Finally migrated back to Firefox today after a multi year user of Chrome.
What pushed me over the edge? Most of my app icons (keep, pulse, calender, whatsapp) stopped opening in their own windows again.
I had to install the PWA extension in Firefox to get that working again, and it’s going to be a slight hassle having to copy and paste URLs from all those windows, but I’m tired of fixing the task bar icons.
Could’ve gone to Edge since it would work out of the box, but I like Firefox. (except for no native PWA support.)
Edit: found I can right click links in the PWA instances and use the send to other device option to open them in my main Firefox window.
Oh man time for my little rant. Long time Firefox supporter and still use it on desktop, but I had to uninstall on Android. It reloads the tab every time I switch out and back to it. It just kills me. Especially since I pay for Kagi search, and it’s nearly doubling my search count by reloadng all the damn time. So now I’m using Privacy Browser on Android, and it’s great, bit I’d rather be on Firefox. There are threads asking for a fix from years ago and it’s still a problem
I didn’t know that Firefox for android will reload tab. That’s why my voyager app keep reloading some images.
Anyway, for the time being, my immediate solution is to install ‘Stop Auto Reload’ addon (possible by using Firefox nightly custom add on collection). Still early to tell but so far it doesn’t reload the images.
I find DuckDuckGo for Android is a decent option, albeit chromium based.
News Flash:
Every single browser for Android has Chromium under the hood… Including Firefox.
For that reason alone is why I’m using Samsung Internet with AdGuard Content Blocker on my Galaxy A series.
Uhh that’s not true? Firefox for Android is Gecko based and doesn’t use chromium.
Maybe you’re confused with iPhones? Firefox for IOS is WebKit based, because that’s what apple mandates. That’s why it doesn’t support extensions. But on android there’s no such restrictions.
No. I’m not sure where you’ve gotten your information from, but that is incorrect. Firefox on my Android phone shows that it’s the Gecko engine:
Like the other commenter mentioned, you’re probably thinking of iOS where every browser is WebKit under the hood.
Firefox is open source, so if you still feel that you are correct in your assumption, and you can view it here - there is no Chromium code. Also, chrome specific URLs don’t work (eg
chrome://flags
) which would be in a Chromium based browser such as Brave.