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I'm perfectly happy with Firefox, both desktop and mobile. It works very well and I never have problems with it. It blocks ads on mobile and chrome doesn't. As

I'm perfectly happy with Firefox, both desktop and mobile. It works very well and I never have problems with it. It blocks ads on mobile and chrome doesn't. As far as I have seen, it's fast. I don't notice a difference on the rare occasion I open chromium to check and see that some application will look the same for a client as it does for me. But I guess it's always true: people go out of their way to complain, but not to compliment. I should write a "I'm perfectly happy with Firefox, happier than I would be with any other browser" blog post and see if it gets any attention.

marak830 5y ago
That's a bit harsh. Every point they raised is valid: the UX changes have been weird and inconsistent, the lack of history searching is frustrating etc I still use ff, I certainly won't be using Chrome as I appreciate my add-ons too much.
- elliotf 5y ago
  Chrome is also adding bizarre ux choices on mobile. The tipping point for me was nested tabs (tab groups) with no way to disable them. I've been a happy Android Firefox user since then.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I use chromium based browsers on mobile primarily and I just want to agree with you wholeheartedly. I don't know why this decision was foisted on us. Two layers of organizational abstraction with minimal benefit. I'm sure some people like it, but that's why you make it optional. The UX with nesting tabs is absolutely abysmal.
  - nonbirithm 5y ago
    As a user of Brave, I completely agree with this. I wish the tab grouping could be disabled instead of forced upon users. And despite the issues with Fenix's project management that I mentioned in my post, I still believe that between Google and Mozilla the latter organization would be more willing to listen to user feedback and not attempt to move forward with features such as those. I can't imagine Google suddenly deciding one day that tab grouping was a mistake and walking back such a feature.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    The fact that open in new tab only gives the option for "in group" did it for me. Kiwi at least gives options for opening new tabs as in-group or standalone.
- lasc4r 5y ago
  Calling ff a mess is worse, as someone that absolutely hates ads it's a godsend.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    You might like Vivaldi. Basically Chrome w/ adblock without Brave's business model. Built by the team that left after Opera's purchase.
    - LamaOfRuin 5y ago
      Does Vivaldi support add-ons/extensions on android? I don't see it mentioned on the landing page. Granted, ad-block is the primary one and included by default in Vivaldi, but I still like there being a possibility for extensibility even if what's supported on Firefox for Android is limited.
      - tomrod 5y ago
        Unfortunately not. This is why I considered FF before last years release to have been _the_ browser for Android.
      - betwixthewires 5y ago
        FYI there is a chromium fork called Kiwi Browser that supports extensions. I'm using it to tell you this right now.
        beerandt 5y ago
        Kiwi has become my goto Android browser, and it's not even close. Primary reason being chrome add-on support. But it does have a high number of quirks make it through to release versions. Like tab ordering in the current version is broken, such that swiping tabs are in a different order than browsing tabs.
        betwixthewires 5y ago
- Reubachi 5y ago
  I don't think it's harsh, as those points to me aren't valid. I'd much rather have the Mozilla foundation focus on security, privacy, ubiquity than UX and less used features like history searching. That said, I can't do any combination of Netflix + Any other application leveraging graphic card drivers. Completely locks up the computer milliseconds after application loads,need to hard restart. Event viewer for system and FF is no help. Submitted bug tickets, no updates. Oh well, it's fast and secure when I'm not on netflix.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    > I'd much rather have the Mozilla foundation focus on security I would, too, but they're not able to keep up on that, either, despite vast funding. Foundations and nonprofits used to do one thing well, not 12 things okay, and 5 things pretty poorly.
quaintdev 5y ago
> I should write a "I'm perfectly happy with Firefox, happier than I would be with any other browser" blog post and see if it gets any attention. And here I was thinking the post missed a lot of issues maybe I should create another blog post. Stop defending something that really has issues. This fanboy behaviour ends up hurting the very thing we love.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Agreed with you. FF was my main mobile browser when I could -block ads -modify default text size (so I could read websites like old.reddit.com without having to zoom in) There were a whole lot of other great features that weren't dealbreakers without. Now? It's just weird.
  - hammyhavoc 5y ago
    What's weird about it? Works how I would expect.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      The article mentions some of the many bugs one can anticipate.
- II2II 5y ago
  Saying that you're happier with a certain product than the competition is not fanboy behavior and should not be taken to mean a product is without fault, particularly when it relates to the use of other people. It is also less destructive behavior than a laundry list of faults with little acknowledgement of benefits, particularly when those faults will only be encountered by a fraction of the user base. As for my experiences with Fenix, aside from a rocky ride when it was first introduced, it has been positive. This is coming from a person who prefers incremental change and frowns upon massive changes.
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  Constructive criticism is important. However, praising things that are working well when everybody else is layering on the negativity with a trowel regarding the "death" of Firefox, and how it is a "mess" is important so that we don't end up with more undesirable changes made.
danShumway 5y ago
I'll push back a little bit on this. To preface, I have also been at least reasonably happy with Fenix on Android, although I am frustrated that the add-ons are still limited. I don't feel like I have a lot of friction, the UI works well enough for what I need it to do, and I have pretty much no desire to switch to another browser. And I regularly get annoyed at the level of scrutiny and amount of bad-natured criticism that Mozilla gets. I think it's part human nature, part meme, but I see people throw complaints at Firefox with a level of vigor that they can't seem to muster for browsers that are clearly far, far worse. And I've seen those same people ignore some of the legitimately fantastic stuff that Mozilla has been doing, some of it inside of Firefox. All that being said, I didn't get any of those bad feelings from this article. The criticisms seemed fair, and it felt to me that the author was speaking out of genuine concern and desire for Fenix to be better. I didn't feel like the author was going out of their way to complain. More importantly, as someone who is generally a lot more bullish on Mozilla and Firefox than other people on HN, and as someone who honestly still trusts Mozilla quite a bit, the complaints about closed designs and lack of community involvement in some parts of the browser ring true to me and I empathize. I trust Mozilla a lot, but I do really wish that they didn't make these kinds of design decisions that came so far out of left field with so little community input. They could do better here, and it is a worrying trend. It is weird for a browser to have this many tab switcher redesigns, and to have so many of them received so negatively. I do recommend people use Firefox on Android. I think the average experience is going to be better than the author describes, particularly if users aren't on nightly. And having support for Ublock Origin is a killer feature, and not just for privacy. The mobile web is borderline unusable for me without a good adblocker. But... a lot of the criticism here is valid, and I hope that people at Mozilla look at it, and in the best case scenario, I hope maybe this kind of criticism leads to more open, thoughtful design where community input and involvement happens earlier in the design process.
- dont__panic 5y ago
  Agreed. I use FF on my Android devices because it's the best browser by a huge margin (uBlock Origin and AMP redirect alone guarantee that; not being made by Google is icing on the cake). However, FireFox mobile could always be better. I really hope that Mozilla keeps listening to the users to figure out how to make the browsers better, especially when they have so many engineers that they seem to constantly shuffle the UI around just to give them work to do. There's plenty of actual improvements to make, and more options to give users with different preferences, and that should be where Mozilla spends engineer time with such a mature product. Instead of rewriting the browser every couple of years because the previous one was a mess.
dheera 5y ago
I've found the Firefox tabbing experience much nicer on mobile. Chrome wrecked their UX recently, sometimes new tabs become circles at the bottom (that don't obey the tab button) and sometimes they become big squares at the top that are under the tab button. The two types of tabs are confusing as hell. And sometimes the big square tabs have little squares inside them so you now have tiny circles inside little squares inside big squares and this 3-dimensional tabbing is just nuts. 1 dimension is enough.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Personally appreciate the grouping (roughly) by time opened, especially since the tabs are movable to other bunches.
m-p-3 5y ago
I have two complaints for Firefox Mobile (Android. 1. `about:config` is disabled on Stable branch, if you want to access it you need to use the Beta branch. Why is that the case? You don't see the same arbitrary limitation on desktop. 2. It seems to have issue loading a page randomly from time to time, and even trying to reload or open a different URL doesn't work, kinda like as if the tab itself crashed and became unresponsive. I haven't found a cause yet, and I don't know if I'm the only one.
- nonbirithm 5y ago
  Just to add another data point, I also experienced the second issue when trying to navigate between links with Fenix on many different occasions, including the period I was writing this post. However, I chose not to mention it because I also wasn't able to reliably reproduce it.
  - commoner 5y ago
    I used to experience this issue when I had manually configured my DNS over HTTPS (DoH) settings on Firefox for Android in about:config, and had set network.trr.mode to 3 (force DoH). Changing it to 2 (prefer DoH, use normal DNS as fallback) fixed the issue for me. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver#DNS-over-HTTPS_Prefs_in_Firefox https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver#DNS-over...
- dont__panic 5y ago
  Agreed about point 1 -- it seems silly to disable "advanced" features on the Stable distribution of the browser. Of course, clearly someone at Mozilla thinks this is a good idea because they do the same damn thing on desktop -- you can't disable add-on certificate checks on Stable, but you can on the Beta/Nightly/Developer Edition branches. We all found out the hard way a couple of years ago when all the FireFox add-ons stopped working just because someone forget to renew a certificate.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  The lack of about:config bugs me as well. I believe this lockout coincided with the introduction of Mobile Friendly Add-Ons. The pages not loading is something that started with-in the last year and it seems to be getting worse. I open a lot of things in new tabs and at least 10% of the time it fails.
thayne 5y ago
I'm happier with android firefox than I would be with any other mobile browser, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have issues. The biggest one for me is that bookmarks are almost unusable. You can't search them, you can't see or edit tags, and you can't re-order them.
wink 5y ago
I fully agree with you, but I have to admit I am not a mobile "power user", my usage pales in comparison to desktop usage. But my only complaint is what I'd call a bug that I haven't reported. I have a custom search engine on the desktop, where I for example can rewrite e.g. "x leo whatever" to "search for whatever on leo.org", and I can call this via a literal https://example.org/leo%20whatever https://example.org/leo%20whatever - but I can't get firefox to accept that I enter a url with a space, it will never open my own "https://example.org https://example.org" with the params, it will always search google for "example.org" even if I prefix it with https:// https:// - this is maddening and maybe I just haven't found the switch to remove this stupid omnibar trend. Oh, and the url bar at the bottom is weird, but I'm not even complaining.
bennysomething 5y ago
My major problem is that the rewrite in 2019 broke nearly all the addons and ones I use haven't been fixed.
troyvit 5y ago
I like how the top reply to your comment is two complaints about firefox.
dmz73 5y ago
FF on android WAS a great browser. If it never existed before and you tried current version then it would be OK but lacking some important features and you could hope it would gain those features soon. Knowing what features have been removed since the FF was first released, it's hard to call FF great, good or even OK. And maybe you don't need or use those removed features...until you do need them and they are suddenly not there...and other browsers still have them or have gained them. After all that it becomes clear why FF is down to 1% and browser share and still sliding down. With that level of mismanagement it will either disappear or become unusable in not too distant future.
pmarin 5y ago
I don't have download notifications neither with its own download manger or the external.

marak830 5y ago

That's a bit harsh. Every point they raised is valid: the UX changes have been weird and inconsistent, the lack of history searching is frustrating etc I still use ff, I certainly won't be using Chrome as I appreciate my add-ons too much.

elliotf 5y ago
Chrome is also adding bizarre ux choices on mobile. The tipping point for me was nested tabs (tab groups) with no way to disable them. I've been a happy Android Firefox user since then.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I use chromium based browsers on mobile primarily and I just want to agree with you wholeheartedly. I don't know why this decision was foisted on us. Two layers of organizational abstraction with minimal benefit. I'm sure some people like it, but that's why you make it optional. The UX with nesting tabs is absolutely abysmal.
- nonbirithm 5y ago
  As a user of Brave, I completely agree with this. I wish the tab grouping could be disabled instead of forced upon users. And despite the issues with Fenix's project management that I mentioned in my post, I still believe that between Google and Mozilla the latter organization would be more willing to listen to user feedback and not attempt to move forward with features such as those. I can't imagine Google suddenly deciding one day that tab grouping was a mistake and walking back such a feature.
- beerandt 5y ago
  The fact that open in new tab only gives the option for "in group" did it for me. Kiwi at least gives options for opening new tabs as in-group or standalone.
lasc4r 5y ago
Calling ff a mess is worse, as someone that absolutely hates ads it's a godsend.
- tomrod 5y ago
  You might like Vivaldi. Basically Chrome w/ adblock without Brave's business model. Built by the team that left after Opera's purchase.
  - LamaOfRuin 5y ago
    Does Vivaldi support add-ons/extensions on android? I don't see it mentioned on the landing page. Granted, ad-block is the primary one and included by default in Vivaldi, but I still like there being a possibility for extensibility even if what's supported on Firefox for Android is limited.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      Unfortunately not. This is why I considered FF before last years release to have been _the_ browser for Android.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      FYI there is a chromium fork called Kiwi Browser that supports extensions. I'm using it to tell you this right now.
      - beerandt 5y ago
        Kiwi has become my goto Android browser, and it's not even close. Primary reason being chrome add-on support. But it does have a high number of quirks make it through to release versions. Like tab ordering in the current version is broken, such that swiping tabs are in a different order than browsing tabs.
        betwixthewires 5y ago
Reubachi 5y ago
I don't think it's harsh, as those points to me aren't valid. I'd much rather have the Mozilla foundation focus on security, privacy, ubiquity than UX and less used features like history searching. That said, I can't do any combination of Netflix + Any other application leveraging graphic card drivers. Completely locks up the computer milliseconds after application loads,need to hard restart. Event viewer for system and FF is no help. Submitted bug tickets, no updates. Oh well, it's fast and secure when I'm not on netflix.
- atatatat 5y ago
  > I'd much rather have the Mozilla foundation focus on security I would, too, but they're not able to keep up on that, either, despite vast funding. Foundations and nonprofits used to do one thing well, not 12 things okay, and 5 things pretty poorly.

quaintdev 5y ago

> I should write a "I'm perfectly happy with Firefox, happier than I would be with any other browser" blog post and see if it gets any attention. And here I was thinking the post missed a lot of issues maybe I should create another blog post. Stop defending something that really has issues. This fanboy behaviour ends up hurting the very thing we love.

tomrod 5y ago
Agreed with you. FF was my main mobile browser when I could -block ads -modify default text size (so I could read websites like old.reddit.com without having to zoom in) There were a whole lot of other great features that weren't dealbreakers without. Now? It's just weird.
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  What's weird about it? Works how I would expect.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    The article mentions some of the many bugs one can anticipate.
II2II 5y ago
Saying that you're happier with a certain product than the competition is not fanboy behavior and should not be taken to mean a product is without fault, particularly when it relates to the use of other people. It is also less destructive behavior than a laundry list of faults with little acknowledgement of benefits, particularly when those faults will only be encountered by a fraction of the user base. As for my experiences with Fenix, aside from a rocky ride when it was first introduced, it has been positive. This is coming from a person who prefers incremental change and frowns upon massive changes.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
Constructive criticism is important. However, praising things that are working well when everybody else is layering on the negativity with a trowel regarding the "death" of Firefox, and how it is a "mess" is important so that we don't end up with more undesirable changes made.

danShumway 5y ago

I'll push back a little bit on this. To preface, I have also been at least reasonably happy with Fenix on Android, although I am frustrated that the add-ons are still limited. I don't feel like I have a lot of friction, the UI works well enough for what I need it to do, and I have pretty much no desire to switch to another browser. And I regularly get annoyed at the level of scrutiny and amount of bad-natured criticism that Mozilla gets. I think it's part human nature, part meme, but I see people throw complaints at Firefox with a level of vigor that they can't seem to muster for browsers that are clearly far, far worse. And I've seen those same people ignore some of the legitimately fantastic stuff that Mozilla has been doing, some of it inside of Firefox. All that being said, I didn't get any of those bad feelings from this article. The criticisms seemed fair, and it felt to me that the author was speaking out of genuine concern and desire for Fenix to be better. I didn't feel like the author was going out of their way to complain. More importantly, as someone who is generally a lot more bullish on Mozilla and Firefox than other people on HN, and as someone who honestly still trusts Mozilla quite a bit, the complaints about closed designs and lack of community involvement in some parts of the browser ring true to me and I empathize. I trust Mozilla a lot, but I do really wish that they didn't make these kinds of design decisions that came so far out of left field with so little community input. They could do better here, and it is a worrying trend. It is weird for a browser to have this many tab switcher redesigns, and to have so many of them received so negatively. I do recommend people use Firefox on Android. I think the average experience is going to be better than the author describes, particularly if users aren't on nightly. And having support for Ublock Origin is a killer feature, and not just for privacy. The mobile web is borderline unusable for me without a good adblocker. But... a lot of the criticism here is valid, and I hope that people at Mozilla look at it, and in the best case scenario, I hope maybe this kind of criticism leads to more open, thoughtful design where community input and involvement happens earlier in the design process.

dont__panic 5y ago
Agreed. I use FF on my Android devices because it's the best browser by a huge margin (uBlock Origin and AMP redirect alone guarantee that; not being made by Google is icing on the cake). However, FireFox mobile could always be better. I really hope that Mozilla keeps listening to the users to figure out how to make the browsers better, especially when they have so many engineers that they seem to constantly shuffle the UI around just to give them work to do. There's plenty of actual improvements to make, and more options to give users with different preferences, and that should be where Mozilla spends engineer time with such a mature product. Instead of rewriting the browser every couple of years because the previous one was a mess.

dheera 5y ago

I've found the Firefox tabbing experience much nicer on mobile. Chrome wrecked their UX recently, sometimes new tabs become circles at the bottom (that don't obey the tab button) and sometimes they become big squares at the top that are under the tab button. The two types of tabs are confusing as hell. And sometimes the big square tabs have little squares inside them so you now have tiny circles inside little squares inside big squares and this 3-dimensional tabbing is just nuts. 1 dimension is enough.

atatatat 5y ago
Personally appreciate the grouping (roughly) by time opened, especially since the tabs are movable to other bunches.

m-p-3 5y ago

I have two complaints for Firefox Mobile (Android. 1. `about:config` is disabled on Stable branch, if you want to access it you need to use the Beta branch. Why is that the case? You don't see the same arbitrary limitation on desktop. 2. It seems to have issue loading a page randomly from time to time, and even trying to reload or open a different URL doesn't work, kinda like as if the tab itself crashed and became unresponsive. I haven't found a cause yet, and I don't know if I'm the only one.

nonbirithm 5y ago
Just to add another data point, I also experienced the second issue when trying to navigate between links with Fenix on many different occasions, including the period I was writing this post. However, I chose not to mention it because I also wasn't able to reliably reproduce it.
- commoner 5y ago
  I used to experience this issue when I had manually configured my DNS over HTTPS (DoH) settings on Firefox for Android in about:config, and had set network.trr.mode to 3 (force DoH). Changing it to 2 (prefer DoH, use normal DNS as fallback) fixed the issue for me. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver#DNS-over-HTTPS_Prefs_in_Firefox https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver#DNS-over...
dont__panic 5y ago
Agreed about point 1 -- it seems silly to disable "advanced" features on the Stable distribution of the browser. Of course, clearly someone at Mozilla thinks this is a good idea because they do the same damn thing on desktop -- you can't disable add-on certificate checks on Stable, but you can on the Beta/Nightly/Developer Edition branches. We all found out the hard way a couple of years ago when all the FireFox add-ons stopped working just because someone forget to renew a certificate.
cptskippy 5y ago
The lack of about:config bugs me as well. I believe this lockout coincided with the introduction of Mobile Friendly Add-Ons. The pages not loading is something that started with-in the last year and it seems to be getting worse. I open a lot of things in new tabs and at least 10% of the time it fails.

thayne 5y ago

I'm happier with android firefox than I would be with any other mobile browser, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have issues. The biggest one for me is that bookmarks are almost unusable. You can't search them, you can't see or edit tags, and you can't re-order them.

wink 5y ago

I fully agree with you, but I have to admit I am not a mobile "power user", my usage pales in comparison to desktop usage. But my only complaint is what I'd call a bug that I haven't reported. I have a custom search engine on the desktop, where I for example can rewrite e.g. "x leo whatever" to "search for whatever on leo.org", and I can call this via a literal https://example.org/leo%20whatever https://example.org/leo%20whatever - but I can't get firefox to accept that I enter a url with a space, it will never open my own "https://example.org https://example.org" with the params, it will always search google for "example.org" even if I prefix it with https:// https:// - this is maddening and maybe I just haven't found the switch to remove this stupid omnibar trend. Oh, and the url bar at the bottom is weird, but I'm not even complaining.

bennysomething 5y ago

My major problem is that the rewrite in 2019 broke nearly all the addons and ones I use haven't been fixed.

troyvit 5y ago

I like how the top reply to your comment is two complaints about firefox.

dmz73 5y ago

FF on android WAS a great browser. If it never existed before and you tried current version then it would be OK but lacking some important features and you could hope it would gain those features soon. Knowing what features have been removed since the FF was first released, it's hard to call FF great, good or even OK. And maybe you don't need or use those removed features...until you do need them and they are suddenly not there...and other browsers still have them or have gained them. After all that it becomes clear why FF is down to 1% and browser share and still sliding down. With that level of mismanagement it will either disappear or become unusable in not too distant future.

pmarin 5y ago

I don't have download notifications neither with its own download manger or the external.