Ask HN: Alternatives to Android Firefox Browser?

[dvanwag]

With the debacle of Mozilla's signed certificates expiring my favorite addons for Firefox for Android have all become broken. This is highly annoying as since my adblocker no longer functions I have discovered just how unreadable the web has become. Are there similar browser out there that posses the same capabilities? And maybe respect a users privacy?

[user8273]

IceCatMobile on F-Droid and many others. It's is very decent and not chromium based.

[maverick74]

WT...? Addons are already functional again!!! Just update Firefox ;)

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/05/09/what-we-do-when-thi...

About alternatives: as Ultramanoid said, there is no other decent browser. If you want privacy and respect your only choice is Firefox. Everything else is Chromium based (or as i would put it: "spyware based").

(Edit: You naturally have a few browsers based on firefox as well, such as Tor Browser, Waterfox and so on... but Firefox is the real deal ;)

[dvanwag]

I've updated my mobile Firefox and they still don't work. It kills me this has not been a priority for Mozilla, it shouldn't be this hard to browse the web.

[Induane]

If updating didn't work I would file a bug report with Mozilla. This is the first incident I've heard of around the cert debacle where updating didn't correct the issue so what you're experiencing could be a bug.

I use Firefox Focus most of the time instead of the full blown Firefox, and its so stripped down that it doesn't support addons (and so wasn't affected by the cert issue). In fact it doesn't even really support tabs. It does help me not have a trillion tabs open and focus on one thing at a time. Depending on your browser needs it's a good, albeit totally different, experience.

[maverick74]

ups... i missed we were talking about Firefox for android!

Still, latest version is fixed.

If you want you may try the VERY experimental version of Firefox Preview ( https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/mozilla/firefox-fenix )

[maverick74]

yeah... that's really weird!!! v66.0.4 fixed that (there's a 66.0.5 on windows)!

You can try to fix it from about:support, but beware that it might delete some preferences, logins and other things like that...

by the way, you also have GNU IceCat Mobile -> Firefox minus proprietary things plus security measures ( https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/ )

[Ultramanoid]

Short answer; no. Everything else is based on Chromium, which is basically Google-sponsored spyware.

That said, try Bromite : https://bromite.org

Edit : Unclear from your question if you're aware that the problem was fixed -- just update to the latest version.

[dvanwag]

Thank you all for the recommendations, definitely leaning towards IceCat mobile. I'll be playing around with it tonight.