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.
Thanks for the tip! I might give that a go
Does Kagi give better results than Google? If so, how consistently?
Honestly, it’s hard to say. I’m using it partly on principle as part of degoogling. I will say it’s ahead of all the other alternatives I’ve tried (DDG, Qwant, Startpage, Mojeek etc).
You don’t get Google suggestions and that’s moslty a good thing IMO although I sometimes miss getting a currency conversion or dictionary item answered without having to visit a site. Generally the results are as good as Google but Wikipedia or something is more likely to be top rather than buried under some spammy results.
You can try 100 searches or something for free, give it a go
It has currency conversion, but it expects specific format
IIRC Startpage is just an alternative frontend for Google, so it being better than Startpage would make it better than Google.
i’ve been having issues with autofilling credentials from saved passwords on firefox android
This is well known problem, you need to restart the phone itself or kill the services… I don’t know why they haven’t fix this yet for such long time
Definitely doesn’t happen for me, that’s annoying.
Does Firefox focus face the same issue?
I find DuckDuckGo for Android is a decent option, albeit chromium based.
For me, it not only reloads every time, but it reloads from cache, meaning I have to manually reload again to get the latest version of the page I was on. And the first reload from cache is slower, not sure how that makes sense.
Weirdly I haven’t had this issue much yet. I have had issued where the tab would kinda / break in sense that the tab would become useless and nothing can be done (eg. It will just show blank or some other tabs content)
Maybe try whitelisting Firefox from battery optimisation. It should help as some OEMs do aggressive background kill for apps.
Yeah I tried that but no luck. I’ve seen suggesions it relates to RAM management but there’s no settings available for that.
Which brand is your device from? Maybe I could find something useful.
Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro. Ive tried disabling battery optimisation, enabling autostart. Xiaomi phones are known to be aggressive with optimising, but every Chromium based browser is fine - Chrome, Vivaldi, Brave, and what im using now which is Privacy Browser. So I do think there’s sonething about Firefox in particular
Ohh. I never had this problem when I was using MIUI. IDK how it works.
Yeah, I’m still putting up with Firefox here—it affected both my devices, a Nokia 7 plus with stock Android and a MIUI device with all the RAM/battery optimizations turned off for the app. I think at this point its entirely a Firefox issue.