Firefox for Android is a mess, and something needs to change

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26762431

But complaining about a problem that Mozilla's already gotten rid of is counterproductive at best.

100% on the money. Note the caveat that a number of the key, vital, privacy preserving extensions are available on Firefox for Android, because otherwise, even users who do care about privacy would be shit-out-of-luck.

I'm glad to hear that Nightly is in a better spot though[1]! This makes me hope that eventually, improvements are coming. But right now it seems like a number of features seem to get disabled before release, such as about:config.

I hope some-day Chrome reconsiders this ancient old policy of providing zero user-agency on the web. Extensions are the system by which users can opt to modify their web experience, and not having extensions available on the most restricted, most constrained, most in-need-of-help modality is cruel. A decade ago there might have been sufficient cause to believe the "mobile devices aren't fast enough," but today it just feels like Google doesn't want to allow users to do good things for themselves.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/19594

About 50% of the time I type something in, it will find an url suggestion for the first letter or so but keep that suggestion at the end as I keep typing, unless I press backspace before enter. e.g. "hot tubs for salettps://news.ycombinator.com"

To preface, I have also been at least reasonably happy with Fenix on Android, although I am frustrated that the add-ons are still limited. I don't feel like I have a lot of friction, the UI works well enough for what I need it to do, and I have pretty much no desire to switch to another browser. And I regularly get annoyed at the level of scrutiny and amount of bad-natured criticism that Mozilla gets. I think it's part human nature, part meme, but I see people throw complaints at Firefox with a level of vigor that they can't seem to muster for browsers that are clearly far, far worse. And I've seen those same people ignore some of the legitimately fantastic stuff that Mozilla has been doing, some of it inside of Firefox.

All that being said, I didn't get any of those bad feelings from this article. The criticisms seemed fair, and it felt to me that the author was speaking out of genuine concern and desire for Fenix to be better. I didn't feel like the author was going out of their way to complain.

More importantly, as someone who is generally a lot more bullish on Mozilla and Firefox than other people on HN, and as someone who honestly still trusts Mozilla quite a bit, the complaints about closed designs and lack of community involvement in some parts of the browser ring true to me and I empathize. I trust Mozilla a lot, but I do really wish that they didn't make these kinds of design decisions that came so far out of left field with so little community input. They could do better here, and it is a worrying trend.

It is weird for a browser to have this many tab switcher redesigns, and to have so many of them received so negatively.

I do recommend people use Firefox on Android. I think the average experience is going to be better than the author describes, particularly if users aren't on nightly. And having support for Ublock Origin is a killer feature, and not just for privacy. The mobile web is borderline unusable for me without a good adblocker.

But... a lot of the criticism here is valid, and I hope that people at Mozilla look at it, and in the best case scenario, I hope maybe this kind of criticism leads to more open, thoughtful design where community input and involvement happens earlier in the design process.