After using Firefox on Android for as long as I can remember, I have changed browsers.
Every time I start the new version my screen flashes. I perceive no performance improvements or “experience” benefits. On the contrary my favorite extensions no longer work.
My question is, why should I use/return to this new version?
Same here, even on my latest Google Pixel, the Firefox performance was awful, the browser experience was not good. But now I’m very happy with the latest version, I can see real good improvements, the browser experience is great and it’s not resource hungry as the oldest version. I would like to congratulate the Mozilla team for the great job!
I… hated it. Especially I feel like there wasn’t enough testing with the bar configured on top. I wrote a rant with the issues I have, which will probably read as too angry for a lobste.rs comment but allowed me to vent my frustration.
For now I set the bar on the bottom, which I don’t really like but solves 2 issues (buggy sites, and the new tab button being too far).
Still thank you for your work. I couldn’t get anything done without firefox in my pocket.
Another issue not listed: I will sometimes come back to firefox to find an old tab is now completely blank. Reloading will not help: I have to close the tab and open it again. I’ve had this happen with both a lobsters tab and a completely unrelated site… I will have to try and find a reproducible way to trigger it, could be hard.
Lots of users hate the new tab drawer (vs. the original tab page in earlier Firefox Preview builds). I don’t think it matters whether it’s a drawer or a full screen page, but the fact that scrolling to the top of the list continues into closing the drawer is extremely annoying. I do not ever want to close the drawer by moving my finger down on the list of tabs!! Please make an option to only have the header draggable for closing.
No idea about Klar, but Fennec is similar to IceCat: Firefox with the proprietary blobs removed. I think F-Droid doesn’t like vanilla Firefox for the reason that it contains blobs.
My recollection is that F-Droid’s Fennec build is just Firefox with the trademarks removed, not proprietary blobs. The new Firefox for Android, Fenix, doesn’t get packaged because its standard build system involves downloading pre-compiled copies of other Mozilla components, like the GeckoView widget, rather than building absolutely everything from source. F-Droid does allow apps that download pre-compiled copies of things, but only if they’re obtained from a blessed list of Maven repositories, and Mozilla’s CI system is not on the list.
Also, there may be something about requiring the Play Store to support notifications, but I don’t think it’s the only or even the biggest blocker.
One thing I would absolutely love is socks5 proxy support. Any plans for that? Also, I use ^L and ^K a freakton in the desktop browser. I’d love to see support for that when using Firefox for Android on ChromeOS.
In general I’m pretty happy with the new version of Firefox. The one big mistake Mozilla made however was to pull important features out.
For example I miss “custom search keywords”. I have a carefully crafted list of custom search keywords, and I use Firefox on top of iOS too because of it (otherwise I’ve got no reason to not switch to Safari). And it seems that this particular feature is not coming back on Android, due to some unification with the search engines, which don’t even synchronize. And this made me a little sad.
Also the new engine has some issues with some animations on some websites, as when scrolling such pages I sometimes get lag. I also hope that you’ll improve Android’s UI for tablets, as some of the UI elements are a little small on top of my Galaxy Tab S7.
Otherwise I’m happy to see Firefox improve, and the few add-ons I relied on still working. For me Android is not usable without Firefox ❤️
Great work! It sounds like there’s been a lot of work going on under the hood for this release, and there’s mentioning of it now being easier to make new features in the product. Are there any blog posts - or could you talk a bit about what changes that has been made which now unlocks this extra velocity?
Any way to display your bookmarks on startup or something like this ? I’m used to switching through my bookmarks, now I’ve got to add them all to this “collection”(? german word is “Sammlung”) and that is collapsed every time I create a new tab. “Add to start screen” doesn’t do anything.
This is the version that finally made me rate Firefox in Play store: to 1 star! Why did you (plural) make it this bad?
Things that broke:
setting DuckDuckGo up a default search engine was simple in the past as I remember. It was auto-discovered, I think, I installed Firefox quite a time ago. Now I had to manually edit a search string.
The text selection menu is totally useless. I used to have “copy to clipboard” and “search <default search provider” there. Now I have to push “…” and scroll a tiny list with useless items populated by some incomprehensible logic, containing apps installed on my phone eg. a “pdf reader”, “encrypt”, “private search”, “Firefox search”, “new task”. Lot of useless crap instead of a single simple workflow. The “Firefox Search” option is the functional equivalent of the old operation, but it is at the bottom of the list, so it is a pain to use.
icons in the start page are smaller, and the workflows on their manipulation are not intuitive.
tab selection is terrible. The tabs opened in the background are at the top of the tab stack, but the current tab is at the top of the screen, and there are no visual cues that there may be other tabs above, you need to scroll both ways to find what you are looking for…
The whole UX suggest that the developers don’t use Firefox for daily browsing. The feature are there, the UX is terrible, and is a regression in every possible aspect.
The single good thing is the address bar in the bottom. I’d prefer to downgrade to an older version actually, as the previously advertised speed benefits are not noticable.
The PR page states:
User experience is key, in product and product development
Maybe I’m not the target audience?
I know this is not your (singular) fault, more likely a project management issue, but I think the direction is not the right one.
Hi Stefan, please take a look at brave on mobile. I was eagerly waiting for Brave UX in firefox and chrome. Fantastic news that firefox.
One suggestion -
After clicking on tab number at right bottom corner to open new tab, is it possible to slide to normal window to incognito windows by sliding on screen rather than click on each icon. This will be especially helpful for mobile or tablet with big screens.
Again, big thanks making such huge change possible.
If Firefox wants to get users back from chrome, maybe they shouldn’t exclude extensions, even though they work fine. I really don’t like the fact that after an auto upgrade from the play store my browser broke. Yeah yeah new features and fixes, nobody cares if the thing you want to use, just stops working with no way to revert it. please Focus on that instead of developer comfort.
The improvements in Firefox for Android don’t just stop here: they even go way beyond the surface as Firefox for Android is now based on GeckoView, Mozilla’s own mobile browser engine. What does that mean for users?
Wait, Firefox for Android wasn’t using Gecko all along?
This must be some sort of a mistake of someone thinking that anyone cares about their Chromium-based stint by the misleading name of Firefox Focus, right?
Firefox for Android was using Gecko all along, but previously (I think) like Firefox for Desktop the UI was all rendered in XUL/HTML, with the performance and battery-life consequences that implies. GeckoView is a new, different port of Gecko to Android that allows more modern features like process separation and hardware acceleration, and also works as an ordinary widget that can be used with the standard Android UI framework.
This is what has kept me busy the past 18 months. Ask me anything :-)
I’ve been using the preview for a while, and I like it a lot. Thanks to you and everyone at Mozilla.
Moving the address / tool bar to the bottom of the screen is, imho, a very clever decision that made my huge phablet phone a bit less painful to use.
After using Firefox on Android for as long as I can remember, I have changed browsers.
Every time I start the new version my screen flashes. I perceive no performance improvements or “experience” benefits. On the contrary my favorite extensions no longer work.
My question is, why should I use/return to this new version?
Same here, even on my latest Google Pixel, the Firefox performance was awful, the browser experience was not good. But now I’m very happy with the latest version, I can see real good improvements, the browser experience is great and it’s not resource hungry as the oldest version. I would like to congratulate the Mozilla team for the great job!
I… hated it. Especially I feel like there wasn’t enough testing with the bar configured on top. I wrote a rant with the issues I have, which will probably read as too angry for a lobste.rs comment but allowed me to vent my frustration.
For now I set the bar on the bottom, which I don’t really like but solves 2 issues (buggy sites, and the new tab button being too far).
Still thank you for your work. I couldn’t get anything done without firefox in my pocket.
Another issue not listed: I will sometimes come back to firefox to find an old tab is now completely blank. Reloading will not help: I have to close the tab and open it again. I’ve had this happen with both a lobsters tab and a completely unrelated site… I will have to try and find a reproducible way to trigger it, could be hard.
I’ve had that issue on desktop firefox. If the site is bookmarked, I click it (helpful especially if it was a container tab)
Lots of users hate the new tab drawer (vs. the original tab page in earlier Firefox Preview builds). I don’t think it matters whether it’s a drawer or a full screen page, but the fact that scrolling to the top of the list continues into closing the drawer is extremely annoying. I do not ever want to close the drawer by moving my finger down on the list of tabs!! Please make an option to only have the header draggable for closing.
Any plans for completing the bookmark feature?
Will it it be made available on F-Droid? Soon? Ever?
How does this release relate to these:
Getting Firefox via F-Droid has always confused me, so I’ve stayed away, but I’m always on the lookout for a good browser for Android.
No idea about Klar, but Fennec is similar to IceCat: Firefox with the proprietary blobs removed. I think F-Droid doesn’t like vanilla Firefox for the reason that it contains blobs.
My recollection is that F-Droid’s Fennec build is just Firefox with the trademarks removed, not proprietary blobs. The new Firefox for Android, Fenix, doesn’t get packaged because its standard build system involves downloading pre-compiled copies of other Mozilla components, like the GeckoView widget, rather than building absolutely everything from source. F-Droid does allow apps that download pre-compiled copies of things, but only if they’re obtained from a blessed list of Maven repositories, and Mozilla’s CI system is not on the list.
Also, there may be something about requiring the Play Store to support notifications, but I don’t think it’s the only or even the biggest blocker.
Ah, sounds like you know a more about this than me - I stand corrected. Thanks for the information!
why block about:config? why no arbitrary extensions on your own risk? I would love a split screen or dual window feature.
One thing I would absolutely love is socks5 proxy support. Any plans for that? Also, I use ^L and ^K a freakton in the desktop browser. I’d love to see support for that when using Firefox for Android on ChromeOS.
How can I downgrade without losing my settings and open tabs?
Hi @st3fan,
In general I’m pretty happy with the new version of Firefox. The one big mistake Mozilla made however was to pull important features out.
For example I miss “custom search keywords”. I have a carefully crafted list of custom search keywords, and I use Firefox on top of iOS too because of it (otherwise I’ve got no reason to not switch to Safari). And it seems that this particular feature is not coming back on Android, due to some unification with the search engines, which don’t even synchronize. And this made me a little sad.
Also the new engine has some issues with some animations on some websites, as when scrolling such pages I sometimes get lag. I also hope that you’ll improve Android’s UI for tablets, as some of the UI elements are a little small on top of my Galaxy Tab S7.
Otherwise I’m happy to see Firefox improve, and the few add-ons I relied on still working. For me Android is not usable without Firefox ❤️
Keep up the good work.
Great work! It sounds like there’s been a lot of work going on under the hood for this release, and there’s mentioning of it now being easier to make new features in the product. Are there any blog posts - or could you talk a bit about what changes that has been made which now unlocks this extra velocity?
I use Android with a keyboard.
Do you know of any keyboard-driven browsing solutions like Vimium on Android at this time?
Any way to display your bookmarks on startup or something like this ? I’m used to switching through my bookmarks, now I’ve got to add them all to this “collection”(? german word is “Sammlung”) and that is collapsed every time I create a new tab. “Add to start screen” doesn’t do anything.
[Comment removed by author]
Finally found the option to add it as part of the start screen. The new Bookmarks view is hard for me to grasp, like everything looks the same.
This is the version that finally made me rate Firefox in Play store: to 1 star! Why did you (plural) make it this bad?
Things that broke:
The whole UX suggest that the developers don’t use Firefox for daily browsing. The feature are there, the UX is terrible, and is a regression in every possible aspect.
The single good thing is the address bar in the bottom. I’d prefer to downgrade to an older version actually, as the previously advertised speed benefits are not noticable.
The PR page states:
Maybe I’m not the target audience?
I know this is not your (singular) fault, more likely a project management issue, but I think the direction is not the right one.
Hi Stefan, please take a look at brave on mobile. I was eagerly waiting for Brave UX in firefox and chrome. Fantastic news that firefox.
One suggestion - After clicking on tab number at right bottom corner to open new tab, is it possible to slide to normal window to incognito windows by sliding on screen rather than click on each icon. This will be especially helpful for mobile or tablet with big screens.
Again, big thanks making such huge change possible.
Just got the update. Really liking the bar on the bottom.
If Firefox wants to get users back from chrome, maybe they shouldn’t exclude extensions, even though they work fine. I really don’t like the fact that after an auto upgrade from the play store my browser broke. Yeah yeah new features and fixes, nobody cares if the thing you want to use, just stops working with no way to revert it. please Focus on that instead of developer comfort.
This new submission describes my feelings quite well: http://jacquesmattheij.com/why-johnny-wont-upgrade/
Is it possible to set it as default browser with private mode by default (like firefox focus)?
Yes, you can configure it to open links in private browsing mode by default.
Is it available to download somewhere, or is that only for Google Android via the play store?
I have bookmarked this address, it’s for the testing build of Firefox https://firefox-ci-tc.services.mozilla.com/tasks/index/mobile.v2.fenix.nightly.latest/arm64-v8a
I found this address unnecessarily hard to find
I used Aurora Store, after that FFUpdater picks it.
Wait, Firefox for Android wasn’t using Gecko all along?
This must be some sort of a mistake of someone thinking that anyone cares about their Chromium-based stint by the misleading name of Firefox Focus, right?
Firefox for Android was using Gecko all along, but previously (I think) like Firefox for Desktop the UI was all rendered in XUL/HTML, with the performance and battery-life consequences that implies. GeckoView is a new, different port of Gecko to Android that allows more modern features like process separation and hardware acceleration, and also works as an ordinary widget that can be used with the standard Android UI framework.