly maintained. I remember the flurry of blog articles from really passionate and disappointed addon writers back then, leaving the scene, and it looks that did have an effect - most of the newer addons (the long tail ones, not the mainstream TST or uBlock type ones) are of lower quality or are by companies that are trying to hook you into their service using the addon as the bait. I've never seriously considered Brave before, but it looks like it's time to start looking into it.
      - corty 6y ago
        Feature parity is impossible. Webextensions are intended to take away possibilities like altering the UI or calling out to external programs. So webextensions will never ever be on feature parity with XUL addons. Also, changes to webextensions are proceeding at a snails pace, suggesting that Mozilla doesn't really intend to get anywhere close to working support for e.g. keybinding remapping or anything like that. If you are waiting for more powerful webextensions, abandon all hope. Change is not coming.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I'm not sure what extensions everyone was using that are missing from Fenix. uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes, and HTTPS Everywhere were the big ones for me, and those three were all greenlit for Fenix (at least in Nightly). Are people still using greasemonkey scripts, or what?
- AndrewDucker 6y ago
  One to remove UTM tracking from all URLs. One to redirect amp to normal web pages. I'm not upgrading Firefox until the new one supports both of those.
- ajot 6y ago
  I do miss Redirector, Leechblock NG and Redirect AMP to HTML. I hope they are available soon.
- mjevans 6y ago
  Stylish and Ghostery are two of the other addons that I like, at least on desktop.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    Sure, and I have about a dozen that I use for Firefox on the desktop as well. But this change is for Firefox Android.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Doesn't Ghostery have privacy issues?
    - nwah1 6y ago
      I know Stylish does and that is why many switched to Stylus
  - aasasd 6y ago
    You might want to read about how ‘Stylish’ was stealing user's browsing history. (At least I hope it's ‘was’ and not ’still is’.) ‘Stylus’ is the popular open-source alternative.
ubercow13 6y ago
It's a bit weird that Firefox deprecated all extensions while moving to a simpler API with a more limited surface area, in order to allow changes to be made more easily in the future to the underlying browser without breaking compatibility with extensions, and then proceeded to make changes to the underlying browser which break compatibility with all extensions using that API.
- sp332 6y ago
  It's more that they moved to a new codebase that is not yet feature-complete. It will gain compatible functionality over time.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    You still believe in miracles?
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    If it's not feature complete, how can it be an official release??
    - blibble 6y ago
      this is a problem with Mozilla in general they gradually remove features essential 1-2% of the userbase and now they're getting to the point they have no users at all the main reason to use Firefox over Chrome on mobile is the extension support, and now that's gone too
      - vlod 6y ago
        >the main reason to use Firefox over Chrome on mobile is >the extension support, and now that's gone too That's not quite accurate. From "Firefox for Android upgrade FAQs" https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-upgrade-faqs https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-upgrade... Supported add-ons (note: currently, a limited number of Recommended Extensions are supported. Here's the list: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?recommended=true&type=extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?recommended... Things like uBlock-Origin etc are there, so I'm happy.
ajot 6y ago
I know that HN demographics is biased to using and getting info about IT, but I believe that people that use Firefox on Android are not common and most have some kind of interest on IT. It wonders me how they could not hear about the new Firefox for Android, it's been ~a year since Mozilla announced it, and news about how it's development was going on (and that Firefox Fenix was the Stable version somewhere a month ago).
- teekert 6y ago
  I indeed heard about it, a long time ago, yesterday's update took me by surprise though.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  I work in this domain and am using exclusively FF for Android, but I've never been interested in following their development. Either way, I don't think that being surprised is the problem. Having a browser update break extensions is the problem - I would bet a lot of people only use FF because Chrome doesn't support extensions (I know that's why I use it anyway), so essentially the update is breaking the only important functionality. Thankfully, I don't have automatic updates enabled, so I can still wait and see how broken this really is and how long it will take to fix it.
  - rurp 6y ago
    Firefox is the biggest reason I don't have automatic updates enabled on my phone. The amount of pointless UI and functionality breaking changes they have made over the years is crazy. The fact that they are laying people off after all of this wasted effort makes it even worse. The only reasons I use FF are extensions and that it's not Chrome. The former is mostly gone. The latter is enough to keep me around for now but it's getting old.
teekert 6y ago
For me it is not the missing add-ons, and I even like the bar at the bottom. But how on earth do I read some sites while coming back to my favorites? Tapping the address bar gives me a big back screen with the bar at the top, that is where I used to find my most used sites. Now instead I have to tap the small tabs icon, tap + and then choose a site. This leaves me with a lot of tabs open. I used to open things for reading in new tabs in the background, but those now get lost in my huge list of unused tabs opened solely to get to my favorites. I can't find the option to start with an empty session after closing so I now have to manually clean up al those tabs every now and then. Oh, and I can't find print and the downloads button anymore... Any advice on alternatives? I just picked up my laptop to avoid FireFox mobile :s I my most used sites were simply available below the address bar after tapping it, that would be really helpful to me.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  This is indeed annoying; there's no UI option to select anything from your collections or top sites in the current tab. There are a few other issues that annoy me: - tab management is a bit of a mess relative to the previous version. I seem to end up with the same websites open in many tabs because the UI for selecting an icon from top sites or collections always opens a new tab. IMHO that's a UX failure and something that needs rethinking. - Neither top sites or collections are part of the normal bookmarks or synced to my desktop browser. This seems like an odd choice to me as bookmark syncing works great. I've repeatedly lost collections by switching to different versions of firefox preview, firefox nightly, etc. This makes me reluctant to buy into the feature because I know I will lose all collections at some point again. - Page caching is way too aggressive. It's not acceptable to show days old versions of a website in a new tab. Yet, this happens to me on pretty much all news websites and blogs that I visit. Including HN. I have to reload freshly opened news websites to get the current version. To me this feels like a bug and I hope this is not actually intended behavior (that would be seriously misguided). - The back button history does not stop with the opening of the tab (which is what I expect). With HN, if I repeatedly hit the back button I get back to the login screen I used months ago. The old browser would go back to the main screen so I could open up a new tab. IMHO that behavior is nicer. - You have to be really careful manipulating collections via the touch screen. I've repeatedly deleted sites from there by accident because I wasn't scrolling perfectly straight or trying to open the site. Swipe to delete without confirmation is broken UX. Really annoying and it seems overly sensitive to this. Every delete I've done this way was unintentional. Despite this, I kind of like it because adblocking (aka. the #1 use case for extensions) works great and I also enjoy privacy protection, which on Android normally is kind of a bad joke with Google tracking your every move.
niftylettuce 6y ago
ungoogled-chromium works on Android too https://git.droidware.info/wchen342/ungoogled-chromium-android https://git.droidware.info/wchen342/ungoogled-chromium-andro... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708688
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Huh; it's got extension support. Experimental and hacky, but still...
- nwah1 6y ago
  Is it better than Bromite?
muunbo 6y ago
“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” should’ve been the name of this release
neiman 6y ago
As an extension developer, this is highly frustrated. Mozilla already broke our extension (Almonit extension) in browser a few weeks ago, when they changed default behaviour unannounced, without supplying (yet) an alternative solution. We actually had to found out about this change because people started to complain. Now our extension was removed and is impossible to reinstall after this upgrade. It's highly frustrating because we're trying to build a stable user-crowd here, and it's impossible to do if the user experience is being hurt so badly every few weeks. On the positive note, the people in Mozilla's Add-ons Matrix room were super positive and helpful. The problem was that there's not much that they could really do.
flas9sd 6y ago
there's an iceweasel f-droid fenix build available that enables more webextensions if you're so inclined, see r/fdroid leading you to github.com/interfect/fenix/releases
solstice 6y ago
For me it's the weird new way of handling custom search engines that annoys me. Old workflow: tap the address bar, start typing your search term and then either press return to search with default search engine, or 2) tap one of the custom search engine buttons. In both cases, the search was executed directly. New Firefox: (go to settings to enable non-default search engines to be displayed) Best case: tap the address bar, enter your search term, press return or one of the non-default search engines and then return. The problem is that after adding a custom search engine, it ends up at the bottom of the list, meaning that in order to select it after typing my search terms, I have to scroll down, causing the keyboard to collapse. After selecting the right search engine firefox doesn't search automatically but rather I have to tap the address bar again and then press return. So, where in the past I had a "tap, type, tap, (search results)" experience, now it is "tap, type, scroll, tap (bottom of screen to select SE), tap (top of screen into the address bar to get the keyboard back), tap (bottom of screen [return key on keyboard]), search results" I very much would like to go back to the old behavior.
- MaxikCZ 6y ago
  The longer I use new firefox the more hatred I harbour for it. Opening new tab before: Tap tabs icon on top. Tap open new tab icon that appears in the same place(essentially slow doubletap) Now:tap tabs icon on top. Tap new tab thats on the other side of display (I tried getting used to having navigation bar down, but the pageload progress bar should have stayed top. When arriving to page and looking at the top its completely out of my peripheral vision) Opening certain links in app. Not only was outrageous that mozzila said "nah" to ability to always open certain links in app (in the name of seamless web experience), so when opening a reddit link on slow and highly datalimited connection I had to wait until page starts loading, then stop load to not consume data (but not too soon, or open in app icon doesnt show), and then click the icon to open link in app. Now I have to tap the menu first to get access to open in app icon. Forcing me to add another tap (or three if I want to stop the pageload too) everytime I want to do something that should be user settable in the first place. Also, can anyone explain me why closing the tab view now requires two swipes down instead of one? (Or one rly long one, granted, but still...) And the fact that the thubnail (main visual cue as to what tab it is) is now smaller is also getting on my nerves Some pages are super jitery when I try to zoom them as a main big image loads (and few seconds after). Wasnt issue before. There are more things that annoy me, but cant remember them in the heat of the moment, might edit this later. And ofcourse, cant use old version because they know best whats good for me. Im about to start looking for another browser soon, would welcome suggestions! (Ability to run ublock is neccesity)
vezycash 6y ago
Mozilla is acting like Microsoft right now - Step 1: Replace a working app with a shinier UI with less features than the original Step 2: Promise to add missing features in the future Step 3: Put off adding missing features existing users want. While adding features "prospective users" say they want. Step 4 - Repeat steps 1-3 a few times (rewrite, remove features users use, add features non-users want) Step 5: Retire the product citing low usage
- rjzzleep 6y ago
  2014 Brendan Eich was removed and replaced with the Chief of Marketing as CEO[1][2]. I mentioned that it worries me back then and that nothing good can come out of the Chief marketing guy becoming CEO. Today what we see is the result of that. Yandex browser on android has more chrome extension support than firefox for android. This isn't just about Mozilla as a company. It's also about how we as a community supported Mozilla in becoming that company and now being surprised at why it does the things that it does. Obama made a speech not too long ago about not to conflate people doing good things with being good in all situations. The only people always seeming to be good are the ones groomed to be politicians without ever sharing a bad opinion in public. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551896 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7530807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7530807
  - diminish 6y ago
    I sometimes wish we need the linux governance model with firefox - where a leader like linus with a team of a handful of people manages a true open source project. This would prevent monetization-led programming, creating a hierarchical company with a product & engineering management organization creating an average well known adventure of "how to make more money"
- malnourish 6y ago
  The question then is who becomes the new Mozilla?
  - 6y ago
kevin_b_er 6y ago
I called it over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20392546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20392546 > This marks the last Android release with extensions/add-on support. A lot people called it FUD, but we can see they took an extra 9 months or so, supported just a few extensions, then replaced what worked with a low feature version. And users are angry. Yep. Can't say I'm surprised.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  I have uBlock origin working just fine and I'm using the new Firefox Mobile. I agree with the assessment that you're spending FUD I'm afraid.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    It's not FUD at all if you use extensions outside of whatever Mozilla deigns to add to their whitelist.
    - zamadatix 6y ago
      If that's what the claim was I'd be inclined to agree but extension support was not deceptively and indefinitely dropped in Q3 2019 as the comment talked about. There was Fear extensions would be permanently removed imminently, Uncertainty with how the releases would be scheduled and feature roadmap, and Doubt they'd ever listen to feedback. In reality partial extension support was already there + expansion of support on stable on full support on nightly on the near term timeline at release https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034, the switch on stable FF happened in Q3 2020, and they changed stance after all of the feedback.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ggm 6y ago
My partner has lived in FF as their browser of choice for over 15 years now. She is very angry at the lack of user-respectful UX around the change. She said to me all the choices suck, and it has the flavour of "for your better enjoyment... we broke you" type communications. Not "we're sorry" but a belief "but you want this" when directly, specifically she doesn't and didn't * No way to manage the landing page favourites order. An issue in fenix, but no indication of intent to change. * Default shifted to "speedy read-y down-the-bottom-y" * Tabs replaced by the counter of pages open. * It was anything but "principle of least astonishment" The delivery of better tracking protection? Thats great. The unexpected UI changes? They suck. No amount of A/B testing can help you in the communication of "this is better" if you don't actually try to communicate.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
viraptor 6y ago
> unexpectedly forced on a large batch of Firefox 68 Android users without any warning, way to opt out or roll back I wish they were more careful. FF displayed a warning about the change ~a month ago and you could opt out by disabling FF updates. There are bad things about this change, but this is just not true.
- Macha 6y ago
  The only heads up I've seen about this update has been on HN.
m45t3r 6y ago
The Register makes some of the most clickbait titles in the area. The real ones is that Firefox Quantum is finally out for Android (Firefox for Android jumped from version 68.0 to 79.0), and this bought a completely new interface too. Now, the new interface is very nice (bottom navigator bar FTW) and the browser is much faster, but it lost some features and there is a limited number of extensions available for now (Mozilla seems to be manually approving them). So what happened? A small but vocal number of users complained and we get this news from The Register like this was the worse mistake ever. It is not. Sure Mozilla could have managed this update better (losing settings seems pretty bad for example), but most users are probably pretty satisfied with the update. I couldn't use Firefox Android before (too slow compared to Chrome) and I was using Nightly (and afterwards Beta) just so I could get the performance improvements since the browser is so much faster. And also the new interface looks fantastic.
- anonymousab 6y ago
  >A small but vocal number of users complained You can use this to rationalize-away every regression in every piece of software. Enough "well, they're just edge case loud power users" papercuts may eventually prove fatal. A to-hell-with-your-workflow sneak update, no-downgrade path approach like this speaks volumes about Mozilla. EDIT: Sneak insofar as no clear communication about how much functionality users would be (potentially permanently) losing, and no directions on how to avoid that outcome. The play store rollout has certainly been inconsistent but that's probably more on Google's end.
  - your-nanny 6y ago
    well I didn't know it was coming and my workflow went to hell.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Never attribute to sneakiness what can be attributed to not wanting to maintain 2 versions of one app until 100% feature parity. There isn't really direction to give for a path that doesn't exist.
lovelearning 6y ago
As a Firefox fan who has recommended it in my circles in the past, I'm disappointed by the new privacy and user experiences. I see it as many steps back from the old experience. I hesitate to recommend this new mobile version to anybody. They claim this is "the most private mobile Firefox so far". But DNS-over-HTTPS is disabled. There is no way to enable or configure it because there are no network settings at all in the new Settings page. DoH was a simple solution to government censorship in my country. Now, users will probably switch to Brave because it has a built-in VPN. The UX too irritates... 1) I use the android navigation bar at bottom to jump to Home or switch apps or lock the phone. FF in light theme mode takes over that area with a white background making it impossible to use white-on-white buttons. I had to switch to dark theme just to be able to see those buttons. 2) The top sites list uses smaller icons with website titles as captions. If a website uses the title "Breaking News", that becomes its caption. It's difficult to tell from the favicon and such titles what site it is. The captions are single-line cropped with ellipses making it even more difficult to guess which website it is. What I don't understand is why the release was rushed with such drastic changes instead of some kind of UX A/B studies to get feedback over time. Their reddit sub is rather hostile to any feedback and reminds me of stackoverflow nastiness. It's almost like Mozilla is trying to shed its user base.
- dblohm7 6y ago
  > Their reddit sub is rather hostile to any feedback and reminds me of stackoverflow nastiness. “Their” Reddit sub is not an official forum any more than this HN thread is.
- papaf 6y ago
  1) I use the android navigation bar at bottom to jump to Home or switch apps or lock the phone. FF in light theme mode takes over that area with a white background making it impossible to use white-on-white buttons. I had to switch to dark theme just to be able to see those buttons. I have this problem too and I am using the default phone configuration. Its bizarre that professional Android developers would make the extra effort of breaking the navigation buttons on a product that is unfinished because of time constraints.
- aasasd 6y ago
LoSboccacc 6y ago
it's 2020 and still we can't have a browser where the mobile/desktop view switch is per domain instead of being per tab.
bad_user 6y ago
Mozilla did not handle this well. I like the new Firefox for Android, but it is obviously beta quality. Extensions don't work, and last time I tried (a month ago or so) custom search engines weren't working either. I use Firefox on iOS just so I can sync and use my custom search engines. I get that the new Firefox is faster and better, but don't break functionality people relied on, even if temporary. And if you do that, then release it under a different freaking name.
exoji2e 6y ago
I'm quite happy with the new release. It's faster, and I've not had any problems with crashes. Also the three plugins I regularly use worked when I got the release pushed to me (more than a week ago).
anotheryou 6y ago
Shipping breaking changes without warning is really bad... They already did it for beta users before and I lost add-ons, their settings (and can't even remember some names).
- rnestler 6y ago
  I remember receiving a warning a few weeks ago which announced the upcoming changes and what I'd need to do to keep most of my stuff (one needed to unset the master password to migrate the saved passwords for example IIRC)
  - anotheryou 6y ago
    Ah alright. Better than for the beta users than.
iforgotpassword 6y ago
The new UI is great, now it's finally on par with IE11 mobile! But really, if the navigation bar is at the bottom I don't need an extra back button anymore, the system's back button is right there below. Didn't have any crashes yet so that would probably change my impression, but so far it's been great.
ChrisRR 6y ago
The only issue I've had is that lastpass stopped working with it. It says it can't find the address bar
- szszrk 6y ago
  For me lastpass was horrible in android integration, tried on a few devices on Android 9-11, always the same. Wanted to buy a subscription for me and family, but it just required a LOT of maintenance and still didn't work well. Keepass2android on same devices was flawless, so says family as well.
novaRom 6y ago
Is there any good alternative? I think the main problem now on Android is Google Store wall. There would be much more Open Source alternatives if Android users could use another App Store. I wish we have something like an audited Store of Open Source only Apps.
- koopuluri 6y ago
  What is preventing you from installing another App Store? I got F-droid installed seamlessly a week or so ago to download Newpipe, and it sits perfectly fine alongside the Google Play store. Perhaps I'm missing something. Is it not possible to install other app stores?
  - mcherm 6y ago
    If you are a consumer using Android it is reasonably straightforward (at least for someone a little bit technically inclined... maybe not for the general population) to install a new app store. If you are a vendor of apps, it is hopeless. Approximately zero consumers will be using any other app store.
  - novaRom 6y ago
    F-Droid doesn't respect my system language. It shows me Apps descriptions in a language of my current country instead. And I don't see any language setting.
    - Tepix 6y ago
      I suggest you report this at https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues if you haven't already.
conradfr 6y ago
I've disabled auto-update for Firefox (first time even looking for that feature on Android). I don't know, I like having a back button on my browser I guess? As someone who uses "Firefox" since the Netscape Communicator days it's sad to see all this unrevealing.
- conradfr 6y ago
  Didn't work, it updated anyway.
- rnestler 6y ago
  > I don't know, I like having a back button on my browser. What's wrong with just using the Android back button in the browser? I find it quite intuitive to use.
  - jamienicol 6y ago
    I use the android back button (or gesture) to go back one page. But the Firefox back button is useful because you can long press it to see the history and skip back several pages.
    - avhon1 6y ago
      Or forward several pages, too! Such a useful feature... gone...
      - jamienicol 6y ago
        It's still there!
        avhon1 6y ago
        It's definitely not in 79.0.5 (build #2015758619), which is the version I have from the Play store. (Google says it's the most up-to-date version.)
Causality1 6y ago
Just my opinion, but I think Mozilla is risking users it has in order to chase users it's almost certainly never going to get.
znpy 6y ago
wait, you are telling me that firefox mobile freezing when loading ebay.com and other websites was working as intended ? ma porco...
d3sandoval 6y ago
For those (like me) who are wondering why their Firefox still looks the same, "If you live in Europe, you’ll find the update available today, August 25, 2020. If you live in the USA, you’ll see the update on the 27th of August, 2020" [1] [1] https://www.slashgear.com/firefox-daylight-update-revitalizes-android-web-experience-25635016/ https://www.slashgear.com/firefox-daylight-update-revitalize...
amq 6y ago
I'm using it since the Preview as the daily driver and it has been a day and night change for me in terms of performance compared to the original 68 version. I just wish Mozilla had done a better job at rolling out the change to existing users.
accountLost 6y ago
Just lost my HN account thanks to this update. I can't remember the password and my firefox logins have not been migrated. Apparently I was supposed to disable the master password before the upgrade. Silly me...
nirse 6y ago
Actually, there's a lot in this new release that I like (my high light is when navigating back, actually going back to where you were on that previous page, without the page jumping around as things are re-rendered on my somewhat slow phone). Yes, there are changes, but I can deal with changes (they are part of life, please get used to them) and who knows, over time (ie not within 2 hours after the update installing) we might even come to appreciate Mozilla's choices.
cybwraith 6y ago
Just tried nightly and haven't updated my main version yet. The lack of addons is sad and I'm not confident they'll be adding them back with any haste. However the biggest issue I see is that the default page is empty, theres no one-tap button to add a bookmark in the url bar, and getting to my bookmarks now requires using a small context menu. They really need home page customization, because the whole flow of open tab > click bookmark is just completely gone Why make using bookmarks, a core piece of any browsing experience, so much harder? What's the functional difference for a typical user between a 'collection' and a folder of bookmarks? Collections aren't on desktop, so now I need to bookmark and add to a collection. The menu containing 'open all links' in a collection is hidden until you expand said collection, then click on the newly revealed menu button. This whole update reeks of "UX" department needing to justify their jobs by making unnecessary changes.
- your-nanny 6y ago
  I've only found two differences between a bookmark folder and a collection: 1. Collections show up on new tab 2. collection items are remarkably easy to accidentally deleted,with no confirmation or undo functionality. Reminds me of Firefox reading lists... which also disappeared and I hardly noticed.
alyandon 6y ago
Desktop password sync to my phone (presumably because I use a master/primary password) no longer works. Using the standalone lockwise app to copy/paste passwords on my phone is really not an improvement in security. :-/ Do the Android Firefox developers even actually use their browser?

115 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

This is just the new Firefox mobile user interface, right? I've been using it for quite some time in the nightly builds. It took a few minutes of adjustment the first time I saw the interface, as everything has been moved to the bottom of the screen. But this is actually fantastic for mobile usability, because you no longer have to reach all the way to the top of your screen to get to the URL bar or tab switcher. The loss of extensions is unfortunate, but not surprising, given they've been gone from mainline Firefox for some time. There are some webextensions available now, including ublock.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> The loss of extensions is unfortunate, but not surprising, given they've been gone from mainline Firefox for some time. There are some webextensions available now, including ublock. Firefox mobile never supported XUL extensions, AFAIK; this was a different breakage.
- fabrice_d 6y ago
  Fennec had support for XUL extensions. I did add-ons review for some time and it's... interesting what some people try to slip through, and how they react when caught red handed.
  - Steltek 6y ago
    Did that exist outside of Maemo? I don't remember ever seeing XUL extensions on Android...
    - fabrice_d 6y ago
      Yes, Fennec for Android had "classic" add-ons. Eg. Adblock+ was a port of the desktop version.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Sounds intriguing. Would like a (anonymized, if necessary) writeup.
    - fabrice_d 6y ago
      One example: an add-on tried to wrap the existing XPCOM component that is responsible to create http(s) connections with their own. That was very much not ok in general, and had nothing to do with the stated purpose of the add-on. When asked for an explanation, they claimed it performed better (it didn't).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
teekert 6y ago
Do you used favorites? How do you go through a list of you sites of interest?
- ajot 6y ago
  I had bookmarks. Now I put those in collections. It's worse for going to 1 specific site, but great to going to many sites at a time (think HN, twitter, newspaper and weather, all at once when you start your day).
  - teekert 6y ago
    Oh, yes, maybe that is the pattern I should adopt.
  - teekert 6y ago
    So it turns out to open all sites in a collection, you need to tab the 3 dots next to the collection name and then choose "open all sites", which you then loose in your huge list of tabs that you had already opened to get to the "start page". Are the devs using this themselves even?
fooey 6y ago
The biggest thing I've missed is that pull to refresh doesn't work, and it's such a basic tiny little thing it drives me crazy every time it doesn't work.
- yorwba 6y ago
  I tap in the bottom-right corner to open the menu and then tap the refresh button, which is in the bottom-right corner of the menu. So basically don't need to move my thumb at all. Much more convenient than pull-to-refresh in my opinion.
  - cecja 6y ago
    a good pull-to-refresh can be triggered wherever on the canvas.
  - MaxikCZ 6y ago
    I cant understand how 2 taps in precise location are more convenient to some people than one short swipe anywhere on screen, but to each their own I guess
    - yorwba 6y ago
      On my phone, pull-to-refresh doesn't work in Chrome if I only do a short swipe. It seems to reject anything shorter than 3cm or so. And that's only if I'm already at the top of the page.
- akdor1154 6y ago
  Maybe someone could write an extension to implement it... Oh.
- staktrace 6y ago
  Pull to refresh has been implemented, but still needs some polish before being released. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/9766 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/9766
Cyphase 6y ago
There's a Toolbar setting for whether to have the bar at the bottom or top. It's under Settings > Customize.
- vetinari 6y ago
  The new tab button will stay at the bottom; so if you put your toolbar back to top, you will travel the entire height all the time. Great for tablets /s.
  - Cyphase 6y ago
    You are correct.
Steltek 6y ago
I'll disagree. There are too many regressions in the new UI (FF/Android Beta, 80.0.1 over regular FF/Android 68.0). I use FF everywhere exclusively and that includes on my tablet, where keyboard and mouse shortcuts are totally missing; not even ctrl-T for a new tab. The UI breakage and uncanny valley only seemed to increase when I checked out Nightly to see if things got better there. Also, while I understand why a phone friendly layout takes top priority with meager dev resources, the loss of the "desktop-like" layout on the tablet is kinda painful on a tablet. A cursory search about these things is that Mozilla simply needs to focus on the major points first and edge cases like tablets will come later. On the plus side, the webview capability is wicked cool and I have several PWA's "installed" to my home screen. I'm really enjoying that. I understand things will improve with time. It's just a bit of a rocky experience right now.
- cmm 6y ago
  uh, you could do the "add site to home screen" thing in the old version too. and in the new version, enabling the (very cool, by itself) "Open links in a private tab" setting does guess what to PWA's (but only if a tab for the specific PWA does not already exist, because of course)
shock 6y ago
> The loss of extensions is unfortunate, but not surprising, given they've been gone from mainline Firefox for some time. What are you talking about? How have extensions been gone from mainline Firefox for some time?
- kikokikokiko 6y ago
  He's talking about the really powerful ones, the xul based ones. Not this farce we still have today. When addonpocalypse happened was the day Firefox started to die.
  - sundarurfriend 6y ago
    > When addonpocalypse happened was the day Firefox started to die. That was a devastating blow, but I still had hope in their statement that the Addon ecosystem will build up back again and most features will be implemented in WebExtensions. Unfortunately that doesn't really seem to be happening, not at any good pace anyway. A lot of the newer "replacement" addons as still buggy af, don't have feature parity with what the XUL addons had years ago, and seem to be relatively poorly maintained. I remember the flurry of blog articles from really passionate and disappointed addon writers back then, leaving the scene, and it looks that did have an effect - most of the newer addons (the long tail ones, not the mainstream TST or uBlock type ones) are of lower quality or are by companies that are trying to hook you into their service using the addon as the bait. I've never seriously considered Brave before, but it looks like it's time to start looking into it.
    - corty 6y ago
      Feature parity is impossible. Webextensions are intended to take away possibilities like altering the UI or calling out to external programs. So webextensions will never ever be on feature parity with XUL addons. Also, changes to webextensions are proceeding at a snails pace, suggesting that Mozilla doesn't really intend to get anywhere close to working support for e.g. keybinding remapping or anything like that. If you are waiting for more powerful webextensions, abandon all hope. Change is not coming.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I'm not sure what extensions everyone was using that are missing from Fenix. uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes, and HTTPS Everywhere were the big ones for me, and those three were all greenlit for Fenix (at least in Nightly). Are people still using greasemonkey scripts, or what?

AndrewDucker 6y ago
One to remove UTM tracking from all URLs. One to redirect amp to normal web pages. I'm not upgrading Firefox until the new one supports both of those.
ajot 6y ago
I do miss Redirector, Leechblock NG and Redirect AMP to HTML. I hope they are available soon.
mjevans 6y ago
Stylish and Ghostery are two of the other addons that I like, at least on desktop.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  Sure, and I have about a dozen that I use for Firefox on the desktop as well. But this change is for Firefox Android.
- godelski 6y ago
  Doesn't Ghostery have privacy issues?
  - nwah1 6y ago
    I know Stylish does and that is why many switched to Stylus
- aasasd 6y ago
  You might want to read about how ‘Stylish’ was stealing user's browsing history. (At least I hope it's ‘was’ and not ’still is’.) ‘Stylus’ is the popular open-source alternative.

ubercow13 6y ago

It's a bit weird that Firefox deprecated all extensions while moving to a simpler API with a more limited surface area, in order to allow changes to be made more easily in the future to the underlying browser without breaking compatibility with extensions, and then proceeded to make changes to the underlying browser which break compatibility with all extensions using that API.

sp332 6y ago
It's more that they moved to a new codebase that is not yet feature-complete. It will gain compatible functionality over time.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  You still believe in miracles?
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  If it's not feature complete, how can it be an official release??
  - blibble 6y ago
    this is a problem with Mozilla in general they gradually remove features essential 1-2% of the userbase and now they're getting to the point they have no users at all the main reason to use Firefox over Chrome on mobile is the extension support, and now that's gone too
    - vlod 6y ago
      >the main reason to use Firefox over Chrome on mobile is >the extension support, and now that's gone too That's not quite accurate. From "Firefox for Android upgrade FAQs" https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-upgrade-faqs https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-upgrade... Supported add-ons (note: currently, a limited number of Recommended Extensions are supported. Here's the list: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?recommended=true&type=extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?recommended... Things like uBlock-Origin etc are there, so I'm happy.

ajot 6y ago

I know that HN demographics is biased to using and getting info about IT, but I believe that people that use Firefox on Android are not common and most have some kind of interest on IT. It wonders me how they could not hear about the new Firefox for Android, it's been ~a year since Mozilla announced it, and news about how it's development was going on (and that Firefox Fenix was the Stable version somewhere a month ago).

teekert 6y ago
I indeed heard about it, a long time ago, yesterday's update took me by surprise though.
tsimionescu 6y ago
I work in this domain and am using exclusively FF for Android, but I've never been interested in following their development. Either way, I don't think that being surprised is the problem. Having a browser update break extensions is the problem - I would bet a lot of people only use FF because Chrome doesn't support extensions (I know that's why I use it anyway), so essentially the update is breaking the only important functionality. Thankfully, I don't have automatic updates enabled, so I can still wait and see how broken this really is and how long it will take to fix it.
- rurp 6y ago
  Firefox is the biggest reason I don't have automatic updates enabled on my phone. The amount of pointless UI and functionality breaking changes they have made over the years is crazy. The fact that they are laying people off after all of this wasted effort makes it even worse. The only reasons I use FF are extensions and that it's not Chrome. The former is mostly gone. The latter is enough to keep me around for now but it's getting old.

teekert 6y ago

For me it is not the missing add-ons, and I even like the bar at the bottom. But how on earth do I read some sites while coming back to my favorites? Tapping the address bar gives me a big back screen with the bar at the top, that is where I used to find my most used sites. Now instead I have to tap the small tabs icon, tap + and then choose a site. This leaves me with a lot of tabs open. I used to open things for reading in new tabs in the background, but those now get lost in my huge list of unused tabs opened solely to get to my favorites. I can't find the option to start with an empty session after closing so I now have to manually clean up al those tabs every now and then. Oh, and I can't find print and the downloads button anymore... Any advice on alternatives? I just picked up my laptop to avoid FireFox mobile :s I my most used sites were simply available below the address bar after tapping it, that would be really helpful to me.

jillesvangurp 6y ago
This is indeed annoying; there's no UI option to select anything from your collections or top sites in the current tab. There are a few other issues that annoy me: - tab management is a bit of a mess relative to the previous version. I seem to end up with the same websites open in many tabs because the UI for selecting an icon from top sites or collections always opens a new tab. IMHO that's a UX failure and something that needs rethinking. - Neither top sites or collections are part of the normal bookmarks or synced to my desktop browser. This seems like an odd choice to me as bookmark syncing works great. I've repeatedly lost collections by switching to different versions of firefox preview, firefox nightly, etc. This makes me reluctant to buy into the feature because I know I will lose all collections at some point again. - Page caching is way too aggressive. It's not acceptable to show days old versions of a website in a new tab. Yet, this happens to me on pretty much all news websites and blogs that I visit. Including HN. I have to reload freshly opened news websites to get the current version. To me this feels like a bug and I hope this is not actually intended behavior (that would be seriously misguided). - The back button history does not stop with the opening of the tab (which is what I expect). With HN, if I repeatedly hit the back button I get back to the login screen I used months ago. The old browser would go back to the main screen so I could open up a new tab. IMHO that behavior is nicer. - You have to be really careful manipulating collections via the touch screen. I've repeatedly deleted sites from there by accident because I wasn't scrolling perfectly straight or trying to open the site. Swipe to delete without confirmation is broken UX. Really annoying and it seems overly sensitive to this. Every delete I've done this way was unintentional. Despite this, I kind of like it because adblocking (aka. the #1 use case for extensions) works great and I also enjoy privacy protection, which on Android normally is kind of a bad joke with Google tracking your every move.

niftylettuce 6y ago

ungoogled-chromium works on Android too https://git.droidware.info/wchen342/ungoogled-chromium-android https://git.droidware.info/wchen342/ungoogled-chromium-andro... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708688

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Huh; it's got extension support. Experimental and hacky, but still...
nwah1 6y ago
Is it better than Bromite?

muunbo 6y ago

“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” should’ve been the name of this release

neiman 6y ago

As an extension developer, this is highly frustrated. Mozilla already broke our extension (Almonit extension) in browser a few weeks ago, when they changed default behaviour unannounced, without supplying (yet) an alternative solution. We actually had to found out about this change because people started to complain. Now our extension was removed and is impossible to reinstall after this upgrade. It's highly frustrating because we're trying to build a stable user-crowd here, and it's impossible to do if the user experience is being hurt so badly every few weeks. On the positive note, the people in Mozilla's Add-ons Matrix room were super positive and helpful. The problem was that there's not much that they could really do.

flas9sd 6y ago

there's an iceweasel f-droid fenix build available that enables more webextensions if you're so inclined, see r/fdroid leading you to github.com/interfect/fenix/releases

solstice 6y ago

For me it's the weird new way of handling custom search engines that annoys me. Old workflow: tap the address bar, start typing your search term and then either press return to search with default search engine, or 2) tap one of the custom search engine buttons. In both cases, the search was executed directly. New Firefox: (go to settings to enable non-default search engines to be displayed) Best case: tap the address bar, enter your search term, press return or one of the non-default search engines and then return. The problem is that after adding a custom search engine, it ends up at the bottom of the list, meaning that in order to select it after typing my search terms, I have to scroll down, causing the keyboard to collapse. After selecting the right search engine firefox doesn't search automatically but rather I have to tap the address bar again and then press return. So, where in the past I had a "tap, type, tap, (search results)" experience, now it is "tap, type, scroll, tap (bottom of screen to select SE), tap (top of screen into the address bar to get the keyboard back), tap (bottom of screen [return key on keyboard]), search results" I very much would like to go back to the old behavior.

MaxikCZ 6y ago
The longer I use new firefox the more hatred I harbour for it. Opening new tab before: Tap tabs icon on top. Tap open new tab icon that appears in the same place(essentially slow doubletap) Now:tap tabs icon on top. Tap new tab thats on the other side of display (I tried getting used to having navigation bar down, but the pageload progress bar should have stayed top. When arriving to page and looking at the top its completely out of my peripheral vision) Opening certain links in app. Not only was outrageous that mozzila said "nah" to ability to always open certain links in app (in the name of seamless web experience), so when opening a reddit link on slow and highly datalimited connection I had to wait until page starts loading, then stop load to not consume data (but not too soon, or open in app icon doesnt show), and then click the icon to open link in app. Now I have to tap the menu first to get access to open in app icon. Forcing me to add another tap (or three if I want to stop the pageload too) everytime I want to do something that should be user settable in the first place. Also, can anyone explain me why closing the tab view now requires two swipes down instead of one? (Or one rly long one, granted, but still...) And the fact that the thubnail (main visual cue as to what tab it is) is now smaller is also getting on my nerves Some pages are super jitery when I try to zoom them as a main big image loads (and few seconds after). Wasnt issue before. There are more things that annoy me, but cant remember them in the heat of the moment, might edit this later. And ofcourse, cant use old version because they know best whats good for me. Im about to start looking for another browser soon, would welcome suggestions! (Ability to run ublock is neccesity)

vezycash 6y ago

Mozilla is acting like Microsoft right now - Step 1: Replace a working app with a shinier UI with less features than the original Step 2: Promise to add missing features in the future Step 3: Put off adding missing features existing users want. While adding features "prospective users" say they want. Step 4 - Repeat steps 1-3 a few times (rewrite, remove features users use, add features non-users want) Step 5: Retire the product citing low usage

rjzzleep 6y ago
2014 Brendan Eich was removed and replaced with the Chief of Marketing as CEO[1][2]. I mentioned that it worries me back then and that nothing good can come out of the Chief marketing guy becoming CEO. Today what we see is the result of that. Yandex browser on android has more chrome extension support than firefox for android. This isn't just about Mozilla as a company. It's also about how we as a community supported Mozilla in becoming that company and now being surprised at why it does the things that it does. Obama made a speech not too long ago about not to conflate people doing good things with being good in all situations. The only people always seeming to be good are the ones groomed to be politicians without ever sharing a bad opinion in public. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551896 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7530807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7530807
- diminish 6y ago
  I sometimes wish we need the linux governance model with firefox - where a leader like linus with a team of a handful of people manages a true open source project. This would prevent monetization-led programming, creating a hierarchical company with a product & engineering management organization creating an average well known adventure of "how to make more money"
malnourish 6y ago
The question then is who becomes the new Mozilla?
- 6y ago

kevin_b_er 6y ago

I called it over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20392546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20392546 > This marks the last Android release with extensions/add-on support. A lot people called it FUD, but we can see they took an extra 9 months or so, supported just a few extensions, then replaced what worked with a low feature version. And users are angry. Yep. Can't say I'm surprised.

kiwijamo 6y ago
I have uBlock origin working just fine and I'm using the new Firefox Mobile. I agree with the assessment that you're spending FUD I'm afraid.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- anonymousab 6y ago
  It's not FUD at all if you use extensions outside of whatever Mozilla deigns to add to their whitelist.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    If that's what the claim was I'd be inclined to agree but extension support was not deceptively and indefinitely dropped in Q3 2019 as the comment talked about. There was Fear extensions would be permanently removed imminently, Uncertainty with how the releases would be scheduled and feature roadmap, and Doubt they'd ever listen to feedback. In reality partial extension support was already there + expansion of support on stable on full support on nightly on the near term timeline at release https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034, the switch on stable FF happened in Q3 2020, and they changed stance after all of the feedback.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ggm 6y ago

My partner has lived in FF as their browser of choice for over 15 years now. She is very angry at the lack of user-respectful UX around the change. She said to me all the choices suck, and it has the flavour of "for your better enjoyment... we broke you" type communications. Not "we're sorry" but a belief "but you want this" when directly, specifically she doesn't and didn't * No way to manage the landing page favourites order. An issue in fenix, but no indication of intent to change. * Default shifted to "speedy read-y down-the-bottom-y" * Tabs replaced by the counter of pages open. * It was anything but "principle of least astonishment" The delivery of better tracking protection? Thats great. The unexpected UI changes? They suck. No amount of A/B testing can help you in the communication of "this is better" if you don't actually try to communicate.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

viraptor 6y ago

> unexpectedly forced on a large batch of Firefox 68 Android users without any warning, way to opt out or roll back I wish they were more careful. FF displayed a warning about the change ~a month ago and you could opt out by disabling FF updates. There are bad things about this change, but this is just not true.

Macha 6y ago
The only heads up I've seen about this update has been on HN.

m45t3r 6y ago

The Register makes some of the most clickbait titles in the area. The real ones is that Firefox Quantum is finally out for Android (Firefox for Android jumped from version 68.0 to 79.0), and this bought a completely new interface too. Now, the new interface is very nice (bottom navigator bar FTW) and the browser is much faster, but it lost some features and there is a limited number of extensions available for now (Mozilla seems to be manually approving them). So what happened? A small but vocal number of users complained and we get this news from The Register like this was the worse mistake ever. It is not. Sure Mozilla could have managed this update better (losing settings seems pretty bad for example), but most users are probably pretty satisfied with the update. I couldn't use Firefox Android before (too slow compared to Chrome) and I was using Nightly (and afterwards Beta) just so I could get the performance improvements since the browser is so much faster. And also the new interface looks fantastic.

anonymousab 6y ago
>A small but vocal number of users complained You can use this to rationalize-away every regression in every piece of software. Enough "well, they're just edge case loud power users" papercuts may eventually prove fatal. A to-hell-with-your-workflow sneak update, no-downgrade path approach like this speaks volumes about Mozilla. EDIT: Sneak insofar as no clear communication about how much functionality users would be (potentially permanently) losing, and no directions on how to avoid that outcome. The play store rollout has certainly been inconsistent but that's probably more on Google's end.
- your-nanny 6y ago
  well I didn't know it was coming and my workflow went to hell.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Never attribute to sneakiness what can be attributed to not wanting to maintain 2 versions of one app until 100% feature parity. There isn't really direction to give for a path that doesn't exist.

lovelearning 6y ago

As a Firefox fan who has recommended it in my circles in the past, I'm disappointed by the new privacy and user experiences. I see it as many steps back from the old experience. I hesitate to recommend this new mobile version to anybody. They claim this is "the most private mobile Firefox so far". But DNS-over-HTTPS is disabled. There is no way to enable or configure it because there are no network settings at all in the new Settings page. DoH was a simple solution to government censorship in my country. Now, users will probably switch to Brave because it has a built-in VPN. The UX too irritates... 1) I use the android navigation bar at bottom to jump to Home or switch apps or lock the phone. FF in light theme mode takes over that area with a white background making it impossible to use white-on-white buttons. I had to switch to dark theme just to be able to see those buttons. 2) The top sites list uses smaller icons with website titles as captions. If a website uses the title "Breaking News", that becomes its caption. It's difficult to tell from the favicon and such titles what site it is. The captions are single-line cropped with ellipses making it even more difficult to guess which website it is. What I don't understand is why the release was rushed with such drastic changes instead of some kind of UX A/B studies to get feedback over time. Their reddit sub is rather hostile to any feedback and reminds me of stackoverflow nastiness. It's almost like Mozilla is trying to shed its user base.

dblohm7 6y ago
> Their reddit sub is rather hostile to any feedback and reminds me of stackoverflow nastiness. “Their” Reddit sub is not an official forum any more than this HN thread is.
papaf 6y ago
1) I use the android navigation bar at bottom to jump to Home or switch apps or lock the phone. FF in light theme mode takes over that area with a white background making it impossible to use white-on-white buttons. I had to switch to dark theme just to be able to see those buttons. I have this problem too and I am using the default phone configuration. Its bizarre that professional Android developers would make the extra effort of breaking the navigation buttons on a product that is unfinished because of time constraints.
aasasd 6y ago

LoSboccacc 6y ago

it's 2020 and still we can't have a browser where the mobile/desktop view switch is per domain instead of being per tab.

bad_user 6y ago

Mozilla did not handle this well. I like the new Firefox for Android, but it is obviously beta quality. Extensions don't work, and last time I tried (a month ago or so) custom search engines weren't working either. I use Firefox on iOS just so I can sync and use my custom search engines. I get that the new Firefox is faster and better, but don't break functionality people relied on, even if temporary. And if you do that, then release it under a different freaking name.

exoji2e 6y ago

I'm quite happy with the new release. It's faster, and I've not had any problems with crashes. Also the three plugins I regularly use worked when I got the release pushed to me (more than a week ago).

anotheryou 6y ago

Shipping breaking changes without warning is really bad... They already did it for beta users before and I lost add-ons, their settings (and can't even remember some names).

rnestler 6y ago
I remember receiving a warning a few weeks ago which announced the upcoming changes and what I'd need to do to keep most of my stuff (one needed to unset the master password to migrate the saved passwords for example IIRC)
- anotheryou 6y ago
  Ah alright. Better than for the beta users than.

iforgotpassword 6y ago

The new UI is great, now it's finally on par with IE11 mobile! But really, if the navigation bar is at the bottom I don't need an extra back button anymore, the system's back button is right there below. Didn't have any crashes yet so that would probably change my impression, but so far it's been great.

ChrisRR 6y ago

The only issue I've had is that lastpass stopped working with it. It says it can't find the address bar

szszrk 6y ago
For me lastpass was horrible in android integration, tried on a few devices on Android 9-11, always the same. Wanted to buy a subscription for me and family, but it just required a LOT of maintenance and still didn't work well. Keepass2android on same devices was flawless, so says family as well.

novaRom 6y ago

Is there any good alternative? I think the main problem now on Android is Google Store wall. There would be much more Open Source alternatives if Android users could use another App Store. I wish we have something like an audited Store of Open Source only Apps.

koopuluri 6y ago
What is preventing you from installing another App Store? I got F-droid installed seamlessly a week or so ago to download Newpipe, and it sits perfectly fine alongside the Google Play store. Perhaps I'm missing something. Is it not possible to install other app stores?
- mcherm 6y ago
  If you are a consumer using Android it is reasonably straightforward (at least for someone a little bit technically inclined... maybe not for the general population) to install a new app store. If you are a vendor of apps, it is hopeless. Approximately zero consumers will be using any other app store.
- novaRom 6y ago
  F-Droid doesn't respect my system language. It shows me Apps descriptions in a language of my current country instead. And I don't see any language setting.
  - Tepix 6y ago
    I suggest you report this at https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues if you haven't already.

conradfr 6y ago

I've disabled auto-update for Firefox (first time even looking for that feature on Android). I don't know, I like having a back button on my browser I guess? As someone who uses "Firefox" since the Netscape Communicator days it's sad to see all this unrevealing.

conradfr 6y ago
Didn't work, it updated anyway.
rnestler 6y ago
> I don't know, I like having a back button on my browser. What's wrong with just using the Android back button in the browser? I find it quite intuitive to use.
- jamienicol 6y ago
  I use the android back button (or gesture) to go back one page. But the Firefox back button is useful because you can long press it to see the history and skip back several pages.
  - avhon1 6y ago
    Or forward several pages, too! Such a useful feature... gone...
    - jamienicol 6y ago
      It's still there!
      - avhon1 6y ago
        It's definitely not in 79.0.5 (build #2015758619), which is the version I have from the Play store. (Google says it's the most up-to-date version.)

Causality1 6y ago

Just my opinion, but I think Mozilla is risking users it has in order to chase users it's almost certainly never going to get.

znpy 6y ago

wait, you are telling me that firefox mobile freezing when loading ebay.com and other websites was working as intended ? ma porco...

d3sandoval 6y ago

For those (like me) who are wondering why their Firefox still looks the same, "If you live in Europe, you’ll find the update available today, August 25, 2020. If you live in the USA, you’ll see the update on the 27th of August, 2020" [1] [1] https://www.slashgear.com/firefox-daylight-update-revitalizes-android-web-experience-25635016/ https://www.slashgear.com/firefox-daylight-update-revitalize...

amq 6y ago

I'm using it since the Preview as the daily driver and it has been a day and night change for me in terms of performance compared to the original 68 version. I just wish Mozilla had done a better job at rolling out the change to existing users.

accountLost 6y ago

Just lost my HN account thanks to this update. I can't remember the password and my firefox logins have not been migrated. Apparently I was supposed to disable the master password before the upgrade. Silly me...

nirse 6y ago

Actually, there's a lot in this new release that I like (my high light is when navigating back, actually going back to where you were on that previous page, without the page jumping around as things are re-rendered on my somewhat slow phone). Yes, there are changes, but I can deal with changes (they are part of life, please get used to them) and who knows, over time (ie not within 2 hours after the update installing) we might even come to appreciate Mozilla's choices.

cybwraith 6y ago

Just tried nightly and haven't updated my main version yet. The lack of addons is sad and I'm not confident they'll be adding them back with any haste. However the biggest issue I see is that the default page is empty, theres no one-tap button to add a bookmark in the url bar, and getting to my bookmarks now requires using a small context menu. They really need home page customization, because the whole flow of open tab > click bookmark is just completely gone Why make using bookmarks, a core piece of any browsing experience, so much harder? What's the functional difference for a typical user between a 'collection' and a folder of bookmarks? Collections aren't on desktop, so now I need to bookmark and add to a collection. The menu containing 'open all links' in a collection is hidden until you expand said collection, then click on the newly revealed menu button. This whole update reeks of "UX" department needing to justify their jobs by making unnecessary changes.

your-nanny 6y ago
I've only found two differences between a bookmark folder and a collection: 1. Collections show up on new tab 2. collection items are remarkably easy to accidentally deleted,with no confirmation or undo functionality. Reminds me of Firefox reading lists... which also disappeared and I hardly noticed.

alyandon 6y ago

Desktop password sync to my phone (presumably because I use a master/primary password) no longer works. Using the standalone lockwise app to copy/paste passwords on my phone is really not an improvement in security. :-/ Do the Android Firefox developers even actually use their browser?