News: 1598342559

In light mode can only just about make out icons at bottom.

Lost defaut search (Startpage)

Lost history.

Reset all my preferences (home page setting etc)

Ghostery no longer works

And that's what I found messed up in the first five minutes.

A cluster fuck of design.

Try [1]F-Droid Fennec , if they've got any sense they won't update it any more than 68.11.0.

The only problem is getting your bookmarks and extensions back if you don't use Firefox Sync, fortunately the new UI will let you select and share bookmarks which is an improvement (as is the address bar at the bottom).

Now that they've fired everyone, I'm not sure Mozilla are in a position to return support for the majority of addons they've disabled.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

I have been a contented Firefox user for many years, but my experience with this upgrade has made me consider the previously unthinkable step of switching to Chrome on my phone.

For some reason the phrase "New Coke" comes to mind ...

Try [1]Bromite instead. It's Chromium fork with adblocker. I'm quite happy with that so far.

[1] https://www.bromite.org/

Try Brave, you'll thank me.

Thank goodness I have auto-updating of apps on my Android phone disabled. I usually update them from time to time manually. I guess Firefox is one that will be left alone for now until this mess is sorted, or until I've had enough and moved elsewhere.

Oi, I was queued for 79 already, but (luckily) have no wifi in the office. Now that was a close shave. There is no internet without adblock.

Precisely one of the main reasons I use Firefox on my phone - too many websites that are otherwise unusable without it. The alternative if Mozilla can't get their shit together I guess is to check out alternatives such as Vivaldi Mobile.

uBlock is one of the few supported add-ons.

Unfortunately I've found the Play Store (don't remember this ever happening when it was the Market) is occasionally wont to mysteriously forget that I've told it that every few months and start downloading automatically. I'd make sure you have a copy of the last good APK handy just in case.

I can no longer demo my work on an Android browser of any kind

since this Frefox 'update' disabled all but a chosen handful of web-extension add-ons.

Phew! Just in time to let me turn off auto-updating. It was sitting there ready to go...

I don't have a mobile 'phone so cannot speak from experience but Palemoon, a fork of Firefox, is available for PCs. Is it available for mobiles? On a PC Palemoon will accept many Firefox extensions and being based on Firefox retains most of the look and feel of a pre-Australis Firefox.

I did see, when I was using a tablet, that there was some form of Palemoon available but it seemed to be quite limited and being unable to get any applications that worked without Google's involvement I gave up using said appliance.

It would be a shame if Mozilla went the way of so many other developers and unilaterally decided that they know what is best for their users.

Palemoon was available on Android for a while, but I don't think it was a development priority and may have been dropped more recently. A pity as I do use Palemoon as my primary browser on the PC and quite like it.

Besides it isn't the first time Mozilla have done this. It was the hideous "Australis" refresh of Firefox that drove me to Palemoon in the first place...

"It was the hideous "Australis" refresh of Firefox that drove me to Palemoon in the first place..."

Yes, me too. It does seem as if Mozilla has some form of death-wish. Still, with FLOSS we do have a choice, which is something that Mozilla, Google and others would do well to remember

Yes, me too. It does seem as if Mozilla has some form of death-wish. Still, with FLOSS we do have a choice, which is something that Mozilla, Google and others would do well to remember

Well, maybe, maybe not. These days the status is quite simple; ****ALL BROWSERS SUCK****. Each one will have it's own particular flavour of suckiness, but in general ALL browsers are shite. And the ones that aren't crap because of user-hostile refactoring and UI changes end up having little to no support (from abandonment, lack of dev support, or incompatible changes in whatever codebases they depend on).

Read this and turned off auto update.

Have just finished prompting nearest and dearest to also turn off auto update.

at least you CAN turn it off... for now...

Shades of what they did when AUSTRALIS rolled out.

Don't they LEARN? (apparently NOT)

icon, because, facepalm

Cookie Autodelete and uBlock Origin are both on the "recommended" list, but not uMatrix. If Mozilla are so keen on privacy, why is it missing?

Auto-update disabled.

Good:

- The new interface is a lot slicker than the old one and a lot of thought appears to have gone into it

- Hamburger menu is decluttered

- Rendering and layout seems a lot smoother

- Built-in QR code scanner

- More tracking / privacy enabled

Bad:

- Open tabs view shows them as a big long list instead of thumbnails so it takes more vertical space to list them. Needs an option to switch views.

- All the animations such as when a menu shows or tabs are shown are cute but rapidly become the cause of brain farts. Needs an option to turn them off

- Trying to stop a page loading has become terrible. When a page is loading you would expect a stop button but it's buried in the hamburger menu. Why isn't it in the url bar when loading?

- Landscape mode doesn't show more toolbar buttons which have plenty of space to be shown, such as the stop button or back/forward.

- Creating a privacy tab requires more taps, or secret knowledge of a long press

So I can see which way they're going and maybe it will improve a bit in subsequent updates but they made a mess of it. At the very least they should have had a welcome screen which explained some of the changes and smooth over the upgrade shock.

The built-in QR code scanner is not good, it means you need to give the camera permission to the browser instead of a separate app which doesn't use the Internet like Barcode Scanner.

There is an option buried in privacy settings to upload usage to a mobile advertising partner, make sure that's turned off.

Also some features now take more than one tap making them more fiddly, including opening a private tab. The address bar at the bottom is good, removing the option to turn off auto-hiding the address bar isn't as that means you need to scroll before the address bar appears.

Firefox already had the permissions for camera / microphone. You can always say no when the app asks for initial permission to do it or manually turn it off if you inadvertantly enable it.

Well, that's the point, before you could leave the camera permission for Barcode Scanner on and Firefox off. Now you have to mess around with it in Firefox if you use the QR scanner.

I got automatically updated last week and I'm not very happy about it.

My Android Tablet had an Android Software Update AND a Firefox Update so I thought it was the Android F**king with me :(

Not impressed with an interface that looks like it was designed by someone without any experience in designing a UI!

Hopefully the privacy features haven't been as badly affected (not yet looked) and am dreading !!

Please, Mozilla, get this fixed ASAP

Trying to work how to reset the homepage (or at least how to set it up), no fucking clue.

So click "Help"

And here is the page you go to:

...

"Firefox for Android Beta Support"

...

Useless idiots. Maybe stop making the clever people redundant and start getting rid of the idiots that rolled out this mess.

Useless idiots. Maybe stop making the clever people redundant and start getting rid of the idiots that rolled out this mess.

Mozilla is following the IBM model of firing the people who actually DO the work, and keeping the middle-managers.

When open source software rollouts come over us with as little regard for how they affect users as we're already used to with monopolist commercial software, it's no wonder that open source developers' statements also sound like monopolists' corporate PR.

When open source software rollouts come over us with as little regard for how they affect users as we're already used to with monopolist commercial software, it's no wonder that open source developers' statements also sound like monopolists' corporate PR.

It's the GNOME model of Open Source development.

For those of you that have had your phone polluted by the new Firefox, I can suggest that you scrub Firefox from the phone then re-install version 68 from an app mirror site such as

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/mozilla/firefox/firefox-68-0-release/

There are other sites such as apkpure.

Then make sure auto update is turned off.

This could be Mozilla's try at the longest suicide note in history.

Oh great. Again. I've used Firefox for donkey's years, but this is just the latest in a litany of balls-ups. On desktop there was Quantum, breaking all the extensions overnight, and that lovely weekend where they remotely disabled add-ons via a deeply suspicious mechanism that they still have access to.

Every update for me is a voyage into the unknown. How long will I have to spend reconfiguring it to get things back to how I want? Messing about in about:config or userchrome with a bunch of badly-documented settings that only make sense to the developers.

The android version was pretty stable, but now it turns out that they were just saving all the shit up for one go at it. Can you re-order bookmarks on the bookmarks page in this version at least? Is there even still a bookmarks page? Comments above suggest that it's no longer possible to set bookmarks as the home page...

I still use it in spite of all this, but Mozilla are bloody hard to like. They've been trying to drive users away for years.

They already succeeded. Switched to Brave.

I like the ability to have the menu bar at the bottom but who on earth was it designed for? The touch targets are tiny, my fingers are larger than an HB pencil Mozilla!

Add to that the fact all my add-ons are missing, most notably Ghostery, my start page with links to all my most used sites is gone and the complete lack of usable settings... very, very bad Mozilla. Very bad.

Later today I'll have to explain the changes to my other half who will probably struggle to see the tiny new menu bar and do what little setup there is available for her.

the open tabs view, I haven't noticed much difference to the old version. It looks a little cleaner, but no real major differences so far.

The two add-ons I use are still there (NoScript and uBlock Origin). If NoScript ever disappears, that will remove the reason not to move to another browser, it is the singe differentiating factor, for me.

"no, once you’ve upgraded to the new browser, you won’t be able to return to the old browser," Moz says.

Wrong, thanks to apkmirror.

Then disable auto-update, and start the search for something better. *sigh*

Thinking about this mess draws me to the conclusion that the problem is a blurring of the line between Updates and Upgrades.

Updates should be limited to the underlying nuts and bolts of the software. Adding compatibility for HTML changes and suchlike. One essential characteristic should be that the UI should not be altered unless it is absolutely essential. Even then there should be warnings that enable a user opt out even if auto-updates have been enabled.

Upgrades are the place for stylistic product changes. Style is almost by definition a subjective matter. I prefer the Classic windows style of page for PCs and eschew any others. That is my choice and I respect others who prefer other paradigms. There should be room for both.

It annoys me that I have to be smart, to be cunning to avoid the traps and pitfalls arranged by people such as the Mozilla design managers. On a PC I use extensions and CSS style sheets to take the Firefox UI back to the old layour circa version 40. On Android I have had to scrub Firefox and reload/sideload version 68 again (see above).

It shouldn't be necessary. I shouldn't have to treat Mozilla with suspicion every time they release a new version. I should be persuaded to make donations to them rather than curse them. You may ask why I don't go elsewhere. It's because the rest are worse.

From what I read here and in the comments, it will also be the last version of Firefox for Android, because everyone is going to move to something else.

No back button ? WTF ?

The back button is the usual Android capacitive/soft back button. I can't quite put my finger on it but the behaviour's slightly different though, sometimes the page closes when I'm sure it didn't before.

if it had zoom and reflow...

"Rolling out an entirely new product to a large group of users is a complex process that can easily result in issues when executed too quickly."

There's the problem. Users want to be able to decide whether they want an entirely new product. They don't want it foisted, let alone forced, on then as a routine upgrade.

I wonder if the removal of add-ons is related to this https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/

I find it an alarming account of Mozilla development. At one level is could be read as the consequence of abandoning the discipline of making architectural changes with major release numbers with minor numbers for more incremental changes. On another level it's maybe a description of the corner they'd painted themselves into which forced them to abandon that.

There are three types of extensions on Firefox, XUL extensions (the first kind) never worked on Firefox Android.

Only Webextensions work now, but with the latest version they only added enough support to the new UI just to get the most popular extensions working. I guess they are being agile.

If this is an overhaul and it isn't feature-complete, why didn't they release it separately? A notification of the new version in the original app would suffice to give users the choice to switch when they're ready.

Firefox did flash me a notification - in advance - yesterday (maybe because I have an account?) and I had already seen mention of this elsewhere so had disabled play store auto updates and I've removed my Master Password for now, just so my passwords don't get blitzed.

I could probably live with the new version - I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to block ads and trackers and they are available in the new version (though I'd be unsurprised if Badger needed to relearn all the trackers it blocks.

However the lack of back/forward buttons (if true) would be a complete bummer - how else do you get back to the Register home page from here?.

I also understand that they haven't enabled about:config which would mean I have no control over my DNS (amongst other things): I do use DoH (via Nebulo) but avoid Cloudflare (the company whose Chief Security Officer was previously sacked by Uber).

On my PC's Firefox-esr (LTS) I have three months overlap of the old and the new version, so I don't get bumped into upgrading. On Android, not only do they stop supporting the old version for security immediately they hit you with an automatic upgrade.

For now I'm sitting fast on the old version. Any suggestions for a good alternative mobile browser? Don't say Chrome.