And to anyone trying to convert your friends "mobile supports ublock" is usually all I have to say.
Edit:unblock == uBlock Origin (sorry, on my phone)
We already support a very limited set of the WebExtensions API to offer features like Reader Mode. Rest assured that more features will land in the coming months.
If you're a developer and you want to help us, our Github site is at this link. We mark easier issues with a Good First Issue label. We also need help with translations, documentation, and even getting issues filed.
As it stands, adblocking is "post MVP"[1][2]. QR code scanning, however, is somehow part of the MVP. This doesn't make sense to me: there are many apps that launch the default system browser when scanning a URL QR code. You can easily get by without that functionality in the browser.
The comments in this post should be sending you really loud signal: technical users (the type of people who install preview software) don't consider a browser without adblocking MVP. You are drastically underestimating the significance of adblocking extensions.
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/96 [2]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/2622 [3]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/113
It is always soft of amusing to watch companies make all kinds of unforced errors with their products because the managers feel that they know much better than the users of the product what should be important to users. They fail all the time just to have someone else come in and say "Oh, those people, they were just holding the instructions wrong" and go repeating the same mistake.
So far in this ( software + hardware space ) there has been exactly one company that nailed it. The company is called Apple and the product is called iPhone. Since that point on Apple has not introduced anything that was not a direct play on "Our users want X, we are going to give them X, maybe with a bit of a twist"
The users are telling you that the USP of Firefox is ad blocking. If your PM says it is something else, you should replace the PM. That should be your singular focus. Everything else is secondary.
A usable night mode e.g. invert the topbar icons and change the white screen you see before the page loads combined with an existing dark theme would be an easy feature to implement and would put it miles ahead of other mobile browsers too. I presently have to use Swift for Samsung to overlay a proper black theme (with white icons etc), but still get bright white when loading pages.
(Of course, some time later I realized what "extensions enabled" truly means, and started using other extensions I have enabled on my desktop browser too :).)
Please listen Mozilla. Firefox is the only browser that works as intended for me, on mobile. Cookie AutoDelete + uBlock Origin and Dark Reader. What a blessing.
Using Firefox because it has a particular technological feature is a political choice. That political stance would lead users to turn to other browsers as fast as tech is added or removed.
I use Firefox for political reasons and for what it stands.
Which means that when Firefox gets worse I still use it and support what it stands for.
It's very Stallmanesque and let it be clear I am not saying the choice to favour superior tech over ethic concerns is wrong. It's just a different choice.
That's what I tell people when talking about Signal and messenger, Chrome and Firefox.
Also, I don't think Mozilla is a white knight and in my opinion they fucked up some good things over the years (tech or ethic). But the good still largely surpasses the bad.
This way, you can switch your acquaintances to use Firefox, and they'll stay with it by inertia. I'd say that's a win-win.
I hope "collections" will come to the desktop too. Are there plans?
(uBlock Origin is a prerequisite for me.)
It's not the same thing, but the built-in tracking protection incidentally blocks a portion of ads.
Lacking a port I would be interested in a solid, maintained Firefox-without-the-GUI base so people could port it somewhat easily.
It isn't even clear that they're not going to replace Android Firefox with Fenix before getting extensions working.
As far I know this issue is the most recent source of information: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/574
It says «We are currently finalizing the transition plan».
Even if they don't have the entire transition planned out, I think it was important for Mozilla to communicate their Android dev focus was gonna shift to GeckoView, from existing apps, to allow external devs, and customers to have a better plan, even if they don't have the add on strategy and timeline fully fleshed out.
The alternative is waiting a few months to know any of this was happening.
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.
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)
I wish they'd focus more on getting the UX of containers up to snuff. They are almost there, but still far enough away to make addons like Multi-Account Containers (MAC) something I cannot recommend to my parents.
Here is what I mean: Suppose I want to keep my use of example.com separate in it's own Example container. How do I do that?
1) Click the MAC icon in the toolbar, then click the "+" button.
2) Enter 'Example', pick an icon or color, then click okay.
3) Open a new Example container.
4) Navigate to example.com in the Example container
5) Click the MAC icon in the toolbar, then check "Always open in Example"
6) Close the tab.
7) Open a new tab, and browse to example.com
8) Click "Remember my decision"
9) Click "Open in Example container"
This is nuts. I can't recommend this workflow to anybody.
Outside of that I'm sure turning ad blocking on by default would break several sites.
Also publicly, they've said that ads are an integral part of the web.
Anyone remember when Firefox extensions broke recently? I thought it was a rather horrible experience.
If the new Firefox Preview can natively block advertisements, whitelist sites, disable third party cookies, prevent and hide social trackers, block anti-ad-blockers, etc. etc. then I agree that extensions are kind of useless, and I understand Mozilla's point.
However, I see the lack of extension support detrimental to my freedoms as a user, since it means I no longer can control what the software hides for me, nor what it broadcasts about me to the abyss of waste that is the advertising industry; I will have to trust the browser, and the lack of extension support is a rather untrustworthy property to begin with.
I hope they add support for addons otherwise there isn't much use for it at least to me.
With that said, what sites are you visiting? It could be that I simply don't visit sites with any ads, but I gave a few of my daily sites a spin in Firefox Preview and didn't notice any ads.
Winning their userbase back is the only way to win back the leverage they once had...
When you install Firefox Preview, tracking protection is enabled by default. This is recently true for Firefox Desktop as well.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/when-it-comes-to-pr...
This post below by our CEO explains how we're thinking about the issue broadly. Your privacy and agency are definitely front and center.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/the-web-the-world-n...
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)
I understand that it's a testing release, but they stand to lose out on many testers and users. While I am perfectly willing to be a guinea pig and use this as my daily driver, I am passionately unwilling to browse with ads (especially on a mobile device where data is more expensive).
I am likely part of the vast majority of potential testers/users. There probably won't be a "hey, we support plugins/blocking now" announcement and, even if there will be, it probably won't be as visible as this announcement.
As a tester of Firefox Preview: WebRender has been a godsend for mobile browsing -- I have yet to see it choke!
I'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 "more space" resolution.
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.
I hope I'm not coming off as an ass here, I'm just sad that I've had to move away from firefox and to see all my coworkers also moving to chrome.
For me adding "Auto Tab Disard" [1] (a Firefox equivalent of The Great Suspender for Chrome) has reduced my FF memory/CPU footprint by 10x. It defaults to 10 minutes which is usually long enough where you've mostly forgotten about the tab, then it will refresh when you focus on it. A feature fortunately becoming native to FF. I don't seem to have the previous performance issues anymore but I'll be looking for it now.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
That's what I thought as well, but apparently it's something to do with the compositor and FF redrawing the whole window instead of just relevant pixels or areas - which provokes a lot of unneeded calculations -something specially damaging for users that have scaling set to more space (effectively a higher resolution).
That was my understanding at least, when I first learned about the bug many months ago. I followed the development for a while with no (public) improvements and now I just wait for news about the issue or something, but all FF related news so far have been about new features or products.
I am not trying to cast doubt on your experience, but I just wanted to point out that it isn’t universal!
It makes me really confused because my current understanding on the bug doesn't seem to be compatible with the idea of only affecting some users - and to be clear I'm not casting doubt on your experience either, it's just hard to imagine how a performance issue regarding the compositor and screen redrawing could be affecting users differently.
Subconsciously I started using Chrome on my Desktop more regularly too, since the abhorrent state of Firefox on Macbooks trained me into using Chrome instead.
The Firefox developers don't seem to care about the state of Firefox, on macOS, to be honest.
For example - This is a bug report I made 7 months ago of an issue that would be quick to implement, yet make a noticeable difference in UI on macOS (move the Share menu to the File menu). Nobody has bothered to respond. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1512851
Otherwise, I've always been on FF from the Netscape days. I use Chrome when I have to (noticably Hangouts for a while), but otherwise stayed with FF without a problem.
(Just curious about how your setup differs from mine)
Another thing that annoyed me about the previous mobile Firefox was the 'x' in the URL bar closed the bar instead of clearing it like Brave. I had to unlearn months of muscle memory since it was a habit of mine. Maybe it doesn't matter since it's just an issue after switching.
My two main gripes are the default search engine and telemetry. Both of these options should be set by the user on first launch. I don't want to use Google and I don't want to send data to Mozilla.
* or, places that are hard to reach for most users
Mobile-first design really hasn't taken hold for many UX web designers (and/or the organizations haven't adapted). Relatively speaking, large phones where it's difficult to reach the top weren't popular until recently. Even mobile apps are just starting to put navigation towards the bottom.
2) same browser gets put on a mobile phone, wants to "feel natural"
3) url bar goes in the "familiar" place.
What "native look and feel" are you talking about?
Chrome'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's warts.
But I agree, uBlock Origin makes the mobile web far less painful. Also, I'll point out that you want to be using uBlock Origin, not uBlock. As I recall, Raymond Hill (the creator of uBlock) decided to hand over uBlock Firefox to one of the contributors to offload some of the maintenance burden but then the new owner immediately started trying to monetize it which prompted him to create uBlock Origin.
FF with add-ons run noticeable slower than brave.
On the other hand, the "Firefox Focus" app and Chrome do not seem to have this issue. Is there any way to fix this, because it's literally the only thing that stopping me.
But I think it's available for Asian countries only.
- I use Firefox, and have done continuously for a long time. I don't intend to switch to anything else, despite being very unhappy with the experience in many ways, as I consider it to be the "least worst"
- I genuinely believe there are very easily achievable low-hanging fruit that Mozilla could implement that would at least please a large swathe of their target demographic. Namely, not talking about privacy and then slapping Google tracking into everything they do. I understand that there's a revenue stream there, and a balance to be met between economic survival and ideal conditions, but this particilar issue is a deal tipped too far towards defying the point of the exercise.
Perhaps I'm in a bubble and this is just my "single issue", but shouting about privacy and sending all that data about their users to Google seems a fairly large deal to me.
Huh, I must have missed that - if true, this is a huge breach of trust for me. Do you have a link?
* They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone
* They silently served modified installers to a small subset of users downloading firefox which sent all browsing data to a 3rd party by default.
* Disabling experiments used for pushing the mr robot ad does not disable "normandy" - which is practically the same thing and they used to push new certificates once their old ones expired and broke addons recently. This feature is hidden in advanced settings.
And then as you say, using google analytics everywhere (giving google data), painting google indirectly as evil while having it as a default engine and collecting google money.
Among that group are sysadmins, webmasters and people who get called by friend or family members for anything tech-related.
If they do things right, like they did when IE was dominant, these guys will definitely give back.
I've used since v0.4.
My main gripe is that I feel like bookmarks are now a second-class citizen in Firefox Preview, they're not as accessible. I could see my mobile bookmarks right on the new tab screen in Firefox, now I have to press ⋮ > Your Library > Bookmarks and then click the bookmark I want.
4 clicks, while it took only one (or two) before with bookmarks as the default panel on my homepage on Firefox "classic".
Also, I feel the opposite regarding the address bar position - give it a few days, you'll absolutely love it. Edge on Windows Mobile had the same position, and it was a very nifty and time-saving UX. You can now use the phone one-handed more easily, even for small-handed people.
Swiping up seems to only give me the option to share and/or bookmark the page, and in Fennec those things were already possible through the main menu, so not much of an improvement (though I suppose swiping might be a little easier than precisely hitting the menu button).
Actually viewing my bookmarks has indeed become more cumbersome, though, and that is what your parent comment is referring to: In Fennec bookmarks were accessible through the about:home UI, which appears both when opening a new tab and when tapping the URL bar to enter URL edit mode, both of which feel quicker than "Open main menu -> Open library -> Open bookmarks" in Fenix.
With you on the bookmarks though. Especially since they're putting this new "Collections" feature front-and-centre but it seems to have no integration with Your Library. The whole "Tab Groups", etc. paradigm has been tried time and time again: the reason it never sticks isn't because it's a bad idea, it's because it's never integrated with idiomatic browser features.
Sure it's disturbing at first but from a usability standpoint it seems vastly superior, especially for bigger screens.
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).
Unfortunately it cannot be disabled. The flag to disable it was removed. https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/8152831?hl=en
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 infinite scroll. Having to scroll up 47 pages in order to refresh is not great. It is also nice to refresh a page without losing one's place on it. For these reasons, I would like to see the refresh button remain, even if pull-to-refresh is implemented.
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.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-pull-...
Whenever I raised issues with Mozilla about things that degraded, it was always either talking to a brick wall or a wontfix. They made the decision based on one person complaining about it being the old way, implemented the change, and no matter that other people liked the old way, it wouldn't be changed back or made configurable.
I then tried to compile Firefox for Android myself and cherry pick only security updates, but that was enough of a pain in the ass that I gave up on it.
And before you mention it, changing default font size in browser/OS doesn't really help, mostly makes things worse (Bad categories like "medium", "huge" instead of font size, page layouts breaking etc.)
The newest version mentioned in this article actually feels faster than chrome although I'm not crazy about the new ui it is usable without difficultly and a work in progress.
Experiences from years ago aren't really relevant any more, as Firefox has gotten a lot of work done the last couple of years.
Will it be continually "improving" when they drop extension support?
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.
Ads on, say, Stack Overflow or HN or whatever, that target nerds ("great hosting!", "3d printing tech!", "legos!") would be perfectly doable without tracking each of us personally.
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.
This also goes for all other apps...
So they shouldn't put updates on the Play Store?
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.
You can toggle between the modes in one tap, and if you're in a private mode, opening links from other apps behaves just like Focus (minus the convenient "erase everything" button, at least for now).
It's the best of both worlds, I don't have to use a second one for those rare scenarios in which I want cookies (like remaining logged into HN).
More than once I've found myself saying "oh my god, go away!" 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.
You can change it to a linear list easily. Settings -> General -> Compact Tabs.
Personally I strongly prefer the way Firefox does it. The order is actually pretty simple. Left to right, top to bottom is oldest to newest.
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.
TL;DR: There was too much cruft built up.
Work should move faster now. We substantially grew our Android team in the last year.
1) Tap the tabs button
2) You're already on the new tab, so either
a) Search in the search bar: this opens your search results in this current new-tab (you can also type an address there and search see your recent history)
b) Click on one of the links saved in a "Collection": this opens in this new tab.
Edit: OK, the fact that you have to wait for the animation is annoying indeed.
Now: Firefox + uBlock Origin (no Containers)
Upcoming: Firefox (no uBlock Origin, no Containers)
Seems like we're moving backwards, no?
We'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...The Chrome user agent has your device model, even in incognito mode.
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.
For example, on my phone, Firefox's current User-Agent header is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Android 8.1.0; Tablet; rv:67.0) Gecko/67.0 Firefox/67.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; Moto G (5) Plus) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/740.3729.136 Mobile Safari/537.36And you know what absolutely clinches it for me? That you moved the address bar to the bottom!! Just like Edge on Windows mobile - that's the best position for address bar IMO.
I also hope you do something about better battery management on the android app.
Have a bow!
Long press the link.
…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.
And is it just me that really, really needs a fast way to switch tabs to use a browser?
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.
Otherwise I’d switch to this browser yesterday
I like the collections concept, and the home screen.
Also, it's a joke that Google's image search is horrible on Firefox, for no good reason. If you switch the user agent it works fine.
Otherwise it's just too slow.
That is what keeps me away from using Firefox on mobile (15 years Firefox user).
The other one I just can't understand is why not implement pull-to-refresh? Surely that can't be hard?
I know this is just ranting, but it's weird to see browser makers completely re-inventing their products when small, basic things could be fixed in their current versions.
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't work.
My specific use case may not be very common, but certificate authorities in BYOD companies aren't uncommon either. I can't use this for my daily driver until I can import my certificate :(
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.
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.
Question is, how to get Facebook and other sites to stop serving shit quality to Firefox users? How is this fair?
Another might be adblocker-esque trusted and shared community-maintained lists along with an add-on (does this exist?) for per-domain user agent mocking. Hopefully with enough adoption (i.e integrated into ublock) that it reduces the value proposition of investing the time.
Thirdly, continuing to call out the companies who do this sort of thing.
I think this is a typo, and meant to say that Firefox for Android development is on hold, not Focus.
If you're interested in community maintainership of Focus, please fill out this survey: https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5022894/Firefox-Focus-Survey
(Linked from https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/06/geckoview-in-2019/)
- Comes with Google search suggestions enabled by default on first run
(has a Google logo prominently displayed in the middle of the screen on first run in fact)
You mean, at Mozilla.
This whole branding campaign to shove everything under the "Firefox" umbrella is silly.
(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)
- Performance is great. I'm already using it pretty much everywhere.
- Ad blocking is about to become Firefox'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.
- I wish the QR code reader had been released as a separate app (and on iOS too), but I'm actually quite glad to see Mozilla doing one. I look at my app store for QR code readers, and I'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'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.
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
Also, it'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'll say "something went wrong" and the in-line retry/reload button doesn't work, same error, but reloading the whole page sometimes works. So far I haven't had this problem with Preview.
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)
2) Animations like of the mere max-height to unhide content perform like garbage, as if it was performed by the CPU alone
And I already did report this behaviour even with this version, let's see how it will turn out.
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.
- Chromium's zoom on tap is really more intelligent. Hitting the [-] on HN is much easier on in Brave than Firefox.
- The gesture to switch tab on Chromium is also more comfortable. That's a missed opportunity on Firefox Preview as well.
- 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's one more tap to do that on Firefox than on Brave.
For now, looks promising to be a challenger to the Chrome monopoly.
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.
So I don't mind adds in general just adds which have no relevance to me.
1. It doesn't properly "Follow device theme" (as per Settings) - I had to switch it to Dark manually;
2. Zooming text doesn't work on some pages, and on others it doesn't make the text rewrap. That's a pet peeve of mine as far as mobile browsers go. Only a handful gets this right (Opera, Yandex).
Very hopeful for the future when it works and supports arbitrary add-ons though (containers pls!)
and don't tell me about buggy add-ons as substitute
also by my experience it was crashing on regular sites and had problems with repeated words/characters and jumpy cursor in text fields making even writing comment on hacker needs impossible
I mean first fix such horrible bugs and provide basic features before you start doing something else
I use Firefox on desktop, but I am not really masochist to use it on Android