I wish the article would talk a bit more about security. Here's what the GrapheneOS project has to say about Firefox [1]:
> Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
If you're someone who's taking GrapheneOS' thread model into account, a locked down native browser is definitely better.
Chrome has a whole bunch of cool security tricks that definitely outshine many other browsers, but I find it all rather inconsequential when the using Chrome leads to such a terrible, privacy-hostile experience.
I use Graphene OS and I like it a lot, but 1) I have the feeling that, with Android's Decree coming, they are counting their days left to live. Unfortunately they built an amazing OS on very shaky foundations, it's not their fault, it's the mobile OS ecosystem that sucks. And 2) They (or, better, their benevolent dictator) tend to be very silly when it comes to threat modeling, as in "my way is the only one that makes sense". Personally, I prefer to use a browser like Firefox that allows me to block every annoying ads and to customize my experience as I want, rather than a super-secure fully isolated browser like Vanadium that a) does not replace Chrome anyway for many websites that require strong attestations (e.g. Wise's verification works on GOS with Chrome but not with Vanadium), and b) it's still based on Chromium, so still built on shaky Google foundations. With Mozilla's questionable choices over time, I keep my fingers crossed for Ladybird or Servo, or similar.
The Graphene team has seemingly partnered with an OEM, who is releasing binary security patches for them already (with source code available after embargo lifts). Hardware does not seem too far away at this point either.
If google is doing something as drastic as intervening in the installation of all apps, they're not likely to sell phones with unlocked bootloaders - the pixels that GrapheneOS currently depends on 100% - much longer.
Just serve them through any http server on termux! Works as you'd expect, but on FF you need to manually add the http:// prefix in the URL bar if you navigate to an IP address like 127.0.0.1. Not sure why it doesn't figure that out by itself.
Firefox mobile was basically the only option I considered for a long time just because it lets you install Ublock origin . Not sure if other mobile browsers have that now too or not. I'm a firefox user on desktop anyway so I love having tab sharing between my phone and all my pcs. They also added a nice feature recently that optionally requires an additional login (fingerprint) to access private tabs. I have found no reason to switch.
I teach CS at a state university, specifically computer security. At the beginning of this semester, I did a poll of my students and asked if they use any form of ad-blocking. Less than a third of my students did, and not many more even knew about browsers other than Chrome or Safari. This was out of a class of ~110.
Granted, it's anecdotal, but if 66% of my upper-division CS students don't even know about Firefox and ad-blocking, than I seriously doubt many non-tech people do.
Similarly, after that lecture, I had a student come to my office hours and ask for more info about ad-blockers. I had them open up msn.com and showed them the large banner ad on the page. It took a few seconds for them to even realize they were being advertised to! I then showed them my browser, nice and ad-free.
I get the impression that people have gotten so used to ads flashing in their face that they gloss over them. But the damage is still done.
Although I didn't collect numbers, but I made a similar experience in my workplace. I assume many people are highly distracted by ads and work efficiency is even reduced. Even many software engineers seem to not be aware of ublock... Would be interesting to know how many students started using an ad blocker at the end of your lecture :)
I have been using Firefox + ad blockers almost exclusively for almost 20 years now on all my devices. I also install Firefox + uBlock Origin for all my family members. I'm constantly suprised when I look at other people's browsers. How can they put up with all those ads, especially on YouTube? (I have uBlock disabled for a certain national newspaper and I'm pretty close to paying for a subscription instead :)
I was curious and obviously there is no single exact source but it seems like ~30% of web users have an ad blocker of some kind. Remember that some quite popular browsers include a built-in ad blocker.
I recently figured I'd try browsing without a dedicated adblocker. Using NextDNS, configured with several adblockers, I thought it would be interesting to see how effective it would be alone.
In approximately no time at all, I wanted to go full Amish. Maybe Office Space.
Ublock should be protected as a religion. It is divinely inspired and a modern miracle. I know about false idols and the antichrist and all that, but I think even Jesus would approve. Gorhill is a Saint.
I noticed google cloud console runs extremely slow (practically unusable) on Firefox Android while there're no issues with Chrome. No issues with any other site which I find strange.
Yeah, that's really sad and totally undermines my UX on iOS (my iPad particularly). On my Android phone and macOS FF is my go-to browser, a delightful, irreplaceable experience. Sometimes people are amazed by the experience when I show them, look, no ads. But then they go back to their phones and just use whatever crap they use.
I was hoping that the EU directive [1] would give FF a chance of using their own engine, at least in the EU, but no word from that camp, so... I guess not.
I've been using it for years and it is really great. I haven't had to open Chrome for a non-working website in quite a while. Adblock is really something -- you _really_ notice it if you have the misfortune of using a different browser.
The only equivalent to this for iOS is Orion by Kagi. I'm not sure how, but they've managed to avoid drawing apples ire while providing access to both Chrome and Firefox's plugin ecosystems.
I use Orion for my daily mobile web browser and it works fine, the plugin support is generally very good in my experience and you can always post any bugs and they do get looked at. It's worth a shot anyway.
I don't run Android anymore, but when I did (about two years ago) I uninstalled Firefox because, as far as I could tell, it didn't properly background tabs when the app was closed. I didn't realize this initially, so I was unsure why my battery life was terrible and my phone as always hot. Being able to install extensions was neat, but not worth it for killing my battery.
Suffice to say, I do not agree that it's the "best mobile browser" on Android.
My mobile Firefox consistently has an infinity icon instead of a true count of the tabs (presumably because there are so many. Likely hundreds) and I notice no slowdown or battery issues whatsoever
A sibling comment says it has improved in the last couple years, which is entirely possible. I'm pretty sure I'm not wrong about it not properly backgrounding tabs in 2023.
Yeah and your experience is 2 years out of date. Especially in recent months the firefox for android experience got better exponentially.
I am a tab hoarder (a few thousand open tabs) and 2 years ago firefox needed 15 seconds on a fresh start to load. It's instantanious now.
Firefox for android tried to force "inactive" tabs down my throat (I'm sure it helps, but no I don't want it. You can easily disable it in the tabs settings btw). Tabs that didn't get used for 2 weeks get put in an "inactive" state.
A few months ago switching to an open tab took a few seconds up to a minute. For a month or two it's now instantanious.
There are way more optimizations done and I can often tell right away when something got better or worse.
Suffice to say your "experience" is so much out of date it is not even funny. Comparing firefox 2 years ago today is a joke and firefox feels completely different (user interface and speed) and your comment only spreads FUD. Anybody reading this that hasn't tried firefox for android - give it a try!
It's not "just spreading FUD", I disclosed the timeline of when I used it and why I don't think it was a good app. Whether or not it's better now doesn't change the fact that two years ago they had an objectively terrible app that I had a terrible experience with that they still put their name on, and as such I am going to associate it with the experiences I've had. That's not weird; I can only really assess things based on the experiences I've had with them.
I'm glad it has improved but I feel like you claiming this is implying dishonesty on my end, and I do not think that's fair.
I was not claiming dishonesty and I'm sorry if it felt that way. My main problem is that a review of software that is getting updates as often as firefox that is based on 2 year old experience feels so wrong.
I myself am no stranger to critizing firefox. They have done some thigns that made me nearly switch multiple times. But especially in recent times I feel that they are finally getting their act together (vertical tabs in firefox, performance optimizations, actually asking for feedback, ...) and I know that for me user reviews on hn are more valuable than random bloggers I find through $searchengine. Your comment is actually way more transparent than those blogs that have no date mapped to them or are just AI spam or whatever so again sorry for not giving credit where credit is due, I just find it unfair to write under a recent article experiences that are far from the present reality. (sorry for rambling and being kinda incoherent)
The fact that they released an app in such a horribly broken state in 2023 (with such horrible UX with behavior that literally no one wants their phone to have) still says a lot about their development process and does not speak well for what they think is "production ready". They attached their name on it, they didn't say it was "alpha" or "beta", and as the saying goes, you only get one chance at making a first impression.
Again, this isn't weird, this is how everyone acts. If you got food poisoning at a restaurant the first time you went, you might not be inclined to go back to that restaurant even if someone tells you "I swear man, it's gotten better, they wash their hands now!"
This isn't a rag-tag team of people working in their basement for fun. Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company and as such it's not wrong to compare them to Google or Apple.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you understand what "the app was closed" means. A lot of people think that all processing goes to the visible foreground app, but that hasn't been true since the late DOS era. Please learn what's what in the system you're using. Clearly it was running in the background because you onlly had another app or the home acreen open.
I'm saying that when I would go back to the home screen, I still think it was using the same amount of power as if it were in the foreground. I think it was using the full amount of processing for each tab the entire time. This is not the behavior that anyone wants for any mobile app ever. I think the app is poorly made, or at least it was in 2023 when I last used it.
I know that kernels are preemptive and have multiple processes running. Feel free to look at my post history if you don't believe me.
Sorry I said the word "closed" when I meant "backgrounded" if that upsets you, but it was pretty obvious what I meant and I am pretty sure you knew that, so I think you're being needlessly pedantic.
Come on man, do you genuinely think that anyone has ever wanted, on a phone, to have all their tabs running at full power in their pocket? I really don't think this "needs citation".
> It wasn't. It was possible to work the intended meaning out, but not without initial confusion, which is far from "pretty obvious".
It actually was pretty obvious, especially since I said it didn't "properly background tabs", implying that I think things should, you know, be backgrounded, almost as if I know that things run in the background. Saying "closed" was a linguistic shorthand and while I am not going to conduct a broad survey I think most people on this particular forum actually knew what I meant immediately.
It's not up to you to decide whether your communication happened to be obvious or not, and you are being told that you're wrong on this, which is enough of a proof that it wasn't.
> do you genuinely think
Yes, as guided by experiences with fighting various Android mechanisms to respect the will of the user and keep something running in the background, and using an OS that doesn't suspend background applications at all.
I think the person is being actively dishonest, as I think you might be too, because I think that anyone who frequents this forum knew what I meant.
Also who says I can’t determine if something is obvious? Hyperbolic example: If I say “my favorite color is green” and you say “well color doesn’t mean anything and is seriously just a spectrum of light and how it reflects off surfaces and really you should learn how light works before making such sweeping statements”, then I think it’s reasonable to say “I obviously meant that I liked how this particular spectrum of light looked on my optic nerve and deciphered by my brain when it reflected on things”, and I could say it’s obvious to everyone, even people who made the comment, because everyone knew what I meant.
I said something about tabs not being “backgrounded”, implying backgrounding, implying things running in the background. Any reasonable person would conclude that I meant about things running in the background.
And if I don’t get to decide if things are “obvious” then you don’t get to decide if you’re being reasonable.
> Yes, as guided by experiences with fighting various Android mechanisms to respect the will of the user and keep something running in the background, and using an OS that doesn't suspend background applications at all.
Even if I believed this, I do not think it should be the default behavior for something that will spend most of its life in someone’s pocket (by design).
Any reasonable person would have assumed that if you wanted to talk about backgrounding, you wouldn't have used a word with a very different meaning to refer to it. As I said, the fact that it was possible to infer the intended meaning does not mean it's obvious; the interring process being required proves the opposite.
> And if I don’t get to decide if things are “obvious” then you don’t get to decide if you’re being reasonable.
Of course. I might be not. But what I'm sure of is that I'm honest and I'm giving you a piece of information that may make you better at communicating in the future, entirely avoiding discussions like this one. Whether you use it to improve yourself or decide that I'm "unreasonable" is up to you and your ego.
> I do not think it should be the default behavior for something that will spend most of its life in someone’s pocket (by design)
If I don't want an app to run, I close it. If I do want it to run in the background, I don't close it but put it in the background instead. If I don't want to use the phone at all, I suspend the whole device. This is the design that has worked perfectly well on my phones for almost two decades now and was always the default there.
This is getting circular. I think you're actively lying if you say you didn't immediately parse what I said. I think you knew what I meant immediately, and I think you're being needlessly pedantic, which is fine but I think you should just be upfront about that.
I used a word arguably incorrectly ("closed") (though I would like to point out the iOS shortcuts uses that terminology as well), but the surrounding context about being backgrounded makes it very apparent.
Keep in mind, the person who initially responded started giving me a lecture about single-tasking operating systems, as if I don't know that most operating systems are multitasking. Pretty much anyone who frequents this forum will know that operating systems are multitasking, and given that and the fact that I said "backgrounded", it should be immediately obvious what I meant. Neither I nor anyone else here needed to explain to me (or most other people) about multitasking operating systems. This is what I was initially responding to, because the person told me to "Please learn what's what in the system you're using", which is pretty douchey in general, and especially douchey since they're lying about not understanding what I meant.
If I didn't have to ask myself the question "wait, so did they actually mean 'closed' or was that supposed to mean 'backgrounded'?" before I could parse the comment I wouldn't have bothered replying at all.
I’m often surprised how little people talk about the iOS Orion browser on here and it’s ability to let you use both Firefox and chrome extensions. I’ve been using it for a while now and it’s been great. It’s a little bit buggy sometimes, but nothing that would make me switch.
Brave is my favorite, though I prefer Firefox on my laptops. Brave mobile: excellent ad-blocking, download videos for offline viewing. No tinkering needed to make it excellent. It’s excellent out of the box.
I've been using Firefox on desktop for decades and really want to like it on mobile, but I just can't get used to the behavior of new tabs . After just a bit of browsing, it opens 10+ new tabs and there's no way to configure this differently. It's such a shame.
Orion was my daily driver on iOS/macOS for a fair bit ~8 months ago. It wasn’t the most stable and didn’t block ads reliably in YouTube videos either. Planning to give it another shot next year. I certainly like the Kagi ethos better than Brave - the product functionality just wasn’t there yet.
I have youtube premium so I guess I hadn't noticed. it seems perfectly stable and usable to me though so maybe you're more of a power user than me. I do most of my browser on a laptop to be honest
Firefox for Android is missing a bunch of privacy options available on desktop. Right now, I'm forced to always use private browsing mode (sorry, I've forgotten the reason but I do remember that I tried again recently without it and something broke) and I still have no option to allow persistent cookies for specific domains. Other than that it's a really solid mobile browser.
This is not applicable on iOS. The Firefox app remains a wrapper built on Apple’s WebKit engine rather than a fully native implementation. However, with the recent release of uBlock for iOS, Safari has become significantly more tolerable. I’ve tried many so‑called “browsers” (acknowledging they’re all essentially WebKit wrappers), but none match Safari’s energy efficiency or the seamlessness of its sync features.
TIL about UBlock on IOS. Is it good? I've just switched to IOS and have been trying the free version of 1Blocker but it wasn't removing stuff like pop ups.
NextDNS has proven effective for me on iOS. On mobile devices I have the app and my home router is configured to force all DNS requests to use NextDNS servers.
Maybe the plugin ecosystem can paper over some of the deficiencies, but Firefox is slowly taking away user agency and privacy in the name of simplification / whatever Chrome does.
The recent windmill against which I am tilting: Firefox no longer shows you the complete URL. Either in the address bar or long pressing a link. This is incredibly hostile to those of us with technical proficiency which can inspect a URL to see if it is a bad domain or embedding tracking information we would like to strip.
My other long standing annoyance is that on mobile, I can no longer protect cookies. Always keep the cookie to say my HN login, but allow me to bulk delete everything else. Instead, I am forced to manually go through the cookie page (like 10 at a time) and delete everything I do not want.
Firefox on Android could maybe be the best, and I use it exclusively, but it's certainly not without its flaws:
- the confusing home screen comes up all the time after i leave the browser, while i just want to get back to the last tab
- try closing all private tabs, it then goes on to show the now empty list of private tabs, wtf? The point of closing the tabs was to get back to the regular tabs.
- for all i care a private tab can just be listed next to a normal tab, the grouping in private tabs serves no purpose, except for surfacing implementation details
- filtering bookmarks on tags doesn't work in any version AFAIK
- but it's the only way to listen to youtube, with ublock origin and Youtube audio_only
The killer feature of Opera Mobile is that it displays desktop website with desktop-sized text, and when I zoom in, it adjusts the width of the text, so that text is legible no matter how much I zoom in. Do other browsers have something like that?
Firefox mobile was unusable slow for most sites I visited and had rendering issues - probably not FF's fault, but webdevs only testing on Chrome. Brave has been very fast with all the spyware and ad blocking features I was looking for in FF. I just had to disable all the crypto stuff first.
i prefer the Brave mobile app. I previously used firefox focus, but I basically just made brave into a focus app by turning on Private Browsing Only, but can also disable the functionality when needed.
Orion (from Kagi) is a strong contender. It's not (yet) fully open-source, but Kagi has bona fides when it comes to privacy. Orion blocks trackers and ads by default, has no telemetry, and is designed to avoid sending any user data to its servers. Lower memory footprint and battery consumption (reportedly; citation needed).
And it can run FF extensions.
Not exactly in the same way, as Apple nerfed adblocking a few years ago. Works fine for most sites, but good luck blocking the more aggressive methods.
And what will you do if Google decides to disable your account?
Bitwarden is free, has clients and browser extensions for every platform, and it's easy to export your passwords and import them. Plus it supports SSH keys.
they don't have an export function? I did that with lastpass -> bitwarden and it was a little bit of a hassle it wasn't too bad, just need to makes sure the exported cvs looked correct, no issues and didn't find anything wrong. I imagine it can go as smooth with chrome -> whatever
I am eccentric. Perhaps consequently, I am unable to understand how a conversation on the subject of Firefox as a mobile browser can exclude the inexplicable removal of about:config.
Yes, Nightly.
But I fear an example of incrementalism here, where it is brightly illustrated how the aperture into which we have the dongle of creeping suckage repeatedly inserted, lubricated by the existence (deterrent) of Chrome, continues to widen.
At the rate which options are disappearing (I think of gnome/gtk), when we excoriate the final and last one, a consummate advertisement platform will have been coded into our DNA, where we not just watch and listen to the perpetual groping of avarice, but feel it existentially.
Mobile Firefox constantly gets bugged and stops rendering pages until you restart it. It also has issues with scrolling on some pages where it won't let you scroll sometimes. Github is notoriously bad, you can't read code if you can't scroll through the file. As a developer not being able to use Github is a deal breaker. The browser itself is also missing features like webgpu. While extentions are nice, the browser engine itself being this broken for years makes it a painful choice.
The browser with the best content blocking options is the best browser and at this moment that means Firefox ends up on top. Now that Mozilla is slow-walking towards doing ad-related things themselves I'm no longer running the branded versions but choose F-Droid's Fennec instead. If ever a browser with better content blocking shows up I'll give it a good look and might switch if it turns out to be at least on the same level as Firefox/Fennec.
That's telling for the state of the web but alas, that's where we are. You give them an inch (-high banner ad) and they'll take a mile (-wide page-covering all-encompassing data-slurping javascript monstrosity).
As long as you pass Apple's arbitrary rules, you can make your own browser for iOS. Ladybug uses Apple's test suite as an arbitrary measure of completeness.
However, no browser engine has bothered so far because they'd need to upload a separate app to the app store specifically for EU users, and non-EU developers cannot debug the application on a real device so manpower is region-restricted unless you hack around the limitations.
> As long as you pass Apple's arbitrary rules, you can make your own browser for iOS. Ladybug uses Apple's test suite as an arbitrary measure of completeness.
The browser is called Ladybird and it isn’t Apple’s test suite, web-platform-tests is a collective effort all the major players contribute to. Almost two thousand people have contributed to it:
> Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
[1]: https://grapheneos.org/usage
Chrome has a whole bunch of cool security tricks that definitely outshine many other browsers, but I find it all rather inconsequential when the using Chrome leads to such a terrible, privacy-hostile experience.
Government agencies have been recommending everyone use an ad blocker for years now.
Edit: It should be mentioned however, that the blocklist for Vanadium is pretty small.
The Graphene team has seemingly partnered with an OEM, who is releasing binary security patches for them already (with source code available after embargo lifts). Hardware does not seem too far away at this point either.
I like the browsing experience a lot but there are a few rough edges for sure.
Who is voluntarily browsing the internet without adblock?
Granted, it's anecdotal, but if 66% of my upper-division CS students don't even know about Firefox and ad-blocking, than I seriously doubt many non-tech people do.
Similarly, after that lecture, I had a student come to my office hours and ask for more info about ad-blockers. I had them open up msn.com and showed them the large banner ad on the page. It took a few seconds for them to even realize they were being advertised to! I then showed them my browser, nice and ad-free.
I get the impression that people have gotten so used to ads flashing in their face that they gloss over them. But the damage is still done.
In approximately no time at all, I wanted to go full Amish. Maybe Office Space.
Ublock should be protected as a religion. It is divinely inspired and a modern miracle. I know about false idols and the antichrist and all that, but I think even Jesus would approve. Gorhill is a Saint.
Hail Saint gorhill!
I was hoping that the EU directive [1] would give FF a chance of using their own engine, at least in the EU, but no word from that camp, so... I guess not.
1. https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
The article says simply "Ublock", but the screens show "uBlock Origin".
"uBlock" and "uBlock Origin" are two different projects.
"uBlock Origin" is the good one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock
I sometimes have to help my mother out with her chrome and I can't fathom how she can navigate anything
Suffice to say, I do not agree that it's the "best mobile browser" on Android.
I'm glad it has improved but I feel like you claiming this is implying dishonesty on my end, and I do not think that's fair.
Again, this isn't weird, this is how everyone acts. If you got food poisoning at a restaurant the first time you went, you might not be inclined to go back to that restaurant even if someone tells you "I swear man, it's gotten better, they wash their hands now!"
This isn't a rag-tag team of people working in their basement for fun. Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company and as such it's not wrong to compare them to Google or Apple.
I know that kernels are preemptive and have multiple processes running. Feel free to look at my post history if you don't believe me.
Sorry I said the word "closed" when I meant "backgrounded" if that upsets you, but it was pretty obvious what I meant and I am pretty sure you knew that, so I think you're being needlessly pedantic.
[citation needed]
> but it was pretty obvious what I meant
It wasn't. It was possible to work the intended meaning out, but not without initial confusion, which is far from "pretty obvious".
Come on man, do you genuinely think that anyone has ever wanted, on a phone, to have all their tabs running at full power in their pocket? I really don't think this "needs citation".
> It wasn't. It was possible to work the intended meaning out, but not without initial confusion, which is far from "pretty obvious".
It actually was pretty obvious, especially since I said it didn't "properly background tabs", implying that I think things should, you know, be backgrounded, almost as if I know that things run in the background. Saying "closed" was a linguistic shorthand and while I am not going to conduct a broad survey I think most people on this particular forum actually knew what I meant immediately.
> do you genuinely think
Yes, as guided by experiences with fighting various Android mechanisms to respect the will of the user and keep something running in the background, and using an OS that doesn't suspend background applications at all.
Also who says I can’t determine if something is obvious? Hyperbolic example: If I say “my favorite color is green” and you say “well color doesn’t mean anything and is seriously just a spectrum of light and how it reflects off surfaces and really you should learn how light works before making such sweeping statements”, then I think it’s reasonable to say “I obviously meant that I liked how this particular spectrum of light looked on my optic nerve and deciphered by my brain when it reflected on things”, and I could say it’s obvious to everyone, even people who made the comment, because everyone knew what I meant.
I said something about tabs not being “backgrounded”, implying backgrounding, implying things running in the background. Any reasonable person would conclude that I meant about things running in the background.
And if I don’t get to decide if things are “obvious” then you don’t get to decide if you’re being reasonable.
> Yes, as guided by experiences with fighting various Android mechanisms to respect the will of the user and keep something running in the background, and using an OS that doesn't suspend background applications at all.
Even if I believed this, I do not think it should be the default behavior for something that will spend most of its life in someone’s pocket (by design).
> And if I don’t get to decide if things are “obvious” then you don’t get to decide if you’re being reasonable.
Of course. I might be not. But what I'm sure of is that I'm honest and I'm giving you a piece of information that may make you better at communicating in the future, entirely avoiding discussions like this one. Whether you use it to improve yourself or decide that I'm "unreasonable" is up to you and your ego.
> I do not think it should be the default behavior for something that will spend most of its life in someone’s pocket (by design)
If I don't want an app to run, I close it. If I do want it to run in the background, I don't close it but put it in the background instead. If I don't want to use the phone at all, I suspend the whole device. This is the design that has worked perfectly well on my phones for almost two decades now and was always the default there.
I used a word arguably incorrectly ("closed") (though I would like to point out the iOS shortcuts uses that terminology as well), but the surrounding context about being backgrounded makes it very apparent.
Keep in mind, the person who initially responded started giving me a lecture about single-tasking operating systems, as if I don't know that most operating systems are multitasking. Pretty much anyone who frequents this forum will know that operating systems are multitasking, and given that and the fact that I said "backgrounded", it should be immediately obvious what I meant. Neither I nor anyone else here needed to explain to me (or most other people) about multitasking operating systems. This is what I was initially responding to, because the person told me to "Please learn what's what in the system you're using", which is pretty douchey in general, and especially douchey since they're lying about not understanding what I meant.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/whats-new-firefox-focus...
The recent windmill against which I am tilting: Firefox no longer shows you the complete URL. Either in the address bar or long pressing a link. This is incredibly hostile to those of us with technical proficiency which can inspect a URL to see if it is a bad domain or embedding tracking information we would like to strip.
My other long standing annoyance is that on mobile, I can no longer protect cookies. Always keep the cookie to say my HN login, but allow me to bulk delete everything else. Instead, I am forced to manually go through the cookie page (like 10 at a time) and delete everything I do not want.
- the confusing home screen comes up all the time after i leave the browser, while i just want to get back to the last tab
- try closing all private tabs, it then goes on to show the now empty list of private tabs, wtf? The point of closing the tabs was to get back to the regular tabs.
- for all i care a private tab can just be listed next to a normal tab, the grouping in private tabs serves no purpose, except for surfacing implementation details
- filtering bookmarks on tags doesn't work in any version AFAIK
- but it's the only way to listen to youtube, with ublock origin and Youtube audio_only
I lost trust in Firefox after Brendan Eich scandal and the way they treated him.
It's one thing to just have an opinion. It's another to use your money to try to actively make the world a worse place.
Also, he was CEO. YES your speech matters if you're CEO. He's not just some dude. He was THE FACE of Mozilla. Obviously, perception matters.
Nothing beats Safari UX on iOS, nothing.
You can hate the engine and lack of extensions, but Safari is the only thing that I can use with both hands seamlessly without breaking my fingers.
Nothing except for the ads you're forced to see that mobile firefox users don't even know exist, thanks to the full fat uBlock Origin.
Bitwarden is free, has clients and browser extensions for every platform, and it's easy to export your passwords and import them. Plus it supports SSH keys.
I still remember this blog post, which at the the time (late 2021), was 100% accurate: https://web.archive.org/web/20230221123127/https://blog.nori...
Yes, Nightly.
But I fear an example of incrementalism here, where it is brightly illustrated how the aperture into which we have the dongle of creeping suckage repeatedly inserted, lubricated by the existence (deterrent) of Chrome, continues to widen.
At the rate which options are disappearing (I think of gnome/gtk), when we excoriate the final and last one, a consummate advertisement platform will have been coded into our DNA, where we not just watch and listen to the perpetual groping of avarice, but feel it existentially.
Does anyone make a Blink-based mobile browser that also blocks ads?
That's telling for the state of the web but alas, that's where we are. You give them an inch (-high banner ad) and they'll take a mile (-wide page-covering all-encompassing data-slurping javascript monstrosity).
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr-2/id1662217862
https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
However, no browser engine has bothered so far because they'd need to upload a separate app to the app store specifically for EU users, and non-EU developers cannot debug the application on a real device so manpower is region-restricted unless you hack around the limitations.
The browser is called Ladybird and it isn’t Apple’s test suite, web-platform-tests is a collective effort all the major players contribute to. Almost two thousand people have contributed to it:
https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/graphs/contributor...