A Few Improvements for Firefox's Android UI 81
The latest Firefox for Android nightly build now features a number of changes to the UI with the goals of "...keeping a clear distinction between different types of tabs; making better use of the screen real estate on different form-factors and orientations; and being more compliant with Android’s design language. ... the tabs tray is now divided into sections for each type of tab — regular, private, and remote — so that you always keep things separate and organized. Furthermore, once you select a private tab, the main toolbar becomes dark as a clear sign that you're in a different browsing mode. ... We now use a horizontal scrolling tabs tray whenever it improves our use of the screen space. This is achieved with a TwoWayView ... We've recently landed a new skin for Firefox for Android that is more aligned with Android's Holo design language. Almost all textures and gradients were replaced by flat colors giving a much lighter feel to the browser."
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Chrome does the same thing too. And Firefox supports Flash where Chrome doesn't (on a Nexus 4). And finally: AdBlock+, and any number of addons FTW!
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Flash support is really where it's at for Firefox on Android. The default browser did work with the flash plugin for me, but it was horrendously slow and required enabling flash for the entire page which made flash advertisements go active and rape performance (on a 1.4Ghz dual core tegra chip). Firefox I can just enable the video and actually use the 720 streams (1080 has audio sync issues outside of mxplayer).
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Interesting)
With Chrome, your sync data is governed by the Google Privacy Policy [google.com] which basically means they can plunder it any way they feel like to serve you ads.
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As in, the the server has no idea what the data is that its storing. The server just facilitates key generation...
Wait...that can't be right...if the server is generating (and therefore has) the keys, then it can decrypt the stream, no?
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Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Informative)
Give Mozilla credit man?
They are improving it vastly as Firefox 3.6 was beh and 4.0 was frankly aweful. The mobile versions for Android 2.x were terrible too. But that is not the case anymore. So much so I find myself starting to use it again in a non irritational like way and even like it.
I think one browser engine is harmful and I do not care if it is better. Ie 6 was far better than Netscape and even Mozilla 1.2 sadly and people forget that.
I do not want a webkit future no more than I wanted a IE 6 only future a decade ago. Website owners have to use all sorts of hacks with -webkit prefixes and strange relatie:position bugs that do not exist in IE nor Firefox. Many bash IE and Firefox for not being -webkit standard while ignoring W3C standards. It is not nearly as bad as it was but it is going in that direction as sites like HTML5test.com rush to benchmark futures that only exist in webkit to prove that any other browser sucks which are not even part of the W3C standard.
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Oh yeah, great point Mr Anon, by your logic Linux must be the most insecure operating system around because of its dominance on embedded devices and phone.
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I agree with you completely except that I think Firefox should ditch Gecko for Webkit (aka Konqueror web part). There's a lot more to a browser than a rendering engine.
Wow, modded by a Mozilla troll or what?
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...eople with common sense who know their history.
Hah. You not being one of them.
Gecko is the hairball developed for Seamonkey after tearing up the even nastier hairball inherited from Netscape. Webkit is the Konqueror web component lightly skinned by Apple and as such, is every bit as "pure and open" as Gecko. And a lot cleaner. Nothing stops Mozilla foundation from moving to it, and they can even GPL their fork of it, which in my opinion, would be a wise thing to do.
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It's the same reason that I value having Linux around as a desktop OS, even if I don't personally run Linux as my desktop OS and prefer
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The problem with trident being the only browser engine wasn't just the single, but also that the sole developer was anti web browsers as a platform.
google wants the web to be the way to go, they'd prefer to not pay royalties to other people, but they're entire business is about a strong web, the opposite of Microsoft's vision, so I don't think it'd be the end.
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Given that it is in the 10-50 million installs bracket (in spite of the fact that the current incarnation hasn't been around that long) I think this item is more relevant then most on /.
I think there are many reasons it is great, but the most important for most users is that it sync's with desktop Firefox. So, I would say that Firefox for Android is the best choice for a mobile browser for anyone who uses desktop Firefox, and that must be hundreds of millions of users.
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Chrome for Android is better in every way, except no Adblock.
Unfortunately Firefox for Android regularly freezes up on me, choking on pages that Chrome renders without trouble.
I wish they would fix things like that before working on the UI.
-webkit-Here's why -moz-Here's why -ms-Here's why (Score:3)
Thats because web designers use webkit CSS and not the W3c one whenever it detects a small screen.
Perhaps part of it is because the effects needed to make the UI that users of devices with a small screen expect aren't in the latest W3C Recommendation, and the names of those effects differ between WebKit and Gecko by the prefix [slashdot.org].
Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Firefox for Android was important when it was first envisioned because the default browser for Android sucked. Today the default browser is Chrome and its much, much, more usable. About the only thing I think Firefox is better than the stock Android browser (Chrome) is that you can get reliable adblock working for it, something you can't do (or at least couldn't do) with the stock browser.
Adblock and Orbot (Tor) without root access are pretty good reasons why some people use it.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the most important differentiator is one you don't see: putting user privacy first.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've found Chrome offers no benefits over the latest versions of Firefox. At all. In fact, Firefox feels noticeably faster, more responsive, more extensible, and doesn't feel like a skeleton still waiting to be filled. It also feels like it's moving more quickly, somehow.
I think it's really down to perception more than anything. I've heard a lot of people badmouth Firefox lately simply because it's Firefox, and praise Chrome simply because it's Chrome.
Sounds about right to me. Generally, people still want Google to annihilate any competition because thats their browser of choice and again, generally, people want to validate their choice as correct by making it look like at the only proper choice. /me generalizes a lot, but really, that's how it is.
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Adblock is more than enough reason for me to keep using Firefox
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For me it's the awesome bar in Firefox that I've grown to depend on desktop, too. I just type a letter or two of the most frequent sites I visit and there it is. Android chromes are miserable at that and for me that's a game changer.
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However I also have an Asus T300 which sucks pretty badly with Firefox with frequent "application not responding" messages. I don't know if it's the device or the software since the T300 has pretty poor IO performance which might be causing an bottleneck.
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I use Firefox Beta on Android myself, but I do throw in some useful add-ons of course. Now it has click-to-play, Flashblock is less important (yes, I sideload Flash for the sites that need it), but I do install Adblock Plus to keep myself sane. Another obviously useful add-on on an Android tablet is Phony - set it to be "desktop Firefox" and you get the full desktop versions of all sites rather than some half-baked mobile version.
Whilst Firefox isn't any better or worse than Chrome on the desktop, I do thin
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I think you may be confused.
Chrome isn't the 'default Android browser'. Chrome can be the default, if you download and set it up that way. But the 'default', at least as in ASOP and Cyanogenmod, is just "Browser". It's likely based on the same chrome engine, but it isn't Chrome (at least a recent version of it).
I've been using Browser on my (Cyanogenmod 10) phone for the past couple months because the latest Chrome (which has been getting slower and more buggy for the past year on Android) is too glitchy to
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It's likely based on the same chrome engine, but it isn't Chrome (at least a recent version of it).
While they both use WebKit, the version in Browser contains a significant number of optimisations not present in Chrome.
In contrast... Firefox for Android is actually faster
I installed every Android browser I could find trying to find one that gave me fine-grained control over cookies, yet even FireFox only had an option to always allow, always reject, and didn't allow deleting individual ones. This is something we've had on desktop browsers for a decade. I have no idea why Android browsers suck so much in this respect. I can understand Google not wanting
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Firefox is better than Chroume on Android (Score:2)
I use a lot of tabs. I cannot stand the way Chrome handles tabs. Firefox is better at tab management and history management.
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I use it in large part because so many of the browser addons I like on my desktop systems work just fine with it, and also because I can have a different set of standard browser cookies for various things and maintain some professional/personal separation.
The only real problem I have with it is that many, many "mobile" web sites seem to be coded with the assumption that all mobile browsers are WebKit, so mobile sites are occasionally inconvenient to visit.
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Flash is the reason (Score:3)
In the last 2 months the other browsers kind of pooped out and stopped supporting Flash, everyone has been flooding over to Firefox.
Firefox has an opportunity to take that second place to chrome, take over Dolphin browsers spot.
So that's why you see all this development for it all of a sudden.
Re:Flash is the reason (Score:4, Informative)
Yes Google has deprecated iGoogle and is going to kill it completely later this year, but damnit, I like my iGoogle homepage!
It's also nice to have three different browsers around for those situations where a webpage just doesn't render right in one or the other. But I generally prefer Chrome for Android for most of my daily browsing. It's quick at rendering and loading, and since it uses WebKit most web pages just work correctly (but not all of them!)
I don't use Firefox sync any longer, even though I only browse with Firefox on my desktop computers. I used it for a while, but it was killing my battery because it was always doing its syncing thing. Once I turned that feature off my battery life went way up.
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I think Firefox Sync has been fixed. I had similar issues but those are gone now.
I use Firefox Beta instead of nightly (nightly seems to regularly kill Sync in various ways, that make the browser either slow, or eat battery).
Had been using it with Sync for 2 month now, zero issue. And it starts faster than nightly (i guess its due to something like debug code being shipped with nightly, although, I didn't check)
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I keep trying, but can't find how to private browse, hopefully It's far more.intuitive now.
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Just because you don't use it, doesn't mean no one use it.
Firefox is a good browser, have features that other android browser don't have (or are in two or more different browsers), comes from a trusted company (security and privacy point of view).
Not all people uses the same phones, mini-tablets, tablets... each type of device and usage makes one app better than others.
finally, competition is good, we all win with it!
Start page (Score:3, Interesting)
The start page showing the browser history was a deal breaker. Did they get rid of that?
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Firefox becomes Firefox OS? (Score:3)
I don't have much to say about the mobile browser; I don't really use a mobile browser all that much and Dolphin works fine for what I need.
But when I clicked on the links in the summary, much to my dismay, I find that the Firefox team is embarking on some grand plan to have a unified look and feel across all platforms. They call it Project Kilimanjaro or some such thing. And by that I mean eschewing any attempt to look like it belongs on a platform, and to go its own way, Google Chrome-style. Bad enough that Gnome thinks it is an operating system, but now Firefox? I just want a browser that fits with my desktop theme, and looks like a normal app. I don't need an "experience."
I don't get it. Maybe I'm too old. I'm totally happy with the way Firefox looks and works with my GTK theme extension that I've kept alive for the last few firefox versions (well I'm on 10ESR right now). And tabs on top never made sense to me. When a tab is up that doesn't have a url bar or a search box, how do do a search? With tabs on bottom, I just hit the search bar, type, hit alt-enter, and a new tab with my results shows up, no matter what my current tab looks like.
Anyway, it seems like we're regressing in terms of UI design. I guess years of research (not to mention that milions of people have learned things a certain way) doesn't mean much.
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Firefox doesn't override your title bar and OS windows management controls.
Now then again I don't specially like some the new UI either but, those are mockups and not implemented.
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It does on Windows, unless you set various options that aren't really supported and are likely to break when the big theme refresh lands.
The new UI is happening, too. See, for instance, this blog post [msujaws.wordpress.com] about the changes to customization that will restrict what you can do with the UI. Or the UX branch [mozilla.org], which has curvy tabs already.
Extensions can probably address many of the problems they're introducing, but -- particularly with the theme changes -- it's really getting to the point where an actual fork would b
How 'bout speed? (Score:2)
My android has a dual-core 1.8ghz chip in it, and Firefox runs like absolute shit on it.
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My android has a dual-core 1.8ghz chip in it, and Firefox runs like absolute shit on it.
Well here's another bit of anecdata- runs just fine on my single-core 1 GHz phone (HTC One V.)
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Well, even my Dell Streak 7, which has an inferior dualcore and still runs Android 2.2.2, runs the latest Firefox at least as well as the Webkit browsers I have on it. And it runs more responsively than even Chrome on my quad-core 4.2 device. So there.
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i have a dual core A9 at 1.6Ghz on a ICS and it runs just fine, same speed or faster than "browser" or chrome... so exactly what is your problem? maybe the problem is somewhere else or trigger by something, like the internet connection speed, number of tab openned, flash, heavy javascript, etc
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HTC Evo 3D here.
It takes forever to start up, and it seems to take an inordinately long time to process and render fairly simple pages such as wikipedia entries. It doesn't seem to matter if I'm connected via cellular radio or via wifi. In fact, even pages local to my SD card take a while to render.
Bookmark folders?? Ability to sort bookmarks?? (Score:2)
Sadly, doesn't look like it, yet. *Sigh*
I just *love* scrolling through all my bookmarks looking for one I know I have in there. Yes, I know, I can use the search bar to find it, but that doesn't really help when I just want to browse bookmarks of a particular type...for example, restaurants, or online stores.
In the past, I have stored these bookmark types in their own folders, then when I'm feeling peckish (for food or toys :), I'll just open the relevant bookmark folder and see what looks 'appetizing' to