Reinventing Firefox for Android

To any Mozilla&#x2F;Firefox developer reading this. I try to convert people to Firefox. The number one reason people switch, by far, is because mobile has add on support. So I say to push this front and center in marketing (I know this is a preview). People are reluctant to switch their desktop browser because chrome pretty much has the same features. But it they switch their mobile browsers they also switch their desktops to take advantage of the full feature suite.<p>And to anyone trying to convert your friends &quot;mobile supports ublock&quot; is usually all I have to say.<p>Edit:unblock == uBlock Origin (sorry, on my phone)

I just switched to the current Android Firefox a few weeks ago and I must say I find it very hard to go back to Chrome. uBlock and Dark Reader make the phone browsing experience a remarkable amount more pleasant.<p>Chrome&#x27;s general UI interaction is definitely more polished and snappier all around, but browsing mobile with good ad blocking, and not getting blasted in the face by stark white pages more than covers for Firefox&#x27;s warts.

I&#x27;m aware that I&#x27;m reaching a Cartago-delenda-est situation here, but since I see some mozilla devs here I must ask: Is there any news about the deal breaker bugs that are still keeping thousands of people from moving to firefox on OSX?<p>I&#x27;m referring to the bugs that cause extreme CPU usage and as a consequence extreme heating and battery usage, mainly on macbooks with retina screens set to &quot;more space&quot; resolution.<p>I work in a whole building full of developers where every single mac user has stopped using firefox due to this issue, yet there seems to be a deep disconnection between how prevalent the issue is and the priority it seems to be assigned.<p>I hope I&#x27;m not coming off as an ass here, I&#x27;m just sad that I&#x27;ve had to move away from firefox and to see all my coworkers also moving to chrome.

I dont envy Mozilla. The demographic that they&#x27;re targeting are really hard to please.

I have been using Firefox on Android since 2013. It&#x27;s been constantly improving. I am so glad that it exists so that I am not forced to use a browser (Chrome) that doesn&#x27;t respect me or my privacy and has every incentive to fuck me over.

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

You can learn more about Geckoview, the reusable heart of Firefox Preview, at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hacks.mozilla.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;geckoview-in-2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hacks.mozilla.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;geckoview-in-2019&#x2F;</a><p>(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

If there is one thing I miss from current mobile Firefox, it&#x27;s text reflow. Opera mobile did it perfectly.<p>I want to be able to zoom in or out and have text reflowed to the screen width. This makes the web magnitudes nicer to use on a small screen. No cut off lines, no 10 lines per screen. Just convenient freedom over the primary tool we interact on the web: Text.

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.

Don&#x27;t bother sending feedback to the email address mentioned in the blog: it bounces.<p><pre><code> We&#x27;re writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (firefox-preview-feedback) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group...</code></pre>

Small tip: please avoid giving time estimations using seasons &quot;coming this fall&quot;, as in the other hemisphere it is going to be spring.

I&#x27;m a happy user of both Firefox Focus and Firefox mobile, I don&#x27;t know what could they improve but I&#x27;ll give it a look.<p>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&#x27;d miss it if it were to be discontinued.

One reason I like FF on Android better than Chrome:<p>The Chrome user agent has your device model, even in incognito mode.<p>If you have a relatively rare Android device in your market, I think you can be tracked fairly uniquely on that alone. I was creeped out when I discovered this.

Wow, this preview is incredibly good! I was not expecting such a good quality from a preview app (given how bad some of the other tries from Firefox have been on Android).<p>And you know what absolutely clinches it for me? That you moved the address bar to the bottom!! Just like Edge on Windows mobile - that&#x27;s the best position for address bar IMO.<p>I also hope you do something about better battery management on the android app.<p>Have a bow!

Main thing I don&#x27;t like about Firefox for Android is the lack of support for containers. I want to use sites like Facebook within a container.

Not fond of the bottom address bar, I guess I&#x27;m not used to it because I always tap the top-right corner to switch tabs... I just need to get it in my muscle-memory, not a big deal. I still cross my fingers this will be configurable at some point.<p>My main gripe is that I feel like bookmarks are now a second-class citizen in Firefox Preview, they&#x27;re not as accessible. I could see my mobile bookmarks right on the new tab screen in Firefox, now I have to press ⋮ &gt; Your Library &gt; Bookmarks and then click the bookmark I want.<p>4 clicks, while it took only one (or two) before with bookmarks as the default panel on my homepage on Firefox &quot;classic&quot;.

I&#x27;m a huge fan of the navigation bar on the bottom. I&#x27;ve missed it since I had to give up Windows Phone. It&#x27;s hard to believe that neither Apple or Google ever added the option. I can&#x27;t think of a single reason it would be better on top, It&#x27;s simply harder to reach and less usable.<p>This also goes for all other apps...

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.

I&#x27;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.

I&#x27;ve been using Firefox Preview for a while and I like it, especially the bottom navigation bar, but one thing that I hope survives from the old app is the tab queue, which sends links opened from other apps to Firefox in the background without stealing focus from the original app. To me it&#x27;s a game changer on the level of tabbed browsing and I don&#x27;t know why all mobile browsers don&#x27;t have it.

Now if they could just fix Firefox Mobile&#x27;s abysmal tab management. Chrome Mobile&#x27;s tab screen is a stack of pages in the Z-axis with the one closest to the user being the most recent tab and so on. Firefox Mobile&#x27;s is a grid with the number of rows and columns being variable depending on screen dimensions. Figuring out which ones you opened in what order is not immediately apparent. It also suffers from the frankly amateur Android programming mistake of varying the swipe limits directly with the width of the screen, so going from portrait to landscape on a 19.5:9 phone screen means dismissing a tab suddenly requires you to swipe over twice as far as it does in portrait mode.<p>More than once I&#x27;ve found myself saying &quot;oh my god, go away!&quot; after trying and failing three times to swipe an unwanted tab away before remembering I have to drag the damn thing halfway to Timbuktu to dismiss it.

Not too shabby.<p>- Performance is great. I&#x27;m already using it pretty much everywhere.<p>- Ad blocking is about to become Firefox&#x27;s killer app, and it was a major PR mistake to release a preview without enough extension support for ad blockers to work. They should have delayed the release, if necessary.<p>- I wish the QR code reader had been released as a separate app (and on iOS too), but I&#x27;m actually quite glad to see Mozilla doing one. I look at my app store for QR code readers, and I&#x27;m confronted with a sea of questionable permissions, ads, obvious fake reviews, and tainted makers. I welcome a free QR code reader from a source I know and trust, but you can&#x27;t build something like that into a browser without either bloating the browser or limiting the reader. It should be spun off into its own app, then allowed to grow.

I love addons for firefox mobile so I&#x27;m not sure if I can give that up just yet :&#x2F;

This is a great step in the right direction<p>…but I really don’t like the thing that slides up at the bottom of the screen. It takes the place of content which is 99.99% the reason I’m there. Not to share our bookmark. If I want to do that, I’ll find it in the menu.<p>And is it just me that really, really needs a fast way to switch tabs to use a browser?<p>Chrome lets me swipe across the bar at the top of the screen, but with Firefox it’s a tap, a visual scan to find the tab I want, and another tap.<p>Otherwise I’d switch to this browser yesterday<p>I like the collections concept, and the home screen.<p>Also, it&#x27;s a joke that Google&#x27;s image search is horrible on Firefox, for no good reason. If you switch the user agent it works fine.

I keep using Opera because of a few small affordances that any browser could implement (and some do, but only Opera does all of them). The main one is text-reflow on zoom. It seems so ridiculous that I have to either stare at microscopic text or pan back and forwards just to be able to read things. Surely actually reading the contents of pages is a primary feature of a browser?<p>The other one I just can&#x27;t understand is why not implement pull-to-refresh? Surely that can&#x27;t be hard?<p>I know this is just ranting, but it&#x27;s weird to see browser makers completely re-inventing their products when small, basic things could be fixed in their current versions.

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me want to contribute to and use Mozilla projects. Bravo!

I&#x27;ve been using Firefox on Android for about a year now, and it is great, except one major problem. Google news site (news.google.com). News I believe uses my entire phone&#x27;s RAM and starts swapping (I am totally guessing, does Android use swap?) because the app will become unresponsive for about 2 full minutes while the page is rendering. Closing and re-opening a tab in this state actually breaks the app FYI (all other tabs freeze as well). Scrolling will give low resolution visuals below the fold. Horrible experience on google news. Actually all google properties are PAINFULLY slow. Is that on purpose Google? I got around it by installing Firefox Focus, and that seems to load google news quite fast, but Focus is like a permanent incognito mode, so that is quite inconvenient in itself. So now I just use Focus for google news and regular Firefox for everything else. Hopefully there will be performance improvements to come. My phone is an older Huawei Honor 8 so maybe I should just buy a new one... but the infrared on it is so great!

I can&#x27;t get it to work with my custom certificate authority (which I use to analyse traffic coming from my phone every now and then to see if any apps are leaking personal info). Also, though I know better, I also have some intranet services running with a certificate signed by that authority because the domains are dynamically generated and I can&#x27;t automate my DNS to get wildcard letsencrypt certificates.<p>Normal mobile Firefox has their own cert store, so you can import it by clicking a link to the certificate and hitting OK. Other apps use the system certificate store so I have imported my certificate into there as well. Sadly, it still doesn&#x27;t work.<p>My specific use case may not be very common, but certificate authorities in BYOD companies aren&#x27;t uncommon either. I can&#x27;t use this for my daily driver until I can import my certificate :(<p>The new system is very interesting though, the idea of separate browsing behaviours between devices can be a game changer if they implement it smoothly.

Wow. Just tried it out and it is fast! It feels more than just 2x as fast as the regular firefox mobile on the same device.<p>Now just add proper settings (no settings menu yet to disable thirdparty cookies) and add addon support (ublock, skip redirect, cookie autodelete) and I will switch immediately even with smaller bugs

It would be nice if they merged my open PR on GitHub with a core bug exposing global variables...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mozilla-mobile&#x2F;focus-android&#x2F;pull&#x2F;4296" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mozilla-mobile&#x2F;focus-android&#x2F;pull&#x2F;4296</a>

Cool, how about working on that mobile browser you already have? I&#x27;ve been using it for years and it&#x27;s good but apparently the lack of progress on it is because they abandoned us users of it to focus on this thing.<p>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&#x27;s an addon to do it through the addon menu and then tap the image but it&#x27;s not the same.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1363016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1363016</a>

I now have Firefox Preview, Firefox Focus, and Firefox, on my Android phone. I&#x27;m not really clear what the strategy is, and future deliverable? I read that Firefox Focus development has stopped, and Firefox Preview will become Firefox on Android. But is Firefox Preview a whole new thing or is it based on what&#x27;s been learned about Focus? Or?<p>Also, it&#x27;s kinda odd but I always have Twitter not fully loading on Firefox (on Android), where Firefox Focus always works fine. Typical is it hangs with spinners, if I reload it&#x27;ll say &quot;something went wrong&quot; and the in-line retry&#x2F;reload button doesn&#x27;t work, same error, but reloading the whole page sometimes works. So far I haven&#x27;t had this problem with Preview.

Does anyone suffer from degrading image&#x2F;video quality on some websites while using Firefox Android? I have this issue with Facebook. I don&#x27;t want the Facebook app installed on my phone (mostly to block notifications and for privacy reasons) so I access FB via Firefox but images look terrible and every video I click opens in a separate tab instead of in-page (at least I can download it tho).<p>Only solution I have is using user-agent switcher to change my UA to either Chrome or Firefox for iOS (which is what I picked to keep Firefox in my UA) but this breaks other stuff on some websites.<p>Question is, how to get Facebook and other sites to stop serving shit quality to Firefox users? How is this fair?

I guess first party isolation isn&#x27;t supported? (yet?) about:config loads a blank page.

The situation didn&#x27;t change with this another version of Firefox for Android (and I have all of them):<p>1) A webpage with many and mostly made out of grid and flex elements does tender waaaaay too slowly and ugly (low quality artifacts on scrolling)<p>2) Animations like of the mere max-height to unhide content perform like garbage, as if it was performed by the CPU alone<p>And I already did report this behaviour even with this version, let&#x27;s see how it will turn out.<p>Out of this experience, expecting mobile web apps to perform well enough is meaningless, lag and rendering artifacts will fill your patience meanwhile on Chrome like browsers everything is waaaay smoother.

After a few years of using Brave on Android, I switched back to Firefox, since I now have a powerful enough device that the bad cold boot performance can be ignored. A few missing things:<p>- Chromium&#x27;s zoom on tap is really more intelligent. Hitting the [-] on HN is much easier on in Brave than Firefox.<p>- The gesture to switch tab on Chromium is also more comfortable. That&#x27;s a missed opportunity on Firefox Preview as well.<p>- I wish there was a way for uBlock-Origin to integrate better on a webpage. Disabling javascript makes many websites much more usable (disabling most on-load popups). It&#x27;s one more tap to do that on Firefox than on Brave.

Last time I tried FF on Android, the Font Rendering was abysmal :( I&#x27;ve always been a faithful FF user on Desktop and I wish it would be a good alternative on mobile too. Let&#x27;s see where this Preview goes.

Most of the time it feels great already (sometimes it freezes for a few moments), but does someone know how&#x2F;if it is possible to add Progressive Web Apps to the desktop with this Firefox for Android Preview?

Feedback : When you are making a new Firefox for Android, please fix this small problem but personally a big annoyance : I should not need to open a whole new page <i>before</i> trying to open a new tab. Just add a plus button next to the address bar, that&#x27;s it. Currently the workflow just disturbs me in all Firefox browsers for mobile - you have to click the tabs button, <i>then</i> the &#x27;Plus&#x27; button (or click the settings menu and then the new tab - both require two taps with some delay, for something that should be just one quick tap).

Its pretty good, just need faster tab switching and extensions.

Ok, tried it. Almost no settings, no tab previews, no addons, not even about:config. So far unusable for me. And unfortunatelly as seless as Foxus - it&#x27;s effectivelly Focus v2, so I uninstalled it. I hope some provacy features and speedups will eventually be backported to our awesome Firefox which I use daily. Instead of Focus v2, I would like to see Firefox as an alternative default webview for Android.

&gt; In order to have a strong foundation for the next generation of mobile Firefox browsers and put all our efforts and resources in GeckoView, work on Firefox Focus will currently be on hold. Don’t worry though, you can still keep using our privacy browser, Focus, as well as our current Firefox for Android.<p>I think this is a typo, and meant to say that Firefox for Android development is on hold, not Focus.

With a new look and UI, a walkthrough maybe warranted. Took me a while to find the bookmark button. And the color scheme on the button itself is not as intuitive, does not present the idea on first viewing whether a page is bookmarked or not. But overall, looks great and works fast too. I am sure more devlopments are yet to come.<p>For now, looks promising to be a challenger to the Chrome monopoly.

I can&#x27;t find any info about Sync (especially with my own back-end) which is one of the main reasons I&#x27;m using Firefox everywhere.

I am really glad they moved the URL bar to the bottom. As a former BlackBerry10 user I find it more UX friendly for touch-based devices.

Add reflow... Opera does that really well. Doubletap to reflow and make text larger. Its the only android browser that does it afaik.

I use Brave on mobile (also has built in ad blocker). Is this version of Firefox for Android on par with Brave regarding ad blocking?

I think FF should implement an add-blocker which allows me to say which adds I like and which I don&#x27;t.<p>Many important services like news-papers can only survive if they get add-revenue. They also contain adds in their print-edition and people still subscribe to them.<p>So I don&#x27;t mind adds in general just adds which have no relevance to me.

First impressions:<p>1. It doesn&#x27;t properly &quot;Follow device theme&quot; (as per Settings) - I had to switch it to Dark manually;<p>2. Zooming text doesn&#x27;t work on some pages, and on others it doesn&#x27;t make the text rewrap. That&#x27;s a pet peeve of mine as far as mobile browsers go. Only a handful gets this right (Opera, Yandex).

Again Telemetry on by default with asking anything to the end user. Mozilla, when are you going to learn?

Why does the link to the preview release go through a tracking site and not directly to the Play Store?

Preview just lost 3 opened tabs replacing them with about:blank. Could be out-of-memory condition or smth else, but that doesn&#x27;t give me trust. I&#x27;ll stay with an old version for now<p>Very hopeful for the future when it works and supports arbitrary add-ons though (containers pls!)

So how is this new Firefox for Android different than the Firefox I have installed on my Android right now? Will I automatically get upgraded to this when it rolls out or is it a separate product? It would be nice to have that explained on the page&#x2F;blog post.

Why are they breaking their own stuff over and over again?! I updated their browser on Android and after the update it started hanging, refusing to load any website without a restart and eating up all the RAM? Why can&#x27;t they invest in testers? WHY?

Can they please provide a way to close all tabs instead of always having at least a blank one open. I&#x27;m probably just OCD on this but it&#x27;s the most annoying thing I found about Firefox on Android compared to Chrome when I start using it.

Wow, usability is so much better - dark theme, support for Samsung OneUI, search on bottom. Full release will be great (and used by 0.00001% of droid users). PS: using FF mobile for 3 years exclusively. Googlenet can go in the known direction.

Mozilla should do a deal with Huawei now when the trade war is raging. Hard Chinese money, desperate for a high quality Chrome alternative browser, might be better than wishing Google keeps paying for the default search engine spot.

Firefox Preview is dope. Hot off the shelf, and it&#x27;s as swift as a fox. Maybe hopeful but I feel this browser is on fire. Now just need to work on the ux like the button for `read` mode. Bye, G.

reinventing by not even providing pull down to refresh as option? so much for Firefox customization, lacking for years such basic feature<p>and don&#x27;t tell me about buggy add-ons as substitute<p>also by my experience it was crashing on regular sites and had problems with repeated words&#x2F;characters and jumpy cursor in text fields making even writing comment on hacker needs impossible<p>I mean first fix such horrible bugs and provide basic features before you start doing something else<p>I use Firefox on desktop, but I am not really masochist to use it on Android

- Talks about introducing a browser more focused on privacy<p>- Comes with Google search suggestions enabled by default on first run<p>(has a Google logo prominently displayed in the middle of the screen on first run in fact)

Is Firefox on Android ever going to build a sandbox architecture, or are the hard won lessons from the Desktop world going to be ignored?

I and many others that I&#x27;m aware of truly desire a mobile browser that has the feature to disable all mobile sites&#x2F;web pages.

What is the point to have a different version of Firefox? Can&#x27;t they simply remove the unneeded cruft from the standard version?

Add a mobile JS console and this will immediately become my default browser. I don&#x27;t understand why no one has done this yet.

I really wish I could still access about:confg

Seems you can&#x27;t move open tabs to Preview from Firefox Beta on Android. What a pity!

Finally. I already switched on Windows and Linux. Now macOS and Android is missing.

Tried it out. Love it.

My ideal for mobile: Firefox + uBlock Origin + Containers<p>Now: Firefox + uBlock Origin (no Containers)<p>Upcoming: Firefox (no uBlock Origin, no Containers)<p>Seems like we&#x27;re moving backwards, no?

Nice changes, I&#x27;m now wishing for an Android :-)

&gt;At Firefox<p>You mean, at Mozilla.<p>This whole branding campaign to shove everything under the &quot;Firefox&quot; umbrella is silly.

Add extensions support and disable telemetry&#x2F;remote-control by default (pushing updates where you control the code is remote control, don&#x27;t even try to argue against that one).

Still no pull to refresh. They really don&#x27;t want users to adopt their browser. Literally every single other mobile Web browser supports it.<p>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).