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Reinventing Firefox for Android

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#41

Post by earenndil »

AgloeDreams wrote: post #27
steve19 wrote: post #25

Still no pull to refresh. They really don't want users to adopt their browser. Literally every single other mobile Web browser supports it. Yet Mozilla has some ideological stance that it breaks web interaction (with what, the 0.0001% of browser that target Firefox above Safari or Chrome on mobile).

In fairness, that is pretty non-standard and is only done on Android as I understand.

Android is the standard, more or less, for touch interfaces. They have significantly more devices than ios, and no other touch device is more than a blip compared to those two.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#42

Post by Touche »

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.

Pure speculation, I wonder if their contract with Google forbids them from having ad blocking as part of the browser. At least if I was a company paying another company millions of dollars I wouldn't let them block my income stream in their product.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#43

Post by jamesgeck0 »

Touche wrote: post #30

Some feedback: If you are going to market your browser as privacy focused, it has to block ads by default. As far as I can this one does not block ads at all. Good initial experience but please block ads.

This is at least partially covered by tracking protection, which is on by default.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#44

Post by fluidcruft »

steve19 wrote: post #25

Still no pull to refresh. They really don't want users to adopt their browser. Literally every single other mobile Web browser supports it. Yet Mozilla has some ideological stance that it breaks web interaction (with what, the 0.0001% of browser that target Firefox above Safari or Chrome on mobile).

I've been using Preview as my main mobile browser (switched from Firefox Focus as my main when Mozilla announced they've abandoned Focus).

The things I miss:

* Firefox Focus had a very quick way to send a page to a different browser "Open in " and I'm pretty sure it actually just listed the browsers there in the menu. None of the hassling with the share menu that takes forever to load and forever to search through. I really hate using the share menu on android. Somehow it's gotten even worse and side scrolls now. I don't want to sign in to my Google account in Firefox on android, but if you set firefox as your default all the login redirects go there. I think on Focus you could just tap "Open page in Chrome" and it would just punt it along and everything worked when needed.

* Lastpass app annoyances. Lastpass just matches the Firefox app itself rather than the site I'm viewing. Which is annoying but not a huge deal. I'm not sure whether lastpass worked in Focus though. Focus was like a staging area before going to a full browser.

Overall I'm pretty happy with Preview. I really liked using Focus though where it worked like a "firewall" where I could decide whether I actually wanted links opened by other apps to go into my browsing history or not.

I really liked the way I learned to use Focus and I'm sad it's been abandoned. It was like "Open all links in Private mode first and then decide if you actually give enough of a shit to go further". Focus was small and easy to learn to trust.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#45

Post by Touche »

Ultramanoid wrote: post #40
neiman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So don't test, it's not mandatory...

I am a developer and spend half my work time in Firefox Nightly. This is not usable for me despite being exactly the target for this preview.

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

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#46

Post by ploxiln »

steve19 wrote: post #25

Still no pull to refresh. They really don't want users to adopt their browser. Literally every single other mobile Web browser supports it. Yet Mozilla has some ideological stance that it breaks web interaction (with what, the 0.0001% of browser that target Firefox above Safari or Chrome on mobile).

I've never wanted that. I really don't think this is the one think holding back firefox popularity on mobile. But luckily, firefox on android does support extensions:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-pull-...

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#47

Post by riquito »

I'm a happy user of both Firefox Focus and Firefox mobile, I don't know what could they improve but I'll give it a look.

About Firefox focus, I love to have it as default browser when opening links, it gives me a lot of confidence to know that the session will be completely destroyed afterward. I'd miss it if it were to be discontinued.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#48

Post by reificator »

oftenwrong wrote: post #39
steve19 wrote: post #25

Still no pull to refresh. They really don't want users to adopt their browser. Literally every single other mobile Web browser supports it. Yet Mozilla has some ideological stance that it breaks web interaction (with what, the 0.0001% of browser that target Firefox above Safari or Chrome on mobile).

Pull-to-refresh certainly is catching on (I expect my smartphone-addicted parents will discover it within the next 5 years), but I can also understand if there are some reservations about implementing it. What should happen when the user is interacting with the Android device via a non-touch input device, such as a mouse with a scroll wheel? Scroll-wheel-up-to-refresh? One of the worst edge cases is on sites with inf…

> For these reasons, I would like to see the refresh button remain, even if pull-to-refresh is implemented.

I'm not aware of any browsers that implement pull to refresh and have also removed the refresh button.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#49

Post by jimmaswell »

Cool, how about working on that mobile browser you already have? I've been using it for years and it's good but apparently the lack of progress on it is because they abandoned us users of it to focus on this thing.

When quantum came out addon capability on mobile severely regressed and never recovered. This issue to support the context menu API has been open for TWO YEARS.[0] I just want to be able to long press an image and reverse image search it like I used to, is that so much to ask? Yes, there's an addon to do it through the addon menu and then tap the image but it's not the same.

0: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1363016

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