Re:Firefox Android now supports tampermonkey
by jeroenhd on Friday February 17, 2023 @10:17AM
(#34835591)
It was basically a complete rewrite. Mozilla moved from a bundled browser + UI to a GeckoView component with a browser UI on top.
I'm not sure anyone else actually uses GeckoView. I only know about it because their argument for disabling about:config is that users could mess up the bindings between GeckoView and the browser, forcing you to clear the browser's data to get it working again if you mess up the internals.
The old browser definitely could've used some refactoring but after the rewrite almost every feature that made Firefox interesting disappeared. They also changed how user-installed certificate authorities are handled (if you, as a user install your own CA, you need to tap the Firefox logo in the settings seven times to open up special secret settings and enable loading the CA in there).
Firefox currently has two things going for it: their tracking prevention being built in, and a few useful addons. If you don't use those or don't care too much about them, you should switch to Chromium (I recommend Bromite as an alternative, which has ad blocking built in and even rudimentary user script support without addons) because Firefox is a lot slower in comparison.
I'm not sure anyone else actually uses GeckoView. I only know about it because their argument for disabling about:config is that users could mess up the bindings between GeckoView and the browser, forcing you to clear the browser's data to get it working again if you mess up the internals.
The old browser definitely could've used some refactoring but after the rewrite almost every feature that made Firefox interesting disappeared. They also changed how user-installed certificate authorities are handled (if you, as a user install your own CA, you need to tap the Firefox logo in the settings seven times to open up special secret settings and enable loading the CA in there).
Firefox currently has two things going for it: their tracking prevention being built in, and a few useful addons. If you don't use those or don't care too much about them, you should switch to Chromium (I recommend Bromite as an alternative, which has ad blocking built in and even rudimentary user script support without addons) because Firefox is a lot slower in comparison.