I really hate to sound negative talking about Mozilla, because I think their mission is appealing to me, but it came down to a matter of execution of that vision.
From personal experience, my perception of Mozilla has been negatively affected by how they've handled the rewrite of Firefox for Android. It was released too early, and it's still missing the ability to search through browsing history. And there are still so many bugs and performance issues almost a year after its release. I opened issues for many of them and they have been left ignored to this day.
- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh
- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in
- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again
- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)
- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them
- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)
- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab
I'm pretty much only using mobile Firefox out of principle and for uBlock Origin at this point. And sometimes I still have to use something like Brave to get around performance issues.
And then Mozilla announces that they've spent their development resources on projects like Rally and DoH that I personally have no interest in using.
It's certainly frustrating. It makes you wonder what their management is thinking.
I hope I'm not alone in thinking these are objectively bad experiences to have on mobile, which will only increase the marketshare of Blink-based Android browsers. It's been my experience that, when one of their mobile team's engineers says that they have to wait for the corresponding GeckoView issue to be fixed before it can be upstreamed into FfA, you might as well give up hope of seeing it fixed for at least another few months, if ever. And I can't understand why they close and ignore some issues that still have a very real impact on the browsing experience to this day.
It's sad, because Firefox is the only opportunity on mobile to take advantage of uBlock Origin and other WebExtensions (though full support is still not implemented yet), and Brave's adblocking is at times inferior, like for Twitter's web version.
Apologies for the rant, but I feel that it had to be said.
Have you tried Firefox Browser (Nightly for Developers)? I'm using that on Android since the whole debacle that you described. It mostly works fine and from the start it already had a lot of the features that are missing in the main Firefox. I don't understand how it can all be working fine in the dev build whilst the main visible product is so lacking. Sometimes the UI gets some odd changes with updates, but I haven't had to switch browsers again so far. Though I'm not sure if your specific issues are addressed. I mostly ignore or work around them. I have pull to refresh disabled for example as it was driving me nuts.
And yes, I can't understand how Firefox was updated with so many features missing and it is still not there. It's quite sad, really.
I am running Nightly, actually, mostly in the hopes that the most important issues get fixed sooner. It doesn't seem like that's happening. I might end up going back to stable pretty soon.
I should also mention that Chrome on Android has none of the issues I described earlier. Wouldn't it make sense that even someone like me that desperately wants a reason to stand with Mozilla ends up giving into temptation and uses Brave half the time?
I hope that Mozilla can learn from its mistakes and stay competitive, given that the alternative is an Android browser monoculture. They're one of the few organizations with the resources to implement the increasingly encroaching burden of new web specifications, and I don't think a community-supported fork of Firefox or FfA will survive without some kind of miracle (see Waterfox and its need to eventually implement Web Components or fall out of relevance). The partial WebExtension support on mobile alone is one thing that gives me hope FfA will continue to see support for the near future.
From personal experience, my perception of Mozilla has been negatively affected by how they've handled the rewrite of Firefox for Android. It was released too early, and it's still missing the ability to search through browsing history. And there are still so many bugs and performance issues almost a year after its release. I opened issues for many of them and they have been left ignored to this day.
- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh
- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in
- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again
- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)
- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them
- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)
- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab
I'm pretty much only using mobile Firefox out of principle and for uBlock Origin at this point. And sometimes I still have to use something like Brave to get around performance issues.
And then Mozilla announces that they've spent their development resources on projects like Rally and DoH that I personally have no interest in using.
It's certainly frustrating. It makes you wonder what their management is thinking.
I hope I'm not alone in thinking these are objectively bad experiences to have on mobile, which will only increase the marketshare of Blink-based Android browsers. It's been my experience that, when one of their mobile team's engineers says that they have to wait for the corresponding GeckoView issue to be fixed before it can be upstreamed into FfA, you might as well give up hope of seeing it fixed for at least another few months, if ever. And I can't understand why they close and ignore some issues that still have a very real impact on the browsing experience to this day.
It's sad, because Firefox is the only opportunity on mobile to take advantage of uBlock Origin and other WebExtensions (though full support is still not implemented yet), and Brave's adblocking is at times inferior, like for Twitter's web version.
Apologies for the rant, but I feel that it had to be said.