She/They

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Joined 1Y ago
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Cake day: Jun 30, 2023

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Ok. I tried Firefox for about a month on my Android phone and Mac, but unfortunately had to go back to Chrome on both. I don’t really know what to do at this point. I run enough firewalls and ad blockers that using Chrome has never particularly bothered me from a usability standpoint, but I get the point everyone is trying to make. However, I also don’t want to spend weeks of my life fighting to get yet another open source program to work the same as the “other” program, or find some substitute that I can live with.

I used to use Firefox when I was a kid and loved all of the extensions. However, it seems severely lacking now. I tried to find something to give me group tabs, and found old abandoned projects or some tree thing that made 0 sense to me. I saw an article I think explaining that it is coming? I don’t understand why a feature like this is missing when it used to exist a long time ago. Seems like basic functionality to me. Also, why is the tab bar so big? It takes up a lot of screen real estate.

The thing that killed it for me was the lack of PWA support, which is how I have used Outlook for around 6+ years. I fought with the extension for a while and things sort of worked on and off for a few days here or there, but half the time it would open emails in the main browser anyway. Once it got to the point where Outlook was completely blank and refused to load at all, I gave up. I could never get it to work again. I hoped I could maybe setup the PWA to just be in Chrome or Safari, but it just opens it as a tab in Firefox anyway. I tried, but I am not going to spend hours fighting with it anymore at this point and it would be nice if it was built into the browser instead of a random extension.

It was a better experience on the phone, and I like the bar on the bottom, until I realized it was draining my battery. I found a thread of users complaining about it for the last few months with no fix. I don’t even use the sync feature, but that supposedly is the culprit? Phone kept dying and I barely used it. Looked at the battery usage screen and there it was, almost the top item. I would love to use Firefox on Android, but not at the expense of my battery. Sorry.


I ended up getting it from them directly. I am on Android 90% of the time and don’t pay for the license from the Apple store. No idea if that one is a single device or the same as the multi-device. I tend to not do things from the Apple store as I don’t have an iPhone and they seem to want or assume you have one. Just like I can never use their watch (not that I want one).


I use AdGuard both on my Android phone and iPad. Not quite as good on the iPad because Apple doesn’t make it easy, but definitely makes a huge difference. For me, $30 a year is worth it and you can use it on 3 devices. I got sick of the ads in apps that were downright disturbing in some cases and reporting them didn’t do a whole lot. Browser extensions can do a lot more to tidy up the experience, but I will take what I can get.

https://adguard.com/en/welcome.html