4 ms·

One year ago they launched their new Android version, which is godawful. Just read the reviews on the android store. Why Firefox, why?!

by knob 5y ago

dunefox 5y ago
> Just read the reviews on the android store. 4 1/2 stars with over 4 million reviews. I use it regularly and have no real problems with it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kunagi7 5y ago
  Well, it did drop to 3.9 stars. Initially, Google Play reviews got filled with 1 star reviews from users complaining that a lot of their workflows were broken, things that they liked were removed, extensions not working (unless you used the initial nine excluded extensions). The rating dropped from 4.7 to 3.9 in less than a month. After that, some one star reviews were removed (maybe google thought it was review bombing or Mozilla used some kind of third party service for that). Ratings started to go up a bit after that. And suddenly a lot of 5 stars reviews with little to no content (thumbs up emojis, Nice/Great/Good, or just dots) started to appear and the rating almost returned to the previous normal. Nowadays is just a mix of good and bad reviews, most of them quite lengthy.
scrollaway 5y ago
Firefox on Android is pretty fantastic. I feel like it's the one thing Mozilla did really right. As someone who has their laundry list of issues with regular Firefox, I have no serious complaint against their Android port.
- blendergeek 5y ago
  I believe most of the complaints stem from the fact that a year or two ago, Mozilla removed most of the features (including the ability to install almost all addons). This mass feature removal is just one more data point in line with what is discussed on the article.
  - anonymousab 5y ago
    Most importantly, they did so as a plain update to the existing app sku rather than as a new app (despite it being trialed as a new sky). Thus if you had auto updates, which developers and security folks were so keen on recommending, you suddenly lost a massive amount of functionality and possibly could not do many of the things you need to do on your phone. With no recommended way back. Oh, and many users lost their history, passwords and bookmarks with that as well. It's hard for users to see that approach from a software company as anything other than a statement of "We're smarter than you, we know better than you, get f**ed"; a big thumb in the eye from some product manager somewhere. Get that experience enough times with Mozilla updates and you start to view all of their design decisions through that lens.
bantunes 5y ago
What makes you say that? I use it as a daily driver since it launched.
tomrod 5y ago
Completely agree. Poorer UI, removed extensions, and made it so text at old.reddit.com is microscopic despite all attempts. Iirc about:config access was removed too, but I can't remember for sure. It was a great browser! I still install it once a month to see if they bring back the critical usability features. No dice yet.
Arech 5y ago
What? FF for Android works great (but Mozilla as usual for them pisses off users with weird and stupid UI changes)
leto_ii 5y ago
Writing this on Android Firefox right now, I don't have too many complaints. I have up on Chrome a decade ago and never looked back. I used Opera for some years and then switched to Ff. What are your main pain points?
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Not the person you responded to, but I normally use Firefox on Android and I've definitely seen features disappear with the new release. I like the new look, I even like the bottom URL bar placement that many reviewers seem to be negative about, and I like the concept of collections that the user base is protesting so much. Those are fine for me. However, I'm regularly running into bugs ever since I updated from that latest "old" mobile Firefox. It took them months to support the certificate authority installed on my phone, and even now that's a hidden setting somewhere in a debug menu. Using said certificate with a HTTP proxy is still broken. There's no setting to control DOH, even though there's no reason the browser might not support it. In fact, there's no way to use about:config AND use a stable version of the browser on Android; you need to run Beta or Nightly or the folks at Mozilla don't trust you to touch the settings. The addon library is abysmal, even after all this time, and the hack to get around that requires a Mozilla account and messing with custom addon lists. I can't view the source of the current page anymore. It's been too long since I last had the option, so I'm not sure if this was an addon or a part of the core browser, but I used to be able to hit the menu button and click "view source". I think the view-source: URI scheme is still supported, but I can't figure out how to make the app respect it anymore. For the past weeks, I've been running into a bug where using Swiftkey in combination with Firefox sometimes clears the entire text field. On websites that use native text boxes like HN I can correct that by opening another keyboard with a control key (Hacker's Keyboard) and hitting CTRL+Z, but on websites that provide their own rich editing that's impossible. This bug has eaten tens of posts of mine, some not at all short, and from what I can tell from Github the bug should already be fixed (it isn't) or will be fixed in Firefox 94 (which hits Beta in about 20 days, and then stable in November). All other browsers work fine with this keyboard, and it seems like everyone using Swiftkey and Firefox together should be running into this. I'm a little annoyed that this fix wasn't backported to current versions of the browser. I would've been fine with all of this if this was the first release of Firefox on Android. However, it's simply not; there was a competent version of Firefox before the rewrite and the modern version still hasn't reached feature parity after dropping that version more than a year ago. Being able to hit install on any Firefox addon and being reasonably sure that it'll work was very liberating. Of course, some of the addons simply couldn't work because they relied on UI not present in the mobile apps, but I never saw that as a problem. Those addons got purged with the switch to WebExtensions anyway. Perhaps people who switched from Chrome to Firefox after the release of the rewrite won't have as many issues because they never used the advanced features Firefox used to support. All in all, it's a decent mobile browser, but the reasons I started using it in the first place have slowly been eroded away.

One year ago they launched their new Android version, which is godawful. Just read the reviews on the android store. Why Firefox, why?!

by knob 5y ago

One year ago they launched their new Android version, which is godawful. Just read the reviews on the android store. Why Firefox, why?!

dunefox 5y ago

> Just read the reviews on the android store. 4 1/2 stars with over 4 million reviews. I use it regularly and have no real problems with it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kunagi7 5y ago
Well, it did drop to 3.9 stars. Initially, Google Play reviews got filled with 1 star reviews from users complaining that a lot of their workflows were broken, things that they liked were removed, extensions not working (unless you used the initial nine excluded extensions). The rating dropped from 4.7 to 3.9 in less than a month. After that, some one star reviews were removed (maybe google thought it was review bombing or Mozilla used some kind of third party service for that). Ratings started to go up a bit after that. And suddenly a lot of 5 stars reviews with little to no content (thumbs up emojis, Nice/Great/Good, or just dots) started to appear and the rating almost returned to the previous normal. Nowadays is just a mix of good and bad reviews, most of them quite lengthy.

scrollaway 5y ago

Firefox on Android is pretty fantastic. I feel like it's the one thing Mozilla did really right. As someone who has their laundry list of issues with regular Firefox, I have no serious complaint against their Android port.

blendergeek 5y ago
I believe most of the complaints stem from the fact that a year or two ago, Mozilla removed most of the features (including the ability to install almost all addons). This mass feature removal is just one more data point in line with what is discussed on the article.
- anonymousab 5y ago
  Most importantly, they did so as a plain update to the existing app sku rather than as a new app (despite it being trialed as a new sky). Thus if you had auto updates, which developers and security folks were so keen on recommending, you suddenly lost a massive amount of functionality and possibly could not do many of the things you need to do on your phone. With no recommended way back. Oh, and many users lost their history, passwords and bookmarks with that as well. It's hard for users to see that approach from a software company as anything other than a statement of "We're smarter than you, we know better than you, get f**ed"; a big thumb in the eye from some product manager somewhere. Get that experience enough times with Mozilla updates and you start to view all of their design decisions through that lens.

bantunes 5y ago

What makes you say that? I use it as a daily driver since it launched.

tomrod 5y ago

Completely agree. Poorer UI, removed extensions, and made it so text at old.reddit.com is microscopic despite all attempts. Iirc about:config access was removed too, but I can't remember for sure. It was a great browser! I still install it once a month to see if they bring back the critical usability features. No dice yet.

Arech 5y ago

What? FF for Android works great (but Mozilla as usual for them pisses off users with weird and stupid UI changes)

leto_ii 5y ago

Writing this on Android Firefox right now, I don't have too many complaints. I have up on Chrome a decade ago and never looked back. I used Opera for some years and then switched to Ff. What are your main pain points?

jeroenhd 5y ago
Not the person you responded to, but I normally use Firefox on Android and I've definitely seen features disappear with the new release. I like the new look, I even like the bottom URL bar placement that many reviewers seem to be negative about, and I like the concept of collections that the user base is protesting so much. Those are fine for me. However, I'm regularly running into bugs ever since I updated from that latest "old" mobile Firefox. It took them months to support the certificate authority installed on my phone, and even now that's a hidden setting somewhere in a debug menu. Using said certificate with a HTTP proxy is still broken. There's no setting to control DOH, even though there's no reason the browser might not support it. In fact, there's no way to use about:config AND use a stable version of the browser on Android; you need to run Beta or Nightly or the folks at Mozilla don't trust you to touch the settings. The addon library is abysmal, even after all this time, and the hack to get around that requires a Mozilla account and messing with custom addon lists. I can't view the source of the current page anymore. It's been too long since I last had the option, so I'm not sure if this was an addon or a part of the core browser, but I used to be able to hit the menu button and click "view source". I think the view-source: URI scheme is still supported, but I can't figure out how to make the app respect it anymore. For the past weeks, I've been running into a bug where using Swiftkey in combination with Firefox sometimes clears the entire text field. On websites that use native text boxes like HN I can correct that by opening another keyboard with a control key (Hacker's Keyboard) and hitting CTRL+Z, but on websites that provide their own rich editing that's impossible. This bug has eaten tens of posts of mine, some not at all short, and from what I can tell from Github the bug should already be fixed (it isn't) or will be fixed in Firefox 94 (which hits Beta in about 20 days, and then stable in November). All other browsers work fine with this keyboard, and it seems like everyone using Swiftkey and Firefox together should be running into this. I'm a little annoyed that this fix wasn't backported to current versions of the browser. I would've been fine with all of this if this was the first release of Firefox on Android. However, it's simply not; there was a competent version of Firefox before the rewrite and the modern version still hasn't reached feature parity after dropping that version more than a year ago. Being able to hit install on any Firefox addon and being reasonably sure that it'll work was very liberating. Of course, some of the addons simply couldn't work because they relied on UI not present in the mobile apps, but I never saw that as a problem. Those addons got purged with the switch to WebExtensions anyway. Perhaps people who switched from Chrome to Firefox after the release of the rewrite won't have as many issues because they never used the advanced features Firefox used to support. All in all, it's a decent mobile browser, but the reasons I started using it in the first place have slowly been eroded away.