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.
The recent mobile Firefox is worse in every way that matters to me:
° Breaking recent add-ons (for the few add-ons that exist). I added a close-tab icon to compensate for the bad tab-ui. It's gone now.
° URL-bar hiding is wonkey. Some overlays disable hiding due to recent phising attacks. Now, for overlays, it is always present and hides the bottom of the page. This is very annoying when links are hidden behind the bar.
° URL bar (2): where have my bookmarks gone?
° URL bar (3): no more editing the URL if anything was *ever* searched in the current tab. Instead it edits the search. The URL is inaccessible.
° After 'Open in new tab' there is an annoying delay for 'Switch' again hiding links.
° Tab selection is just bad now. Preview is broken. If anything is displayed, it is often the image of two sites ago, even if the page has rendered.
° Tab selection (2) no more moving the tabs?
° Tab selection (3) why waste so much space? Using only 80% of the screen. And every tab wastes two lines and a half of useful space. Why is only the domain shown? Why not truncated or cut in the middle?
° Tab selection (4): newly opened tabs are hidden, you always have to scroll up as the current tab is always first, older tabs are lower.
° about:config is broken. Certificate error. Certificate error is broken too. Thus no disabling reader mode.
I didn't use many add-ons, but I miss the home page thing which had my most used sites. (I don't see the point of the tab collections. I don't want to nor have time to do many things at once when I'm using my phone – I want to do one thing now.)
It also starts up a lot slower than the old one, and there's a bug where sometimes a page will just stay white and I have to flick back and forth between tabs or restart it to get it to load.
But I do notice there's less delay when clicking on a link from a page, so that's nice I guess.
- In the previous version when you search something in the URL
bar you could long tap the search suggestions to insert them
into the URL bar for editing. Gone.
- To open a new tab you have to open the tab selection with the icon on
the top (or bottom) of the screen and then tap the "+"-icon in the
middle of the screen. In the previous version you could just double
tap the icon.
- No way to create a new search shortcut from a search box on a
website. You have to manually enter a URL containing a %s. No way to
search with POST forms.
- They removed the option to hide the microphone icon in the URL bar
> To open a new tab you have to open the tab selection with the icon on the top (or bottom) of the screen and then tap the "+"-icon in the middle of the screen
Out of curiosity, how come you have ‘+’ in the middle of the screen? Standard behavior for ‘material design’, which FF seems to follow for me, is to have such floating buttons at the bottom right.
> They removed the option to hide the microphone icon in the URL bar
That appears to be back, at least in ‘Nightly’. There's a toggle called ‘show voice search’ in the search settings.
You're right, the "+"-icon is on the bottom (which is even worse). I
got it confused with closing a tab, the tab-list starts in the middle of
the screen.
Apparently search interferes only with some URLs:
0) Copy this url: "https://forums.spacebattles.com/forums/worm.115/"
1) Search anything (I use ddg, load the page completely)
2) Tap the url-bar. Notice no url, just the search.
3) Remove the search, "Fill link from clipboard" appearch, tap it.
4) Tap the URL-bar. The original search appears again. Unable to edit copied url.
The search stays present as long as the URLs with the same behaviour are entered manually, from history, or pasted. Most urls reset the behaviour. I have three from different domains. One is a top-level URL, the others are not. The top-level of the example does not have this behaviour.
> Can you dismiss (most) of my arguments in this post?
Probably I can't, but I am not interested. Nothing that you cite bothers me so why should I work to disprove you? Like yourself said, this is what matters to you, not me. For me, the performance and interface changes brings much more value than what you put in your post, and I did use old Firefox but really was forcing myself to use it since I don't like Google hegemony. The new Firefox is for me a mobile browser that is finally a joy to use.
However, this is not my point. The Register does makes clickbait titles and clickbait articles. Of course this update broke some workflows (https://xkcd.com/1172/), but instead of getting data and saying that "new Firefox update broke this and that workflow, Mozilla is working to fix it" (this is assuming a good editorial asking for Mozilla input before publishing the article, not a tabloid like The Register), what we actually got is "Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build".
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.
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.
Not everything works yet, but with the whitelist, virtually nothing does. Removing it would still make a lot of extensions work without breaking anything.
Unless something has changed recently deleting Firefox also deletes anything you ever downloaded with it. Be very careful about this.
Also there is no way to clear the list of downloaded files, there is only a 'delete' button, which if clicked deletes all your downloads. This is particularly annoying if you start downloading something only to find out you already downloaded it (i.e a podcast), the download history tab is the only place to cancel the download, but if you've used firefox for a while the tab is so slow to load that your download has often completed before the tab has loaded.
As far as complaints about the UI go, I agree with you. It's fine, and you can keep the URL bar at the top if you want to, that's why it asks you for your preference after you update.
The lack of addon support is annoying though. One addon I often use (Hide Fixed Elements, to get those annoying popovers to disappear) isn't supported and I still notice it missing every day. It seems to me that a browser built for customisability just isn't finished without the complete addon pack. They could've kept Fenix in beta but decided to launch with missing features regardless.
Wnat I'm also missing is about:config support. It exists but has been disabled in stable branches on purpose "in case people break their browser". This mindset is exactly why I'm starting to lose interest in Mozilla.
The UI looks great and the performance improvements are very welcome, but to say the bad news is all "just a vocal group" goes too far for me. Firefox users, especially on mobile, are mostly just "the vocal group". Everyone else is on Chrome already.
I couldn't believe they would block about:config just like that. That mindset is completely unacceptable.
But it seems to be a bit more complicated. See https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/i51k0q/mozilla_cou.... about:config is not blocked just because of configurability and the usual danger of breaking something, but because it is essentially broken. Still, it's the wrong decision. Users can just reinstall if the app breaks, and there is no blame on Mozilla in that if they showed a warning before, as they do on the desktop.
It's not essentially broken though, because you can toggle the settings I know of perfectly fine without breaking anything.
Yes, theoretically you can break the connection between Firefox and GeckoView but that's got nothing to do with enabling eSNI or setting the behaviour of user installed certificates.
> you can keep the URL bar at the top if you want to
Sort of, but it's clearly not designed for that. The tab switcher slides out from the bottom of the screen and has the "new tab" button at the very bottom.
To navigate to a new page, I now have to tap the top of the screen, then the bottom of the screen and then the top again.
You are oh so right, but I'd like to add that that bookmarklets don't work at all. That was a very unnecessary loss and has screwed things up big time for me. I can no longer add bookmarks to Pinboard.
> This mindset is exactly why I'm starting to lose interest in Mozilla
Ah, the eternal Windows 8 loop of failure... Don't give users options because they are stupid. I just hope the layoffs didn't paint the future for Mozilla.
What's better about bottom navigator bar than top?
I honestly have no idea which one is better, but after having it at the top (and all other applications seem to have their menu/nav on the top as well) for YEARS, it's a very hard sell to my muscle memory.
Faster is good, disabling my extensions simply sucks. Extensions were the main reason I use firefox on mobile at all.
Now I'm looking at obscure browsers like Kiwi just to get working extensions on a mobile browser.
Bottom navigation bar works great for me because it's easier to use with my thumb.
I think Mozilla had to choose to either wait a long time to get full extension support and miss the train, or release early. I am also unhappy with not having the extensions I use, but I think this was the right choice. They plan to support the whole extension API eventually. Also aren't they the only ones who support extensions on Mobile?
No, Mozilla did not have to choose. They could have offered both as options! They could have allowed the end consumer to control when to upgrade (some would go quickly, some would wait until their key extensions work available). I'll admit, the majority of people will upgrade only when it's the default.
The toolbar on the bottom is easier to reach on big phones. But also you can decide whether you want it on the top or bottom in settings so it really isn't a big deal.
Losing extensions really does suck, but you can at least install a lot of the big ones like uBlock, Dark Reader etc.
This is a fork that seems to be popular (enough to show up first in my search).
It looks and feels like the Firefox I lost with 79.
Firefox Sync brought most of my data back in minutes.
Hello, I have found one android browser based on Chrome that have extension (addon) support : "Kiwi Browser". https://kiwibrowser.com/ note: Its extension store is the Google Chrome Store.
Does your phone not come with a back button? How do you navigate "back" in Android? The lack of back button seems to be a common complaint, and I just can't understand it. EDIT: "I just can't understand it" means I'm evidently lacking information about how other people use their phones, so I'm hoping someone who does understand can explain it to me.
I get that feeling but android does not have the full functionalities either. If you do a longpress on the backbutton in either browser on either platform, you will get your history. I don't think android has that longpress for the backbutton.
Long-pressing the back button to get the history actually works in the Nightly version. I didn't realize that the Stable version doesn't have this feature.
The issue is probably me, by using non-Android stuff most of the time but having an Android tablet. So I have a „back“ button on my iPhone, on my Desktop Firefox (and Chrome and so on), but I can‘t have one on my Androit tablet.
So I‘m the one that usually swipes (that somehow doesn‘t work either...) or click the back button (because that‘s what I‘m used to do). Even feeling dumb not realizing there‘s this „back for everything“ physical button on Android, it feels unnatural to me to use that one.
That's the "leave this Activity" button, personally I strictly don't use it navigating within an app because it's never clear if it's been overridden or not.
For mobile browsers, I always use "open in new tab" so I don't need to go back and can avoid guessing.
No, you are completely right. Android has a back button in the main UI. Even better if the gesture navigation is activated. The browser does not need to copy that.
But Firefox Preview had a bug where often enough the back functionality did not work. I hope that is fixed, if not that might explain some of the complaints.
Yeah, I am going by the complaints from users in the Play Store ratings. It is pretty clear that the number is not big (the score on Firefox is still pretty high), but the complaints are very focal saying "this is the worst update ever".
> but most users are probably pretty satisfied with the update
And yeah, this one I don't have any backup, this is why I said "probably".
> I am going by the complaints from users in the Play Store ratings.
Even if the number there is small (which I'm not sure, "small" compared to what?), you can't look at one place and make such a global strong statement. There are many other places for people to voice their opinion, Mozilla forums, chat, social media or, well, here.
> this one I don't have any backup, this is why I said "probably".
Probably is not a synonym of "maybe" or of "I don't know"...
the new ui is no improvement its just different. just broke all my flows for no reason. the only reason i use firefox on mobile is that i can use ublock orgin. also the "messages from mozilla" that appear after updates are spam. I dont care to hear your political opinions no matter if I agree with them or not. you are just a company. nobody cares what "you" think.
If you use a Firefox sync account and then switch browsers after they have detected you haven't logged in to the account for a while they will send you actual spam trying to get you to switch back.
Mobile Firefox 79 is the worst update Firefox has ever had since it used to be called 'Mozilla Suite'. That includes removal of xul and what not.
I recall updating on the July 31st, it crashed 4 times in less than 70mins on random pages. It lost all its bookmarks, virtually all add-ons, 'home' page, tab thumbnails, removed/reset search engines, etc. Instead, it added totally useless collections. Ah yeah - added Facebook there too, since I just have it disabled on all levels, incl. DNS.
>A small but vocal number of users
Downplaying it like that, insulting long-time users just to score points on HN is weird and unneeded. Look at the latest version reviews on Play Store.
I've downgraded to 68 and I'll keep using until it becomes totally unusable (likely in couple of years or so). The process of finding proper downgrade/compatible version, setup and all took couple of hours as it's necessary to uninstall and wipe it all, else 68 installation would fail.
Collections would actually be a useful feature if you could also access them easily from the desktop version of Firefox. Can't think of why they wouldn't have added them to the desktop browsers at the same time except for fear of them competing with Pocket.
Microsoft Edge also has collections and you can access them from the mobile and desktop browsers.
While I like new droid FF and can wait without much discomfort for the rest of the features, please let's not use term "vocal minority" ever again. Why? Because it sucks to be on the receiving end of it while having a valid problem. "Shut up, you are vocal minority and don't matter" - I saw replies like that in some unrelated cases, and from moderators even. This is extremely frustrating. Thank you and sorry for the offtopic rant.
"Vocal minority" is a perfect description for a real modern communication issue. Cheap, instantaneous communication allows for people to communicate about anything instantly which is good! But this also allows for people to both complain about anything and receive positive feedback, and for others to have a warped sense of priorities since they mostly see feedback from people who complain about everything all the time. See twitter mobs and "cancel culture." These people don't reflect the majority.
I'm not talking about twitter mobs obviously, I'm talking about discussions about technology on tech forums or subreddits when any complaint (blaming the company who developed certain software) gets shut down without even comprehending the problem, purely as a "vocal minority = irrelevant". Oh well, I guess that idea is not yet ready for the masses. More people need to experience the frustration first hand.
> Now, the new interface is very nice (bottom navigator bar FTW)
Maybe if you have a large phone or short fingers but beside this bottom
bar there are only disadvantages in the new UI, like no bookmarks in the
new-tab-page. Or the additional movements/tapping you have to make to
open a new tab. It's like the designers never even used the previous
FF.
> and the browser is much faster
Maybe if you mainly visit shitty javascript-bloat-sites like twitter or
reddit but for me there isn't much difference in loading times. The
small initial pageload-speedup is lost by the time I need to scroll over
all the new advertisements I previously never had to deal with thanks to
uMatrix.
> but it lost some features
not just "some features". It lost _everything_ that made it better than
chrome. Now there is just no reason for mobile FF to exist anymore.
> A small but vocal number of users complained
How did you measure that? I see mostly complaints and a few people who
are happy because of the bottom URL bar.
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.
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)
> Now:tap tabs icon on top. Tap new tab thats on the other side of display
You can long-press the tabs icon on top, which is slightly more convenient. (No, it's not obvious.)
> Im about to start looking for another browser soon, would welcome suggestions! (Ability to run ublock is neccesity)
AFAICT the only other open-source android browser that supports ublock origin is Kiwi Browser.[0] It used to heavily lag behind upstream chromium, though — I don't know if that's changed.
you can scroll the tab list down but because it's a drawer UX once it hit bottom it auto closes
for some reason the automatically most used link don't work, I've to pin websites to the new tab area, but then they're static, and have to be maintained
it a page timeouts the description text is so long the retry button is out of screen, and that test doesn't scroll itself, and your stuck going into the hamburger menu because something as common as drag down from top too reload isn't supported here
oh and the update also forgot all my settings about min and max font sizes
> For me it's the weird new way of handling custom search engines that annoys me.
It's like we used to have a "search bar" and when you wanted to "search" for something you used the "bar" designated for that purpose...
And since this "bar" had a designated purpose, it was also super-easy to configure, at will, for that express purpose without things getting confusing, cumbersome or complex. It really was pretty damn good.
But nonono. Chrome wanted to leak every single thing you typed into the location-bar straight to Google anyway, so clearly we should get rid of the search-bar and do that too.
I'm pretty sure Mozilla screwed this process deliberately. At the end of the day, their only real source of income is Google paying to be the default search engine. So screw the users, this little annoying thing between them and their overlords... I even developed some addons for the old Firefox of the early 2000s, and nowadays I would NEVER, ever do anything to help the Mozilla foundation, such is the hate I feel towards their attitude from around 2015 on.
In the nightly there's a setting called "Use New Search Behaviour" (in the secret settings menu, tab the Firefox logo five times in the about screen to enable it) that solves a lot of UI annoyances for me. It seems they're not done tweaking the search behaviour yet.
Autocomplete works for me in the nightly (at least for DDG) so if it doesn't right now, it'll be fixed eventually.
> How are you supposed to use search autocomplete with any other search engine except your default?
It's possible though exceedingly cumbersome. You select the search engine first, then type the query. If that doesn't work with the default settings of displaying the engines right away, it certainly does if you turn off ‘Show search engines’ in settings and go via the button. Wikipedia auto-completion finally works for me.
However, I can't say that this UI is better than the old one for the default case of not caring about non-default-engine completion.
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.
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.
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.
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"
Mozilla just replaced an open app ecosystem (incl. side loading) with a centralized opt-in nine entry app gallery.
Maybe there's a time to call them interested in an open web but this specific release is a big step away from their former principles. A browser should be an user agent.
Their principles are probably, just like in any other company, primarily marketing and we should evaluate them just the same as we do other companies.
Every time Google centralizes an ecosystem we do call that out. It's usually a power grab. We should do the same in cases in which Mozilla does it.
I think that the open extension ecosystem on desktop Firefox is save as long as Chrome on desktop still has somewhat open extension support.
On Android there is no chrome extensions, hence there's no competitive advantage for Mozilla to keep them - which probably made it all costs and no gains.
... which is probably the moment they're out of the window, if principles are no concern.
I think it's a dilemma. If Mozilla can't do it Firefox deserves a better organizational structure that enables the product to continue to work as a gateway to user autonomy and software freedom on increasingly closed platforms like Android.
On mobile, virtually the only extension that anyone uses is an adblocker. From what I understand, it still works perfectly fine. Mozilla has probably looked at the stats and decided putting a year of work and holding off the new version is not worth it for the 10 users who installed something else.
Their user share is almost irrelevant now. They have no significant user base anymore but they will continue to exist for a long time because they are funded by google purely to make them not a monopoly.
I do not think that Mozilla will prevent Google from being legally perceived a monopoly, rather Yandex and Alibaba will prevent the US administration from braking up Google. Imagine Google be broken up to be effectively less influential compared to what they are right now. Do you really think Yandex or Alibaba will give a shit and give up their quasi-monopoly in their realms as well? It's effectively Googles size which prevents these two from taking over.
They have no significant user base anymore but they will continue to exist for a long time because they are funded by google purely to make them not a monopoly.
This is exactly where Microsoft was with Apple in the 1990s, before Jobs returned. Is there some way to break this cycle?
Mozilla was great when it focused on making a browser that people loved. Tabbed browsing, addon extensibility leveraging the power of thousands of user-developers, lightweight on resources and application size to download... Those where the days. In the early 2000s the only thing that would steal the focus of the company from their killer app was Thunderbird, and it was ok. Nobody cared about it but it did not imapct the quality of their amaaaaazing browser, Firefox. Then starting around the time that Brendan Eich was ousted, I don't even know what is the real focus of Mozilla anymore. What was the name of that company that they bought, and bloated Firefox with, that button were you could save tabs for later? I mean, I can't even remember the name of the damn thing. Now it's VPN and God knows what else. I just want a lightweight, extensible browser. Is that too much to ask?
The way things are going, Google will probably have to also hire some programmers and designers for Mozilla. And then see that they are working on things that appeal to users—so that the users don't all abandon FF.
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.
The situation is frustrating when there have been Firefox developers on this site assuring us that there will be full extension support eventually. This no longer seems to be the case.
The previous codebase was left at 68 ESR so the team could work on the new codebase. 68 ESR is now EoL. So now the question is do they try to spend time dragging the legacy release along into the future and continue to attrition users (FF mobile is already down to ~0.5% browser share) or bet that continuing to focus on the version based on the new codebase will yield better outcomes even if it doesn't have all of the features of the old version.
> bet that continuing to focus on the version based on the new codebase will yield better outcomes even if it doesn't have all of the features of the old version.
Ah, executing the famous Netscape strategy, are they? If they were attritioning users already, I shudder to think what will happen with almost no extensions for a few... Weeks? Months? And, if the article is right, also a good number of stability issues.
Multiple chromium forks are working at integrating chrome (desktop) extensions (and some already have experimental support).
As soon as they do, there's really no point in using firefox anymore. Especially since they seem to give zero fucks about my workflow, I give zero fucks about them.
Especially since they now get an outcry and see which features are actually required and which others, they could have invested time on are not required.
In the FAQ they announced a few features "within three weeks" which for me is the thing about "most frequent pages" being shown on a new tab. Quite a habit of mine to use that ...
Relying on removing features then seeing which ones get you yelled at is not a great approach to building trust in your users. when you classify adding to tickets about the missing features with comments like "I really need this feature and it's omission is causing me to look elsewhere" as unproductive (or even in other projects taking a similar approach some have called it harassment) at the same time, it's a bad look.
Just got the new Firefox on my tablet earlier and ublock origin did unfortunately not work well after the update. Ads are no longer removed, but replaced by whitespace with a loading icon in the middle. I'm still considering if I find that more or less annoying than browsing with ads enabled.
> If I want only monitored stuff I may as well switch to Google...
I was thinking this to myself. I use firefox on android because I have a set of addons that I refuse to browse the web without. If firefox can't run the addons I want, I might as well switch to the builtin browser instead.
Mozilla seems to be banking on "a freer/opener web" being a convincing selling point on its own. But at that point, they might as well just rebadge chromium like all the others.
Corralling power users into a separate app version ala Nightly now comes across as a vain attempt at creating a longterm offramp to avoid backlash.
It really makes you think "what's the point?" about it all.
Come back and let me know how that works. :) Maybe you've forgotten the cesspool that the web has become, with all the crappy adverts and popups. I'm just glad I can run ublock-origin, the rest I'll wait for a bit.
>Allowing only extensions monitored by Mozilla is against the great free internet spirit that Mozilla was functioning under till now.
I feel the same way.. I would suggest to a have a LITTLE patience. They'll most likely get more extensions going forwards or people will fix the ones you use.
Power users in general will dsable telemetry, so the bulk of the data these companies get come from the patterns of usage of the lowest common denominator users. It's no surprise then that everything that appeals to power users is slowly but surely removed from future iterations of the software in question. Mozilla is just another dumb corporation circling the drain of death at this point.
In my experience, people often make decisions first then go trawling through sea of data, selecting metrics which support their decision and ignoring those that contradict it. Intentionally or not, much of this stuff is essentially p-hacked.
Yeah as a long-time Firefox on Android user, I'm not happy about the current state of things. Excitement about ~~~the future~~~ wore off about 2-3 years ago and things are still not great overall.
Unfortunately, since Brendan Eich left it's being downhill. I know I'll get downvoted to pieces, since this is Hackernews, but so be it. When an organization starts prioritizing anything other than what is best for the product and it's users and starts talking about "social" stuff, say goodbye to efficiency and technical brilliance.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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
This doesn't happen for me on Android 10, and I haven't seen such a mode on any screenshots, so it seems to be a bug. Neither the new nor the old version have options for ‘fully-full-screen’ display where the top and bottom bars would be hidden.
However, Mozilla isn't known for speedy fixing of bugs—probably doubly so with its current troubles. So I wouldn't raise hopes up even if this behavior is reported in the tracker.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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).
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?
> 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.
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, the switch on stable FF happened in Q3 2020, and they changed stance after all of the feedback.
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?
Without these three, its jarring to use Firefox for me. But there is no other user in the world with my browsing habits. After including the most used extensions, Mozilla is showing no interest in getting more extensions. It's quite frustrating.
"Video Background Play Fix" and h264ify. I primarily watch YouTube on my phone and it's unusable without these extensions. I've had to downgrade after the automatic update.
Seconded. Good UI, quick fixes whenever Google tweaks some things in the background. Also, the ability for background playback is key to listen to music. and the speed and pitch control sliders area lot of fun when listing to speeches (eg Mickey Mouse JFK).
I don't understand how people are able to use Newpipe regularly. I use it to download videos or listen to music in the background, but even there I encounter the 'Something went wrong' error page about 30% of the time (with the latest updated Newpipe every time). It used to be worse, being a 50-50 chance of getting the error page, but 30% is still too high for me to use it as my everyday Youtube client.
I'm still using greasemonkey scripts to redirect any link that'd go to a paywalled newspaper to instead go to my own web-cache which has a crawler circumventing the paywalls and which serves the article without paywall, or ads, or any other undesired content (disclaimer: I have a paid subscription to the paper version of the newspaper, but the paywall is so broken it's simpler to just circumvent it than to actually log in for every single article)
I built this in 2 hours, and obviously I never intended it for anyone else to be used, so it's just a tiny greasemonkey script, a golang webserver and a nodejs crawler running along nicely. No official addon or anything.
Greasemonkey is super useful for this kind of personalized stuff.
For me, it's cookie auto-delete -- their default tracker suppression still white-lists more than I'd like. Very likely to block updates over this while I consider my next move. (My threat model is not your threat model...)
I have the plugin configured to drop cookies a few seconds after the tab that set them is closed, excepting a very short whitelist. "On quit" would sweep them up once every couple of weeks -- way too coarse. Not the same at all.
Containers, especially temporary containers. For me they've become as essential and eye-opening as adblockers.
I'm convinced if ff weren't screwing up on mobile containers would become as popular as adblockers as well.
I still use ff on mobile but it's mostly because I don't know what would be better, not because I like it. There's a huge chasm between mobile and desktop.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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]
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)
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.
The beta and nightly versions have the back button, and you can install them in parallel without losing your data. So you can install one of those if you want to give it a try but don't want to risk not being able to revert it.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.