[HN Gopher] End of support for Firefox on Amazon devices
___________________________________________________________________
End of support for Firefox on Amazon devices
Author : cozzyd
Score : 154 points
Date : 2021-04-10 14:40 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (support.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (support.mozilla.org)
| mastrsushi wrote:
| Firewho?
| varispeed wrote:
| If Apple can pull off its walled garden thing and there are many
| people defending it, then why should Amazon be any different?
| They jump on the bandwagon and will milk it until regulators ban
| the practice (hopefully). It's all about money.
| franklyt wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: Firefox is allowing itself to be phased out,
| and contributing to a less free internet, with their business
| moves. It was hugely upsetting when they axed their dev team mid-
| pandemic.
| the_duke wrote:
| Mozilla really can't do that much to prevent it.
|
| Firefox only got popular because it was so much better than IE
| at the time.
|
| Now Chrome and Safari are the preinstalled on most devices or
| are pushed on you if they are not. They are also good enough or
| better that users don't have enough incentive to switch,
| especially with ad blockers working just fine on the
| competition (for now...). And Google won't allow Chrome to fall
| behind in a meaningful way.
|
| There is not much market opportunity to compete against the
| monopolistic distribution channels that Apple and Google can
| leverage.
| franklyt wrote:
| This would be a decent point if nobody had any interest in
| chromium alternatives and Firefox was a new upstart brand,
| neither of which are true.
|
| Usually, when a CEO heads an explicitly sinking ship, the CEO
| will be removed and someone will be brought in to turn around
| the company.
|
| No idea why that hasn't happened.
| [deleted]
| kbrosnan wrote:
| The last 10 years worth of CEOs for Mozilla Corp.
|
| 2008-2010 John Lilly
|
| 2010-2013 Gary Kovacs
|
| 2014 Brendan Eich
|
| 2014-2019 Chris Beard
|
| 2020-now Mitchel Baker
|
| [edit formatting]
| franklyt wrote:
| This brings up a fascinating point that spins off into
| another, entirely complex discussion: does Mozilla pay
| enough for a great (not good) CEO?
| jacquesm wrote:
| They pay too much for this one.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| They already replaced their last CEO due to outrage.
| Another replacement would signal disaster.
| franklyt wrote:
| Was the last CEO let go for performance reasons?
| st3fan wrote:
| You can read https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/29/my-
| next-chapter and decide for yourself.
| dralley wrote:
| > This would be a decent point if nobody had any interest
| in chromium alternatives and Firefox was a new upstart
| brand, neither of which are true.
|
| What? The dominance of the mobile space by one of their
| competitors, who pre-installs their own browser, and who
| advertised said browser for free on the most visited
| website on the planet (google.com) for years, is absolutely
| relevant regardless of how old Mozilla is.
|
| And the world isn't like HN, most people don't care that
| much about their browsers, and don't even know what
| "chromium" is.
| franklyt wrote:
| Firefox has, since incipience, faced that challenge.
|
| Anyhow, the point I'm making is that I don't agree that
| it is impossible to compete with trenched competition.
|
| Firefox has some prior momentum themselves, they're not
| quite an upstart.
| goonogle wrote:
| Mozilla isn't the same company as when I was a teen.
|
| I've attempted to use their platform on numerous devices over
| the last 3 years and ran into issues. I've moved on.
|
| No amount of HN praise can override my real world experience.
| sgt wrote:
| They said they did the axing due to the long term viability of
| Firefox. So it would be ironic if this axing had such bad PR
| that it had a worse effect than having too many heads.
| jgrowl wrote:
| This seems more like a bad omen for the future of firesticks than
| it is firefox. I say that as someone that uses a firetv and a
| firestick every day. They become unresponsive to input, freeze,
| and lag constantly. Even for amazon's own shows. It has only
| gotten worse over time. I'm slowly just moving towards getting a
| windows instance to every tv in house.
| gizmodo59 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why did you choose firetv and firestick
| compared to the alternatives? (Apple TV, roku, chrome cast
| etc). I'm trying to decide
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| Not OP but I chose FireTV because of the inbuilt Alexa
| support.
|
| Shouting "Alexa turn the TV off" from another part of the
| house when it's my daughter's bedtime is worth the entry fee!
| Also when my wife is in the car with her Echo Auto, she can
| say "announce that I'm coming home" and that message will
| play on the TV (and convert it to text as well). Ps. we
| didn't know the FireTV did this when we bought it. It's quite
| nice finding these features as you use other Alexa devices.
|
| I've not experienced much in the way of lagging or
| unresponsiveness. Note that they just released a major
| update.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I've actually looked into buying one recently, but between
| general slowness (a friend of mine has one), price and lacking
| an Alexa-less option if you need 4k, I'm actually considering
| an used AppleTV 4k now.
| deadmutex wrote:
| You may also want to consider ChromeCast with Google TV:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sb9-NOxZlg . ~$50
| craftinator wrote:
| Yeah, but who voluntarily wants another Google product?
| deadmutex wrote:
| It may come as a surprise, but there's a large number of
| consumers that buy Google/Amazon/Facebook(Oculus)
| products. I suspect there might be a negative bias
| towards those companies on HN.
| tclancy wrote:
| I would say the Chromecast with Google tv is an
| impressive bit of kit and it's not bound to their
| services.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I'd disagree. The new Chromecast with Google TV requires
| you to disable privacy settings in order to use basic
| features on the Chromecast. I had to make a new Google
| account and enable Web & App History on it just so I
| could use the device normally.
| devenblake wrote:
| How does one de-Google a Google Chromecast?
| nailer wrote:
| I had the old Fire TV Stick and can confirm the latency was
| bad.
|
| The 4K one is much faster (irrespective of display
| resolution) than its predecessors. I really like it.
| katbyte wrote:
| Got an apple tv 4k just for infuse<>emby and am very happy
| with it, looks much better with 4k HDR content then anything
| else i've tried: andriod tv apps, emby app, netflix, prime
| (was the worst) and casting to a 4k chomecast.
| deergomoo wrote:
| The Prime Video app for Tizen-based Samsung TVs is a shit-show
| too. Every other app I use is acceptably responsive, but Prime
| Video consistently feels like the UI runs at 5fps with about
| half a second of input latency
| notatoad wrote:
| I have the same experience on Roku. It was bad enough that I
| cancelled prime and started pirating the couple of prime
| shows I wanted to watch. The Plex app on my Roku runs
| great...
| keanebean86 wrote:
| Same on my vizio tv. Most apps are fine. Amazon is laggy
| and search input is basically unusably slow. Hulu also does
| weird stuff but we're complaining about amazon today.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Yes, I've noticed the same, as well as software getting buggier
| over time (I have a 1st gen Fire TV 4k, and the Disney+ app
| doesn't respond to pause)
| noneeeed wrote:
| Oh god, the Disney+ app is a complete dumpster fire.
|
| There is a fix for the Disney+ pause issue: Got to Settings
| -> Display -> Sounds -> Audio -> Dolby Digital Output and
| turn it off. Obviously that's crap if you want Dolby Digital
| Output, but for some reason it fixes the issue.
|
| I don't actually have a problem with the Firestick as a
| whole, seems responsive enough for the services I use, but
| Disney really needs to up their game, it's the only one I
| have an issue with.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I botched the password input the first time I tried to log
| into the Disney+ app. It apparently stored _that_ password to
| use for subsequent runs, as I was prompted for the password
| every time I ran it. Resetting the app data fixed the
| problem, so that 's where the assumption about storing the
| wrong password is from.
|
| (I'm saying, don't necessarily blame only the hardware)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I have multiple models of both the Fire TV/Stick and the
| Chromecast, and I agree.
|
| I really, really want someone to release a Chromecast-like
| device that isn't Amazon or Google, though.
|
| The latest Chromecast with Google TV barely works without
| granting Google access to a whole bunch of your private data.
| For example, you need to enable Web & App Activity across your
| entire Google account to use normal Chromecast features.
|
| I will pay good money for a device that uses the castv2
| protocol and doesn't siphon my data to Google's servers just so
| I can watch videos on my TV.
| klondike_ wrote:
| Miracast is an option
| heavyset_go wrote:
| In my experience, the tooling is limited and I believe
| Miracast support is being phased out on many devices that
| had it or, at least in theory, could support it.
| dig1 wrote:
| This is a sad story. From a desire to have a genuinely open-
| source browser (with proper open development) present almost
| everywhere, we now have Firefox present on fewer and fewer
| platforms. I think, in the end, it will be "officially supported"
| only on Windows and macOS.
|
| I understand that web browser is a complex business, but TBH, I
| don't want VR, Pocket, and tons of half-baked junk in my browser.
| Google poured millions of dollars into Mozilla (which is cheaper
| than battling with anti-trust commission), and yet, most of their
| projects failed. I think they need to rethink their management
| and strategy before everything goes to the ground.
| kbrosnan wrote:
| Firefox on Amazon devices uses the Android Webview. Fire Sticks
| have specs that are comparable to several year old phones when
| they were released. This makes them poor targets for general
| use computing.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > Google poured millions of dollars into Mozilla (...), and
| yet, most of their projects failed.
|
| Perhaps it's actually working as intended.
| lightgreen wrote:
| Don't blame Google for that. It's Mozilla management failure.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Agreed. Google just wrote the check.
| st3fan wrote:
| If only it was so simple that you need great (product)
| management to have a successful product.
|
| Mozilla tries hard and like every other startup or company
| out there, many ideas or products fail or turn out to not
| be profitable.
|
| There is no magic here. If there was then all startups and
| all ideas would work.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > Don't blame Google for that. It's Mozilla management
| failure.
|
| Is there any reading material online supporting this
| position? I would tend to agree but my opinion is fairly
| uninformed.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Usage was down, revenue went way way up, and executive
| salaries reflected that. As revenue has dropped, I doubt
| executive salaries have stayed at the same level.
|
| It's insane how much flak they get for the CEO making a
| million dollars more after signing a deal that got them
| hundreds of millions more dollars a year.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > It's insane how much flak they get for the CEO making a
| million dollars more after signing a deal that got them
| hundreds of millions more dollars a year.
|
| I think the derision comes from the fact that this is
| theoretically a non-profit org.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The executives are employees of the Mozilla Corporation,
| not the nonprofit.
| lallysingh wrote:
| If the board had paid the same amount and gotten half the
| return from a service or consultant, they would be
| praised for it. But an employee! Good forbid!
| st3fan wrote:
| I'm a senior engineering manager at Mozilla. Are you
| saying that because Mozilla is a non-profit I should just
| accept to take a salary that is mediocre or below
| industry standard?
|
| What if we apply that to engineering too? Marketing,
| operations, SREs ..
|
| How do you think that would work out for Mozilla? Do you
| think we would have any impact if the place was run like
| that? Do you think we would have much talent on board?
| luckylion wrote:
| > It's insane how much flak they get for the CEO making a
| million dollars more after signing a deal that got them
| hundreds of millions more dollars a year.
|
| What are you talking about? Hundreds of millions _more_
| per year? Their revenue [1] grew by 40m (520m to 562m)
| during the year they doubled their top exec salary. It
| fell by 90m the next year, earning them a loss for the
| first time.
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Fina
| nzierun... German Wikipedia has a nice table.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The deal was made in 2015, and I assume that the
| executives do not negotiate their salary every year.
| luckylion wrote:
| Looking at the financials, it's pretty obvious that there
| was not huge deals that brought in additional hundreds of
| millions.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| I have often thought that leading a shining beacon like
| Mozilla should and would be done by a previously
| successful executive who doesn't need the money and would
| like a challenge. Compensation would be $1/year,
| everlasting respect, and a true legacy to leave behind.
| But that's just my vision of panacea I suppose.
|
| I respect Mitchell Baker's history at Mozilla but is it
| time for a change?
|
| reference: https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/about/leadership/
|
| edit: changed phrasing and tone
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| She's only been CEO for roughly a year now, and your hope
| that someone would do that work for free is unrealistic.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Yeah.. > that's just my vision of panacea I suppose.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Sorry, it does seem far harsher than I intended it, I'll
| change it. People often have extremely idealistic views
| of Mozilla that puts then in a position where they can do
| no right, and I'll end up debating that idealism while
| ignoring what was said.
| consumer451 wrote:
| No worries. I understand that his is complex topic and I
| am coming to it with little knowledge.
|
| The reason I thought she had been CEO for years is that I
| saw in the official bio that she was a co-founder and
| CEO. I didn't realize the timeline. I should probably
| learn a lot more prior to making statements like I had
| previously about change.
|
| I also do have the baggage of an anti-administrative
| bloat bias/agenda which I am may be applying here
| inappropriately.
|
| I was just really disapointed with some of the teams that
| were removed like Security. I know that money has to come
| from somewhere and seeing exec compensation go up at the
| same time was a hard pill to swallow.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >. I know that money has to come from somewhere and
| seeing exec compensation go up at the same time was a
| hard pill to swallow.
|
| The last year we have executive salaries from is 2018,
| while those cuts were in 2020. I suspect executive
| compensation also fell sharply, I know the number of
| executives is lower.
| lallysingh wrote:
| I also hope that they wear a black costume and fight
| crime at night.
|
| But all we get are police and skilled people who want to
| be paid what they're worth.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| I'm guessing the management failure was engineered from the
| start. Follow the money.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| So blame Yahoo, the ones paying them during the
| "management failure?"
| staticman2 wrote:
| Mozilla is competing with the world's biggest advertisement
| company who can advertise their competition 24/7 and is
| also competing with the biggest phone company in America
| who has banned their product and forced their customers to
| use the phone company's product.
|
| This all might have something to do with it.
| orra wrote:
| > most of their projects failed. I think they need to rethink
| their management and strategy before everything goes to the
| ground.
|
| Lots of projects fail. It's the nature of R&D. You should see
| the number of products Google has shut down.
|
| Besides, the project that Mozilla gets the most flack for?
| Firefox OS. Turned out to be a great idea? Why? Because Apple
| and Google anti competitively bundle their own browsers with
| their own mobile OSes.
|
| Yes, sadly Firefox OS failed. But the future (now, present) of
| web is mobile: Mozilla had to try.
| input_sh wrote:
| Not to mention a fork of Firefox OS is probably the 3rd most
| used mobile operating system now: https://www.kaiostech.com/
| hkt wrote:
| Firefox OS didn't fail: it is now known as KaiOS and is
| present on vast, vast quantities of "smart feature" phones in
| places like India. I recall Mozilla specifically talking
| about how to approach the next billion people to come online.
| It is admittedly a nuanced reading, but I think they
| succeeded on those terms. Still, the experience is very
| different to the one on Firefox OS as-was in 2015 or so.
|
| Apologies for no citations, but I recall a talk from 2014 or
| so at Mozfest in London and not much else. I've also owned a
| KaiOS phone - the Nokia 8110 and can say aside from a lack of
| apps it is great.
| simias wrote:
| I'm generally worried for the future of Firefox, but this
| particular decision doesn't really sound all that significant
| to me.
|
| I don't really think it's reasonable for Firefox to officially
| support every single proprietary platform out there, especially
| when it must have had a tiny number of users. I'd rather
| Firefox focused on improving the browser where it matters than
| supporting some niche proprietary environment.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I wonder if this might be a play to try and get some money from
| Amazon to reverse course...?
| ZoF wrote:
| I think this is a terrible choice and wish they would explain why
| the decision was made.
|
| Was it something that amazon imposed(ostensibly)? If so, please
| share.
| simias wrote:
| Maybe it was just too small a market share to warrant
| supporting? That was my first guess.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| Yes if they were transparent about why I think people would be
| understanding and less critical of the decision. As it stands,
| the announcement says nothing like that.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| It costs them to support it. How many Firefox users on Amazon
| fire TVs do you think there were?
|
| I would guess it just looks like a bad return on time invested.
| cozzyd wrote:
| https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-tv/issues enough to
| file this many issues, but probably not enough to fix them?
| st3fan wrote:
| There are always enough technical users with a github
| account to file issues. They represent a tiny tiny tiny
| fraction of product users though :-)
| yosito wrote:
| Are there any organizations talking about forking Firefox and
| taking the software in a different direction than Mozilla is
| taking it?
| londons_explore wrote:
| The main reason to drop support for Amazon devices is you want to
| start using some Google Play Services API's.
|
| They include everything from fitness tracking to push
| notifications to face/voice recognition.
|
| I wonder which they want to use?
| yosito wrote:
| > The main reason to drop support for Amazon devices is you
| want to start using some Google Play Services APIs
|
| I'm assuming this is slight hyperbole, as there are other
| plausible reasons to drop support for Amazon devices. But I'm
| curious to know if you have any other reason to believe that
| Firefox plans to use Google Play Services APIs?
| caturopath wrote:
| Push notifications seem like something a browser would want --
| is it a thing on any platform?
|
| I tried searching, but I suspect there are a lot of subtleties
| to the technologies involved (with similar names and such) that
| I don't know how to connect whether this fills a gap.
| londons_explore wrote:
| All major Web browsers on Android and iOS provide push
| notifications to websites (if granted permission).
|
| Most webpages use it for spammy notifications of little value
| to most users sadly...
| Larrikin wrote:
| I'm curious if there are any good use cases for browser
| push notifications out side of chat web apps. I keep
| meaning to disable them globally because I can't think of
| any.
| indymike wrote:
| Push notifications aren't just for humans. They can be
| used to push messages to service workers that for
| instance, might sync local data for an offline mail
| client. This is a really big deal for PWAs. PWAs are a
| lot like electron, except they do not include a separate
| browser runtime, they just use your existing browser, and
| are managed by the browser.
| symlinkk wrote:
| I mean web apps are apps, so same as anything you'd want
| a push notification for via an installed app. E.g. an
| email webapp might send you a notification when you get a
| new email, a hacker news webapp might send you one when
| you get a reply, etc. It's pretty obvious
| ldjb wrote:
| I know websites that can send a push notification when a
| product that is out-of-stock is restocked.
|
| I'm sure I've also been on sports websites that allow you
| to receive a notification when a goal is scored in a
| particular match.
| jefftk wrote:
| When I run a query at work in my browser, it uses that
| API to give me a push notification when it finishes. I
| like it a lot!
|
| I also get push notifications when meetings are about to
| start.
| lights0123 wrote:
| > All major Web browsers on Android and iOS provide push
| notifications to websites
|
| _No_ browsers on iOS allow push notifications on websites.
| https://onesignal.com/blog/the-state-of-ios-web-push-
| in-2020...
| kiwijamo wrote:
| That is good news. Such a user hostile idea so hopefully
| it never comes.
| GranPC wrote:
| I disagree. I'm currently building a live webapp, and all
| of my users want to receive notifications when shows are
| going to start, so they don't miss anything. Since
| WebPush is pretty much unusable (unsupported on iOS,
| useless on Android) I had to resort to sending SMS to
| each of my users, which is expensive and a worse
| experience.
|
| Just because the API is often used for evil, it doesn't
| mean that the API itself is hostile. I can think of many
| usecases where a properly functioning web push
| notification API would be desirable - the unfortunate
| truth is that the current implementation makes it useless
| for most real world scenarios.
| tpxl wrote:
| Whats wrong with email?
| GranPC wrote:
| Most users don't receive timely push notifications when
| an email is received. Especially in the case of Gmail,
| which is the most popular email provider with Android
| users, since they employ an algorithm to automatically
| categorize emails in categories such as "promotions" and
| "updates" - which causes those emails to not trigger a
| notification.
| taeric wrote:
| I am curious on the "most" part. Is there any other use?
| Push notifications, by and large, are a vapid wasteland of
| wasted time, in my experience.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Firefox is dying because they switched their target audience from
| people who like Firefox to people who don't like Chrome. They act
| like they're going to come up with some wiz-bang feature and wake
| up with a 50% market share while ignoring everything that got
| them a 25% share. It does not and will never work that way.
| qzw wrote:
| True to an extent, but don't forget that for quite a while
| Chrome was genuinely far ahead in technology, so the number of
| people who liked Firefox was dropping rather precipitously.
| They probably felt immense pressure to come up with ways to not
| just stop the loss of users but to reverse the trend. A pretty
| tall order for anyone. Microsoft couldn't do it either.
| psim1 wrote:
| This sucks. Firefox actually works great on FireTV Stick, unlike
| many other apps available for the device. It is useful for
| loading stream sites that don't have apps; e.g. Stanford Puffer.
| dal wrote:
| Firefox is not available on my Nvidia Shield Android TV either.
| So seems like Mozilla just does not want to have a browser on
| TVs.
| vetinari wrote:
| There would be something other at play, as no other browser -
| Chrome, Opera, Edge, Vivaldi, Brave - is available for Nvidia
| Shield either.
| caslon wrote:
| Honestly, there's barely a reason for Firefox to exist anywhere
| outside of the desktop after they eliminated extensions _one more
| time_ for every other platform.
|
| The "Firefox anywhere but desktop" package nowadays is "Here's a
| sub-par, slower, poorly-optimized browser without an ad-blocker;
| you'll be happy to know we have Pocket and Ads built-in! Why even
| bother with those icky websites? Just click our links! Addons? I
| mean, we have four. We no longer allow you to use the rest of the
| AMO addons."
|
| Firefox on desktop is nice, except for their most recent design
| update (coming in a month or two, already on Nightly), which
| makes compact mode massive and normal mode gigantic. But you can
| get around that by simply going out of your way to write CSS to
| eliminate tabs entirely, and replace them with an extension.
| vesinisa wrote:
| I honestly have no idea what are you talking about. I really
| enjoy uBlock Origin on my phone, and that's the primary reason
| I use Firefox for Android. On iOS Firefox is just an UI to
| Apple WebView, but that's a matter for antitrust courts and not
| a fault of Mozilla.
| caslon wrote:
| They recently limited the Android (and derivatives', like FR)
| build's access to AMO; there are less than fifty there, now.
| uBO is one, but there's very few other than that. Kind of
| defeats a major selling-point of WebExtensions.
| anonymousab wrote:
| I've been able to use any extension so far on the Nightly
| version - at least, any that previously worked in Fennec.
|
| But it's an unintuitive process. You need to create an add-
| on site account, then create a Collection, then add the
| extensions you want to the collection. Each add-on page has
| an Add to Collection option, and the collection page itself
| has a search option but it's a limited subset and so it's
| kinda useless.
|
| Then you enable some dev mode option in the app, and
| (manually) copy some account and collection ids into a
| setting. Then the collection and the add-ons will appear
| and let you download and install them.
|
| It does feel like a "placate power users while adding as
| much friction as is reasonably possible" approach, and
| Mozilla certainly seems to be heading for a greatly
| restricted add-on experience for all users in the future.
| There is an abundant feeling of "a PM wants to see the
| metrics say X" all over this experience, as with most
| modern Firefox degradations. But at least this is an option
| for now.
|
| Edit: having to use nightly does suck as well, as I've seen
| a new different annoying bug every version or two (e.g.
| broken menus, tap targets not working any more, etc.) that
| I wouldn't have seen in the main release candidates. But
| you can at least try to avoid updating whenever you feel
| the current nightly is ok.
| commoner wrote:
| This is correct. On Android, add-ons from
| addons.mozilla.org can be installed onto Firefox Nightly
| or Fennec F-Droid (a fork of Firefox stable).
|
| Instructions:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-
| extensio...
|
| Firefox Nightly: https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai
| ls?id=org.mozilla.fe...
|
| Fennec F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozil
| la.fennec_fdroid/
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Yup!
|
| I'm still using the old version of Firefox on Android
| because I need the extensions I have.
|
| Which really sucks
| input_sh wrote:
| You _can_ install all extensions available on desktops on
| new Firefox for quite some time, it 's just clunky:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-
| extensio...
|
| Might convince you to upgrade, I generally would never
| run an outdated browser.
| simias wrote:
| I don't know about the Amazon Devices version, but on Android
| Firefox works great in my experience. In particular the
| advantage is that it does support extensions.
| caslon wrote:
| They recently limited the Android (and derivatives', like FR)
| build's access to AMO; there are less than fifty there, now.
| uBO is one, but there's very few other than that. Kind of
| defeats a major selling-point of WebExtensions.
| simias wrote:
| I don't understand what FR and AMO mean. Are you saying
| that many extensions are not compatible with Firefox
| Mobile?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| AMO = addons.mozilla.org, I don't know what FR is, but in
| short... well, I dunno about actually technically
| incompatible, but yes Mozilla redid mobile extensions and
| at the same time switched to only allow installation of a
| tiny hand-picked set of approved extensions on mobile.
| asddubs wrote:
| AMO is addons.mozilla.org, i had to look that one up too.
| no idea about FR, that's harder to google (since it's the
| country code for france)
| TheGoddessInari wrote:
| FWIW, on Nightly you can make your own custom addon list.
| It's not that they can't support add-ons, but that there
| are things to work out again before a wide re-release.
| Fenix, based on GeckoView, is a total redesign. I
| appreciate it, even if I lose access to one NON-AMO
| extension that was useful.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yes, it is possible, but hardly user friendly - _each
| user_ needs to create an AMO account, create a custom
| addon list and then copy paste id strings back and forth.
|
| Only then finaly you can actually use an addon from AMO
| in your Nigtly Firefox.
|
| Frankly sounds much more like jumping through unnecessary
| hoops than anything. Most users will likely give up than
| provide much needed feedback to extension authors about
| how their extensions work on Android.
| sigmar wrote:
| Lots of doom and gloom comments here, but the post only refers to
| ending support on amazon echo and fire tv. The experience of
| using a(ny) browser on those devices was terrible. They probably
| saw usage numbers on those two devices were so low that support
| made no sense.
| brundolf wrote:
| Isn't the echo voice-only? How does that even work?
| popey wrote:
| The article says "Echo Show" which is a device with an
| integral display.
| fencepost wrote:
| The most important and easy thing to miss is probably that this
| is on "DEVICES" not on "Tablets." You can still run it just
| fine on the color Amazon Android-based handhelds, it's the
| "IoT" category devices where it's going away.
|
| Honestly I wouldn't have predicted better than a 50% chance
| that Firefox ran on those anyway.
| cozzyd wrote:
| I wouldn't browse HN on my FireTV, but it's great for live
| streams of various events, which seem to exist on a zillion
| different websites (I just watched a wedding this morning on my
| FireTV using Firefox)
| bdcravens wrote:
| The UI is really weird; I only use the browser for videos where
| no app option exists.
| shawnz wrote:
| Firestick users can also connect a USB mouse with a USB-OTG
| adapter and sideload the Firefox mobile APK (the one for phones).
| In my opinion it gives a much better experience than the Firefox
| for Fire TV app, although as noted it's basically unusable
| without a mouse. You can get updates by sideloading the F-Droid
| APK (which works great on Fire TV).
| wpietri wrote:
| I'd love to hear the story behind this. Are Amazon devices
| drifting too far from Android to be easily supported?
|
| I'm fine with Firefox dropping niche platforms and focusing
| resources on actual users. (Most stats don't even cover the
| Amazon devices; the only mention I could find of Silk usage was
| 0.02% of traffic.) But it surprises me that Amazon's devices are
| now far enough off from regular Android that there's a support
| burden. Anybody here shipping apps for Fire who can explain?
| voxadam wrote:
| Fire OS 7 is based on Android 9 with API level 28. So, yeah,
| it's not exactly cutting edge.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I'm on kitkat 4.4. I hope in 10 years to reach 9.
| varispeed wrote:
| Android 9 is when that system ended for me, as Google
| completely disabled call recording by 3rd party apps. It's a
| must have feature if you want to have any defence against
| scamming insurance companies and so on. Probably they were
| losing too much money when people were able to call their
| lies and demand refunds, so they must have somehow convinced
| Google to remove this feature altogether.
| rock_artist wrote:
| But isn't Firefox even supports Android 5 devices?
| scaladev wrote:
| The latest version works fine on my x86 phone with Android
| 5.
| jldl805 wrote:
| Why do you live your life like this?!?
| molasses wrote:
| I get this. I have a low spec phone by today's standards,
| and it has android 10, it is pretty useless practically.
| It is pretty much stock. And I would gladly go back some
| versions for speed hikes.
| brundolf wrote:
| > x86 phone
|
| Sorry, what? I think I need to know more...
| GranPC wrote:
| Possibly something like an Asus ZenFone 2 (ZE551ML) which
| has an Intel Atom processor, and a binary translator to
| run ARM code, for compatibility reasons.
| brundolf wrote:
| That's wild. Why would they make something like that?
| Does it dual-boot Windows or something?
| sgerenser wrote:
| There was a period (back in 2016 or so?) where Intel was
| really gunning for the phone space with their Atom SoCs.
| I imagine they gave very good deals to Asus to put them
| into their products (undoubtedly large "marketing
| support" dollars were involved). Alas the lack of
| progress on Intel's side combined with the utter
| domination of ARM basically killed Intel's hopes at the
| phone CPU market.
| david_allison wrote:
| API 28 is released in 2018, 2 versions behind the latest.
|
| It's a sad state of software development that we so quickly
| drop support for older hardware, it contributes massively to
| e-waste, although Android manufacturers shoulder a lot of the
| blame for not supporting OS upgrades.
|
| Context: Put out a (hopefully) final release for API 16 last
| month. It'll mean that 15,000 people can no longer update the
| app. From analytics, we still have users on Android 1.5 (API
| 3)
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| How are the security updates situation for the Fire OS
| devices?
| osmarks wrote:
| Two versions behind is actually better than the majority of
| Android phones in the wild.
| sgt wrote:
| It may sound unbelievable, but to most Android users out
| there, Android 9 is cutting edge!
| pmlnr wrote:
| Android 8 user here, because I got tired of hunting for
| half-working internet supported releases for my phone.
| Plus, to be honest, I lament the 2.3 times: apps were
| literally 100x smaller, and the OS was much simpler from
| every perspective.
|
| I still have a HTC Desire with the last 2.3 based MIUI, and
| that OS is still wonderful.
| jebeng wrote:
| Do you get security updates though? I stopped getting
| them in Dec 2019. Forcing my hand to move over to a phone
| with Android 9 that gets quarterly security updates
| still(on March 2021 now I think). I realize this is a
| manufacturer/carrier thing as far as I know, and I'd like
| to go back to a nice clean debloated 8.1 or whatever. But
| I feel like I'm dragged kicking and screaming along the
| path of forced obsolescence just skimming over the
| security stuff that apparently I'm never going to get if
| I don't upgrade phones.
|
| Honestly it's just really annoying. I've toyed around
| with Lineage and such but at some point it seems it got a
| lot harder to do things on a lot of models and carrier
| configs. It seems you need to really research exactly
| what phone model is open enough and has enough people
| graciously doing open source work to support updates and
| such outside of the manufacturer and carrier.
| pmlnr wrote:
| > Do you get security updates though
|
| Nope. And I even stopped updating Firefox, because their
| move to Quantum on Android made a great browser and
| abysmal experience.
|
| Once this phone dies, I'll go and buy a Fairphone, hoping
| that might be kept alive a bit longer with updates.
| llarsson wrote:
| I only buy Android One phones now. Monthly security
| updates for several years, guaranteed. Pretty stock
| Android, too.
|
| Great? Perhaps not. But much better than the phones
| manufacturers just dump onto the market and then forget
| about.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, pretty much, looks like Android 9, 10 & 11 only add
| up to 63.2% of Android market share ?
|
| https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-android-sdk-versions
| ajfjrbfbf wrote:
| I have three libraries supporting API 14, one app API 16 and
| another API 21. There's rarely a reason not to support at
| least API 21 for general apps. Almost only very specific and
| niche APIs were added after that. Not supporting at least API
| 24 is unreasonable and most likely due to ignorance. Java 8
| is only supported since API 24, but everybody switched to
| Kotlin ages ago.
| ianbicking wrote:
| My somewhat vague sense is that Firefox only ever supported
| Amazon devices because of a partnership. The partnership ended
| and there wasn't any other reason to maintain support.
|
| In turn Amazon only partnered because there wasn't a YouTube
| app, and via Firefox they could support YouTube. But they
| reached a deal with YouTube (maybe using Firefox as leverage),
| so it didn't matter to them any longer.
| vntok wrote:
| How much longer to the day of the "Incredible journey" post on
| Mozilla's blog?
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