Because damn that’s annoying. With phones being massive now, it makes little sense to make us reach up to the top of the screen to swipe between tabs. Do all their chrome devs just have super long fingers…?
I tried switching to Firefox, which has the URL box at the bottom, but the lack of tab grouping (not the same thing as Firefox’s tab collections) is really annoying. I’ve come to love that feature in Chrome!
So, next question… What’s your fave browser on Android, and how well does it handle syncing with the desktop?
Firefox nightly 100%
Being able to use Add-ons makes it world’s better than other mobile browser’s. I use Firefox on my desktop so it’s all synced between and I can grab tabs from either which is handy too.
I have to use Microsoft Launcher because I have a Pixel and the ad-riddled Google search is baked into Pixel’s native launcher.
Bit out of scope of the post but do you recommend Microsoft launcher? I have a pixel as well and the google search bar on the bottom annoys me.
I do recommend it. Offers a lot more customisation. The At a Glance is worlds more useful than Google’s news section and the Microsoft news is better).
It lets you overhaul the whole layout. I replaced the Google search with a bing search widget which opens up in Firefox. Can also just put a Firefox widget if you prefer.
So nice not having every search appear in a temporary window that disappears when I search a second thing. Even nicer not to have adverts on every search.
hate the fact that chrome killed the bottom address bar.
i use vivaldi and it covers all the bases (and a lot more, heck it even has its own Mastodon server)
I came to recommend Vivaldi, too.
Same here. Vivaldi rocks.
And another vote for Vivaldi
At this point, I just can’t do without Stacks, Tile view, Sessions and Work Spaces. The build-in Periodic Reload is also great, but by far, the most incredible feature is that you can customize your right-click menues however you like. I also have a lot of Command Chains set up in the Quick Command bar.
The amount of stuff that you can customize in Vivaldi has been without parallel for me.
You can set bottom address bar for Vivaldi Mobile.
Firefox on all my devices. Adding the right extensions also taught me how a web without almost no ads looks like.
I have tried most of the other browsers but nothing beats Firefox. They are the one that are fighting for a free Internet. All other big names are in it for the money and the power.
@mikestevens I use Firefox on both phone and pc and use Firefox Sync to sync between them.
Samsung Internet is honestly an underrated browser. It has the ability to put the navigation bar at the bottom. I like a lot of its features and how light it is.
Yeah I like the Samsung browser too. I think I’m just too obsessed with chrome’s tab grouping. Can’t bring myself to give it up!
That’s what I’ve been using on my tablet, since Firefox seems to not find making a tablet version a priority
Will always use Firefox so long as it’s free of the bullshit that sets it apart from Chrome and it’s ilk.
I use Firefox (or Mull to be exact). Also used Bromite (Chromium fork) until the development seemingly stopped. Privacy Browser from FDroid is also a good browser imo.
Sometimes Firefox, since I use it on my PC as well and it’s nice to have my stuff synchronized. For regular mobile use, though, Kiwi Browser Has been treating me well and is faster than FF in my experience.
I use Firefox Desktop and app, but I’d love to bee able to zoom images on google search without opening the link, as I can using the Chrome app.
You can do that on desktop with Imagus extension, but it’s not out for Android. You just hover the mouse over the image and works with many websites.
🙂 Android solution: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search-fixer/
If you’re willing to jump through a hoop, it’s probably doable.
A lot of google services explicitly check if you’re using chrome before enabling certain features. This can be spoofed with a user-agent switcher. And Firefox for android supports extensions.
I use Firefox Nightly on both desktop and Android. It has the option to have the address bar on bottom on mobile. I love being able to use all the extensions on my phone. uBlock Origin is the best content blocker available. I can syn and see my tabs on other devices.
uBlock Origin plus consent-o-matic are must-haves in my opinion. The latter automatically denies & closes all cookie nag screens.
How does Consent-o-matic compare to I Still Don’t Care About Cookies?
Never tried that one, so I really can’t tell. c-o-m sets all the GDPR tags as well, if the other one does the same, they’d be more or less identical I’d say.
okay, I might give it a try.
Samsung Internet keeps this feature. It’s honestly a very decent browser actually. I fing it light with all the features I need.
If tab grouping is what I think it is, I couldn’t adapt to it, so I went Firefox on mobile, instead of Chrome
I also prefer Firefox since it has ad blocking if you add ublock origin. Sometimes it takes forever to load a web page though.
Bromite is pretty decent
Bromite hasn’t been updated for a while sadly, a shame as it was the only chromium based browser on Android that wasn’t full of bloat and had ad blocking.
Ah, that sucks. Thanks for the heads up!
You can also use Vivaldi’s mobile version as well. It’s also chromium-based, you can set address-bar position and tab switcher style, and it has inbuilt tracker and ad blocking, just like the desktop version.
This is by the dev that worked on Bromite, it’s regularly updated.
Brave, bromite isn’t updated as often as i want and it has bottom search bar
I don’t use Brave anymore but god, I remember really loving that bottom search bar layout (with the search icon rather than the whole bar). It was probably one of the hardest things for me to get used to not having when I switched to Firefox.
Use this instead, it’s made by one of the devs that worked on Bromite.
I’ve moved from Chrome to Fennec, the Firefox-fork made by the developers of the F-Droid store.
Other than Firefox stable you have full support for addons/extension just like in the Desktop version, and it syncs perfectly with the good ol’ Desktop FF. Firefox nightly mobile did crash here or there or used extensive resources once in a while.
For the precious few websites that require a Chromium-based browser, I have Kiwi installed in parallel, which also supports all addons in the mobile version right from the chrome store.
