Ad blockers are already dead on Android Chrome. I wish more people would use ad-blocking browsers, perhaps Firefox, but Fenix is somewhat slower than Chrome, and is a software train wreck of bugs.
What bugs? Ff had an upgrade not long ago where they made it difficult to use extensions, and the UI has been made worse (or I'm just old and set in my ways), but bugs? It just works. If it is slow, I never noticed.
I'm using Firefox Nightly, but many of the issues are present on release too:
- Saving images doesn't send the cookies, so you can't save images gated behind a login. (over 1 year old, not fixed, #17716)
- Switching tabs (by swiping the address bar) sometimes shows the old tab's contents/interaction, with the new tab's address bar. (unsure if reported, I should report it.)
- The menu shows a "sign in to sync" or similar prompt. When I click it, the settings screen shows me as logged in. When I close the settings screen, the menu shows me as logged in. (#19657, possibly #19036 too)
- Reopening a tab moves it to the very top of the list, before your oldest open tab. (fixed in nightly, #10986)
- Opening the tab menu scrolls you to a random place, rather than the currently open tab. (got fixed a few days ago. #20637, possibly #20960 too.)
- Reader mode randomly switches to default theme (fixed a few months ago, #17865)
The impression I get is that Firefox Mobile is shipping broken code and unwanted redesigns, and testing in production. Perhaps it's from a lack of engineering culture and management. Looking at issues like https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/21038, I feel Mozilla is more interested in marketing, design, and analytics, than solid engineering. It's nauseating and depressing to see Mozilla fall so far.
It's funny, because I had the same "what bugs?" response as the parent. After reading your list, I realized that we just use the browser very differently.
I never save images from the web on my phone. I didn't even know you could switch tabs by swiping the address bar (I always open the tab menu). I'd never noticed the "sign in to sync" issue (just checked and I do see the same behavior you see), but it's just a harmless display bug IMO, that doesn't affect functionality. I've never seen the issue where opening the tab menu scrolls to a random place. I rarely use reader mode on mobile, and haven't noticed the theme issues.
The only one I've seen from your list is where reopening a closed tab moves it to the top of the list. But I do that so infrequently that it doesn't bother me.
Agree about Mozilla's engineering culture, in their mobile division at least. It's startling to think that literally the only alternative to a Blink monoculture on Android is a poorly-managed alternative. I now see myself as a holdout of Firefox on desktop, because the constant issues and quagmire of inexplicable UI changes compelled me to move to Brave on mobile.
As an example, the GeckoView ticket[1] that #17716 depends on has been constantly pushed back from v88 to possibly v93 or later over the past year. Being able to save an image that I am able to see on a webpage is what I consider basic functionality, but there does not seem to be much of an acknowledgement from the GeckoView team about its importance.
Another example is this[2] issue report I submitted. It was closed because they "couldn't address it", and even after providing a video showing the exact problem, my report was still ignored. The issue is that it does not matter whether or not they consider it a problem, because I do, and Chromium does not have the same problem. That only makes me more likely to choose Chromium over Firefox. Compound that a dozen times over, and for me, practicality wins out over principle.
I'm also worried about the long-term stability of their mobile division - not only because of Servo, but because issues related to the mobile team being understaffed and overworked had come to light in at least once instance in the past. Mobile web browsers are becoming far too important to get wrong in the present day, and after realizing this fact, I have to wonder why Mozilla's financial structure still prevents direct contributions to their development teams for Firefox, and why they are still using what resources they do have on far less important projects like Mozilla VPN or Relay.
I believe it was fixed a while ago, but I had pull to refresh disabled as a workaround at the time (when they finally made it configurable).
The pull-to-refresh implementation is a prime example of a buggy feature that was pushed out too early and only underwent sufficent testing only after it reached users. Some of the issues stemming from it still weren't fixed even a year afterwards, and they appeared in places as critical as Google's search results page.
> The pull-to-refresh implementation is a prime example of a buggy feature that was pushed out too early and only underwent sufficent testing only after it reached users.
I found out that this may not be accurate. Looking at https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/21175, pull-to-refresh is simply absent from release builds, and only present in nightly builds. I wish it worked properly there though.
> Ff had an upgrade not long ago where they made it difficult to use extensions
You're talking about the old extension API, which was more of a "do whatever the heck you want" than an actual API, at that point in time it was pure technical debt - Mozilla was on a clock to remove it, or Firefox could never hope to stay competitive. It was a major roadblock in enabling modern sandboxing / isolation, performance improvements, developer productivity, etc.
Can't you see they had no other alternative? They wouldn't lose the few die-hard users that absolutely "needed" their browser to do insane shit, because there was no other (maintained, modern) browser that could do all of that; and the sympathy of the remaining 99.999% of their user base was at stake. Whichever option Mozilla would go for, the 0.0001% would get the same thing - the browser you were OK with, eventually stops getting updates, becomes irrelevant, and dies.
> If it is slow, I never noticed.
Luckily we can rely on tooling, such as benchmarks and profilers, to gather actual empirical data, and use that to guide our decisions. Whatever may not be a noticeable difference on your system, could have an enormous impact on another. I remember switching from Chrome to FF right around Quantum, because it was finally usable on my hardware.
No, I'm talking about only supporting "trusted" extensions (all 17 of them, last I checked) unless you use nightly and install extensions through a predefined list.
> Luckily we can rely on tooling, such as benchmarks and profilers, to gather...
> I remember switching from Chrome to FF right around Quantum, because it was finally usable on my hardware.
What are you talking about? I'm on an ancient phone and FF is far from slow. Is Chrome faster by X percent? Who cares. Installing an ad blocker is all one needs^W^W I need to surf the net easily.
