I just installed Mobian on my Pinephone SD card, and the first application I try out is usually the web browser. As a new user the experience isn't exactly stellar, but after fiddling around a bit I've found some things that takes Firefox some way towards being usable for me.
So I thought it would be a good idea to have a thread where we can share our experiences and tips on how to get the best browser experience on Mobian!
How do you browse the internet on Mobian?
So I thought it would be a good idea to have a thread where we can share our experiences and tips on how to get the best browser experience on Mobian!
- First of all: script filtering. This is essential for me and I run NoScript on my desktop. I noted that Firefox on Mobian comes with uBlock Origin installed by default, which seems like a great idea! I'm not exactly sure yet how this compares to NoScript, but kudos to the Mobian developers for having this out-of-the-box!
- Next up: screen rotation. Tap the top bar to swith to landscape mode. I think I actually prefer this manual selection of orientation to an automatic one; I almost always lock the rotation anyway if it's automatic. But with Mobian the screen is rotated so that the buttons ends up on the bottom, which is very inconvenient! I hope this is a bug and that it will get fixed.
- Screen estate: With the screen in landscape mode pretty much half the screen gets eaten up by Mobian's black bars on top and bottom and by Firefox's menu bar, to the extent that landscape mode becomes unusable. However, if you open the "three-bar" Firefox menu there's a "Fullscreen" option, and this removes all the clutter so that the whole screen is usable! Tap the bottom-right corner to get the Mobian bars back. However since fullscreen mode hides the fullscreen option, I have not been able to figure out how to get out of full screen mode to reach the address bar and tabs again!
If I could figure this out, Firefox could be quite useful for me on Mobian. Any ideas?
- My previous smartphone (a HTC Desire - yes, from 2010), has a great browsing experience: the browser is automatically full-screen; the address bar is reached by scrolling the web page to the top (it's effectively stacked on top of, and "part" of, the web page); and perhaps most importantly, the width of all text fields is automatically adjusted to be no wider than the screen width! That means that no matter how you scale the page, free-flowing text fields never overflow the screen width sideways, so you can scale the page (images and font size) to your preferred size without ever having to scroll sideways back-and-forth to read all the text in a field! I'm a bit saddened that this is not the obvious way to do things today, 10 years later... but maybe we can get it on our Pinephones some time in the future?
How do you browse the internet on Mobian?