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.

  • soniquest@lemmy.studio
    38·
    1 year ago

    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

    • boyi@lemmy.sdf.org
      14·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • soniquest@lemmy.studio
        10·
        1 year ago

        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

      • SALT@lemmy.my.idEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        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

    • sgtlighttree@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • kalmarin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • PapaDuke@beehaw.org
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • sushibowl@feddit.nl
          16·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.netEnglish
          8·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • steakmeout@aussie.zone
          4·
          1 year ago

          Where did you get that misinformation from? I think you may be confusing Android for iOS where all iOS browsers are using WebKit - Safari’s engine. That is about to change though.

    • TheMadnessKing@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • soniquest@lemmy.studio
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yeah I tried that but no luck. I’ve seen suggesions it relates to RAM management but there’s no settings available for that.

          • soniquest@lemmy.studio
            1·
            1 year ago

            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