To preface, I have also been at least reasonably happy with Fenix on Android, although I am frustrated that the add-ons are still limited. I don't feel like I have a lot of friction, the UI works well enough for what I need it to do, and I have pretty much no desire to switch to another browser. And I regularly get annoyed at the level of scrutiny and amount of bad-natured criticism that Mozilla gets. I think it's part human nature, part meme, but I see people throw complaints at Firefox with a level of vigor that they can't seem to muster for browsers that are clearly far, far worse. And I've seen those same people ignore some of the legitimately fantastic stuff that Mozilla has been doing, some of it inside of Firefox.
All that being said, I didn't get any of those bad feelings from this article. The criticisms seemed fair, and it felt to me that the author was speaking out of genuine concern and desire for Fenix to be better. I didn't feel like the author was going out of their way to complain.
More importantly, as someone who is generally a lot more bullish on Mozilla and Firefox than other people on HN, and as someone who honestly still trusts Mozilla quite a bit, the complaints about closed designs and lack of community involvement in some parts of the browser ring true to me and I empathize. I trust Mozilla a lot, but I do really wish that they didn't make these kinds of design decisions that came so far out of left field with so little community input. They could do better here, and it is a worrying trend.
It is weird for a browser to have this many tab switcher redesigns, and to have so many of them received so negatively.
I do recommend people use Firefox on Android. I think the average experience is going to be better than the author describes, particularly if users aren't on nightly. And having support for Ublock Origin is a killer feature, and not just for privacy. The mobile web is borderline unusable for me without a good adblocker.
But... a lot of the criticism here is valid, and I hope that people at Mozilla look at it, and in the best case scenario, I hope maybe this kind of criticism leads to more open, thoughtful design where community input and involvement happens earlier in the design process.
Agreed. I use FF on my Android devices because it's the best browser by a huge margin (uBlock Origin and AMP redirect alone guarantee that; not being made by Google is icing on the cake).
However, FireFox mobile could always be better. I really hope that Mozilla keeps listening to the users to figure out how to make the browsers better, especially when they have so many engineers that they seem to constantly shuffle the UI around just to give them work to do. There's plenty of actual improvements to make, and more options to give users with different preferences, and that should be where Mozilla spends engineer time with such a mature product. Instead of rewriting the browser every couple of years because the previous one was a mess.
To preface, I have also been at least reasonably happy with Fenix on Android, although I am frustrated that the add-ons are still limited. I don't feel like I have a lot of friction, the UI works well enough for what I need it to do, and I have pretty much no desire to switch to another browser. And I regularly get annoyed at the level of scrutiny and amount of bad-natured criticism that Mozilla gets. I think it's part human nature, part meme, but I see people throw complaints at Firefox with a level of vigor that they can't seem to muster for browsers that are clearly far, far worse. And I've seen those same people ignore some of the legitimately fantastic stuff that Mozilla has been doing, some of it inside of Firefox.
All that being said, I didn't get any of those bad feelings from this article. The criticisms seemed fair, and it felt to me that the author was speaking out of genuine concern and desire for Fenix to be better. I didn't feel like the author was going out of their way to complain.
More importantly, as someone who is generally a lot more bullish on Mozilla and Firefox than other people on HN, and as someone who honestly still trusts Mozilla quite a bit, the complaints about closed designs and lack of community involvement in some parts of the browser ring true to me and I empathize. I trust Mozilla a lot, but I do really wish that they didn't make these kinds of design decisions that came so far out of left field with so little community input. They could do better here, and it is a worrying trend.
It is weird for a browser to have this many tab switcher redesigns, and to have so many of them received so negatively.
I do recommend people use Firefox on Android. I think the average experience is going to be better than the author describes, particularly if users aren't on nightly. And having support for Ublock Origin is a killer feature, and not just for privacy. The mobile web is borderline unusable for me without a good adblocker.
But... a lot of the criticism here is valid, and I hope that people at Mozilla look at it, and in the best case scenario, I hope maybe this kind of criticism leads to more open, thoughtful design where community input and involvement happens earlier in the design process.