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mozilla-mobile
fenix
Kotlin2018–2024
mozilla-mobile / fenix · Archived

fenix

⚠️ Fenix (Firefox for Android) moved to a new repository. It is now developed and maintained as part of: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android

112Distinct people
159Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
6.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

⚠️ Fenix (Firefox for Android) moved to a new repository. It is now developed and maintained as part of: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I love all of the work that Mozilla do to make the web a better, more privacy focused place. A little time tinge of disappointment though, is that the new Firefox for Android…

2T1Qka0rEiPr used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year159 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-11-10 16:40:14 UTC to 2024-08-29 17:38:28 UTC.

010203040502018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 49 mentions; 1 submissions, 48 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 42 mentions; 3 submissions, 39 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 24 mentions; 5 submissions, 19 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 27 mentions; 2 submissions, 25 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 3 submissions, 9 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC49148
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC42339
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC24519
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC27225
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1239
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Firefox for Android Fenix (internal codename) is the all-new Firefox for Android browser, based on GeckoView and Mozilla Android Components. Getting Involved Please read the Community Participation Guidelines and the Bugzilla Etiquette guidelines before filing an issue. This is our professional working environment as much as it is our bug tracker, and we want to keep our workspace clean and healthy. Guide to Contributing (New contributors start here!) Browse our current Issues, or file a security issue. Matrix: #fenix:mozilla.org channel (We're available Monday-Friday, GMT and PST working hours). Related channels: #mobile-test-eng:mozilla.org channel: for UI test automation #perf-android-frontend:mozilla.org channel: for front-end (JVM) performance of Android apps #android-tips:mozilla.org channel: for tips on Android development Check out the project wiki for more information. See our guide on Writing Custom Lint Rules. Localization happens on Pontoon. Please get in touch with delphine (at) mozilla (dot) com directly for more information. Beginners! - Watch out for Issues with the "Good First Issue" label. These are easy bugs that have been left for first timers to have a go, get involved and make a positive contribution to the project! I want to open a Pull Request! We encourage you to participate in this open source project. We love Pull Requests, Bug Reports, ideas, (security) code reviews or any other kind of positive contribution. Since we are a small team, however, we do not have the bandwidth to review unsolicited PRs. Please follow our Pull Request guidelines, or we may close the PR. To make it easier to review, we have these PR requirements: Every PR must have exactly one issue associated with it. Write a clear explanation of what the code is doing when opening the pull request, and optionally add comments to the PR. Make sure there are tests - or ask for help on how the code should be tested in the Issue! Keep PRs small and to the point. For extra code-health changes, either file a separate issue, or make it a separate PR that can be easily reviewed. Use micro-commits. This makes it easier and faster to review. Add a screenshot for UX changes (this is part of the PR checklist) As a small team, we have to prioritize our work, and reviewing PRs takes time. We receive lots of PRs every day, so if you can keep your PRs small, it helps our small team review and merge code faster, minimizing stale code. Keep in mind that the team is very overloaded, so PRs sometimes wait for a very long time. However this is not for lack of interest, but because we find ourselves in a constant need to prioritize certain issues/PRs over others. If you think your issue/PR is very important, try to popularize it by getting other users to comment and share their point of view. I want to file an issue! Great! We encourage you to participate in this open source project. We love Pull Requests, Bug Reports, ideas, (security) code reviews or any other kind of positive contribution. To make it easier to triage, we have these issue requirements: Please do your best to search for duplicate issues before filing a new issue so we can keep our issue board clean. Every issue should have exactly one bug/feature request described in it. Please do not file meta feedback list tickets as it is difficult to parse them and address their individual points. Feature Requests are better when they’re open-ended instead of demanding a specific solution -ie “I want an easier way to do X” instead of “add Y” Issues are not the place to go off topic or debate. If you have questions, please join the #fenix:mozilla.org channel. Please always remember our Community Participation Guidelines Please do not tag specific team members to try to get your issue looked at faster. We have a triage process that will tag and label issues correctly in due time. If you think an issue is very severe, you can ask about it in Matrix. Please keep in mind that even though a feature you have in mind may seem like a small ask, as a small team, we have to prioritize our planned work and every new feature adds complexity and maintenance and may take up design, research, marketing, product, and engineering time. We appreciate everyone’s passion but we will not be able to incorporate every feature request or even fix every bug. That being said, just because we haven't replied, doesn't mean we don't care about the issue, please be patient with our response times as we're very busy. Build Instructions Pre-requisites: Android SDK To run command line tools, you'll need to configure Java: see our how-to guide. Clone or Download the repository: git clone https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix Import the project into Android Studio or build on the command line: ./gradlew clean app:assembleDebug If this errors out, make sure that you have an ANDROID_SDK_ROOT environment variable pointing to the right path. Make sure to select the correct build variant in Android Studio. See the next section. Make sure to select "Default APK" under Installation Options inside Run/Debug configuration: see this bug. Build Variants For general development, we recommend the debug build variant. Here's an explanation of each variant: debug: the default for developers, similar to most other Android apps. It is debuggable, uses a Nightly GeckoView with debug symbols, adds tools like LeakCanary for troublingshooting, and does not strip unused code. nightly: what we ship to the Firefox Nightly channel, using GeckoView Nightly. beta: what we ship to the Firefox Beta channel, using GeckoView Beta. It is more stable than nightly. release: what we ship as Firefox for Android, using GeckoView Release. It is the most stable. nightly, beta, and release are unsigned and debuggable=false by default. If you want these variants to be: automatically signed, see Automatically signing release builds debuggable=true, see Building debuggable release variants Performanc
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

159 sources
Since Fenix's first release they've been saying that the absurd limitations on add-ons support were only temporary, and they would have quickly increased the number of supported ones. And instead absolutely nothing changed for three years. Furthermore the insane bugs from which Fenix suffers from its release (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12731) (and make it unbearable) have been left hanging, focusing the few resources on dumb ui experiments. So everything suggested that Mozilla did not care of its Android browser, or actually that they were deliberately sabotaging it. This news instead represents a huge improvement, hence my bewilderment. I don't know what people who downvoted my message thought I meant.
In Firefox for Android will soon support extensions
Firefox for Android is lacking on so many basic features, it's amazing that they prioritize anything else before fixing those. E.g deep links. Which is very, very basic feature for mobile. Firefox on Android is unusable without it - and it seems like no one prioritize this, so excuse me for not being excited by any other feature. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54653641/app-links-not-w... https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/15202 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1809264
In Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release
Completely new codebase yeah. The old codebase is known as Fennec and is directly based on Gecko (the browser engine that powers desktop Firefox). All the same advantages. The UI wasn't excellent, but it did the job perfectly well. The new codebase is known as Fenix and is instead based on GeckoView which isn't an actual browser but rather an library version of Gecko that is intended to replace Androids own System WebView (it was first used in Firefox Focus which was this tiny trackerblocking microbrowser that they offered). The difference sounds tiny but it feels just... way clunkier to use and there's a bunch of features missing since a WebView browser isn't made with those in mind the same way a regular browser is. There's just... loads of features missing or not available and the team working on Fenix is blatantly either mismanaged or
Read the rest
underfunded. It's so feature-poor that you still can't actually set your homepage to a URL[0] among many other bugs and missing features. It appears to have gotten so bad that they moved the entire issue tracker over to Bugzilla and moved the repo to a new GitHub repo to hide just how feature poor this browser is. Firefox Fenix is terrible, has been terrible for the past 2 years and I don't understand why they're still developing it instead of shoring up Fennec properly. [0]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/7551
In Firefox Android now supports Tampermonkey

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