Not that anyone is asking me, but I think the mobile browser is a limiter. No matter how much I like a given desktop browser, I like bookmark & password syncing more. Unfortunately for me I find the Firefox desktop browser is first class, but the mobile browser is not. As a result it's almost immediately ruled out.

I've never seen anyone else mention this so I might be a tiny minority.

I vehemently disagree. With support for add-ons including uBlock Origin, it's one of the very few usable browsers on mobile.

That said, new Firefox mobile is way faster and the nightly build already has uBlock support. Best of both worlds.

Things got a bit better over time, but unfortunately the thing that eventually fixed it was when I got a new phone. Now I get around 2-3 90Hz frames, which is still worse than chrome, but far less noticeable. I have not measured "New Firefox"/Fenix/Preview yet, but it does feel like it's a bit closer to chrome.

Whenever I've tried other browsers - Chrome, Brave, DDG - having to click "I accept" on every single webpage to remove the "This site uses cookies!" pop-up is really tedious. I hope the Firefox on Mobile add-ons support doesn't just start and end at ublock origin.

(I don't use uBlock on mobile, but I might go look into it...)

My only complaint is that it doesn't integrate quite as well as Chrome, but I don't think that's Mozilla's fault.

There's a reason Mozilla is rewriting the whole thing.

That LG v35 outspecs my BlackBerry KEYone by a good margin, and Firefox is just as fast as Chrome for me. Which is to say, snappy.

I read more details about your performance problems in another comment, and it sounds horrible; I can't imagine anyone using that. Sounds like a nasty bug, I guess..?

Unless I am wrong, which I hope I am.

AFAIK, you cannot install uBlock (or any add-on) on Firefox for iOS.

Plugins support is lacking, that is true.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-display...

[2] https://www.xda-developers.com/mozilla-transition-users-from...

When I first heard of people complaining that it is atrocious, it was as much news to me as it is to you that it is excellent in my experience. I agree it's a weird phenomenon.

My issue with stable is that it's slow. Everything about it is slow. Pages that load immediately in Chrome take double digit seconds in Firefox. When they do load, scrolling lags my finger and jerks around, and zooming is noticeable unresponsive. The acceleration curves feel off too. On my mid-range tablet performance is so bad it gives me a headache.

So I might open a link in my email app, then when I tap the back button on the phone, the expected behaviour is it will close the tab and return to the email app. Instead I'm finding it navigating back to the page that was open previously on the tab that was already open.

On heavier sites it's inevitable that it will crash. Years ago Chrome/Chrome Beta also had this problem (the root cause is with the phone hardware/android) but somehow they managed to catch it and not bring down the whole browser app.

I still use it despite the other main drawback (being slower than chrome beta on heavy sites, like say twitter) because I like my uBlock and tab-sync, but every so often I get so annoyed at it that I avoid it for about a month until Chrome even with basic adblocking via Blokada makes me mad enough to switch back.

The Android version was released a year later, three years after (the frankly pretty unappealing) Android 1.0 release. It was within months of Opera's Android launch. Hardly "very late."

That probably got a lot of people's attention.

By satisfying the needs of users who

> have used Firefox but have faced issues and would want to try it if <...>

You’re right that every time there’s a Firefox release, it rises to the top of HN with the same comments. I’ve stopped commenting, but I’ll do so now since you asked.

Gripes with Firefox I’ve seen on HN include bad midi support and lack of (or broken) support for macOS features such as the Keychain.

My reason for not using Firefox (and I inadvertently get people out of it) is that it’s atrocious for automation on macOS. It’s the only major browser without AppleScript support, and the bug report open for it is old enough to vote.

When I’ve talked to people from Mozilla about it, I’ve gotten the reply that AppleScript is a power user feature that regular users don’t care for. What they fail to understand is that power users build features for others. I have several tools that interact with web browsers that are relatively popular with non-power users. Every time they ask “can you add support for Firefox?” my answer needs to be “I’d like to, but they don’t provide the functionality”. You can be certain that several of those abandon Firefox, because they’d rather have the convenience of the tool.

You can have Firefox “thrive and grow” by giving its users what they need. It doesn’t matter how “private” Firefox is (and Mozilla has done plenty to not be trusted blindly on that regard) if people can’t use it as their daily browser.

Probably the same as anything else: find a USP that resonates with a large number of potential users.

It used to be customisation and extensions, but it's been more than 2 years since Quantum and there are still numerous ways that my everyday browsing experience is worse now than it was before. I suspect that for a lot of people, Firefox is no longer particularly associated with being more customisable than any other browser, even if it was before.

Today I suspect the best shot for a solid USP is the privacy/security angle, which is what kept me on Firefox as my default browser in the end despite it being much inferior after 57. But the marketing for that is inconsistent and gets drowned out in all the who-cares features that Firefox keeps introducing.

Ironically, the breakage of extensions has probably contributed significantly to the loss of confidence in the security/privacy side, since it took out a lot of useful enhancements in those areas. Normal people don't understand tools like uBlock Origin, which are powerful but have UIs that make Git's look intuitive and well-designed, and in 2020 a simple, effective ad-blocker is entry-level for a decent browsing experience.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adguard-adblo...

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardBrowserExtension

I debugged something similar in Angular about 18 months ago, didn't have time to report it and blamed it on Google not testing in other browsers.

The issue was reported (7 years ago) by Chris Wilson, who's been at Google working on WebAudio stuff for years and has published lots of related articles and repos. I'm a big fan. https://github.com/cwilso

There's even a comment from someone at Ableton, expressing interest and support ("testing with preliminary builds as well as providing hardware for implementers to test with"). That was 2 years ago, and no one from Firefox engaged them?! Sounds like a huge missed opportunity.

Sadly, the last comment a year ago was from a person no longer at Mozilla, saying the issue is stalled and that it's "very low priority work".

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Edit: Aah, now I'm imagining what might have been, a collaboration between Firefox and Ableton, would have been so cool..

The solution is to partner with celebrities, the biggest ones, to make Firefox more popular as a choice for better privacy.

If you want to jump right in and look for bugs that match your skills/interest, try: https://codetribute.mozilla.org/

Now that's normal and I've sorta acclimated for the past 3 years.