1) Most people experience most of the "web" on their phones via a non-browser. This may be by clicking on a shared link within the FB/Twitter/WhatEver app and seeing it inside an integrated WebView, or it may simply be viewing content normally available via the web through the lens of an app presenting the "same" content "natively". Either way, the point here is that browsers have had less of a role.
2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here.
The above may not be the case for the typical HN crowd, but it's quite naïve to think the majority want and act the same as we.
I am hopeful that this trend is changing - that slowly dedicated mobile web browsers are becoming a more viable option - but certainly this was not the case when Fennec was launched. The best we could hope for was for Chrome/Safari to gain ground over "apps". Mozilla's offerings never stood any real chance of being super successful in this early climate and tbh FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.
I really want uBlock and uMatrix like on the desktop. When I tried from within FF on my phone neither were supported.
Yes, as well as many other extensions. I'm using Self-Destructing Cookies, Desktop by Default, Smarter Scrolling and Android Text Reflow in addition to uBlock, thus tweaking my mobile browsing experience to something much better than the stock browser.
We seem to be heading towards a browser engine monoculture, and i am not sure i like that even if said engine is open source.
- UBlock Origin
- NoScript
- HTTPS Everywhere
- Self-Destructing Cookies
- Better Privacy (remove Flash cookies and delete Local Storage)
- Canvas Blocker
I've found most plugins that work on desktop Firefox work on Android Firefox.
They should have pursued commercial strategies like becoming the default browser for Samsung and others. That would have got them around the "default" problem. Sell the "differentiation", build a kick-ass browser for Android; that would have given them a chance. They didn't even try it.
And yet Firefox, for a period of time, had trumped IE on Windows. And of course, Chrome trumps IE on Windows today.
Besides, the "age of the OS" doesn't matter -- the age of the users does, and younger users tend to be even more savvy and favorable of third party browsers.
Android's browser was never in a position quite that bad.
I disagree, which is why I cited Chrome for Android as an example. It was not the default for a while (a couple of years at least?) but was still fairly popular. I remember doing webdev at the time and getting bug reports for Chrome. I also have received bug reports for Chrome for iOS.
I agree that it's hard to beat a good default, but the original Android Browser was so bad that it opened the door for competition.
Firefox is at a similar position here because on mobile nobody cares about a browser with slightly more functionalities than the builtin one.
Firefox had an opportunity to become what Chrome for Android eventually became; the better 3rd party browser. But they made 2 critical mistakes (as an outside observer):
1. They didn't take mobile (and specifically Android) very seriously at first. Fennec felt like a side-project at best. 2. XUL didn't work very well on Android, and it took them a long time to make the switch to native.
I believe things could have turned out very differently had they done the right thing from the beginning.