Reinventing Firefox for Android • Hacker News Board

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#61

Post by mncolinlee » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #3

Does not support any addons, and is therefore useless until it does. (uBlock Origin is a prerequisite for me.)

It's a preview release. Addons are coming as well as ad blocking.

It's not the same thing, but the built-in tracking protection incidentally blocks a portion of ads.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#62

Post by Jonnax » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

silversconfused wrote: post #18

Add extensions support and disable telemetry/remote-control by default (pushing updates where you control the code is remote control, don't even try to argue against that one).

Compile it from source rather than installing from the Google store if you are averse to auto updating application.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#63

Post by mncolinlee » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

owaislone wrote: post #13

I've been using it and it has been actually pretty good. It already has Firefox Sync and ability to send tabs to different devices. Only thing I miss is the ability to open tabs in background. This was my favorite feature in the previous Firefox for Android.

> Only thing I miss is the ability to open tabs in background.

Long press the link.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#64

Post by orbital-decay » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

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.

>If you are going to market your browser as privacy focused, it has to block ads by default

A privacy-focused browser should care about the privacy part of the online advertisement, which is tracking. Completely preventing the site from showing any ads is a different feature.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#65

Post by vast » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

Just yesterday I thought it is really annoying that mobile browsers put the address bar on top, even worse if it is moving in and out. That way it is impossible come close to a native look and feel. Now FF puts the address bar on bottom. Quite a suprise but I think it is a pretty smart change.

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#66

Post by Roritharr » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #3

Does not support any addons, and is therefore useless until it does. (uBlock Origin is a prerequisite for me.)

I really don't understand why Mozilla doesn't put ad-blocking & tracking protection front & center the way other orgs do.

Winning their userbase back is the only way to win back the leverage they once had...

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#67

Post by bad_user » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

Nice changes, I'm now wishing for an Android :-)

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#68

Post by silon42 » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

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.

plugins are better (I use uMatrix).

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#69

Post by Someone1234 » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

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 is why I want to move away from Chrome. It keeps going off as I scroll down a page, changing my page position or losing content.

Unfortunately it cannot be disabled. The flag to disable it was removed. https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/8152831?hl=en

Re: Reinventing Firefox for Android

#70

Post by jimmaswell » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

mncolinlee wrote: post #58

jimmaswell wrote: post #49

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 i…

We had many discussions around this. The Firefox for Android code base was not in a great condition to maintain backwards compatibility as well as accept a new rendering engine and all of the new Android Components we wanted to introduce to unify of our code bases for different Android-based products. TL;DR: There was too much cruft built up. Work should move faster now. We substantially grew our Android team in the…

I hope that works out then, I'm just frustrated with the state of mobile as it's been since the regressions. As someone who still thinks dropping XUL from desktop was a mistake (and maybe even mobile now that devices are more powerful) I wish it could've just stayed how it was but I'll just have to make the best of it.