Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

I tried brave. But I constantly had ads on it. It would block trackers and ads on websites but if I was to open a few tab it would have crypto ads or some other nonsense.

I would strongly disagree on the sysadmin stuff. Firefox has always had a very powerful settings system. All the stuff you could set in about:config can also be set via a set of configuration files provided by the sysadmin, the user and the distro, each of which can provide defaults, presets or locked non-changeable settings which are hierarchically enforced. Exactly what you need as a sysadmin, cross-platform, could do everything and the kitchen sink, distributable either via your usual config management or LDAP/HTTP/whatever you can script in a few lines of Javascript if you need. GPOs are just a poor windows admin's substitute, they cannot do half of that, even in IE and Edge. Not to mention Chrome, which lags miles behind there.

I'm not aware of the APIs in question and it sounds like this probably to prevent fingerprinting of a device... but why not simply return only the default device when enumerated?

It inherently makes sense that all those apps would try to understand what devices were available and even allow switching between them. It's often required because that entire stack between the browser, os, and device is very unreliable even on something like macOS.

Yea it's on MS to test and fix their stuff, but FF is the one losing market share and honestly part it sounds like they make their apis more prone to misuse. At least in this case.

Not the person you responded to, but I normally use Firefox on Android and I've definitely seen features disappear with the new release.

I like the new look, I even like the bottom URL bar placement that many reviewers seem to be negative about, and I like the concept of collections that the user base is protesting so much. Those are fine for me.

However, I'm regularly running into bugs ever since I updated from that latest "old" mobile Firefox. It took them months to support the certificate authority installed on my phone, and even now that's a hidden setting somewhere in a debug menu. Using said certificate with a HTTP proxy is still broken.

There's no setting to control DOH, even though there's no reason the browser might not support it. In fact, there's no way to use about:config AND use a stable version of the browser on Android; you need to run Beta or Nightly or the folks at Mozilla don't trust you to touch the settings. The addon library is abysmal, even after all this time, and the hack to get around that requires a Mozilla account and messing with custom addon lists.

I can't view the source of the current page anymore. It's been too long since I last had the option, so I'm not sure if this was an addon or a part of the core browser, but I used to be able to hit the menu button and click "view source". I think the view-source: URI scheme is still supported, but I can't figure out how to make the app respect it anymore.

For the past weeks, I've been running into a bug where using Swiftkey in combination with Firefox sometimes clears the entire text field. On websites that use native text boxes like HN I can correct that by opening another keyboard with a control key (Hacker's Keyboard) and hitting CTRL+Z, but on websites that provide their own rich editing that's impossible. This bug has eaten tens of posts of mine, some not at all short, and from what I can tell from Github the bug should already be fixed (it isn't) or will be fixed in Firefox 94 (which hits Beta in about 20 days, and then stable in November). All other browsers work fine with this keyboard, and it seems like everyone using Swiftkey and Firefox together should be running into this. I'm a little annoyed that this fix wasn't backported to current versions of the browser.

I would've been fine with all of this if this was the first release of Firefox on Android. However, it's simply not; there was a competent version of Firefox before the rewrite and the modern version still hasn't reached feature parity after dropping that version more than a year ago. Being able to hit install on any Firefox addon and being reasonably sure that it'll work was very liberating. Of course, some of the addons simply couldn't work because they relied on UI not present in the mobile apps, but I never saw that as a problem. Those addons got purged with the switch to WebExtensions anyway.

Perhaps people who switched from Chrome to Firefox after the release of the rewrite won't have as many issues because they never used the advanced features Firefox used to support.

All in all, it's a decent mobile browser, but the reasons I started using it in the first place have slowly been eroded away.

I'm always amazed at people's resistance to the concept of tree style tabs (or even just tabbing vertically instead)... The horizontal space is far less valuable on widescreens (most websites are just a column down the middle anyway) and top/horizontal tabbing systems are worthless when you have a non-trivial number of tabs.