this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Warning to mobile Fediverse commenters (slrpnk.net)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by sgibson5150@slrpnk.net to c/firefox@lemmy.ml
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I've been experimenting with going without the suggestion strip on my Android keyboard because I tend to hit that row (and a random unwanted word) occasionally on my relatively new Moto when thumb typing. This can cause problems in FF as it did for me today when I was writing a long-ish comment and accidentally hit the reading mode button in the right of the address bar (I have my address bar at the bottom) and of course flushed my comment to hell. It was a perfect storm of shit haha.

Might move to nightly so I can disable the reading mode button, assuming that's still possible. I've been on Android released for the last year or so.

Edit: BTW this happened on the photon front end. Not sure if you could run into this with default Lemmy. Edit #2: In first paragraph, I used both the terms "comment" and "post". I was referring specifically to commenting. Haven't noticed the reading mode button be available when writing a whole new post, but I comment more than I post.

Any other "gotchas" that you guys have encountered on mobile FF?

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[–] eco_game@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My personal gripe with mobile Firefox is searching by using the address bar.

I have had countless times where I put in my search prompt, followed by pressing the little X all the way on the right and thus clearing the address bar. My brain just really expects an enter button to be there.

I think my current record is entering a search term and then clearing it literally directly 3 times in a row, getting more and more confused each time.

[–] scorp@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

same thing happens with bookmarks when selecting text while editing

[–] Dirk@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Any other “gotchas” that you guys have encountered on mobile FF?

Not specific to Lemmy, but I was ... impressed ... that it is impossible to set a custom homepage in the browser. Something that is possible since 15+ years in every mobile browser I used.

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 9 points 2 months ago

It's unclear to me what the mobile Firefox homepage even is. It doesn't increase the tab count, it just sort of hovers over your screen. And you can get to it by either pressing the Home button or the New Tab button; both of these do almost the same thing.

[–] sgibson5150@slrpnk.net 6 points 2 months ago

Ah wow. You're right. Guess I never noticed that on mobile. I always set that option on FF desktop.

[–] Xylight@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Photon seems to have a semantic layout that firefox detects as settable into reader mode.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

Yup. but it works quite well if you only want to see the text body

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Unless they changed it, mobile Firefox is locked to a limited set of extensions unless you:

  1. Use Nightly.
  2. Create a Mozilla account.
  3. Log in to that account on the Add-Ons site and create an add-on collection with all the extensions you want to install.
  4. Set that collection as your source of add-ons in the Firefox settings.

You're also unable to use about:config unless you're using Nightly (or maybe Beta). So Nightly is really the only version worth using since it doesn't have nearly as many artificial restrictions as the stable version does. This is also true to a lesser extent on desktop where you have to use Nightly to install unsigned extensions.

You also can't open any offline HTML files for whatever reason and on devices with very little RAM (like 2GB) Firefox isn't viable, but Chrome-based browsers work mostly fine. Firefox is still the best mobile browser though, mostly because it supports extensions at all.

[–] sgibson5150@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 months ago

My meaning exactly. I used to run Nightly on all my devices until a couple years ago. Can't remember why I switched. Maybe my sync got borked? Risks of unstable.