4 ms·

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 th

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.
- toupeira 6y ago
  > 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). If this is with collections, apparently it's intentional: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/10417 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/10417
  - jillesvangurp 6y ago
    Yikes. It's broken, plain and simple. I'm surprised that there is any debate about this in Mozilla about this being a bug or a feature.
    - toupeira 6y ago
      Yeah, they seem to be more interested in doing UX research and "highlighting value" of this broken feature: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/5652 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/5652
ptx 6y ago
> Oh, and I can't find print and the downloads button anymore... I just bought a printer a few weeks ago and was happily printing from Firefox, but now it seems the entire feature is gone. As a workaround, you can share the page from Firefox to the Mopria app, but I think that rerenders the whole thing in Mopria's embedded Webkit view, which might not always work. But people with printers are probably a minority, so according to the prevailing line of thinking it doesn't matter. Why would anyone ever want to do anything that's not commonly done by at least half the population?

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.

toupeira 6y ago
> 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). If this is with collections, apparently it's intentional: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/10417 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/10417
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  Yikes. It's broken, plain and simple. I'm surprised that there is any debate about this in Mozilla about this being a bug or a feature.
  - toupeira 6y ago
    Yeah, they seem to be more interested in doing UX research and "highlighting value" of this broken feature: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/5652 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/5652

ptx 6y ago

> Oh, and I can't find print and the downloads button anymore... I just bought a printer a few weeks ago and was happily printing from Firefox, but now it seems the entire feature is gone. As a workaround, you can share the page from Firefox to the Mopria app, but I think that rerenders the whole thing in Mopria's embedded Webkit view, which might not always work. But people with printers are probably a minority, so according to the prevailing line of thinking it doesn't matter. Why would anyone ever want to do anything that's not commonly done by at least half the population?