I am not old enough to have been a participant in the first browser wars, when they ended 1998 I was about to meet my first computer, which was in 1999, and I couldn’t care less about who made my browser, or my OS for that matter. What was important was that the computer ran Star Wars Podracer. My first ever video game, that my father got me and that we used to play together.

Long story short, I grew up under the reign of the Emperor Internet Explorer and never knew how much better life could be. Not until I entered tech collage in 2005, just around the time a rebellion formed around Mozilla and Firefox started to convert user after user from the dark side Microsofts browser.

Being a young and idealistic man back then, who also just learned about Linux and free software I joined the cause, battles were lost and won, the Emperor has died since, killed off by the people who put him up on the throne in the first place and has now been replaced by a new monster called Chrome, who reigns the internet these days.

And me? Well ever since I first installed Firefox I have only briefly switched browsers to safari back in 2010, when I got my first MacBook, but quickly switched back again. I am a Firefox user and for good reason.

Not only is Firefox the equivalent of one last Jedi in a galaxy dominated by Sith (Browsers with Chrome as an engine) fighting for the oppressed, it is also the only browser that works the way I want it to.

Let me explain. For starters, there is the way it searches. I can adjust this. I have my Firefox setup so it first searches my bookmarks and provides me options from there, also from open tabs, so that when I have opened way to many tabs it servers as a quick way to switch to that tab I am looking for.

What it doesn’t do is immediately leak everything I type to some search engine and try to guess what I want to do on the first letter I put in, or go through every page in my history first (cough Safari cough), because why would any of that possible be my first thing I want to do?

I also like to browse the web with an ad-blocker enabled and given that ad-blockers will only work in a very (VERY) limited way on chrome based browsers once Manifest-V3 is pushed through, Firefox will be the only viable option for an ad-free web experience.

But there are other reasons too, like Firefox Containers, an AddOn that allows me to imprison certain websites so they can’t push a cookie on me to track me over other sites, like Amazon or youtube for example. The very excellent developer tools or the option to set profiles, so I can have a private and a work version and bookmarks don’t get mixed up.

All in all, Firefox for me is as if someone asked me what I want in a browser and just built it, tailor made for me.

So why am I writing this?

Everything above these words concern the desktop version of Firefox and other browsers, but when in 2007 a certain Steve Jobs presented the iPhone to the world and one year later the first android phone was available for purchase, mobile browsers went from WAB to actual web browsers.

The year of writing this is 2024, 17 years after the first smartphones, people born when the iPhone was released are now allowed to vote in Austria. More people daily use the internet via a smartphone than a PC. AND THERE ISN’T A SINGLE PROPER BROWSER ON THE DOMINANT PLATFORMS!

Everything on iOS/iPadOS that isn’t Safari is just a dressed up version of Safari, because Apple decided that every browser on their OS is required to use WebKit as an engine. Now with the EU ruling that this isn’t a good idea (17 years later) only users in the EU will be allowed to install browsers with a different engine.

Why the holdback? Well, both Firefox and Chrome have more up to date engines than WebKit, that Apple held back intentionally so that developers couldn’t bypass their 30% cut on AppStore purchases by deploying PWAs. Progressive Web Apps, meaning Apps that run in the browser and look and feel as if installed natively. And with the new EU ruling, Apple decided that users in the EU won’t have PWAs enabled on their devices any more, because loophole. Also they made it so, that only users in the EU will be able to download a browser with a different engine than WebKit, so we will likely see Chrome coming over, but I doubt that Mozilla will be able to afford the resources to maintain their browser in two versions.

And on the other side, in Android land? Well, the native browser engine, chrome, doesn’t support AddOns out of the box, why? Well Google has no interest in anyone using an ad-blocker on an Android phone, so alternative browsers like Vivaldi, that use the Chrome engine, would be required to develop the integration of AddOns themselves, which according to one of Vivaldis blogposts is massively expensive. I read that Microsofts Edge browser does allow AddOns given some configuration but couldn’t get it to work, also it crashed on me multiple times only browsing the web, without changing anything, but it is the successor to Internet Explorer, so what did I expect.

And Firefox? Well, by now Firefox supports just about every AddOn available on the desktop on Android as well, it lets you decide what the search bar should do. It syncs with your desktop browser, when you switch to desktop view, it shows the actual desktop version of a web page. I haven’t found the developer options yet, but otherwise, it is again the best option available, however there is an issue.

Every chrome based browser on Android supports running in more than one window, Firefox doesn’t.

On a phone, I couldn’t care less, but on a tablet multiple app windows aren’t a nice to have, that is essential. If I can only do the same stuff as on a phone, just with a bigger screen, a tablet is pointless. Safari can do that too on iPadOS by the way.

So where does that leave us at? There is a perfect browser on the desktop, but on either of the two big mobile operating systems there is none. There are kids that were borne the year the iPhone was released that have kids now, but we haven’t managed to get the most essential thing working properly on the most widely used devices on this planet.

It is times like this, when I boot up my first gen PinePhone, update it and just wonder, how a device with so little computing power and an OS put together by enthusiast is the only mobile device able to run a proper browser…