You're not alone, Firefox mobile is practically unusable. But! For a while now, Mozilla has been putting all their development effort into Fenix (Firefox Preview on the Play Store), which has all the speed and responsiveness main Firefox doesn't, plus a better UI and general slickness. It even has limited extension support in the alpha, which should make it to the release version very soon. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for a few months now and it's great. There are still occasional bugs, but it's finally a legitimate Chrome alternative.
I was using Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin, and I found that Chrome with no adblocking was a better experience. Page loads, scrolling, zooming, and the other interactions were so slow they counteracted the advantage.
That said, new Firefox mobile is way faster and the nightly build already has uBlock support. Best of both worlds.
I had extreme response time issue on my old phone. I recorded my screen, and I measured a reliable 3-5 60Hz frames between the touch indicator and the page scrolling. Chrome reliably had just 1.
Things got a bit better over time, but unfortunately the thing that eventually fixed it was when I got a new phone. Now I get around 2-3 90Hz frames, which is still worse than chrome, but far less noticeable. I have not measured "New Firefox"/Fenix/Preview yet, but it does feel like it's a bit closer to chrome.
I'm not too bothered about ublock - I already run blokada so the worst adverts are already blocked at the network level - but being in Europe I can't manage without the I don't care about cookies add-on.
Whenever I've tried other browsers - Chrome, Brave, DDG - having to click "I accept" on every single webpage to remove the "This site uses cookies!" pop-up is really tedious. I hope the Firefox on Mobile add-ons support doesn't just start and end at ublock origin.
I tried it on a Galaxy Tab s5e and an LG v35, which have last year's mid-range Qualcomm chip and 2018's high-end chip respectively. On the v35 loading was slow, and sometimes it would crash or make all my tabs blank until restarted. On the tablet it couldn't even scroll down a page without lagging. I haven't run into any other apps that do this on either device. Zooming was always laggy and a bit off--bad acceleration curves or something--enough that they've redone it from scratch for other platforms instead of trying to fix the code.
There's a reason Mozilla is rewriting the whole thing.
That LG v35 outspecs my BlackBerry KEYone by a good margin, and Firefox is just as fast as Chrome for me. Which is to say, snappy.
I read more details about your performance problems in another comment, and it sounds horrible; I can't imagine anyone using that. Sounds like a nasty bug, I guess..?
Sadly you're right. This is Apple's fault: they refuse to allow alternate browser engines on iOS, so iOS "Firefox" is really a Safari web view with some Firefox buttons on it. Chrome and other browsers have the same problem.
Say what? It's the only browser I use on mobile for years, can't say I have faced any issue, not major issue, didn't face any issue, apart from very rare stuff that were fixed, can't even remember which.
Really? Huh. I'm surprised other people's experiences have been so different. There are tons of forum complaints about the problems I've had. There's even an official faq about all the tabs going blank [1], which tells you to restart the browser and hope it goes away. Mozilla themselves gave up on the whole codebase two and a half years ago and started work on Firefox Preview/Fenix instead [2].
FWIW, my experience is exactly the same. Zero problems, snappy, supports uBlock Origin, does not contain Google spyware and I therefore vastly prefer it to Chrome.
When I first heard of people complaining that it is atrocious, it was as much news to me as it is to you that it is excellent in my experience. I agree it's a weird phenomenon.
I've been using firefox preview for a few months now and love it. My only complaint is that even though it is set up as my default browser android still insists on using chrome to open some things, such as results from google assistant. But that's hardly Mozilla's fault.
With Preview or with stable?
Preview has a couple of minor bugs, like radio button popups that don't go away when I switch tabs, or the "undo close tab" toast not disappearing, or downloads resulting in empty files sometimes. Annoying, but not dealbreakers and I'm confident they'll be fixed soon.
My issue with stable is that it's slow. Everything about it is slow. Pages that load immediately in Chrome take double digit seconds in Firefox. When they do load, scrolling lags my finger and jerks around, and zooming is noticeable unresponsive. The acceleration curves feel off too. On my mid-range tablet performance is so bad it gives me a headache.
My biggest issue with FF mobile (android) is sometimes when you open a link from a different app, it opens in an existing tab navigating away from a page you already had open. It should always open a new tab.
So I might open a link in my email app, then when I tap the back button on the phone, the expected behaviour is it will close the tab and return to the email app. Instead I'm finding it navigating back to the page that was open previously on the tab that was already open.
On heavier sites it's inevitable that it will crash. Years ago Chrome/Chrome Beta also had this problem (the root cause is with the phone hardware/android) but somehow they managed to catch it and not bring down the whole browser app.
I still use it despite the other main drawback (being slower than chrome beta on heavy sites, like say twitter) because I like my uBlock and tab-sync, but every so often I get so annoyed at it that I avoid it for about a month until Chrome even with basic adblocking via Blokada makes me mad enough to switch back.
