Firefox spokesperson Christopher Hilton tells The Verge that the browser has seen a more than 50 percent jump in users in Germany and a nearly 30 percent increase in France.
I’m confused - does it explicitly ask you now?
I’ve had firefox as default for a while now
I’m hoping, the same isn’t true for Chrome. Safari on iOS was the only other browser that still had relevance, because of this somewhat shitty tactic from Apple.
after Apple started letting users choose their default browsers on iOS 17.4 in the EU last week.
Lol, srsly, why does anyone use apple devices willingly. Like for work I sorta get it if there’s no alternative but it really took government action to compell this extremely basic customisation.
This change doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do before. It’s just a prompt forcing you to pick an option before you can access the web vs just having safari and needing to find an alternative. It’s the same story as on a PC in Windows.
I use it because I’m tired of Androids shit. I have both an Android phone and an iPhone and I only use the android phone for things that I cannot do on the iPhone. And if I wasn’t a massive computer nerd I’d just forgo the second phone entirely.
I use it because I’m tired of Androids shit
Care to explain further? Android and iOS do mostly the same BS, except android edges out iOS in side loading, customizability and root access. Even on Google’s flagship Pixels, unlocking the bootloader and gaining root is no problem.
The UI and UX overall are so much nicer on iOS. Especially with gestures, Android’s gesture system is half baked at best.
Sure you can’t rice your phone, but I don’t want to rice my phone. With Android I’m tempted to do stupid shit to my phone because I could, which then causes the phone to be unstable or just not work at all and I have to wipe and reload. With iOS that’s not an option, and honestly I’ve grown past that shit. When Cyanogenmod died all interest I had left in Android died with it. And over the years I’ve found out I wasn’t alone. Root is great, but have you ever just had a phone that works?
Even when I don’t do stupid shit I’ve experienced so many bugs. My camera for example runs at 2fps on my Pixel 4, and I can’t figure out why. UI and UX for apps aren’t as rigidly followed on Android to the experience is a lot less consistent (insert Apple not following their own guidelines meme). And honestly I run into so many more bugs in various apps on Android. In the past year I’ve had maybe 5 app crashes on iOS using it as my main phone. On my Android phone I’ve had at least twice that + at least one full phone crash.
Also the SOCs available on Android phones are garbage. I haven’t looked much into the SD 8 gen2/gen3, but I honestly doubt they’d be as efficient as Apple’s silicon + deep hardware software tie in. (insert iPhone 15 overheating).
i have a rooted android (running calyx) and it just works and its great. i never fuck around with it at all, whether due to necessity or ricing desires.
Lmao, so most of your problem with android is your own self control and third-party app aesthetics. Btw, I have root enabled right now and my phone has never had an issue just working (and it’s a Pixel Fold, a first gen Google product no less).
You complain of gestures, yet, you’re silent on iOS’s shit notification system? Has iOS finally gotten the ability to turn off individual app notification channels yet? (As in, you can turn all of an apps “promotional” notifications off, but leave actual important ones on)
Bugs are in everything, iOS has had it’s fair share of nasty bugs. On top of that, the Pixel 4 is rather old, latest Pixels have been solid performers for the most part.
Android SOCs aren’t currently beating Apple SOCs, but they’re far from garbage and it’s doubtful you’ll be able to tell the difference in real world usage
You complain of gestures, yet, you’re silent on iOS’s shit notification system?
I have no qualms with iOS’s notifcation system. iOS handles it in app, vs android you’d have to do that in the settings, and not all apps support this. Slack for example does it in app on both iOS and Android. And Discord just doesn’t do either.
latest Pixels have been solid performers for the most part.
The Tensor chips have been hot garbage. There’s a reason I haven’t upgraded my Android phone to one of those. I won’t complain about this pixel performing on par with an iPhone 2 years older than it, and worse than my iPhone 15. But 2 fps in the camera there’s something wrong. And all the stuttering since new just isn’t acceptable. The difference is VERY noticeable when the phone throttles to 10fps in maps. I had to resort to underclocking in order to maintain decent performance longer term at the expense of even worse performance in day to day tasks.
I’m on iOS and had Firefox as my default for several years. Probably shit journo meant browsing engine.
The only thing new is that the first time it prompts you to pick which app to pick as your default (and installs it). Only the prompt is new, manually installing something and making it default has been an option for a while.
Reading through the replies, I’m amazed anyone went through the effort to install Firefox but didn’t bother changing the default browser to it. Something in this story smells fishy.
Eh. I have fiddled with many different browsers as my default. Doesn’t mean much when it’s all WebKit.
Brain dead convenience and simplicity
love to see it!
That’s cool and all, but doesn’t the iOS version of Firefox use the same engine as Safari? If so, does changing browsers on iOS amount to anything else than a skin change?
There is a work-in-progress version of Firefox for iOS with Gecko engine.
But, there is also a challenge that Mozilla is facing as Apple is still trying to me life of developers of other browsers as difficult as possible.
So, not sure how the whole thing will turn out.
Very interesting. I wonder if this will result in the EU putting even more pressure on Apple.
