It's not comprehensive, but I prefer the strategy of publicly releasing the information as they have it available, even if it means it often raises more questions.
Even if they don't have the entire transition planned out, I think it was important for Mozilla to communicate their Android dev focus was gonna shift to GeckoView, from existing apps, to allow external devs, and customers to have a better plan, even if they don't have the add on strategy and timeline fully fleshed out.
The alternative is waiting a few months to know any of this was happening.
They said they were "currently" finalising their transition plans in February, so I think it's reasonable to assume that the plans have been finalised by now.
> I think it was important for Mozilla to communicate their Android dev focus was gonna shift to GeckoView, from existing apps
Focus has already shifted for quite some time, though - the current Firefox for Android ("Fennec") code base has already been in maintenance mode since the end of 2017, i.e. over 1½ years, including a few months at the start of 2018 were almost nobody was regularly working on it at all other than watching Bugzilla for any immediate priority bugs and reacting to those in case any happened.
Firefox was kinda slow sometimes with too much JS on the page on my old phone but still overall usable, and that was a J3 (replaced just last week), so I'd say that's pretty good. Great and lag-free on my s10+ so far. Not convinced optimization should be a priority over features and addons.
uBO is the main reason I use Firefox on Android, as well.
With that said, what sites are you visiting? It could be that I simply don't visit sites with any ads, but I gave a few of my daily sites a spin in Firefox Preview and didn't notice any ads.
Same here. I do not know why the heck Mozilla is tiptoeing from just hiring Raymond and making uBlock an integral part of firefox.
Note that they already included something similar, which is SafeBrowsing(TM), that is maintained by google. Technically, it is exactly the same concept. But uBlock is actively request by 99% of their users, while safeBrowser(TM) fingerprinting is mostly disabled by half.
Pure speculation, I wonder if their contract with Google forbids them from having ad blocking as part of the browser. At least if I was a company paying another company millions of dollars I wouldn't let them block my income stream in their product.
I think the better comparison than SafeBrowsing for uBlock would be Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default. This uses data maintained by Disconnect.
Not really. Advanced users can selectively disable Javascript/frames/media etc on a per-site basis. Also the user has the control to allow trackers on site they care about and know the consequences.
I am sorry but tracking protection on mozilla as it is now (only enabled by default on private windows, and hapening with no user knowledge/information/learning oportunities) is a lame clutch.
What's the difference of shipping a feature off, and shipping with support for an extension (on both firefox and Google's chrome store sites!) that can be installed? At this point we are just discussing semantics. Install vs Turn on.
uBlock Origin and uMatrix in particular are fantastic addons, but I think the UX is still too much for the average casual non-technical user.
I wish they'd focus more on getting the UX of containers up to snuff. They are almost there, but still far enough away to make addons like Multi-Account Containers (MAC) something I cannot recommend to my parents.
Here is what I mean: Suppose I want to keep my use of example.com separate in it's own Example container. How do I do that?
1) Click the MAC icon in the toolbar, then click the "+" button.
2) Enter 'Example', pick an icon or color, then click okay.
3) Open a new Example container.
4) Navigate to example.com in the Example container
5) Click the MAC icon in the toolbar, then check "Always open in Example"
6) Close the tab.
7) Open a new tab, and browse to example.com
8) Click "Remember my decision"
9) Click "Open in Example container"
This is nuts. I can't recommend this workflow to anybody.
Same here. I was so happy to see this and I just went ahead and installed it in a heart-beat. Tried to find the addons page, couldn't find it, found your comment instead and uninstalled it in the next.
I hope they add support for addons otherwise there isn't much use for it at least to me.
Not to be mean, but that statement demonstrates a frankly shocking level of cluelessness. Extensions (mainly adblockers) are the critical feature that distinguishes FF mobile, and are the only reason I have ever been able to convince anyone to switch. I would almost consider adblockers functionality more critical than Javascript support, they should certainly be part of a minimum viable product. I know it's a preview version, but why would anyone in their right mind run this?
Possibly someone in their right mind would run it because they read TFA where it says "primarily aimed at developers and early adopters who want to help us improve Firefox on Android".
I would say that adblock/extension support is a pretty big deal breaker for "developers and early adopters". How are you going to get them to use a crippled browser for any significant period of time?
You're not supposed to use it for an extended period of time, that's why it has "preview" in its name.
I'll be happy to use their other browsers (mainly, Firefox Focus, my default browser) until this one gets more polished, but the moment this one becomes a bit more stable and adds a few more features (adblock support is certainly on top of that list) will be the moment when I not just switch over, but delete every other browser I have installed on my phone. I can't believe a browser (any browser) makes me feel excited in 2019, but this one does.
I would love to know whether Mozilla has resources available to port Firefox to SailfishOS (SFOS) and other non-iOS & non-Android mobile platforms. We could really use a good native browser here. I'm currently running it through SFOS' Android emulation but that has issues.
Lacking a port I would be interested in a solid, maintained Firefox-without-the-GUI base so people could port it somewhat easily.
Agreed. I hastily installed FF Preview and then immediately uninstalled it when I couldn't find where to install uBlock. They shouldn't have launched, or made an announcement, without some form of adblocking (native or plugin).
I understand that it's a testing release, but they stand to lose out on many testers and users. While I am perfectly willing to be a guinea pig and use this as my daily driver, I am passionately unwilling to browse with ads (especially on a mobile device where data is more expensive).
I am likely part of the vast majority of potential testers/users. There probably won't be a "hey, we support plugins/blocking now" announcement and, even if there will be, it probably won't be as visible as this announcement.
Did you actually try it on a website with lots of ads? I've been using focus for the last 6 months or so and the tracker blocking also blocks many ads for me. Also there is blockada which blocks ads system wide.
I would also appreciate if they worked on restoring the original addon capability they had up to 2016 (where you add keyboard shortcuts) before they go showboating.
Anyone remember when Firefox extensions broke recently? I thought it was a rather horrible experience.
If the new Firefox Preview can natively block advertisements, whitelist sites, disable third party cookies, prevent and hide social trackers, block anti-ad-blockers, etc. etc. then I agree that extensions are kind of useless, and I understand Mozilla's point.
However, I see the lack of extension support detrimental to my freedoms as a user, since it means I no longer can control what the software hides for me, nor what it broadcasts about me to the abyss of waste that is the advertising industry; I will have to trust the browser, and the lack of extension support is a rather untrustworthy property to begin with.
The big flash announcement is to get early adopters for testing. There's no reason to delay testing until the MVP is ready, as long as testers remain aware that Firefox Preview is a preview that shouldn't be expected to already have all features implemented.
It's just that, for me and a bunch of other people, we would be happy to test a preview if we could compare it against our current browsers. We can't, because
advertising is an abomination that destroys the utility of the internet
This release is what they termed MVP. Everything after it is post-MVP. It means minimum viable product. In my personal opinion, a lot more functionality was included than what most would call an MVP.
I really feel like this should be the top comment; losing addon support in FF on Android is about the only change I can envision that would cause me to stop using it. It's great as it is, and there is no amount of tinkering they could do to it that might possibly make up for the loss of addons.
With a new look and UI, a walkthrough maybe warranted. Took me a while to find the bookmark button. And the color scheme on the button itself is not as intuitive, does not present the idea on first viewing whether a page is bookmarked or not. But overall, looks great and works fast too. I am sure more devlopments are yet to come.
For now, looks promising to be a challenger to the Chrome monopoly.
Firefox sync is amazing and one of the reasons I never got hooked on chrome (I tried using it for a full year). I often do research on iOS for coding related topics. Send tab to device - boom, it’s there when I need it and I’ve got my text editor open.
You are not currently able to Sync to a custom server in Firefox Preview. Doing that requires access to about:config which is not set up in the release version.
I've been using it and it has been actually pretty good. It already has Firefox Sync and ability to send tabs to different devices. Only thing I miss is the ability to open tabs in background. This was my favorite feature in the previous Firefox for Android.
Like others have said, uBlock Origin ( or solid alternative; uMatrix, etc ) at this point is a prerequisite for any browser.
I am not testing something that puts me in danger and throws me into the festering garbage dumpster that internet is these days without it. It's like testing a car that doesn't have brakes yet.
Tell me how am I supposed to test add-ons on this Firefox as a developer before the release then.
Edit : And again, most of my work if not all related to Firefox, I do on the Nightly build. I expect things to break, but this preview ( of which there have been builds for a while already ) is a non-starter.
These builds have been available and in development for months now. They are announced at this time for 'early adopters and developers' ( EXACTLY us ) and still not even a hint of add-ons, or any obvious / apparent interest in them from Mozilla.
The only way to use uBlock Origin and / or uMatrix ( which again, many of us argue are essential, on top of add-on development itself ) on Android today is Firefox. Yet there have been nothing but vague replies these past months about when development from Mozilla will pay any attention to this, arguably its biggest differentiator and advantage compared to the spyware army of Chromium / Chrome clones on the biggest platform accessing the internet today.
These preview builds have been available for months, not just a couple of days.
Nothing I or my co-workers can actually test yet in them.
No official statement about add-on support which should be at the forefront of development in any Firefox version, the best we get is vague replies about it coming later.
Pi-hole at the DNS level, ublock origin and fingerprint protection at the browser level.
If the latter two are missing because I'm testing a beta browser which is very likely to a) deliver them and b) help defend against a chrome monoculture, I feel alright about sshing into a VPS to update pi-hole and then taking it for a spin.
I love containers, but the lack of ability to sync them really annoys me. Every time I get a new computer (or re-install, or setup a VPN to test with, etc) I have to manually create all my rules to always open my bank stuff in a special container, and always open my work sites in their container, etc. It seems like these rules should just sync.
Totally agree. I've also had it just completely forget all my "always open in container" settings in the past. But that hasn't occurred recently, so hopefully those days are over.
Me too - there doesn't even seem to be a way to generate a file that you could open on another computer? Having them sync via Firefox would be really good - even more so on mobile.
Me too. It is classic Mozilla. They have such big blind spots. Even after the certificate debacle, which wiped containers for some people, they still appear to have no plans to sync them.
Add extensions support and disable telemetry/remote-control by default (pushing updates where you control the code is remote control, don't even try to argue against that one).
> disable telemetry/remote-control by default (pushing updates where you control the code is remote control, don't even try to argue against that one).
They shouldn't be sending me to the Play Store ITFP.
I can't use Play because I've got no GApps in my phone, so I can't try their app unless I find a copy "somewhere" and convince myself it hasn't been poisoned. I got a reasonably up-to-date Firefox through APKPure, and later on after watching that 35C3 talk [1], I unzipped and grepped all those saved .apks to find the APKPure app itself and Firefox and LingoDeer had the same traces of Facebook's SDK in them. So that's off the table, huh? The ones that I saved from older phones after having gottten them through Play were all fine, but I can't update those without grabbing another phone and letting Google ... play in it. <ducks>
Just the other day I asked the Waterfox team for an apk and an md5sum, for the same reason-- though I'd settle for the md5sum alone! But Mozilla has resources WF can barely dream of, and it apparently intends to be a champion for privacy, so this is kinda sad.
If you have a phone without GApps, you're either in China (which has its own app store ecosystems) or not Mozilla's target audience for their binaries.
Again, resources. My workstation is still waiting to get torn down to have the smoke scrubbed out; my desk is torn down and cleaned already but still waiting for me to have a new place to put it. My room didn't burn but there's no electricity and the whole place is not habitable; by the time it is, it won't be my room anyway.
The 4GB laptop isn't very good for compiling large projects, because running WF needs much of that-- and then, just linking libxul.so needs almost all of it. On the side, maybe I also care a little bit about not wasting the energy since I wouldn't be customizing it at all. On the other side, my software compilation experience perfectly matches my desire to ever do it: 100% for Linux, 0% for Android.
Thank you for the link. I went looking for that in the past but gave up, apparently too soon.
Still no pull to refresh. They really don't want users to adopt their browser. Literally every single other mobile Web browser supports it.
Yet Mozilla has some ideological stance that it breaks web interaction (with what, the 0.0001% of browser that target Firefox above Safari or Chrome on mobile).
Android is the standard, more or less, for touch interfaces. They have significantly more devices than ios, and no other touch device is more than a blip compared to those two.
Pull-to-refresh certainly is catching on (I expect my smartphone-addicted parents will discover it within the next 5 years), but I can also understand if there are some reservations about implementing it.
What should happen when the user is interacting with the Android device via a non-touch input device, such as a mouse with a scroll wheel? Scroll-wheel-up-to-refresh?
One of the worst edge cases is on sites with infinite scroll. Having to scroll up 47 pages in order to refresh is not great. It is also nice to refresh a page without losing one's place on it. For these reasons, I would like to see the refresh button remain, even if pull-to-refresh is implemented.
I've been using Preview as my main mobile browser (switched from Firefox Focus as my main when Mozilla announced they've abandoned Focus).
The things I miss:
* Firefox Focus had a very quick way to send a page to a different browser "Open in " and I'm pretty sure it actually just listed the browsers there in the menu. None of the hassling with the share menu that takes forever to load and forever to search through. I really hate using the share menu on android. Somehow it's gotten even worse and side scrolls now. I don't want to sign in to my Google account in Firefox on android, but if you set firefox as your default all the login redirects go there. I think on Focus you could just tap "Open page in Chrome" and it would just punt it along and everything worked when needed.
* Lastpass app annoyances. Lastpass just matches the Firefox app itself rather than the site I'm viewing. Which is annoying but not a huge deal. I'm not sure whether lastpass worked in Focus though. Focus was like a staging area before going to a full browser.
Overall I'm pretty happy with Preview. I really liked using Focus though where it worked like a "firewall" where I could decide whether I actually wanted links opened by other apps to go into my browsing history or not.
I really liked the way I learned to use Focus and I'm sad it's been abandoned. It was like "Open all links in Private mode first and then decide if you actually give enough of a shit to go further". Focus was small and easy to learn to trust.
I've never wanted that. I really don't think this is the one think holding back firefox popularity on mobile. But luckily, firefox on android does support extensions:
I'm not sure I agree. I think everything users want is achievable. The current Firefox allows addons and ad blocking via addons. The Fenix update improves speed and adds some new features. Both the current and the new undermine Blink dominance and serve to support a more diverse, collaborative open Internet. All of these things are attainable in one browser, and I think that would satisfy most users.
You're probably right but, as a member of that demographic:
- I use Firefox, and have done continuously for a long time. I don't intend to switch to anything else, despite being very unhappy with the experience in many ways, as I consider it to be the "least worst"
- I genuinely believe there are very easily achievable low-hanging fruit that Mozilla could implement that would at least please a large swathe of their target demographic. Namely, not talking about privacy and then slapping Google tracking into everything they do. I understand that there's a revenue stream there, and a balance to be met between economic survival and ideal conditions, but this particilar issue is a deal tipped too far towards defying the point of the exercise.
Perhaps I'm in a bubble and this is just my "single issue", but shouting about privacy and sending all that data about their users to Google seems a fairly large deal to me.
Other than putting Google Analytics on all Mozilla properties as sibling commenters have already mentioned (link to info on that here [0]), there is also the following:
- as I mentioned in another comment, Firefox Preview comes with Google as a default search engine (not a huge issue) and with "search suggestions" enabled by default (which sends everything you ever type to Google).
- Even if you disable search suggestions (or change provider), Firefox has a built-in feature called "Google Safe Browsing" which collates every URL you visit and sends bulk reports to Google. This feature is only disable-able via the "here be dragons" about:config area.
- then there's Google Location Services, which sends your WiFi router SSID, SSIDs of routers in range, and hardware details, to Google. This is less clear cut as Mozilla's use of this service has been on-off over time, and varies per device. See[1]
This amounts to far less than "slapping Google tracking into everything they do", which reasonable people would interpret to include just using the browser. Reasonable people also understand that performing Google searches sends data to Google.
> Google Location Services, which sends your WiFi router SSID, SSIDs of routers in range, and hardware details, to Google. This is less clear cut as Mozilla's use of this service has been on-off over time, and varies per device.
Mozilla has made a significant investment to try to get away from this by building the Mozilla Location Service. In the meantime it's a straight tradeoff between quality of user experience and information leakage. Experience shows that degrading the user experience for some invisible and small privacy benefit is not a winning strategy.
"One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe."
> Firefox has a built-in feature called "Google Safe Browsing" which collates every URL you visit and sends bulk reports to Google. This feature is only disable-able via the "here be dragons" about:config area.
Is this not 'about:preferences' -> Privacy & Security -> Block dangerous and deceptive content ?
Safe Browsing in Firefox is nothing more than a flat list of malware-laden sites your browser downloads. It compares your current site against the list to warn you if a match occurs. It does nothing else whatsoever. Even the most basic search of technical details would show that. Firefox code is also open to be read.
Thanks for the clarification - this is all acceptable in my eyes then. Of course I never use Google Search (prefer Qwant, StartPage and DDG) and location services are never running in my browser. Safe Browsing - I prefer not to have it enabled, but it's not such a risk if it is.
This is quite a different thing from using Chrome(-ish browsers) with the "phone home".
This is what it comes down to: I still use Firefox confidently despite being aware of these issues, as I'm aware they're still very minor compared to running Chrome, or even any other Google-engine-based project.
It's still however worthwhile probing these issues. They're still far from ideal, even if they're preferable as a "least worst" option.
They do use Google Analytics on their websites but they do have a contract with Google that explicitly states that Google cannot use any of that data for tracking ever for any reason at all. Would make Mozilla rich if Google violated that.
I'm with you on this one. I don't think mozilla is as privacy oriented as HN would make you think.
* They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone
* They silently served modified installers to a small subset of users downloading firefox which sent all browsing data to a 3rd party by default.
* Disabling experiments used for pushing the mr robot ad does not disable "normandy" - which is practically the same thing and they used to push new certificates once their old ones expired and broke addons recently. This feature is hidden in advanced settings.
And then as you say, using google analytics everywhere (giving google data), painting google indirectly as evil while having it as a default engine and collecting google money.
> I don't think mozilla is as privacy oriented as HN would make you think.
> * They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone
I assume you're talking about the "mr robot" thing here as well. One can accuse it of being many things, but it wasn't a privacy violation, as no data was sent (or planned to be sent) to anybody, either to Mozilla or any third-party. (It was silly, an abuse of studies, a source of worry for those who monitor their list of add-ons for suspicious items, and a strategic error.)
As it should be. If you swallow every bone you are thrown you end up with bullshit like chrome's adblocker crippling served with a fake performance concern sauce.
Loyal. Savvy. Influential. And a userbase that speaks out to get a better product; I'd prefer a loyal userbase that provides feedback about what they care about than a fickle one that doesn't.
Some feedback: If you are going to market your browser as privacy focused, it has to block ads by default. As far as I can this one does not block ads at all. Good initial experience but please block ads.
>If you are going to market your browser as privacy focused, it has to block ads by default
A privacy-focused browser should care about the privacy part of the online advertisement, which is tracking. Completely preventing the site from showing any ads is a different feature.
Considering that advertisements are a common vector for installing spyware and malware, I think adblocking and antitracking are two sides of the same coin.
No, these are not the same and oughtn't be conflated. I'm perfectly happy seeing ads that aren't targeted to me personally based on my browsing history.
Ads on, say, Stack Overflow or HN or whatever, that target nerds ("great hosting!", "3d printing tech!", "legos!") would be perfectly doable without tracking each of us personally.
It's interesting to think about how these sorts of niche sites which have a narrow enough demographic to have valuable ad space are more or less being entirely eaten alive by networks with incredibly wide demographics. The centralized networks have to resort to building a panopticon to replicate segmenting which used to be natural at the network layer and the niche sites have to resort to playing along because of how powerful that panopticon is.
> In order to have a strong foundation for the next generation of mobile Firefox browsers and put all our efforts and resources in GeckoView, work on Firefox Focus will currently be on hold. Don’t worry though, you can still keep using our privacy browser, Focus, as well as our current Firefox for Android.
I think this is a typo, and meant to say that Firefox for Android development is on hold, not Focus.
Not a typo; we had not formally announced that Focus was on hold while we bootstrap the Firefox Preview / GeckoView / Mozilla Android Components ecosystem. Now we have. :)
I'm a happy user of both Firefox Focus and Firefox mobile, I don't know what could they improve but I'll give it a look.
About Firefox focus, I love to have it as default browser when opening links, it gives me a lot of confidence to know that the session will be completely destroyed afterward. I'd miss it if it were to be discontinued.
A neat little thing I've discovered after installing the Preview is that Focus is still here.
You can toggle between the modes in one tap, and if you're in a private mode, opening links from other apps behaves just like Focus (minus the convenient "erase everything" button, at least for now).
It's the best of both worlds, I don't have to use a second one for those rare scenarios in which I want cookies (like remaining logged into HN).
Cool, how about working on that mobile browser you already have? I've been using it for years and it's good but apparently the lack of progress on it is because they abandoned us users of it to focus on this thing.
When quantum came out addon capability on mobile severely regressed and never recovered. This issue to support the context menu API has been open for TWO YEARS.[0] I just want to be able to long press an image and reverse image search it like I used to, is that so much to ask? Yes, there's an addon to do it through the addon menu and then tap the image but it's not the same.
The amount of work to improve Firefox for Android basically meant a rewrite was needed, hence Firefox Preview being the eventually replacement when it's fully ready
We had many discussions around this. The Firefox for Android code base was not in a great condition to maintain backwards compatibility as well as accept a new rendering engine and all of the new Android Components we wanted to introduce to unify of our code bases for different Android-based products.
TL;DR: There was too much cruft built up.
Work should move faster now. We substantially grew our Android team in the last year.
I hope that works out then, I'm just frustrated with the state of mobile as it's been since the regressions. As someone who still thinks dropping XUL from desktop was a mistake (and maybe even mobile now that devices are more powerful) I wish it could've just stayed how it was but I'll just have to make the best of it.
Just yesterday I thought it is really annoying that mobile browsers put the address bar on top, even worse if it is moving in and out. That way it is impossible come close to a native look and feel. Now FF puts the address bar on bottom. Quite a suprise but I think it is a pretty smart change.
I can't understand how UX designers come up with the idea that putting stuff on the top of the screen* is a good thing, and even keep reiterating through that. That's an honest question, anybody knows what's the motivation behind that?
* or, places that are hard to reach for most users
Legacy design and use patterns. The top of the screen used to make more sense than today.
Mobile-first design really hasn't taken hold for many UX web designers (and/or the organizations haven't adapted). Relatively speaking, large phones where it's difficult to reach the top weren't popular until recently. Even mobile apps are just starting to put navigation towards the bottom.
In addition to familiarity as others have mentioned: when you scroll a site, it feels natural to "scroll away" the UI on the top. If you have UI on the bottom, and you want to hide it when scrolling, that doesn't feel as natural.
It's an unbelievably untapped aspect for differentiating browsers. However, instead of the address bar what would be the best experience would be to have navigation buttons on the bottom. Speed dials, back and forward, tab management should be front and center and at the bottom, since that's actually what you're using the most when browsing on mobile.
I love the address bar at the bottom. It feels so much better on a mobile device. As a whole, this version is much nicer to use than the previous versions.
My two main gripes are the default search engine and telemetry. Both of these options should be set by the user on first launch. I don't want to use Google and I don't want to send data to Mozilla.
Exactly. I wanted to use Firefox on mobile but Brave is so much more convenient since it puts the bar at the bottom. Reaching my hand up becomes annoying since I might have to use two hands to not drop my phone.
Another thing that annoyed me about the previous mobile Firefox was the 'x' in the URL bar closed the bar instead of clearing it like Brave. I had to unlearn months of muscle memory since it was a habit of mine. Maybe it doesn't matter since it's just an issue after switching.
I just switched to the current Android Firefox a few weeks ago and I must say I find it very hard to go back to Chrome. uBlock and Dark Reader make the phone browsing experience a remarkable amount more pleasant.
Chrome's general UI interaction is definitely more polished and snappier all around, but browsing mobile with good ad blocking, and not getting blasted in the face by stark white pages more than covers for Firefox's warts.
It should probably be noted that this Firefox Preview they are announcing doesn't yet have Add-On support.
But I agree, uBlock Origin makes the mobile web far less painful. Also, I'll point out that you want to be using uBlock Origin, not uBlock. As I recall, Raymond Hill (the creator of uBlock) decided to hand over uBlock Firefox to one of the contributors to offload some of the maintenance burden but then the new owner immediately started trying to monetize it which prompted him to create uBlock Origin.
Last time I checked, Raymond Hill's website didn't even have a donation button. This is an incredibly generous stance for him to take but if he doesn't want money himself maybe he could collect funds for a charity. I really feel I owe someone for this software.
It's free (libre) software; you don't owe anyone. Eventually you will encounter a bug or translation/documentation error in some free software; taking some time to fix that would help everyone. And so would making software to fix a problem and then releasing it under a free license.
It might not happen in the near future, but chances are eventually you'll get to contribute something. And even if you don't, just accept uBO as a gift from a nice person.
One thing he (rightfully) points out is that the real power of ad-blocking solutions comes from the community-maintained blocking lists. In theory one could manually block every url they run across, but in practice we can use these tools (or a tool like pi-hole) almost effortlessly.
I tried switching a couple of times but every time I face the same issue - the "touch" response is just _bad_ and I can't seem to be able to fix it. For example the "[-]" link on hackernews is almost impossible to click. I have to brute-force it by clicking multiple times, same applies for other websites where it doesn't seem to pickup the closest link I click.
On the other hand, the "Firefox Focus" app and Chrome do not seem to have this issue. Is there any way to fix this, because it's literally the only thing that stopping me.
I've been using Firefox on Android for about a year now, and it is great, except one major problem. Google news site (news.google.com). News I believe uses my entire phone's RAM and starts swapping (I am totally guessing, does Android use swap?) because the app will become unresponsive for about 2 full minutes while the page is rendering. Closing and re-opening a tab in this state actually breaks the app FYI (all other tabs freeze as well). Scrolling will give low resolution visuals below the fold. Horrible experience on google news. Actually all google properties are PAINFULLY slow. Is that on purpose Google? I got around it by installing Firefox Focus, and that seems to load google news quite fast, but Focus is like a permanent incognito mode, so that is quite inconvenient in itself. So now I just use Focus for google news and regular Firefox for everything else. Hopefully there will be performance improvements to come. My phone is an older Huawei Honor 8 so maybe I should just buy a new one... but the infrared on it is so great!
Memory management on Android is awful. My music player routinely gets killed; I've tried all options available to me to prevent this.. It's just too difficult for Android to work out "you're listening to music, even though there's no visible ui, so I won't kill it". I understand that there is a whitelist of music apps which don't get killed - so intractable is this problem - but the one I use (Rocket Player) isn't on it.
In my case I usually have actually nothing else running and my phone has 4GB of RAM so I am at a loss. I just tried Firefox Preview on Andriod with google news, and it loaded in about 2 seconds. So far so good!
The killing isn't actually the fault of Android itself, but the smartphone vendors that try to push the battery time metrics to the max. Battery management from Android isn't that bad actually, but the vendors will always find a way to fuck it up. I really liked this insight from "Zombies, Run!" developer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18901006#18902273
Now if they could just fix Firefox Mobile's abysmal tab management. Chrome Mobile's tab screen is a stack of pages in the Z-axis with the one closest to the user being the most recent tab and so on. Firefox Mobile's is a grid with the number of rows and columns being variable depending on screen dimensions. Figuring out which ones you opened in what order is not immediately apparent. It also suffers from the frankly amateur Android programming mistake of varying the swipe limits directly with the width of the screen, so going from portrait to landscape on a 19.5:9 phone screen means dismissing a tab suddenly requires you to swipe over twice as far as it does in portrait mode.
More than once I've found myself saying "oh my god, go away!" after trying and failing three times to swipe an unwanted tab away before remembering I have to drag the damn thing halfway to Timbuktu to dismiss it.
> Now if they could just fix Firefox Mobile's abysmal tab management. Chrome Mobile's tab screen is a stack of pages in the Z-axis with the one closest to the user being the most recent tab and so on. Firefox Mobile's is a grid with the number of rows and columns being variable depending on screen dimensions.
You can change it to a linear list easily. Settings -> General -> Compact Tabs.
Personally I strongly prefer the way Firefox does it. The order is actually pretty simple. Left to right, top to bottom is oldest to newest.
...which does nothing to address the problem of inconsistent UI experience because the setting doesn't affect landscape mode so now it's even less consistent.
I have been using Firefox on Android since 2013. It's been constantly improving. I am so glad that it exists so that I am not forced to use a browser (Chrome) that doesn't respect me or my privacy and has every incentive to fuck me over.
I used it in 2013 and found it constantly degrading with each update. They removed a major feature to reflow text to fit your screen nicely, worsened the UI, and other things I don't remember anymore. After using an old version for a while, I tried another browser, and holy crap that was 10 times faster as well as being customizable the way I was used to from Firefox desktop. Not open source, not as featureful (no add-ons), but that was so much better. Since then I switched to Lightning: even fewer features, but open source, very lightweight, and great UX.
Whenever I raised issues with Mozilla about things that degraded, it was always either talking to a brick wall or a wontfix. They made the decision based on one person complaining about it being the old way, implemented the change, and no matter that other people liked the old way, it wouldn't be changed back or made configurable.
I then tried to compile Firefox for Android myself and cherry pick only security updates, but that was enough of a pain in the ass that I gave up on it.
The current version of firefox for android works very well and doesn't feel noticeably different from chrome on a several year old phone.
The newest version mentioned in this article actually feels faster than chrome although I'm not crazy about the new ui it is usable without difficultly and a work in progress.
Have you tried other browsers? I must say that the effect has gotten smaller since I got my second Android phone about a year ago (yes, the first lasted 2013-2018), I think because the webview component itself just got more bulky, but it's still very noticeable how slow Fennec is (Firefox from F-Droid) compared to a bare webview browser.
I still have Fennec (Firefox from F-Droid) installed, I didn't notice any major changes since I stopped using it. I use it when there is some web application that expects a modern browser and the webview can't handle it.
But then, I also didn't think 57 for desktop was a big update. For me, it made zero speed difference (Firefox has always been fast on my laptop), on Linux with vertical tabs there is almost zero UI difference, and the only new thing was having to throw out all add-ons with the bathwater. Somehow, it seems I always experience things differently from other people.
Interesting point about reflowing text:
Why don't browsers reflow text on mobile when zooming the same way they do on the desktop? This is a mayor annoyance for me since, well, forever. As a visually impaired user, forcing me to swipe text left to right the whole time after I zoomed to a comfortable font size makes reading on smaller screens really bad.
And before you mention it, changing default font size in browser/OS doesn't really help, mostly makes things worse (Bad categories like "medium", "huge" instead of font size, page layouts breaking etc.)
Im using this add on on Firefox for Android: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/text-reflow-w.... Maybe it can help you. Be aware it's not perfect:
>This add-on is my attempt to provide the "reflow" option for text in Firefox Android. Warning: It is very limited. It will only reflow one paragraph at a time. You will have to tap/click on every single paragraph that you want to reflow.
Watch carefully: Noone will actually commit to extension support in the new firefox for android. They're going to roll their own adblocker, probably with the same inferior capabilities as manifest v3, to try to assuage all the people who use uBlock, while leaving everyone else to rot.
Will it be continually "improving" when they drop extension support?
395 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] thread(uBlock Origin is a prerequisite for me.)
It isn't even clear that they're not going to replace Android Firefox with Fenix before getting extensions working.
As far I know this issue is the most recent source of information: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/574
It says «We are currently finalizing the transition plan».
Even if they don't have the entire transition planned out, I think it was important for Mozilla to communicate their Android dev focus was gonna shift to GeckoView, from existing apps, to allow external devs, and customers to have a better plan, even if they don't have the add on strategy and timeline fully fleshed out.
The alternative is waiting a few months to know any of this was happening.
Focus has already shifted for quite some time, though - the current Firefox for Android ("Fennec") code base has already been in maintenance mode since the end of 2017, i.e. over 1½ years, including a few months at the start of 2018 were almost nobody was regularly working on it at all other than watching Bugzilla for any immediate priority bugs and reacting to those in case any happened.
As a tester of Firefox Preview: WebRender has been a godsend for mobile browsing -- I have yet to see it choke!
Moto G4, Qualcomm Adreno 405, OpenGL ES 3.2
about:config doesn't work either
With that said, what sites are you visiting? It could be that I simply don't visit sites with any ads, but I gave a few of my daily sites a spin in Firefox Preview and didn't notice any ads.
Note that they already included something similar, which is SafeBrowsing(TM), that is maintained by google. Technically, it is exactly the same concept. But uBlock is actively request by 99% of their users, while safeBrowser(TM) fingerprinting is mostly disabled by half.
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)
I am sorry but tracking protection on mozilla as it is now (only enabled by default on private windows, and hapening with no user knowledge/information/learning oportunities) is a lame clutch.
Outside of that I'm sure turning ad blocking on by default would break several sites.
Also publicly, they've said that ads are an integral part of the web.
What's the difference of shipping a feature off, and shipping with support for an extension (on both firefox and Google's chrome store sites!) that can be installed? At this point we are just discussing semantics. Install vs Turn on.
I wish they'd focus more on getting the UX of containers up to snuff. They are almost there, but still far enough away to make addons like Multi-Account Containers (MAC) something I cannot recommend to my parents.
Here is what I mean: Suppose I want to keep my use of example.com separate in it's own Example container. How do I do that?
1) Click the MAC icon in the toolbar, then click the "+" button.
2) Enter 'Example', pick an icon or color, then click okay.
3) Open a new Example container.
4) Navigate to example.com in the Example container
5) Click the MAC icon in the toolbar, then check "Always open in Example"
6) Close the tab.
7) Open a new tab, and browse to example.com
8) Click "Remember my decision"
9) Click "Open in Example container"
This is nuts. I can't recommend this workflow to anybody.
I hope they add support for addons otherwise there isn't much use for it at least to me.
It's not the same thing, but the built-in tracking protection incidentally blocks a portion of ads.
There's not much solid or explicit info in it, but it does seem to be planned eventually.
I'll be happy to use their other browsers (mainly, Firefox Focus, my default browser) until this one gets more polished, but the moment this one becomes a bit more stable and adds a few more features (adblock support is certainly on top of that list) will be the moment when I not just switch over, but delete every other browser I have installed on my phone. I can't believe a browser (any browser) makes me feel excited in 2019, but this one does.
Lacking a port I would be interested in a solid, maintained Firefox-without-the-GUI base so people could port it somewhat easily.
Winning their userbase back is the only way to win back the leverage they once had...
When you install Firefox Preview, tracking protection is enabled by default. This is recently true for Firefox Desktop as well.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/when-it-comes-to-pr...
This post below by our CEO explains how we're thinking about the issue broadly. Your privacy and agency are definitely front and center.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/the-web-the-world-n...
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)
I understand that it's a testing release, but they stand to lose out on many testers and users. While I am perfectly willing to be a guinea pig and use this as my daily driver, I am passionately unwilling to browse with ads (especially on a mobile device where data is more expensive).
I am likely part of the vast majority of potential testers/users. There probably won't be a "hey, we support plugins/blocking now" announcement and, even if there will be, it probably won't be as visible as this announcement.
It doesn't block ads. It blocks trackers that sometimes happen to be ads too. But when it comes to ad blocking, it's no better than Chrome.
Anyone remember when Firefox extensions broke recently? I thought it was a rather horrible experience.
If the new Firefox Preview can natively block advertisements, whitelist sites, disable third party cookies, prevent and hide social trackers, block anti-ad-blockers, etc. etc. then I agree that extensions are kind of useless, and I understand Mozilla's point.
However, I see the lack of extension support detrimental to my freedoms as a user, since it means I no longer can control what the software hides for me, nor what it broadcasts about me to the abyss of waste that is the advertising industry; I will have to trust the browser, and the lack of extension support is a rather untrustworthy property to begin with.
Isn't it strange that the big flash announcement comes before MVP?
advertising is an abomination that destroys the utility of the internet
and so there's no fair comparison.
For now, looks promising to be a challenger to the Chrome monopoly.
(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)
Long press the link.
Now: Firefox + uBlock Origin (no Containers)
Upcoming: Firefox (no uBlock Origin, no Containers)
Seems like we're moving backwards, no?
I am not testing something that puts me in danger and throws me into the festering garbage dumpster that internet is these days without it. It's like testing a car that doesn't have brakes yet.
Edit : And again, most of my work if not all related to Firefox, I do on the Nightly build. I expect things to break, but this preview ( of which there have been builds for a while already ) is a non-starter.
The only way to use uBlock Origin and / or uMatrix ( which again, many of us argue are essential, on top of add-on development itself ) on Android today is Firefox. Yet there have been nothing but vague replies these past months about when development from Mozilla will pay any attention to this, arguably its biggest differentiator and advantage compared to the spyware army of Chromium / Chrome clones on the biggest platform accessing the internet today.
These preview builds have been available for months, not just a couple of days.
Nothing I or my co-workers can actually test yet in them.
No official statement about add-on support which should be at the forefront of development in any Firefox version, the best we get is vague replies about it coming later.
Pi-hole at the DNS level, ublock origin and fingerprint protection at the browser level.
If the latter two are missing because I'm testing a beta browser which is very likely to a) deliver them and b) help defend against a chrome monoculture, I feel alright about sshing into a VPS to update pi-hole and then taking it for a spin.
So they shouldn't put updates on the Play Store?
I can't use Play because I've got no GApps in my phone, so I can't try their app unless I find a copy "somewhere" and convince myself it hasn't been poisoned. I got a reasonably up-to-date Firefox through APKPure, and later on after watching that 35C3 talk [1], I unzipped and grepped all those saved .apks to find the APKPure app itself and Firefox and LingoDeer had the same traces of Facebook's SDK in them. So that's off the table, huh? The ones that I saved from older phones after having gottten them through Play were all fine, but I can't update those without grabbing another phone and letting Google ... play in it. <ducks>
Just the other day I asked the Waterfox team for an apk and an md5sum, for the same reason-- though I'd settle for the md5sum alone! But Mozilla has resources WF can barely dream of, and it apparently intends to be a champion for privacy, so this is kinda sad.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vlD7r-kTc
https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/releases/68.0b13/ has the APKs plus signed hashes though.
(But more generally speaking: Why don't you build Firefox from source if you're so concerned with middlemen messing with the code?)
The 4GB laptop isn't very good for compiling large projects, because running WF needs much of that-- and then, just linking libxul.so needs almost all of it. On the side, maybe I also care a little bit about not wasting the energy since I wouldn't be customizing it at all. On the other side, my software compilation experience perfectly matches my desire to ever do it: 100% for Linux, 0% for Android.
Thank you for the link. I went looking for that in the past but gave up, apparently too soon.
Yet Mozilla has some ideological stance that it breaks web interaction (with what, the 0.0001% of browser that target Firefox above Safari or Chrome on mobile).
Mozilla caved on DRM but this is the line they won't cross?
What should happen when the user is interacting with the Android device via a non-touch input device, such as a mouse with a scroll wheel? Scroll-wheel-up-to-refresh?
One of the worst edge cases is on sites with infinite scroll. Having to scroll up 47 pages in order to refresh is not great. It is also nice to refresh a page without losing one's place on it. For these reasons, I would like to see the refresh button remain, even if pull-to-refresh is implemented.
I'm not aware of any browsers that implement pull to refresh and have also removed the refresh button.
The things I miss:
* Firefox Focus had a very quick way to send a page to a different browser "Open in " and I'm pretty sure it actually just listed the browsers there in the menu. None of the hassling with the share menu that takes forever to load and forever to search through. I really hate using the share menu on android. Somehow it's gotten even worse and side scrolls now. I don't want to sign in to my Google account in Firefox on android, but if you set firefox as your default all the login redirects go there. I think on Focus you could just tap "Open page in Chrome" and it would just punt it along and everything worked when needed.
* Lastpass app annoyances. Lastpass just matches the Firefox app itself rather than the site I'm viewing. Which is annoying but not a huge deal. I'm not sure whether lastpass worked in Focus though. Focus was like a staging area before going to a full browser.
Overall I'm pretty happy with Preview. I really liked using Focus though where it worked like a "firewall" where I could decide whether I actually wanted links opened by other apps to go into my browsing history or not.
I really liked the way I learned to use Focus and I'm sad it's been abandoned. It was like "Open all links in Private mode first and then decide if you actually give enough of a shit to go further". Focus was small and easy to learn to trust.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-pull-...
Unfortunately it cannot be disabled. The flag to disable it was removed. https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/8152831?hl=en
- I use Firefox, and have done continuously for a long time. I don't intend to switch to anything else, despite being very unhappy with the experience in many ways, as I consider it to be the "least worst"
- I genuinely believe there are very easily achievable low-hanging fruit that Mozilla could implement that would at least please a large swathe of their target demographic. Namely, not talking about privacy and then slapping Google tracking into everything they do. I understand that there's a revenue stream there, and a balance to be met between economic survival and ideal conditions, but this particilar issue is a deal tipped too far towards defying the point of the exercise.
Perhaps I'm in a bubble and this is just my "single issue", but shouting about privacy and sending all that data about their users to Google seems a fairly large deal to me.
Huh, I must have missed that - if true, this is a huge breach of trust for me. Do you have a link?
- as I mentioned in another comment, Firefox Preview comes with Google as a default search engine (not a huge issue) and with "search suggestions" enabled by default (which sends everything you ever type to Google).
- Even if you disable search suggestions (or change provider), Firefox has a built-in feature called "Google Safe Browsing" which collates every URL you visit and sends bulk reports to Google. This feature is only disable-able via the "here be dragons" about:config area.
- then there's Google Location Services, which sends your WiFi router SSID, SSIDs of routers in range, and hardware details, to Google. This is less clear cut as Mozilla's use of this service has been on-off over time, and varies per device. See[1]
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/websites/
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1512161
Safe Browsing DOES NOT reveal URLs to Google. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing#Privacy and read the protocol spec or Firefox source code if you doubt this.
> Google Location Services, which sends your WiFi router SSID, SSIDs of routers in range, and hardware details, to Google. This is less clear cut as Mozilla's use of this service has been on-off over time, and varies per device.
Mozilla has made a significant investment to try to get away from this by building the Mozilla Location Service. In the meantime it's a straight tradeoff between quality of user experience and information leakage. Experience shows that degrading the user experience for some invisible and small privacy benefit is not a winning strategy.
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...
Is this not 'about:preferences' -> Privacy & Security -> Block dangerous and deceptive content ?
This is quite a different thing from using Chrome(-ish browsers) with the "phone home".
This is what it comes down to: I still use Firefox confidently despite being aware of these issues, as I'm aware they're still very minor compared to running Chrome, or even any other Google-engine-based project.
It's still however worthwhile probing these issues. They're still far from ideal, even if they're preferable as a "least worst" option.
* They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone
* They silently served modified installers to a small subset of users downloading firefox which sent all browsing data to a 3rd party by default.
* Disabling experiments used for pushing the mr robot ad does not disable "normandy" - which is practically the same thing and they used to push new certificates once their old ones expired and broke addons recently. This feature is hidden in advanced settings.
And then as you say, using google analytics everywhere (giving google data), painting google indirectly as evil while having it as a default engine and collecting google money.
> * They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone
I assume you're talking about the "mr robot" thing here as well. One can accuse it of being many things, but it wasn't a privacy violation, as no data was sent (or planned to be sent) to anybody, either to Mozilla or any third-party. (It was silly, an abuse of studies, a source of worry for those who monitor their list of add-ons for suspicious items, and a strategic error.)
Among that group are sysadmins, webmasters and people who get called by friend or family members for anything tech-related.
If they do things right, like they did when IE was dominant, these guys will definitely give back.
I've used since v0.4.
A privacy-focused browser should care about the privacy part of the online advertisement, which is tracking. Completely preventing the site from showing any ads is a different feature.
Ads on, say, Stack Overflow or HN or whatever, that target nerds ("great hosting!", "3d printing tech!", "legos!") would be perfectly doable without tracking each of us personally.
I think this is a typo, and meant to say that Firefox for Android development is on hold, not Focus.
If you're interested in community maintainership of Focus, please fill out this survey: https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5022894/Firefox-Focus-Survey
(Linked from https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/06/geckoview-in-2019/)
About Firefox focus, I love to have it as default browser when opening links, it gives me a lot of confidence to know that the session will be completely destroyed afterward. I'd miss it if it were to be discontinued.
You can toggle between the modes in one tap, and if you're in a private mode, opening links from other apps behaves just like Focus (minus the convenient "erase everything" button, at least for now).
It's the best of both worlds, I don't have to use a second one for those rare scenarios in which I want cookies (like remaining logged into HN).
When quantum came out addon capability on mobile severely regressed and never recovered. This issue to support the context menu API has been open for TWO YEARS.[0] I just want to be able to long press an image and reverse image search it like I used to, is that so much to ask? Yes, there's an addon to do it through the addon menu and then tap the image but it's not the same.
0: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1363016
TL;DR: There was too much cruft built up.
Work should move faster now. We substantially grew our Android team in the last year.
* or, places that are hard to reach for most users
2) same browser gets put on a mobile phone, wants to "feel natural"
3) url bar goes in the "familiar" place.
Mobile-first design really hasn't taken hold for many UX web designers (and/or the organizations haven't adapted). Relatively speaking, large phones where it's difficult to reach the top weren't popular until recently. Even mobile apps are just starting to put navigation towards the bottom.
My two main gripes are the default search engine and telemetry. Both of these options should be set by the user on first launch. I don't want to use Google and I don't want to send data to Mozilla.
What "native look and feel" are you talking about?
Another thing that annoyed me about the previous mobile Firefox was the 'x' in the URL bar closed the bar instead of clearing it like Brave. I had to unlearn months of muscle memory since it was a habit of mine. Maybe it doesn't matter since it's just an issue after switching.
Chrome's general UI interaction is definitely more polished and snappier all around, but browsing mobile with good ad blocking, and not getting blasted in the face by stark white pages more than covers for Firefox's warts.
But I agree, uBlock Origin makes the mobile web far less painful. Also, I'll point out that you want to be using uBlock Origin, not uBlock. As I recall, Raymond Hill (the creator of uBlock) decided to hand over uBlock Firefox to one of the contributors to offload some of the maintenance burden but then the new owner immediately started trying to monetize it which prompted him to create uBlock Origin.
It might not happen in the near future, but chances are eventually you'll get to contribute something. And even if you don't, just accept uBO as a gift from a nice person.
One thing he (rightfully) points out is that the real power of ad-blocking solutions comes from the community-maintained blocking lists. In theory one could manually block every url they run across, but in practice we can use these tools (or a tool like pi-hole) almost effortlessly.
Isn't it what donation is ?
FF with add-ons run noticeable slower than brave.
https://blokada.org/index.html
But I think it's available for Asian countries only.
On the other hand, the "Firefox Focus" app and Chrome do not seem to have this issue. Is there any way to fix this, because it's literally the only thing that stopping me.
More than once I've found myself saying "oh my god, go away!" after trying and failing three times to swipe an unwanted tab away before remembering I have to drag the damn thing halfway to Timbuktu to dismiss it.
You can change it to a linear list easily. Settings -> General -> Compact Tabs.
Personally I strongly prefer the way Firefox does it. The order is actually pretty simple. Left to right, top to bottom is oldest to newest.
Whenever I raised issues with Mozilla about things that degraded, it was always either talking to a brick wall or a wontfix. They made the decision based on one person complaining about it being the old way, implemented the change, and no matter that other people liked the old way, it wouldn't be changed back or made configurable.
I then tried to compile Firefox for Android myself and cherry pick only security updates, but that was enough of a pain in the ass that I gave up on it.
The newest version mentioned in this article actually feels faster than chrome although I'm not crazy about the new ui it is usable without difficultly and a work in progress.
Experiences from years ago aren't really relevant any more, as Firefox has gotten a lot of work done the last couple of years.
But then, I also didn't think 57 for desktop was a big update. For me, it made zero speed difference (Firefox has always been fast on my laptop), on Linux with vertical tabs there is almost zero UI difference, and the only new thing was having to throw out all add-ons with the bathwater. Somehow, it seems I always experience things differently from other people.
And before you mention it, changing default font size in browser/OS doesn't really help, mostly makes things worse (Bad categories like "medium", "huge" instead of font size, page layouts breaking etc.)
Will it be continually "improving" when they drop extension support?
You mean, at Mozilla.
This whole branding campaign to shove everything under the "Firefox" umbrella is silly.
At Microsoft they make Windows. At Mozilla they make Firefox.