Hang on to Your Firefox

I'm very sick in general of "the criticism will continue until moral improve" attitude that has become more and more common.

Prefaced: I respect Mozilla's mission. All of these criticisms ARE overly harsh. At the same time, app UI should be as invisible as possible to the user, and Mozilla's apps are... "loud"

My last installs of Firefox Klar and Developer a year or two ago had the APKs at over 200 MB, no ability to block sound per-site, confusing UI icons (e.g. I couldn't find the forward button after clicking back, abstract shapes for everything), reader mode that doesn't place you at the same place where you were on the original page, annoying gestures that can't be disabled (swiping tabs away UGGGHHHH), Collections which were really quite silly/not my thing, no toolbar customizability like in the desktop app, no WebHID, and data collection on by default.

Today, Firefox is under 100 MB. It has very much bought into Android's overrounded/inproperly-whitespaced/shadow-heavy/unintuitively-animated Material 3 Expressive. Like most Material Design apps, this Firefox is ugly in a way that offers zero usability benefit: Despite the excessive margins nearly everywhere the three dot menu and menu search icon are still too close to the screen edge. I would place extra emphasis on the unused 8 mm above and 6 mm below the URL text, which SHOULD be 2% rather than 9% of my screen real estate.

I have always felt that Mozilla could join Canonical in dumping the Nickelodeon color scheme. (Did the founders of all these plus FedEx go to Clemson or something??) At least respect my device theme (grey) rather than Grimace purple everywhere! It's particularly strange to me that they have 23 different icons to choose from as well as a "Device Theme" setting but no method of deamethysting all the UI elements.

Tab overview and tabs.

Holding a tab selects its checkbox, holding it longer does "something" but it's not clear what, I guess "show full URL" and then eventually "Share"?

The "swipe tab away" gesture is still there.

Closing multiple tabs creates a sequence of "Closed tab (Undo)" toasts, so you aren't actually sure which toast to click that will undo a specific closure. (Coupled with the swipe detail, it becomes annoying accidentally swiping a tab away while deliberately closing others.)

Per-tab disabling of Sound is still missing; this is not the same as Autoplay!

There are prominent features that I'd never use: private mode icon, "grab tabs from any device", "search your tabs", the giant "FIREFOX IS ON GUARD" reminder, a home screen.

New Tab is across the entire screen from the tab overview button, so you either need to enable the New Tab shortcut (which encroaches on URL space) or just live with "tap top-right, tap bottom-right" for every new tab you'll create in your lifetime which is DEFINITELY not nice for one-handed navigation. There was enough space in the tab overview top bar for a "New Tab" button, but then they'd have to ditch the default Jetpack Compose floating action button.

Everything else.

The shortcut to get to Settings is in a different place on each View.

I couldn't find Reader Mode at first. It only shows up on supported pages and is not as customizable as desktop Firefox. Good enough.

Collections still seem dumb as hell. Maybe I need to use them to appreciate them.

I still have to change just about every default setting to match my personal preferences.

WebHID will never be added. There are a lot of passionate opinions on HID/USB in the browser with solid moral stances against its adoption. I get this and generally agree. However. If I want to reprogram a Gen 1 Shure MVX2U with a cellphone---and I often do---my options are writing my own APK or some very quick/dirty Javascript that I can edit/host anywhere. Mozilla takes away the convenient option and leaves only the labor intensive Google-approved technique.

Oh, and I guess there's no about:config unless you re-enable it at chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml which is not-at-all memorable. :( about:config doesn't matter much anyway, since I can't find any flag that will improve any one complaint I've listed.

I liken Firefox to mediocre toilet paper. It gets its job done and is certainly better than nothing but can get irritating to use day after day.

Progress!

> but need to independently implement updates going forward.

That's not needed either? But since you've provided no rationale, it's hard to point out where the mistake lies. What's wrong with using known code updates as long as you remove the anti-user parts?