Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 152 posts

Re: A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly

#51

Post by bugmen0t »

This is in Nightly. I know people often times do _not_ expect breakage, because Nightly has been pretty stable for a long time. But that's not a guarantee.

Most people will be concerned about lacking Web Extensions support. It's indeed not there yet and this is why this blog post is your heads-up to move to a more stable channel.

Web Extensions are being worked on as you can see dependent bugs linked from this meta issue in bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1582185

And FYI, for me personally the built-in tracking protection has been a decent replacement for my favorite add-ons, so I'm personally quite fine with this change :-)

Re: A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly

#52

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

lorenzhs wrote: post #4
severine wrote: post #2

Doesn't work in my (widely used) Android version. I'm a long time Firefox user and feel abandoned.

"Requires Android 5.0 and up" according to the Play Store listing. Android 4.x is from 2013 and had its last update in 2014. It hasn't received security patches since October 2017. Why should Mozilla continue to support such an ancient version?

"2014 - Ancient version" Sorry, but this mindset doesn't make a lot of good for the technology. It's not 90s anymore in terms of performance growth. The reason a smartphone from 2014 is considered obsolete is not technical.

Re: A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly

#53

Post by silon42 »

jonny383 wrote: post #9

If Firefox pushes this before implementing support for extensions (namely uBlock or other ad-blocking / privacy extensions) then Firefox is well and truly toast on Android. Correct me if I am wrong but the only reason non-tech people use Firefox on Android is to block ads. Perhaps this is a push from Mozilla to try and get some search revenue flowing again?

I've tried Fenix a few times, and even without getting into extensions, it seemed like a regression in many ways.

Re: A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly

#54

Post by thinkingemote »

ohazi wrote: post #20
geek-advised wrote: post #16

Is it me or this article is really vague? What's the new experience, exactly? Also, I started using Firefox on my Android phone because of 2 reasons: block ads and Google seems to be more and more for-profit and not for-users. And I love Firefox with one exception: when I press a link on another app Firefox doesn't open but gives me a small notification on the bottom the screen saying the tab opened in Firefox. I fin…

That feature is called tab queue, and it can be disabled in settings.

What is tab queue? Is that the new feature or is that the old feature that gp was complaining about?

What are the new features?

Re: A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly

#55

Post by joseph2342 »

jshevek wrote: post #34
s5ma6n wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally, uBlock (and other extensions) is the only reason I am using Firefox on Android. If this feature is removed, I will either go back to Samsung Browser or check something else.

If you are checking something else, I recommend Brave. I've switched from Firefox to Brave and I am mostly satisfied.

What does it offer that Firefox does not ?

Re: A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly

#57

Post by chrismorgan »

There is much concern about what’s happening with extensions, and I share it, but I want to say this much: Fenix really is way faster than Fennec. On my low-end phone, I used Fennec so that I can use it as a minimal browser, with fonts disabled, NoScript installed, uBlock Origin installed; also for ideological reasons. I always knew that on pages where I needed to enable scripting it was mostly still a lot slower than Chrome, but I use it anyway.

I’ve just tried Fenix out now, and yeah, it’s going through stress tests like loading Reddit’s web interface much, much faster (like, at least twice as fast and five times as interactive).

I’ll wait for the extensions story to be polished off. There’s clear progress and intent. I have confidence they’ll pull it off.

Re: A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly

#58

Post by darkwater »

severine wrote: post #2

Doesn't work in my (widely used) Android version. I'm a long time Firefox user and feel abandoned.

But you can still use the current (that will be old in the future) Firefox. yeah, no security updates but your OS is not getting them either. It sucks, and it shouldn't be that way, I'm with you, but it's the harsh reality. So, blaming only Mozilla for this situation looks a bit unfair from my point of view.

Re: A new browsing experience arrives in Firefox for Android Nightly

#60

Post by kstenerud »

Zhyl wrote: post #44

Quite a lot of negativity from HN so far, so I'll add some counter. I've been using the Firefox preview since it was announced and overall have found it to be a vast improvement on the previous incarnation. Tab management is much more intuitive and easier on the thumbs, the URL bar being at the bottom is jarring at first but soon becomes much easier to use, the performance is similar to the Firefox Focus which I had…

This is great, and firefox as a product is also great, but I couldn't decipher this information from their wall-of-marketroid-speak.

This is a really big problem for a company such as Mozilla, because marketroid speak makes me distrust them, and they're riding on a reputation of trustworthiness.

Post reply on HN