LWN: Comments on "A quarter century of Mozilla"

A quarter century of Mozilla

malmedal — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 20:51:55 +0000

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.

A quarter century of Mozilla

flussence — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 18:03:50 +0000

Chromium's fallen a long way. I remember in the early 2010s being amused at the silly attention to detail they put into making it feel not just passable on Linux, but _good_: the non-rectangular overlapping tabs had accurate pointer hit detection, they had special casing in the code to ensure all three mouse buttons did the appropriate action on the tab bar depending on the desktop in use. Small details like that that FOSS had, and has, an unshakable reputation for not giving a damn about. Gtk4's CSD is bad bordering on criminal in comparison.

A quarter century of Mozilla

sammythesnake — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 16:58:34 +0000

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

sammythesnake — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:44:00 +0000

> Power corrupts.

Let's not forget that the flipside is also true: "Corruption Empowers". I.e. those who play fair and eschew evilness miss out on successful (shitty, but undeniably successful) strategies to gain market share / revenue / control...

That's why "enshittification" is so endemic, why legal tools like anti-trust legislation, monopoly commissions etc. exist (with somewhat limited success) and so on.

Sadly, we live in a world where those with the influence (obviously this involves money, but not *just* money) to do so are so richly rewarded for using that influence primarily as a tool to get more influence that inevitably the top of the pile is utterly dominated by those whose priorities heavily lean that way. Any influence spent elsewhere means getting behind on the race to own The World.

Those with enough influence can outspend governments on finding bugs in the legal code, and even influence the drafting of that legal code in the first place through political "donations" etc.

We've reached the point where a handful of people have gained such an egregiously disproportionate share of "The World" that the phrase "The World is Not Enough" starts feeling literally true for them and they start working on projects like "leaving the planet", and "owning lumps of space"

Yay.

A quarter century of Mozilla

immibis — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 16:07:05 +0000

I don't think that Mozilla could have ever been successful and not evil. That's just not a possible outcome within the socio-economic power structures we find ourselves in. A successful version of Mozilla looks like Google - using their technical prowess to form a monopoly in one market and expand to adjacent markets and form monopolies there. Suppose Firefox was the best web browser - Firefox OS might have taken off and we'd all use Firefox Phones and pay for things with Firefox Pay. Pretty much the same position Google is in. We might have Firefox Home voice assistants spying on us instead of Google Home. And I assure you, a detachment of sweaty nerds on LWN would be celebrating 25 years of Google Chrome bravely competing against the evil Firefox monopoly.

Power corrupts.

A quarter century of Mozilla

mathstuf — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 01:00:03 +0000

Ah. I haven't used that. We use Google stuff generally so such things go to Meet instead. Many use Slack because Google Chat is…subpar in so many ways.

A quarter century of Mozilla

asammoud — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 18:14:08 +0000

I have to agree with this .. I only use Firefox on Android CalyxOS. I have zero issues with it.

A quarter century of Mozilla

DOT — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 11:01:17 +0000

Until your co-workers want you to join their Huddle.

A quarter century of Mozilla

mpr22 — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 18:42:12 +0000

> I am not a native speaker, but I don't think that plays a role:

In the very next paragraph, you make statements which make me think that it very much played a role; it sounds like the English-language material to which you were exposed was not representative of a native speaker's daily exposure to the English language.

A quarter century of Mozilla

anton — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 17:57:54 +0000

I don't remember where I encountered it, but I remember that I never had the need for a realignment of the meaning.

I am not a native speaker, but I don't think that plays a role: If I had encountered a lot of usage of "free" as meaning "no cost", that would be what I would (also) associate with that word, just like I learned that "terrific" has a positive meaning.

By the time I encountered "free software" I had read many thousands of pages of English books (including 1984) and other texts, and the proportion of "free" used as meaning "without cost" was vanishingly small (including in 1984). I did have some exposure to commercials through magazines like Byte, but certainly less than a native speaker, and I would have to dig up these old issues and see if there was much usage of "free" with that meaning there.

A quarter century of Mozilla

nye — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 12:18:53 +0000

(I misspoke when I said "English-speaking" earlier - I should have qualified it with "native" because a person whose first language has two separate words for this may well be more likely to consider all the possible interpretations.)

A quarter century of Mozilla

nye — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 12:16:02 +0000

> I certainly never thought that "free software" means "software without cost".

Is this because the term was immediately preceded or followed by some explanatory context? Most of us here probably first came across it in the context of something like this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. Here, the FSF starts off by defining what "free" means - because they correctly recognise that without that explanation, nobody will understand what they mean. This is the norm anywhere that the phrase is used unless it's intended specifically for an audience that's already familiar with the culture.

Or are you claiming that you first encountered it in a more general sentence like "we could use free software for this", or "we should release this as free software"? Because if that's the case, and you claim to have correctly understood the phrase, I would contend that either you are not a native English speaker, or your memory is in error.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Cyberax — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 23:55:15 +0000

Sure. And do you know what would have been even better? Not neutering mobile Firefox in the first place. I understand not porting certain features to mobile, but Mozilla went ahead and _removed_ functionality for no discernible reason.

Also, I've just tried Fenix and there's nothing in my Play Store that remotely looks like Firefox with that name. I've re-installed FireFox and it's the same old: no about:config, limited plugin selection.

I really don't understand WTF is Mozilla doing.

A quarter century of Mozilla

mpr22 — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:24:38 +0000

It's highly likely that the first time I encountered the phrase "free software" in its GNU(-adjacent) usage (in the mid-1990s), the explanation came attached to it in the context of someone making a big song and dance about "free as in speech, not free as in beer", making any potential need for explanation entirely moot.

But if I had encountered the term without the explanation attached, I hazard that I would likely have defaulted to the "as in beer" interpretation.

A quarter century of Mozilla

pizza — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:04:20 +0000

> I certainly never thought that "free software" means "software without cost".

I came of age during the BBS/"shareware" era. I didn't have access to, or even any awareness of, "Free Software" (of the RMS sense) until _after_ I had first been exposed to Linux in the mid 90s. To me and my peers, "free software" meant "zero-cost" -- along the lines of freeware or shareware, and to the rest who only had to use software as a tool (or entertainment) "free software" was a more charitable way of saying "warez".

These days, with Linux just being a hidden implementation detail [1], I'd postulate that the overwhelming majority of software folks (and software-adjacent) folks are very aware of "Open Source", and if they're aware of the term "Free Software" at all, most consider it to be synonymous with Open Source. When they think of it differently, it's along the lines of "those out of touch communist zealots who think we shouldn't even be allowed to charge for (or be forced to otherwise give away) our valuable software" [2]

[1] It's just another app you install from the windows store so you can run (predominantly) third-party black-box kubernetes/docker/etc containers locally when you're trying to develop "for the cloud".
[2] Which isn't accurate or fair, but as the saying goes, perception is reality.

A quarter century of Mozilla

anton — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 17:34:50 +0000

I don't think that the term would have been as successful as it was if it had not been intuitive for many people; maybe not the majority, but certainly a significant number.

It may be that non-developers these days will indeed think of software without cost when they hear "free software", after all they are not directly confronted with the freedom aspects of software, and in their contact with various commercial software (even if some of it is free software) the commercial interests run against making them aware of that.

Software developers have more interaction with software, and they do more thinking about software. For them the freedom aspect is closer to home, although maybe the powers that be have indeed managed to make it unintuitive to everyone. But that was not the case four decades ago.

Yes, even four decades ago there were people who needed the freedom aspect explained to them, and RMS has done that. But not everyone. I certainly never thought that "free software" means "software without cost".

A quarter century of Mozilla

pizza — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 16:44:55 +0000

> our decades ago it was still intuitive that "free software" meant something other than "software without cost", as evidenced by the fact that RMS used the term and a significant number of people got it easily enough to support the cause.

....Intuitive?

That significant numbers of people (at the time) understood and bought into it doesn't make it "intuitive"; it just means that those folks had it explained to them "enough" for them to buy into it.

To the average person, software user, and even "developer", "free software" means "software without cost" -- the only ones who would ever think differently are those who had alternative meanings explained to them.

RMS still had to explain himself back then, and he's _still_ explaining himself to this day..

A quarter century of Mozilla

anton — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:51:49 +0000

Four decades ago it was still intuitive that "free software" meant something other than "software without cost", as evidenced by the fact that RMS used the term and a significant number of people got it easily enough to support the cause.

If, as nye claims, these days not a single English-speaking person in the world understands "free software" as being related to freedom without extra explanation, and that, as many claim, the only intuitive meaning these days is "software without cost", then the meaning of "free" in English has changed indeed.

You point to the fact that software is frequently an article of commerce, and that may be the cause for the "without cost" meaning. But it seems to me that software is not more frequently an article of commerce than four decades ago, and we now have a free software ecosystem that should help with understanding what "free software" means.

A quarter century of Mozilla

gabrielesvelto — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 08:45:10 +0000

> Also, mobile is a case in point. Firefox was a pretty good browser on Android, with plugin support and a better UI than mobile Chrome. Guess what Mozilla did to address this oversight?

Fenix (aka new Firefox for Android) has picked up a lot more market share than Fennec (aka old Firefox for Android) ever had. So mobile shows the opposite trend you're claiming, with constant growth over the years. In addition to this the modules Fenix is built from (GeckoView & friends) are now used by several other mobile applications outside of Mozilla's perimeter: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/geckovie...

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla though I haven't always worked on Firefox

A quarter century of Mozilla

viiru — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 06:03:03 +0000

> > Your use of "ideological purity tests" is below the pretty high standard I'm used to see you use here, so I won't react to that.

> I'm not sure why this should be seen as inflammatory. My point is simply that neither brand of project makes any serious
> effort to keep out the developers who subscribe to the other brand, so while a project may choose to market itself as "free
> software" or "open source," there is no particular reason to believe that its developers actually subscribe to that belief. Sure,
> if a lot of developers were actively opposed to the label, they might change it, but it's my impression that most developers,
> frankly, do not care one way or the other, and so you end up with passive branding that means nothing and says nothing.

> (Perhaps this is because people see the term "purity" as a snarl word? I did not intend it as such, but I suppose it could be
> read that way. I would like to reiterate that such testing is *not* something that the vast majority of projects do, and in fact
> I'm not aware of any project having done it. I only said "vast majority" because I did not want to make an absolute and
> unqualified claim, not because I think that some project out there is actually doing it.)

I'll note here that understanding and agreeing to uphold the DFSG is a required step in being accepted as a Debian Developer. Whether this qualifies as an ideological purity test or not I couldn't say.

A quarter century of Mozilla

mathstuf — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 18:59:04 +0000

My understanding (which may very well be out-of-date) is that this is more like Firefox profiles with a completely separate `.mozilla` subdirectory with some helpful selection UI (whereas Firefox profiles are more or less completely oblivious of each other). Firefox containers are allowed to co-exist within a single window and can be for as little as a single website rather than an entire "browser session"

I suspect it works just fine if you use OAuth to separate your accounts, but I try to avoid cross-linking accounts whenever possible.

A quarter century of Mozilla

mathstuf — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 18:55:17 +0000

Slack (the website app, not the Electron thing) works fine in Firefox here…

A quarter century of Mozilla

NYKevin — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 22:18:52 +0000

> But the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is pretty fundamental. There actually are projects that consider themselves a "free software project" and those projects have certain boundaries they simply won't cross. So, yes, there are differences between Free Software and Open Source.

There are projects with things like the DFSG, it is true, but if I'm honest, the DFSG is the *only* example I can think of off the top of my head. The vast majority of FOSS projects are quite informal. Some of them do have codes of conduct or such, but this is typically more of a "be nice to each other" type of document than a "here's what we believe about the end user's freedoms" document.

> That projects are inanimate, that their developers are not a monolith, etc. are rather banal observations.

So what? This is not a refutation.

Either there is a difference between a "free software project" and an "open source project," or there isn't. I have yet to see any such difference put forward that I can seriously evaluate as an intrinsic property of the projects themselves. Instead, it is always an extrinsic property of the developers who happen to work on the project, and it is my opinion that such a definition is not particularly useful or informative. The actual projects do not materially differ in terms of the development processes, legal structures, or the rights and responsibilities of their developers and users. RMS likes to claim that "free software development" and "open source development" are entirely separate activities and movements (when he mentions "open source" at all), but I'm unconvinced that there is much truth to that. They are the same thing, just with different labels.

> Your use of "ideological purity tests" is below the pretty high standard I'm used to see you use here, so I won't react to that.

I'm not sure why this should be seen as inflammatory. My point is simply that neither brand of project makes any serious effort to keep out the developers who subscribe to the other brand, so while a project may choose to market itself as "free software" or "open source," there is no particular reason to believe that its developers actually subscribe to that belief. Sure, if a lot of developers were actively opposed to the label, they might change it, but it's my impression that most developers, frankly, do not care one way or the other, and so you end up with passive branding that means nothing and says nothing.

(Perhaps this is because people see the term "purity" as a snarl word? I did not intend it as such, but I suppose it could be read that way. I would like to reiterate that such testing is *not* something that the vast majority of projects do, and in fact I'm not aware of any project having done it. I only said "vast majority" because I did not want to make an absolute and unqualified claim, not because I think that some project out there is actually doing it.)

A quarter century of Mozilla

pebolle — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 20:53:27 +0000

> The only difference I have ever heard anyone point to is, basically, "Free software developers are doing it for ideological reasons and open source developers are doing it because they think it's more efficient" - but if that is really the only distinction, then there is no such thing as a "free software project" or an "open source project."

But the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is pretty fundamental. There actually are projects that consider themselves a "free software project" and those projects have certain boundaries they simply won't cross. So, yes, there are differences between Free Software and Open Source.

That projects are inanimate, that their developers are not a monolith, etc. are rather banal observations. (Your use of "ideological purity tests" is below the pretty high standard I'm used to see you use here, so I won't react to that.)

But, being in a sombre mood, I'm inclined to state state that Open Source has won. Most of the software I currently use is developed by people employed by extremely profitable corporations with ethics that I don't share. Yes, it's Open Source but it's seems to be written by people that noticed that money doesn't smell.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Cyberax — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 18:52:23 +0000

> Chrome has the ability to juggle multiple profiles, which amounts to the same thing in practice.

Not quite. Chrome can't run two parallel profiles in the same window. For example, I use containers in Firefox to log into multiple AWS accounts (with color-coding for prod/non-prod accounts) using a small plugin: https://imgur.com/a/S9uhNTv

A quarter century of Mozilla

rahulsundaram — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 18:43:18 +0000

> Their developers do, and in most cases, those developers are not a monolith. Just because a project calls itself "free software," it does not necessarily mean that all developers are 100% on board with Richard Stallman's definition of "free software."

Yes. It also goes further than that. It is entirely possible for people to use the term - free software and not buy into the notion that GNU FDL is a free documentation license or the strategy around firmware is the right one or that GPLv3 handling of Tivo or Novell patent clauses were the right ones and so forth. It may be indicative that they are more sympathetic to the RMS view on things but not conclusively so. Insisting that they do is likely going to end up with more people adopting a different term - open source or libre software or something else.

A quarter century of Mozilla

NYKevin — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 18:21:58 +0000

The basic problem with this argument is that there is precious little practical, day-to-day difference between a free software project and an open source project. They are de facto the same thing. The only difference I have ever heard anyone point to is, basically, "Free software developers are doing it for ideological reasons and open source developers are doing it because they think it's more efficient" - but if that is really the only distinction, then there is no such thing as a "free software project" or an "open source project." Projects are inanimate objects. They don't have intentions or beliefs. Their developers do, and in most cases, those developers are not a monolith. Just because a project calls itself "free software," it does not necessarily mean that all developers are 100% on board with Richard Stallman's definition of "free software." To my understanding, it is extremely unusual for projects (of either brand) to have ideological purity tests or to ask developers to explicitly affirm the FSF's or OSI's core beliefs (beyond the obvious "please actually license your contributions as specified in COPYING.txt" or whatever).

A quarter century of Mozilla

mpr22 — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 17:18:30 +0000

This is not Newspeak at work.

The English word <free> /friː/ still has multiple meanings, including "without cost" and "without restriction".

However! When we use words that have two (or more) meanings, people will tend to assume the meaning that makes the most sense to them.

Software is lifeless and mindless in the same way as a freshly cooked lunch, a bottle of filtered pasteurized beer, or a housebrick.

Software is frequently an article of commerce.

"Software that costs zero dollars" is therefore the most plausible automatic disambiguation of the term "free software" for anyone who is not deeply immersed in the liberty-focused discourse of the Free Software movement.

A quarter century of Mozilla

anton — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 16:23:41 +0000

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.

(George Orwell, 1984, appendix)

Who would have thought that English has been replaced by (a different) Newspeak.

A quarter century of Mozilla

leromarinvit — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 11:54:43 +0000

Interesting, thanks. So the basic ability to separate sessions is there. I quickly tried and failed to find something equivalent to the "Temporary Containers" Firefox extension, so it seems manual action is required to switch profiles.

This is only one part of the setup I currently have in Firefox. I've got it set up to create temporary containers with an empty session whenever I follow a link to a different domain (besides a few sites that automatically get assigned to their own permanent containers), which seems impossible with Chrome currently. That way, even if I click a link on a site where I'm logged in, the target gets a new session and any cross-site tracking will have a harder time linking the two visits.

Now, I'm sure my setup isn't for everyone, since now it matters how you arrived at a particular site, which is probably confusing if you don't expect it (there can be any number of sessions for any particular domain). But I find that property useful, since it trivially enables multiple different logins to the same site without any setup (just manually open a new tab and open the site, and you've got a new session).

I'm (usually) happy with Firefox, so I won't invest a lot of time to recreate this setup with Chrome for now. But it's good to know that this workflow could probably be implemented there with some effort, in case Firefox for some reason ceases to be a viable browser (which I hope it won't).

A quarter century of Mozilla

rjones — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 02:40:29 +0000

Chrome has the ability to juggle multiple profiles, which amounts to the same thing in practice. I don't know how they compare on a technical level besides there is no problems having multiple logins in the same sites at the same time in different profiles.

By default the quick change UI is hidden. Once you make more then one profile it pops up.

A quarter century of Mozilla

mgedmin — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 11:07:29 +0000

Google messed up Chromium enough that Firefox actually feels better to me, these days. No multi-device sync, Linux user interface bugs (wrong corner shape when you tile the window).

I wouldn't use Chromium at all if I wasn't forced to for work reasons (because Slack refuses to support any browser that is not Chrome).

A quarter century of Mozilla

rahulsundaram — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 22:35:38 +0000

> I wonder if this sort of "heavy" open project can be crowdsourced. I mean, I know Mozilla isn't about to go down that route, but I'm pondering if it's plausible really at all.

I don't think so. Instead if you want to fund it, you could get things like Mozilla VPN + Firefox Relay and if you are using these features anyway, getting it this way might also be a way to support browser development.

A quarter century of Mozilla

k8to — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 20:53:38 +0000

I wonder if this sort of "heavy" open project can be crowdsourced. I mean, I know Mozilla isn't about to go down that route, but I'm pondering if it's plausible really at all.

I give Libre Office a bit of money every few years when I use it, and periodically donate a bit to Debian, but I suspect the former has a primary funding model from other sources, and the latter would probably work with almost no funding.

The browser is really the heaviest project I rely on besides programming languages, and the OS, both of which seem to work okay on the sort of crowd-labor model.

A quarter century of Mozilla

k8to — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 23:56:41 +0000

The android firefox ui churn is tedious, and their constraining of addons to a tiny set is infuriating, but the bar is so low that it's still much better than the default. But I won't be surprised if the limited set of addons die off for various reasons of churn in the APIs, firefox, and the addon ecosystem.

Because of the sheer amount of work put in addon support to mobile chromium, it's not going to happen in any of the chromium -alikes, sadly.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Wol — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 20:57:10 +0000

> that basically claims that it will lead to better software. (Users of Microsoft Office, macOS, iOS and whatever else is amazingly popular and rather useful might disagree.)

"Better" and "useful" are different words, with different meanings. Word may be *useful*, but imho there are much *better* word processors out there WordPerfect cough cough ... (sorry LO you're too much of a Word clone to be any better).

Cheers,
Wol

A quarter century of Mozilla

pebolle — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 18:41:56 +0000

> There isn't a meaningful distinction between the FSF's definition of "free software" and the OSI's definition of "open source".

As far as I know there are some (obscure) licenses that are open source but not free software. But that's beside the point. Free Software is a philosophy (or moral point of view, a social movement, etcetera) that stipulates that all (distributed) software ought to be free. Open Source is a software development method that basically claims that it will lead to better software. (Users of Microsoft Office, macOS, iOS and whatever else is amazingly popular and rather useful might disagree.)

A quarter century of Mozilla

nim-nim — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 13:18:16 +0000

Mozilla never understood that their success was linked to the success of the FLOSS desktop, because that’s the only established platform where they are not in competition with the platform owner, who has many ways to make sure they never succeed over his own corporate projects.

With web offerings replacing traditional local apps they had a golden chance to make the FLOSS desktop shine, growing with it (and the multiplicity of distributions is a protection against someone taking over their success via a fork).

Instead, they blew it first by chasing proprietary platforms that were all too happy to get their features first while limiting their platform share, second by trying to corner this opportunity with their own Firefox OS, and third getting distracted from their core competencies favouring the startups of their buddies.

A quarter century of Mozilla

pizza — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 13:15:25 +0000

> It's faster, and it has stopped crashing periodically. And the UI has been progressively improving as well (imo). I feel like Firefox/Gecko is an actually viable alternative browser for Android, in a way it was not when I was first using it.

This mirrors my experience, and I've been using Android Firefox since before it was called Firefox.

Unfortunately Chrome is deeply embedded into Android (==System Webview) so Firefox doesn't get used as much as I'd prefer.

A quarter century of Mozilla

foom — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 13:03:04 +0000

I've used Firefox Android every day for years. And, I very much disagree with your comment. Firefox Android is a LOT better now than it was in the past.

It's faster, and it has stopped crashing periodically. And the UI has been progressively improving as well (imo). I feel like Firefox/Gecko is an actually viable alternative browser for Android, in a way it was not when I was first using it.

I am occasionally disappointed that about:config doesn't exist in the stable branch (which is what I use), but not bothered enough to switch to the beta or nightly releases.