The address bar has become cluttered with buttons THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE: "home" (useless), "translate" (won't go away no matter the setting), and now "share" (for real!?), "reading mode"; remove them from there, I can barely see the first few letters of the address! Also way too much spacing around them
I always have to manually close the previous tab when tapping on a link, let us reuse them instead, you may call us owls or wharever, but we don't like having zillions of tabs open to be closed automatically after x time
Improve speed, it's currently the slowest browser out there
Allow more customization (like about:config) and extensions, and for ex. to be able to remove the useless buttons from the address bar
FWIW about:config is available in beta and nightly on android, my main browser was nightly for a while but it sometimes was too unstable, so I switched to beta as my daily, which seems to be stable.
if there's one surprising thing I've learnt from HN users, it's that there're loads of people out there who run browsers with zillions of tabs open all the time
Meanwhile I do 50% of my internet-ing in private mode and get annoyed when I change between apps the wrong way and loose my 4 tabs lol. I think this particular issue happens because firefox-android must get told by android-OS to free up RAM as it's now a background-app.
But there's another private-tab-killer, and it happens when the screen times-out automatically or manually (eg, when you push the power button). I don't have a passcode or anything, so when I push the power button to power the screen on, it shows the simple "swipe to unlock" screen. The problem is that FF leaves a "private browsing" notification — and FYI, if you click on any notification on my lock screen, it will unlock and go to straight to that app — so of course I see that notification and think "shit yer, here's a shortcut" and click it, to which it unlocks the phone and opens FF, but it wipes all my private browsing tabs in the process!!! But if you unlock it by swiping, then your tabs will survive...
Actually, as I'm typing this, I think it might wipe ALL tabs, but that's not so bad for regular tabs (as you have history, cookies, etc), but it can still ruin your "state" of a search/scroll/etc.
Edit2: I'm also just realising that the way it wipes tabs when I click the notification sounds just like the first issue I mentioned (which I presume is android-OS garbage collecting the memory held by "background" apps). I have a POCO phone that runs Xiaomi HyperOS, and if it's running a non-standard lock-screen "app" by default (because I'm using the default whatever with settings that suit me), then perhaps that's why clicking a notification counts as "changing apps"?! (or perhaps even the default android lock screen counts as its own app?) But this idea seems strange because it would imply that the "swipe to unlock" feature is not part of the "lock screen app"...?
Honestly, "reading mode" is the one reason I switched to firefox on mobile. When I open a page with tons of ads and popups, it gets rid of all of that.
I was going to say that different people have different needs, but many of the things you bring up simply aren't true or are context dependent. For example: translate and share are not on the address bar (they are accessed via a menu, along with many other things, that is on the address bar). For the most part, tabs are reused. The main exception is when sites tell the browser to open a link in a new window.
Firefox may be far from perfect, but I've found it must more malleable than Chrome.
They move things in mobile UI a lot, so the docs might not reflect that. I know it used to look like on this screenshot, but I haven't had it in my Nightly for a while.
I've tried German and French pages, languages for which translation is supported, but haven't seen the translate icon in the toolbar. I had to go through the menu each time.
