Hi Megi! Thank you for your great work to make the PinePhone so much better than it was when I got it!

(I was going to add a people "I want to thank for their hard work"-section to the post, but lacked the time to do it thoroughly and make sure I would not forget a major contributor, and therefore dropped that.)

;-)

The Firefox video there seems pretty misleading from my personal experience. I got a pinephone a couple of years ago with the intention of doing a little bit of development for it, and using it mostly as a handheld web browser and signal client. Even without plugging into an external monitor I found Firefox unusable for most my needs. With essentially any extensions it would grind to a halt. I don’t run a lot of extensions, but Firefox without ublock origin is essentially worthless to me, and with ublock origin enabled it would take Firefox tens of seconds to start, and several seconds to load a new tab. Scrolling on sites with a lot of images- especially infini-scrolling sites like Twitter was nearly impossible.

I really want to like the pine phone, but whether the fault is hardware or software the result is that it’s just not there for performance in my experience.

I’m hopeful that between the pine phone pro and a bit more time to optimize software it could be one day, but it seems a while off.

Incidentally I have basically the same complaint about the pinebook pro. It’s not unusable, but a very small amount of extra power would take it from being a secondary laptop I only pick up for fun to a real viable daily driver when paired with a powerful desktop.

Firefox performance is better with GPU disabled (on Xorg with noaccel), to reduce RAM bandwidth requirements. Which leaves out most of the fancy wayland compositors.

Yes, opening a badly optimized website, like youtube or twitter is slow. Thankfully there are alternatives like twitter -> nitter, etc.

Software optimization is never going to be solved.

Ultimately, software developers will ALWAYS stress the hardware to the limit. With labor saving software tools or else with performance hogging GUIs.

Simply put, devices need to keep up with the latest and greatest.