A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 16:58 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693)
In reply to: A quarter century of Mozilla by Cyberax
Parent article: A quarter century of Mozilla

If I've not got the wrong end of some stick or other, "Firefox" in the Android store *is* Fenix (and previously was Fennec) - "Fenix" and "Fennec" are just code names for the Android variant, and are "marketed" as Firefox just like the desktop variant.

Fennec apparently struggled with stability & performance and Fenix replaced it in 2020 to be less demanding (in development work and CPU/RAM) but got that in part by omitting some add-on APIs and support for dead mobile platforms.

According to a bit of googling, there's wider support for add-ons coming. The curated list of add-ons seems to be expanding incrementally, but more interestingly, the "Firefox Beta for Testers" and "Firefox Nightly for Developers" streams have support for your own "extension collections" and there's work apparently going on to support more of the add-on API. Time will tell how far/quickly this goes, how well it works, how much of it reaches the stable stream and how easy it'll be UI-wise to install arbitrary add-ons...

Access to add-ons that give *me* control of *my* browsing experience is a "killer feature" for a web browser, IMNSHO (and the #1 reason Firefox is the only contender at the moment) so I hope this work bears bounteous fruit quickly!

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 20:51 UTC (Sun) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

As a user of both Fennec and Fenix, I will dispute that Fenix is less resource intensive or less buggy.

Fennec runs well on my old Nexus 9, Fenix is painfully slow.

Unfortunately Cloudflare has started blocking Fennec because of its age, I suppose I'll just have to give up on that tablet.

Fenix runs mostly fine on my current phone, but still has not implemented the tab queue feature.
it also has an annoying bug where a tab will hang, not making progress. I can unblock by killing another tab.

While Fenix Nightly finally after an interminable wait allows me to develop extensions I find it quite annoying that the extensions only work while the USB cable is plugged in. To have it available untethered I have to sign and upload.

I haven't found any websites which work in Fenix but not in Fennec, various features that I would like to use, ServiceWorkers, WebAudio do not work properly in either.

Most featureful Android browser is Kiwi browser, it used to have some stability issues, but has been fine lately.