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Reinventing Firefox for Android

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#351

Post by notyourday »

mncolinlee wrote: post #177
godelski wrote: post #129

To any Mozilla/Firefox developer reading this. I try to convert people to Firefox. The number one reason people switch, by far, is because mobile has add on support. So I say to push this front and center in marketing (I know this is a preview). People are reluctant to switch their desktop browser because chrome pretty much has the same features. But it they switch their mobile browsers they also switch their desktop…

We're certainly aware of how significant ad blocking extensions are. This release required a great quantity of features with only a six month timeline until now. We already support a very limited set of the WebExtensions API to offer features like Reader Mode. Rest assured that more features will land in the coming months. If you're a developer and you want to help us, our Github site is at this link. We mark easier…

> We're certainly aware of how significant ad blocking extensions are. This release required a great quantity of features with only a six month timeline until now.

It is always soft of amusing to watch companies make all kinds of unforced errors with their products because the managers feel that they know much better than the users of the product what should be important to users. They fail all the time just to have someone else come in and say "Oh, those people, they were just holding the instructions wrong" and go repeating the same mistake.

So far in this ( software + hardware space ) there has been exactly one company that nailed it. The company is called Apple and the product is called iPhone. Since that point on Apple has not introduced anything that was not a direct play on "Our users want X, we are going to give them X, maybe with a bit of a twist"

The users are telling you that the USP of Firefox is ad blocking. If your PM says it is something else, you should replace the PM. That should be your singular focus. Everything else is secondary.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#352

Post by Markoff »

reinventing by not even providing pull down to refresh as option? so much for Firefox customization, lacking for years such basic feature

and don't tell me about buggy add-ons as substitute

also by my experience it was crashing on regular sites and had problems with repeated words/characters and jumpy cursor in text fields making even writing comment on hacker needs impossible

I mean first fix such horrible bugs and provide basic features before you start doing something else

I use Firefox on desktop, but I am not really masochist to use it on Android

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#353

Post by Markoff »

godelski wrote: post #129

To any Mozilla/Firefox developer reading this. I try to convert people to Firefox. The number one reason people switch, by far, is because mobile has add on support. So I say to push this front and center in marketing (I know this is a preview). People are reluctant to switch their desktop browser because chrome pretty much has the same features. But it they switch their mobile browsers they also switch their desktop…

it doesn't have pull down to refresh and other browsers like Edge,Bromite, Brave or Kiwi have ad blocker out of box

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#354

Post by Markoff »

bombledmonk wrote: post #74

I just switched to the current Android Firefox a few weeks ago and I must say I find it very hard to go back to Chrome. uBlock and Dark Reader make the phone browsing experience a remarkable amount more pleasant. Chrome's general UI interaction is definitely more polished and snappier all around, but browsing mobile with good ad blocking, and not getting blasted in the face by stark white pages more than covers for F…

you can have dark mode and ad blocker in snappier Brave, Bromite or Kiwi, as well as pull down to refresh

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#355

Post by dbtx »

pgeorgi wrote: post #329
dbtx wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They shouldn't be sending me to the Play Store ITFP. I can't use Play because I've got no GApps in my phone, so I can't try their app unless I find a copy "somewhere" and convince myself it hasn't been poisoned. I got a reasonably up-to-date Firefox through APKPure, and later on after watching that 35C3 talk [1], I unzipped and grepped all those saved .apks to find the APKPure app itself and Firefox and LingoDeer had…

If you have a phone without GApps, you're either in China (which has its own app store ecosystems) or not Mozilla's target audience for their binaries. https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/releases/68.0b13/ has the APKs plus signed hashes though. (But more generally speaking: Why don't you build Firefox from source if you're so concerned with middlemen messing with the code?)

Again, resources. My workstation is still waiting to get torn down to have the smoke scrubbed out; my desk is torn down and cleaned already but still waiting for me to have a new place to put it. My room didn't burn but there's no electricity and the whole place is not habitable; by the time it is, it won't be my room anyway.

The 4GB laptop isn't very good for compiling large projects, because running WF needs much of that-- and then, just linking libxul.so needs almost all of it. On the side, maybe I also care a little bit about not wasting the energy since I wouldn't be customizing it at all. On the other side, my software compilation experience perfectly matches my desire to ever do it: 100% for Linux, 0% for Android.

Thank you for the link. I went looking for that in the past but gave up, apparently too soon.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#356

Post by codesuki »

godelski wrote: post #129

To any Mozilla/Firefox developer reading this. I try to convert people to Firefox. The number one reason people switch, by far, is because mobile has add on support. So I say to push this front and center in marketing (I know this is a preview). People are reluctant to switch their desktop browser because chrome pretty much has the same features. But it they switch their mobile browsers they also switch their desktop…

Thank you Mozilla team for making this great browser! I am a happy user since it was first released. Super happy with how fast the browser is now. I think Firefox always is ahead with great features and better UX. (Lazy tab loading, sticky tabs, containers, no video autoplay, to name a few) Also plugin support on mobile is how I converted several chrome users :)

I hope "collections" will come to the desktop too. Are there plans?

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#357

Post by Millennium »

Not too shabby.

- Performance is great. I'm already using it pretty much everywhere.

- Ad blocking is about to become Firefox's killer app, and it was a major PR mistake to release a preview without enough extension support for ad blockers to work. They should have delayed the release, if necessary.

- I wish the QR code reader had been released as a separate app (and on iOS too), but I'm actually quite glad to see Mozilla doing one. I look at my app store for QR code readers, and I'm confronted with a sea of questionable permissions, ads, obvious fake reviews, and tainted makers. I welcome a free QR code reader from a source I know and trust, but you can't build something like that into a browser without either bloating the browser or limiting the reader. It should be spun off into its own app, then allowed to grow.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#358

Post by pps »

callahad wrote: post #350
pps wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea why after sync I can see history from my desktop browser, but no bookmarks? There are only 3 clean folders on Firefox Preview.

It looks like that should have been resolved a month ago with build 1.0.1921 ( https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/2252 )... are you sure your bookmarks are set to sync (check in about:preferences on desktop)? If so, try forcing a new sync Firefox Preview by hitting Settings -> Sync -> Sync Now.

Yes, the only thing I'm not syncing are passwords. Are those 3 folders under "Desktop Bookmarks" visible in clean install before syncing? https://imgur.com/q1W7GgZ Maybe it's synced somehow only partially? All those folders are empty. And also on my desktop browser I can't see bookmarks I created in FP. I tried hitting "Sync Now" multiple times since yesterday, it always looks like it's working, after a second there's "Last synced: 0 minutes ago"

And I don't see FP under devices in https://accounts.firefox.com/settings/clients?service=sync&c....

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#359

Post by giancarlostoro »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #322
giancarlostoro wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Chrome first came out I stopped using it cause it didnt have adblock. Then when it did it was still crippled and I realized Google is in the Ad business so I never used Chrome since. This is very correct adblocking is a necessity, if they even include a Mozilla Adblocking DNS server for the browser thats fine to me. As long as I dont see ads. I wont give up on Firefox anytime soon. I would love to see some serio…

I don't want my browser ignoring my DNS settings!

I would assume it would be opt-in if they went with this.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#360

Post by dbtx »

mncolinlee wrote: post #310
dbtx wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did I hope that app.adjust.com was somewhere that I could get the .apk without having anything to do with the Play Store?

You can grab APKs on GitHub, but you'll need to update manually if you do so. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/releases/tag/v1.0.0

Thank you. I always expected this sort of thing (like pgeorgi's link) to be available but it isn't made as obvious and I stopped hunting too early.
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