I’ve been hearing more and more about Firefox lately, which seemed to coincide with many users migrating from Chrome. Have there been any major recent changes to the latter which have caused this migration?
Edit: Just installed Firefox and man has it come a long way since I last tried it on Android years ago. Even has ublock origin, page sync with desktop… I think I’ll switch for the next couple days and see how I like it on desktop nowadays.
I remember switching from Firefox to Chromium back when it first came out. Nice to go full circle.
YouTube anti-adblock, Web integrity, mainfest v3, just to name a few. Things just slowly add up and most won’t just stand there and take it
most - I’d venture to guess less than 1% will take any action, unfortunately
Well yeah… Chrome has Billions of users. Any percentage is a lot of people.
If you’re on Android, using Firefox + ublock origin (or some other browser with AdBlock) is game-changing.
Continuing to use, say, Chrome, makes almost zero sense.
Google threatening to take away the ad blockers was enough to make me go back to Firefox.
Manifest V3, Web Environment Integrity, YouTube’s recent war on ad blockers.
The main issue is that now people just test their shit against Chrome. Maybe Safari if they’re feeling generous. There’s a few bits in Firefox Android where things just work a little bit less smoothly than they do in Chrome, and needing extra presses to work in FF. Not sure why, maybe Chrome is making clickable targets that little bit bigger or something.
i used opera on mobile and opera GX on my PC. switched back because of security and privacy concerns. i did not miss any major features, firefox really has become the best browser.
When I used to develop website opera used to drive me mad. It always had weird edge cases.
People are becoming more conscious of stuff plenty of us have been aware for quite some time already. The idea that a browser made by a corporation who harvests your data for the purpose of advertising doesn’t give a shit about privacy and will try to block adblockers is not something some people weren’t expecting - but normies are getting this shoved in their face with YouTube giving them the anti-adblock notification.
Firefox (and it’s clones) is basically the only other choice - all the other (major) browsers (that aren’t Safari) are based on Chromium, which is developed by Google.
tbh Google isn’t blocking ad blockers with manifest v3.
For me it was performance. Google Chrome consistently couldn’t handle the tab loads I would put on it after around 2022, despite my computer not really showing signs of degradation.
Since switching to FF, I can run the same amount of tabs with almost not hiccups or stuttering - what I’d experience with Chrome. Hell, Chrome would crash randomly and I’d lose all my tabs and would have to reload them.
Plus, sometimes to fix Chrome’s poor performance I’d shut the program down entirely, upon re-launch the browser wouldn’t even remember all of the tabs/windows I just closed (it used to). So, if I was doing research on something, Chrome would just not open certain windows back up after a hard reset, even if I CTRL + SHIFT + T and I check history. Madly infuriating.
FF opens all windows and tabs upon hard reset, no questions asked. Plus, the compatibility between PC and mobile is awesome: I can load up a tab from my phone that’s on my PC super easily, which makes things useful for when I want to share web content with friends or family.
I seem to have woken up from my slumber of tolerating Chrome, and chose a better service instead.
The only problem I have with it is that it has no amoled dark theme. Still my default browser though.
Minor gripe but the scrolling feels so bad on desktop imo
Maybe it’s the smooth scrolling? I don’t like it either. There’s an option to disable it.
I can’t notice a difference on Mac OS using a trackpad, but maybe it’s different on other platforms.
Try it with a mouse scroll wheel. It’s a completely different feel compared to Chrome. I was on Windows if it makes a difference
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Got a “disable your adblocker” popup on that article. The third bullet point in the article is about reducing annoyances like ads. Ridiculous.
The site owners have different values and notices than any one writer or journalist. The problem with ads is they became too intrusive. So ad blockers block all, including on respectful websites. It’s better for consumers to block all, but journalism does with no revenue and most don’t want to pay. We don’t yet have a middle ground.
Somebody should make a standard for non-intrusive, not spying, ethical ads (no clickbaits, no contrasting colors, related to the article, etc. etc.).
Adblocks would have websites that strictly follow these guidelines in a whitelist by default (opt-out).
That’s the middle ground. But, I doubt any big ad company like Google or Meta would push for it, if not against.
Adblock Plus did something similar to that.
Then it turned out they were taking bribes to whitelist some providers and then we’re back to square one.
Oh well.
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That’s why adblock wanted to by default allow not annoying ads, but there was a big backlash and other adblockers became more popular like ublock
androidpolice have had lots of articles about ad blocking and picking the best one etc.
Then they won’t let anyone view the site when they follow that advice…
For anyone who is unaware, Firefox developer edition on mobile, otherwise known as Firefox nightly, never lost the ability to arbitrarily install extensions. You just need to make your own collection on the Firefox website, and link it in the settings on your phone.
…
I’ve spent so much time waiting for Cookie AutoDelete to be available. And you don’t even need to create a collection, I just installed it from the mozilla addons pageThank you!
Beta has it too these days.
There are also Firefox forks, but you have to install apk manually and then extension are easy to download without developer collection
Fireforks
I have fennec f - droid and can’t find how to download them easily. What fork are you using?
An about:config toggle to enable unoptimized extensions on your own risk, would still have been nice.
Even now, i see no chance for niche extensions who would work fine on mobile, to be enabled.
https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozilla-firefox-android/
The option to install any extension has always been possible it’s just a tad more work to get setup.
I did this ages ago, I just add the extensions I want to the list and then they appear to let me install them
about:config being available at all for regular Firefox for Android would be nice
Wait, it’s not? Iceraven has it.
Unfortunately not. Firefox Beta/Nightly has it, just not the official android-build. They don’t want to expose it to the user for some reason, but appearently it’s still fine to do it on the official pc build.
Use Fennec F-droid, works fine there
Long time Firefox user here. I’m pretty excited about this
About fucking time. I’ve been irritated since the Fenix update broke extensions. I might switch back from Kiwi.
Already had uBlock Origin.
Just need the ones that remove all the stupid cookie/permission popups.
uBlock Origin has cookie/popups filters that you can enable in its settings that work pretty well
Oh my god, I’ve been using ublock for as long as I can remember and had no idea about this! Thank you, now I just have to figure out what I’m doing.
So hyped about this. It’s the main reason I kept on using Firefox and refused to go back to Chrome or any other browser. The experience is too good, to the point I deleted the YT app and just use YT on FF.
YT on Firefox Mobile has the added benefit of letting you swap to desktop mode and play videos with the screen off, no YT Premium needed ;)
Been doing this for years, but if too much of a hack for you, NewPipe also supports background video, and downloading video, or just the audio, which is great if you have a lot of long form audio-focused channels like music reviews, videoessay content, etc.
God dammit give me grouped tabs already
This, that is the only feature I miss from mobile chromium browsers, but the addition of anyways dark mode with dark reader is outweighing it a little bit
yes! I was shocked that was not a feature when I migrated over on mobile.
Cries in Apple.
fr. I hope Firefox would also allow iOS users to install extensions. It’s definitely possible since Orion browser, a browser made by Kagi supports both chrome and firefox extensions on their iOS app (I’m not promoting it at all btw).
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Orion uses WebKit
I wish they would carry on the momentum and also finally support hardware keyboard shortcuts. This is the one thing that’s killing Android tablets for me (I’m not willing to use a Chromium-based browser): https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/need-more-physical-keyboard-support-for-firefox-mobile-on/idi-p/3836
Issue is being tracked here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1794664
also at least on my Android tablet, the tabs are hidden behind a button (like on a phone) rather than being displayed in a bar (like on a desktop), even though at least in landscape mode there would be enough space for the latter. This too should be fixed or configurable.
Game changer!
I’ve been using Fennec for some time. It’s a Firefox fork that lets you install any extension from the Firefox repository. It uses the “addon group” workaround though, hopefully this version of Firefox will work just like the desktop version.
Only thing I want them to add at this point is for the app to remember the bookmarks position I was in. I use a couple of my bookmark folders almost exclusively on mobile, and every time I want to use them I have to click on bookmarks > Desktop Bookmarks > Bookmarks toolbar > Folder.
I just wish they would at least default to opening to a selected folder so I could just default to the toolbar. It’s literally the only thing I miss about Chrome/Brave.
This is extremely annoying, and it’s been a documented enhancement request from the community for years. What’s even more confusing is that it’s only a problem on Android – it works properly on all desktop environments and iOS. I have no idea why they won’t fix it for Android.
I wonder how they’ll implement I am pretty comfortable at the moment with the workaround and Firefox Beta.
