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I've closely been following Mobile Firefox development over the past year - this browser is dead, like totally dead.

Bug reports pile up, nothing is really fixed, a ton of commits about telemetry, some commits here and there changing certain UI elements, some refactoring, almost nothing else. Go check its revision history all you want: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/commits/main

Mozilla has seemingly totally given up on it. It's incredibly sad.

3 comments

That's because actual browser development doesn't happen there - that's at https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/.

Rereading your comment, you're referring more specifically to mobile; I suppose you might have a point there, but when almost everything is in mozilla-central, I'm not sure what you expect to see there (well, extensions, but beyond that) other than UI work.

There are still loads of things that used to work before the rewrite and now don't, plus a number of bugs introduced during the rewrite, and progress in that area is positively glacial.

I'm starting to think that maybe browsers on Android and iOS just don't matter much anymore, other than as the foundation for in-app web views.

I have a fairly new phone on a 5G network and the browser is soooo much better than it was even ten years ago yet I use it far, far less than I did back then. Part of it is that my phone just didn't do as much back then and so I spent more time in the browser, but I think the other part is that the web has turned into a garbage fire.

I used to browse the web the same way I used to channel surf in 1984. It was what I did for fun. Today, I go to five sites 99% of the time and I kind of dread having to use my browser on my phone outside of that.

If you use any kind of browser sync, that alone makes the choice of browser important, since you need the same one on all devices that you use for it to work seamlessly across all of them.

(I wish we had standardized sync protocols for this stuff. But we couldn't even standardize IM, so that's just futile dreaming on my part.)

i havnt got around to trying floccus out fully but i hope its good because i switch between firefox and vivaldi every few years so it would be nice to have something that would work on both

https://floccus.org/

Firefox Sync is somewhat open. The service is foss and third-party browsers implement it.

Which third party browsers? Epiphany does, but it's not a very good browser, sad to say, and pretty much noone uses it.

Epiphany and Eolie.

I guess your point is Mozilla would care if they were bigger. Nobody can say. The service documents you are allowed to use it as long as you don't use Firefox/Mozilla branding.

Works pretty well for me