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?
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.
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)
Not sure if that's Google Play's metrics being played with, but it's shocking that there appear to be installs on something that old (it's well before TLS 1.2 support on Android, and most of the internet will be broken)
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.
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.
I thought Android One devices had stopped receiving regular updates? I know I read a report that most/all of them had yet to receive Android 11 two months ago and that security updates were now being released months after they used to be. If I recall that report correctly, it sounded like new devices had all but stopped being released and that it seemed like the program is on life support now. I know that program was very locale-specific, so maybe that was just in the US?
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.
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.
> There was a period (back in 2016 or so?) where Intel was really gunning for the phone space with their Atom SoCs.
The whole Meego project (Nokia + Intel, 2009 from the top of my head) was founded with the goal of getting Intel phones. When Nokia jumped ship in February 2011, Intel still continued and hired Nokia engineers to make phones. How long they tried, I have no idea.
Desktop Windows won't run there directly (but works just fine virtualized under qemu, I should add). It's a pretty typical all-in-one SoC, but with an x86 core:
But I can copy statically linked binaries from my main Linux machine, and they work. (Dynamically linked typically don't because Android userspace is so different from "proper" Linux.)
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.
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.
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.
It was definitely a conspiracy between Google and insurance companies and not that the feature was a security/privacy risk used by too few people to be worth investing in developing in a manner which eliminated the risk.
What do you mean? Pretty much every one I know used to record calls. It is perfectly legal in my country.
If Google was concerned about security / privacy why they didn't disable cameras as well?
What dissapoints me is that it's not even available on Android TV/Google TV. Sure you can sideload it, but the controls are tailored for the Amazon Fire Stick remote.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not a surprise. Most consumers have no regard for privacy and may be waiting for a Netflix documentary to enlighten them on why products/services offered from certain companies may be bad.
A ‘bias’ towards some companies exist here as there’s an understanding of the underlying business model, their disregard for data privacy and so on. Most tech companies and news outlets stand to gain nothing by educating the masses on these topics, and it will often hurt their profits as they may be a beneficiary in the overall supply chain.
The typical consumer is consuming goods and services oblivious to all of it. They care about cheap/free goods as opposed to weighing the cost it being cheap/free (they won’t know why they should care, for starters).
Those who are technically savvy and aware of what’s happening may bring attention to the underlying risks... which is what you seem to be classifying as bias.
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.
Oh, I suppose you may need a Google account to set up, I didn’t really think about it. I meant that you can use it for most streaming services and it works well.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given current and ever falling Firefox usage rates I find it hard to believe that the dropping of a platform by Mozilla is any kind of sign regarding the future of the platform.
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)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you were notifying them of shows in advance, but I see now it's meant to be a "the show is about to start now" notification. I see why mail wouldn't work for that.
Emails could be used to send users of up-coming shows ahead of time. I turn off notifications for everything (except SMS and alarms) as I frequently am not in a position to drop everything and do something just because I receive a notification. I just catch up on my messages every now and then and from my emails I can schedule any important alarms for times I need to do something or add things to my calendar so I know what's happening. Instant notification are a huge disruption to my workflow and rarely benefit me.
Well yeah, all users can see the schedule at any time by visiting the website. They still want a notification to serve as a reminder, because many people are forgetful, especially new users who haven't gotten used to the schedule yet.
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.
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.
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
> 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?
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
In the interest of clarity and humility, I carry the baggage of having a very large anti-executive/administration/overhead bias.
I was trying to speak for general sentiment before, which was dumb of me.
Let me attempt to clarify my personal thinking: if for example there was a Patreon where I could give money to Mozilla engineering salaries directly, I would proudly pay $10/month. I would be willing to wager that many others would as well.
If orgs want good feels and a write off, sure 501c Mozilla donations, but let’s go beyond all that.
How about a Mozilla Security Patreon?
How about a Mozilla Rust Pateron?
My point is that there is so much good will and money, just on HN, for Mozilla engineering... can we come up with ways to fund engineering directly?
I realize there needs to be a CEO, etc, but there should also be a funding structure to pay you and your peers more, directly.
Edit: I am just using Patreon as an example of direct creator funding, other mechanisms may be more applicable.
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!
> 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.
Looking at the financials, it's pretty obvious that there was no huge deal that brought in additional hundreds of millions, not even once, and definitely not every year.
I should have said over a hundred million more a year or hundreds of millions more. It was my mistake to say both as the deal only increased revenue by $140 million over predeal revenue in the best year.
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?
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.
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.
>. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?