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Why does not firefox care more about the android version? (lemy.lol)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by King@lemy.lol to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

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Firefox for Android does not support Material UI, has a low minimum API level, and generally seems lacking in features. Why is that?

Edit 1: also the downloading function is super unstable, I lost several files due to firefox starting the download then stopping and removing the download for no reason.

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[–] ZWQbpkzl@hexbear.net 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Is "generally lacking in features" relative to desktop Firefox or other mobile browsers?

Also idk why you'd want Material UI. Not even chrome uses it AFAIK.

[–] King@lemy.lol 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Mobile browsers.

[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What features do you want?

[–] zarenki@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Not OP, but the one thing that bugs me most is that Firefox Android does not have a tablet UI. Other browsers like Chrome have a tab bar and other desktop-like UI features when run on Android tablets.

But on phone I've never run into a case of wanting a feature that it lacks.

[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I'm in the same boat as you, but it seems that Mozilla is finally going to try to improve the tablet UI this year: https://www.androidpolice.com/firefox-tablet-ui-being-developed/

Edit: I went down the rabbit hole and enabled the tab strip in Firefox nightly and I can confirm that they already implemented a huge chunk of what's needed for a proper tablet UI and IMO do it much better than Chrome.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago

I've never noticed any issues probably because I almost never use a web browser on my tablet, I use it almost exclusively for video streaming. That's too bad the tablet experience is subpar, maybe file a feature request or vote for an existing one?

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago

Not OP, but Firefox Android is lacking in features compared to both. For example, when it comes to bookmarking, it is painfully behind its desktop counterpart. Not only is there no desktop style bookmark manager to be found, but bigger folder structures are hard to visualize because subfolders are barely indented when you need to look for them.

I could probably write a short essay about bookmark and tab treatment, and the pseudo-tab that shows up when you tap Home, New Tab, or the URL bar itself. Browsers shouldn't have a learning curve that requires you to acknowledge the pseudo-tab isn't really a tab.