I’m not here to explain why the alternatives suck. I’m just here to complain about Firefox. Yes, I understand many alternatives alleviate these complaints - but in exchance for tens of other more serious problems. I’ve tried every Android browser under the sun, and Firefox is the one for me. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

First, the atrocious, ridiculous “home screen”. You can’t customize it in any way that someone would actually want to. You can toggle on shortcuts, but if you have less than 8 shortcuts, it autofills the rest from your recent history - which is totally garbage, because I want the shortcuts to be to SPECIFIC sites I actually want to visit. Not my banks “successful log out” page. Moronic. If you decide to fill up your 8 shortcuts, that kind of works, but guess what? YOU CAN’T REORGANIZE THEM. Your only choice is to delete and re-add them in the order you want.

Want to set a custom URL as your home page, you know, like people have done since the 90’s? Haha, that’s completely impossible on Android Firefox. Desktop Firefox lets you do it, yeah. But not Android.

Ah, but there are home page wallpapers at least. No wait, just kidding, it’s just a handful of preset images. You can’t upload your own.

Want to configure browser flags with about:config? Desktop Firefox lets you do it. But if you do the same thing on Android, you’re deemed an incompetent meddling idiot and greeted with a totally blank page. You have to visit the SECRET URL chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml, which seemingly is designed just to fuck with you, to PROVE that you really meant to go there. Because those damn phone users just can’t be trusted!!!

And also, why is it so hard for even LARGE companies to just provide a nice little APK link to their OWN app on their OWN site? Even privacy-focused, alternative-tech type things like Waterfox, hide away their APKs. Why? Is it really that hard to pop that file on your server and have a little link to it? No, it isn’t. There’s no excuse and it drives me absolutely nuts. Mozilla at least offers their apks via ftp.mozilla.org, but what kind of ridiculous experience is that? Everyone is stressing about Google forcing people to auth through the Play Store, but from what I can see damn near every app out there is ONLY available on the Play Store anyways.

What about tab grouping? Every Chromium browser supports this CRITICAL quality of life feature, but not Firefox! It supports it on desktop, where you’d almost never need to use it! But on your mobile browser, where people shop and browse and just generally spend 90% of their internet life, nope. Not there.

Mozilla. I appreciate what you do to keep the web more open and less advertisey. I appreciate that you are making a non-Chromium browser that even runs on mobile devices. But, this stuff is a joke. And it’s no wonder Firefox has such trash market share when this is the state of the mobile browser. Get your act together and fix your flagship product.

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