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Reinventing Firefox for Android

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#92

Post by jnurmine »

dsr_ wrote: post #3

Does not support any addons, and is therefore useless until it does. (uBlock Origin is a prerequisite for me.)

Exactly.

Anyone remember when Firefox extensions broke recently? I thought it was a rather horrible experience.

If the new Firefox Preview can natively block advertisements, whitelist sites, disable third party cookies, prevent and hide social trackers, block anti-ad-blockers, etc. etc. then I agree that extensions are kind of useless, and I understand Mozilla's point.

However, I see the lack of extension support detrimental to my freedoms as a user, since it means I no longer can control what the software hides for me, nor what it broadcasts about me to the abyss of waste that is the advertising industry; I will have to trust the browser, and the lack of extension support is a rather untrustworthy property to begin with.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#93

Post by piyush_soni »

Feedback : When you are making a new Firefox for Android, please fix this small problem but personally a big annoyance : I should not need to open a whole new page before trying to open a new tab. Just add a plus button next to the address bar, that's it. Currently the workflow just disturbs me in all Firefox browsers for mobile - you have to click the tabs button, then the 'Plus' button (or click the settings menu and then the new tab - both require two taps with some delay, for something that should be just one quick tap).

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#94

Post by bobajeff »

gcbw2 wrote: post #38
dsr_ wrote: post #3

Does not support any addons, and is therefore useless until it does. (uBlock Origin is a prerequisite for me.)

Same here. I do not know why the heck Mozilla is tiptoeing from just hiring Raymond and making uBlock an integral part of firefox. Note that they already included something similar, which is SafeBrowsing(TM), that is maintained by google. Technically, it is exactly the same concept. But uBlock is actively request by 99% of their users, while safeBrowser(TM) fingerprinting is mostly disabled by half.

I'm pretty sure the main reason is that all websites with block them and tell you to install Chrome if they ever did.

Outside of that I'm sure turning ad blocking on by default would break several sites.

Also publicly, they've said that ads are an integral part of the web.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#95

Post by jnurmine »

mncolinlee wrote: post #61
dsr_ wrote: post #3

Does not support any addons, and is therefore useless until it does. (uBlock Origin is a prerequisite for me.)

It's a preview release. Addons are coming as well as ad blocking. It's not the same thing, but the built-in tracking protection incidentally blocks a portion of ads.

This is a great thing to hear!

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#96

Post by damnyou »

Ultramanoid wrote: post #60
Touche wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The target of a preview is not people expecting it to be feature complete, so no, you're not the target.

Tell me how am I supposed to test add-ons on this Firefox as a developer before the release then. Edit : And again, most of my work if not all related to Firefox, I do on the Nightly build. I expect things to break, but this preview ( of which there have been builds for a while already ) is a non-starter.

Simple, wait until addons are supported.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#98

Post by beiller »

iamnotacrook wrote: post #86
beiller wrote: post #76

I've been using Firefox on Android for about a year now, and it is great, except one major problem. Google news site (news.google.com). News I believe uses my entire phone's RAM and starts swapping (I am totally guessing, does Android use swap?) because the app will become unresponsive for about 2 full minutes while the page is rendering. Closing and re-opening a tab in this state actually breaks the app FYI (all oth…

Memory management on Android is awful. My music player routinely gets killed; I've tried all options available to me to prevent this.. It's just too difficult for Android to work out "you're listening to music, even though there's no visible ui, so I won't kill it". I understand that there is a whitelist of music apps which don't get killed - so intractable is this problem - but the one I use (Rocket Player) isn't on…

In my case I usually have actually nothing else running and my phone has 4GB of RAM so I am at a loss. I just tried Firefox Preview on Andriod with google news, and it loaded in about 2 seconds. So far so good!

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#99

Post by vaer-k »

abdulmuhaimin wrote: post #29

I dont envy Mozilla. The demographic that they're targeting are really hard to please.

I'm not sure I agree. I think everything users want is achievable. The current Firefox allows addons and ad blocking via addons. The Fenix update improves speed and adds some new features. Both the current and the new undermine Blink dominance and serve to support a more diverse, collaborative open Internet. All of these things are attainable in one browser, and I think that would satisfy most users.
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