Firefox for iOS now available

Re:Firefox for iOS now available by biot on Thursday November 12, 2015 @08:51PM (#10557549)

I'm not sure what you mean by private search shortcuts. Would this be a search box that you type something, press ENTER, and it does a search in a normal tab or I could do something else to make it search in a private tab? Or something as easy as Chrome's three dots > "New Incognito Tab" and I could immediately search from the URL bar would be fine.

Having played around with Firefox on my iPad, here are some things which are annoying (I mentioned a few of these elsewhere in this thread). I can see that many of these decisions were likely taking into account the limited real estate on an iPhone where I can understand the limitations, but it makes for a poor iPad experience. Safari and Chrome generally get these correct in a single app by adjusting the functionality based on the screen size.

  - Adding a tab takes two steps: click the number box then
    click "+" to add a tab.
  - Closing a tab takes two steps as well. Why no "x" to close?
    The "star" icon is exactly where I'd expect the close option
    to be. Consider the frequency of someone closing a tab vs.
    marking a URL as a favorite and the resulting UI should be
    obvious.
  - Adding a private tab is three steps: click the number box,
    then click the Private Browsing icon, then click "+".
  - Swapping between regular and private tabs involves three
    steps: click the number box, enable/disable the private
    icon, then click on the tab you want to focus on. In Chrome,
    this is one step: click the Incognito icon which immediately
    swaps between the most recent active tabs in each mode.
  - You can only view one tab at a time. Not only does this make
    switching between tabs tedious but you also lose context;
    not seeing a tab you've opened in the background that you
    mean to read later will generally go unread.
  - "Settings" available via the tab management interface. This is
    a rather unintuitive location to manage application settings.
    Why not have app settings available from within the iOS
    Settings app?
  - Editing the URL of a tab hides the tab's content. Not sure what
    the thinking was here, but if I want to access thumbnails,
    bookmarks, etc. I'll do this from a new tab, not by manually
    editing a URL. Consider the use case of a URL shown in a web page
    but it contains tracking info. I might want to manually type it
    instead of clicking, so when the page contents vanish it's
    difficult to do that.
  - Unable to search for text on the page.

That's what I've run into after five minutes of playing with it. I might keep this on my iPhone, but as it stands it's unusable (compared to alternatives) on an iPad. Safari and Chrome generally get the iPad UX right.

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Re:Firefox for iOS now available by happy-dude on Thursday November 12, 2015 @11:46PM (#10558057)

@st3fan, riding off biot's comment because he hit a lot of the right points.

First off, congrats, this is amazing and beautiful. I've been a long time Firefox poweruser, and here are some of the things I noticed myself:

    - Lack of differentiation between bookmarks, history, open pages, tags, etc. in URL bar.

This is vital for a power user feature I use a lot: browser.url.restrict.* (in about:config), allowing me to quickly get to a page from history, an open tab, or a bookmark. You get the idea :)

    - Inability to reorder tabs
    - No context of tabs opened/ to switch to
    - Unable to specify sync categories
    - Unable to disable password saving asks

Overall, biot is right: this is great from a iPhone POV, but from a iPad POV, there are more controls to bring into view to bring it to parity with Safari/ Chrome. As for going beyond what Safari and Chrome offers on iOS, carrying over the spirit of power user features and customization will definitely do it (like the AwesomeBar icon hints, switch to tab, urlbar match, search keywords, and more).

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