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While we are on the topic, did any get the new FF on their Android phones last week? What happened? It completely breaks my flow of opening a page, reading, goi

While we are on the topic, did any get the new FF on their Android phones last week? What happened? It completely breaks my flow of opening a page, reading, going back to my favorite sites and opening a new page <repeat>.. The only way to find your favorites now is opening a new tap, you'll find that when hitting the small tab counter and then the +. You will gather piles of tabs and they are still there after you close the browser (no more setting to forget them upon close). I like the bar at the bottom but that is the only nice thing. Am I missing something? Play store reviews are also pretty negative...

pvitz 6y ago
This version is terrible. The start screen with the most visited sites doesn't show up anymore. It is slower on my phone and I don't even know anymore how to view my downloads from within the browser. It really makes me consider changing to another browser, but I don't want to use Chrome. Would anyone have a good suggestion?
- teekert 6y ago
  Yeah, I was very surprised, at first I thought: let's just get used to it, but I feel like I won't. Why on earth would hitting the biggest touchable area of the UI (the address bar) lead to a completely black screen with 0 options, that's just a big waste, it could have easily presented my most used websites there. I'm also looking for alternatives, it's a big step back imo. Right now I have 12 useless tabs open, I never had any tabs open (unless I opened them myself for later reading, and those tabs are now lost between all those useless tabs were I just wanted to switch to another website) but it's the only way to get to your favorites and collections (whatever collections may be, currently they are the same as my favorites??). I also can't find print and downloads anymore.
  - rapnie 6y ago
    For me the UX is down the drain. I notice I use my mobile less for browsing.. too unwieldy. Like a different browser was installed in that update. At many places it needs more clicks. Address bar completion works differently. You can avoid the new tab creation by clicking Back button after you open, but I hate to do this all the time. Had a huge list of tabs open before. Now the preview thumbnails do not load/refresh, text is bigger and truncated so tab list only half as useful.
jra101 6y ago
The handling of bookmarks is terrible in the latest Firefox. So bad that I can only assume the developers don't actually use bookmarks and just search for websites by name?
- teekert 6y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking, I was hoping I was missing something but sadly it seems I'm not.
FeepingCreature 6y ago
I just use a fixed APK version of FF Android Beta that I will never, ever update.
the_gipsy 6y ago
I like everything of the new version except that it doesn't close a tab on back button.
jackewiehose 6y ago
I got the update today and I hate it. The new UI just requires more tapping, has less features and rendering isn't even faster! The whole web-experience actually feels more messy because uMatrix is missing. I don't get it. Firefox mobile was how old? Two years? Is that the new standard of software-development where you ditch your source every few years and rewrite from scratch? I'm very disappointed.
- teekert 6y ago
  Do you use favorites much? How do go to your next site of interest?
  - jackewiehose 6y ago
    In the previous version I had all my most visited sites as toplevel-bookmarks (which were displayed in the new-tab-page) and a bookmark-folder with "maybe-read-later"-bookmarks. That was never very good on mobile because there was no way to reorder bookmarks. Now I have my most visited sites in the new "top sites" section and the rest goes to bookmarks. Works for me but there is also absolutely no benefit to before (bookmarks are even less accessible). And you still can't reorder any bookmarks/top-sites/collections nor export/import them. But why fix old bugs or implement requested features when you can just start completely new and ignore the users. That's definitely more fun for the programmers.
    - teekert 6y ago
      So indeed there is no other way to open a new site than by opening a new tab first. Don't you find that annoying? Or do you navigate back constantly?
      - jackewiehose 6y ago
        I find it annoying. The whole update brought nothing but annoyances.
- sciurus 6y ago
SSLy 6y ago
I've got it on my phone, and can't say too much bad about it. It feels fery fluid.
- teekert 6y ago
  Well I guess I'm not alone: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/firefox_android_update/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/firefox_android_updat...
morsch 6y ago
Yes. Thank you. It's really awful. I was afraid I was the only one whose workflow they completely broke. Apparently I'm not, so there is hope yet. Also gone: offline reader mode pages. I'm in the beta channel, I cannot believe they released it on the regular channel in this state. I'm now trying out other Android browsers after having used Firefox pretty much ever since it's available for Android. Brave has offline pages, but the adblocker is much worse than ubo. And the vendor lockin is real, Firefox Sync is nice to have.
- morsch 6y ago
  And while I'm on the topic of offline pages, let me add another rant: As far as I know all Android browsers, including Firefox, keep commiting the cardinal sin of computer applications. They lose user data. I cannot count how often I returned to the browser only to find a previously loaded page reloading. Good luck with that if you're temporarily in a dead spot. Of course most of the time you aren't, but the browsers still lose your data, namely the scroll position. This makes these programs that are, to a first approximation, document display tools eminently useless for displaying documents longer than 140 characters. Even when Firefox had an offline reader mode - built to read longer documents and with complete control over js and rendering - the scroll position was never persisted. I resorted to copy pasting a sentence to a notepad and using Find in page to resume reading. Ridiculous. And that's not even mentioning form content and other more application-y state. Of course I know it's an Android thing; apps don't get to hold on to stuff. So store everything to disk. I'll reload it when I'm good and ready. My podcast app doesn't restart the episode from scratch if I leave it stopped in the background for 5 minutes. I'm sure there are a thousand edge cases, but there's very little evidence of fixing even the simple path. Imagine a desktop browser pulling shit like that. Again, not just a Firefox issue, from what I can tell none of the vendors think this is important.
  - iggldiggl 6y ago
    > but the browsers still lose your data, namely the scroll position. [..] > Imagine a desktop browser pulling shit like that. Again, not just a Firefox issue, from what I can tell none of the vendors think this is important. A bug for storing the current scroll position at all was opened shortly after the release of the 2nd generation Firefox for Android (which is the one that's being replaced now, the 1st generation being the attempt to use a XUL/JS interface on mobile as well, which led to horrible performance problems), and then remained open for 3½ years – at which point it was only fixed because I personally was getting fed up enough about it. So there might be something to that observation… session restoring originally had a number of other annoying bugs as well, one of which had amassed half a dozen duplicate bug reports, but still didn't get much in the way of official attention [1]. On the flip side it did get me contributing to Firefox for quite some time, which was a nice experience, but on the other hand it does make me a bit apprehensive how long some of those lost features and UX regressions will potentially remain that way… I'm mildly curious about the reader mode issues, though. While I never used reader mode much and so never extensively tested it, I do remember writing some code to handle reader mode as well – on the other hand I guess it doesn't matter much now any more what with the old codebase being shunted away into the sidings for good… [1] Maybe it's because commercial developers (which includes the fulltime Mozilla staff, since they are being paid for working on the browser) tend use more expensive phones that are less memory-constrained and hence run into session restoring problems less often? Who knows…

pvitz 6y ago

This version is terrible. The start screen with the most visited sites doesn't show up anymore. It is slower on my phone and I don't even know anymore how to view my downloads from within the browser. It really makes me consider changing to another browser, but I don't want to use Chrome. Would anyone have a good suggestion?

teekert 6y ago
Yeah, I was very surprised, at first I thought: let's just get used to it, but I feel like I won't. Why on earth would hitting the biggest touchable area of the UI (the address bar) lead to a completely black screen with 0 options, that's just a big waste, it could have easily presented my most used websites there. I'm also looking for alternatives, it's a big step back imo. Right now I have 12 useless tabs open, I never had any tabs open (unless I opened them myself for later reading, and those tabs are now lost between all those useless tabs were I just wanted to switch to another website) but it's the only way to get to your favorites and collections (whatever collections may be, currently they are the same as my favorites??). I also can't find print and downloads anymore.
- rapnie 6y ago
  For me the UX is down the drain. I notice I use my mobile less for browsing.. too unwieldy. Like a different browser was installed in that update. At many places it needs more clicks. Address bar completion works differently. You can avoid the new tab creation by clicking Back button after you open, but I hate to do this all the time. Had a huge list of tabs open before. Now the preview thumbnails do not load/refresh, text is bigger and truncated so tab list only half as useful.

jra101 6y ago

The handling of bookmarks is terrible in the latest Firefox. So bad that I can only assume the developers don't actually use bookmarks and just search for websites by name?

teekert 6y ago
Exactly what I was thinking, I was hoping I was missing something but sadly it seems I'm not.

FeepingCreature 6y ago

I just use a fixed APK version of FF Android Beta that I will never, ever update.

the_gipsy 6y ago

I like everything of the new version except that it doesn't close a tab on back button.

jackewiehose 6y ago

I got the update today and I hate it. The new UI just requires more tapping, has less features and rendering isn't even faster! The whole web-experience actually feels more messy because uMatrix is missing. I don't get it. Firefox mobile was how old? Two years? Is that the new standard of software-development where you ditch your source every few years and rewrite from scratch? I'm very disappointed.

teekert 6y ago
Do you use favorites much? How do go to your next site of interest?
- jackewiehose 6y ago
  In the previous version I had all my most visited sites as toplevel-bookmarks (which were displayed in the new-tab-page) and a bookmark-folder with "maybe-read-later"-bookmarks. That was never very good on mobile because there was no way to reorder bookmarks. Now I have my most visited sites in the new "top sites" section and the rest goes to bookmarks. Works for me but there is also absolutely no benefit to before (bookmarks are even less accessible). And you still can't reorder any bookmarks/top-sites/collections nor export/import them. But why fix old bugs or implement requested features when you can just start completely new and ignore the users. That's definitely more fun for the programmers.
  - teekert 6y ago
    So indeed there is no other way to open a new site than by opening a new tab first. Don't you find that annoying? Or do you navigate back constantly?
    - jackewiehose 6y ago
      I find it annoying. The whole update brought nothing but annoyances.
sciurus 6y ago

SSLy 6y ago

I've got it on my phone, and can't say too much bad about it. It feels fery fluid.

teekert 6y ago
Well I guess I'm not alone: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/firefox_android_update/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/firefox_android_updat...

morsch 6y ago

Yes. Thank you. It's really awful. I was afraid I was the only one whose workflow they completely broke. Apparently I'm not, so there is hope yet. Also gone: offline reader mode pages. I'm in the beta channel, I cannot believe they released it on the regular channel in this state. I'm now trying out other Android browsers after having used Firefox pretty much ever since it's available for Android. Brave has offline pages, but the adblocker is much worse than ubo. And the vendor lockin is real, Firefox Sync is nice to have.

morsch 6y ago
And while I'm on the topic of offline pages, let me add another rant: As far as I know all Android browsers, including Firefox, keep commiting the cardinal sin of computer applications. They lose user data. I cannot count how often I returned to the browser only to find a previously loaded page reloading. Good luck with that if you're temporarily in a dead spot. Of course most of the time you aren't, but the browsers still lose your data, namely the scroll position. This makes these programs that are, to a first approximation, document display tools eminently useless for displaying documents longer than 140 characters. Even when Firefox had an offline reader mode - built to read longer documents and with complete control over js and rendering - the scroll position was never persisted. I resorted to copy pasting a sentence to a notepad and using Find in page to resume reading. Ridiculous. And that's not even mentioning form content and other more application-y state. Of course I know it's an Android thing; apps don't get to hold on to stuff. So store everything to disk. I'll reload it when I'm good and ready. My podcast app doesn't restart the episode from scratch if I leave it stopped in the background for 5 minutes. I'm sure there are a thousand edge cases, but there's very little evidence of fixing even the simple path. Imagine a desktop browser pulling shit like that. Again, not just a Firefox issue, from what I can tell none of the vendors think this is important.
- iggldiggl 6y ago
  > but the browsers still lose your data, namely the scroll position. [..] > Imagine a desktop browser pulling shit like that. Again, not just a Firefox issue, from what I can tell none of the vendors think this is important. A bug for storing the current scroll position at all was opened shortly after the release of the 2nd generation Firefox for Android (which is the one that's being replaced now, the 1st generation being the attempt to use a XUL/JS interface on mobile as well, which led to horrible performance problems), and then remained open for 3½ years – at which point it was only fixed because I personally was getting fed up enough about it. So there might be something to that observation… session restoring originally had a number of other annoying bugs as well, one of which had amassed half a dozen duplicate bug reports, but still didn't get much in the way of official attention [1]. On the flip side it did get me contributing to Firefox for quite some time, which was a nice experience, but on the other hand it does make me a bit apprehensive how long some of those lost features and UX regressions will potentially remain that way… I'm mildly curious about the reader mode issues, though. While I never used reader mode much and so never extensively tested it, I do remember writing some code to handle reader mode as well – on the other hand I guess it doesn't matter much now any more what with the old codebase being shunted away into the sidings for good… [1] Maybe it's because commercial developers (which includes the fulltime Mozilla staff, since they are being paid for working on the browser) tend use more expensive phones that are less memory-constrained and hence run into session restoring problems less often? Who knows…