this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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For anyone who thinks they're "stuck" with chrome, Firefox has gotten it's shit together massively in the last few years.
Does Firefox support multiple windows on iPad OS yet? That was the reason I stayed with Chrome for so long, and also is why I've more recently switched to Edge as the only other cross-platform browser I could find that had that.
I'm not sure, but Firefox on iOS isn't true Firefox. To my knowledge, Apple doesn't allow browsers to use anything but their Safari engine. As another user put it, "Firefox on iOS is barely more than a skin for Safari."
I can speak to Firefox on desktop and Android, however: they're fantastic!
tl;dr: If FF sucks on iOS, it's Apple's fault.
Nope, not in this case. iPad OS has supported multiple windows of the same app for years now (since 2018 or 2019), and Safari naturally supported it out of the gate. Google supported it in Chrome very quickly, and Microsoft got around to it with Edge last year.
It turns out that while the rendering part of all browsers on iOS is Safari, the skin and UI elements (the "chrome" that Google's browser was named after) are all custom to each app. And Firefox has been very poor at upgrading theirs.
That's so weird, then, that it'd be so radically different than it is on Android. Why do you think that is?
Is it radically different? It's a feature that iPad OS supports that the iPhone version of iOS doesn't, and I don't think Android does (though I've not used an Android tablet in nearly 10 years, so maybe tablets on Android can do it?). Obviously desktops all support multiple windows and have done forever. Technically, by not having implemented this feature it actually means it's more similar to Android.
Firefox is rather under-resourced in terms of developer power, and they've been consistently prioritising other things rather than implementing this feature. I don't think there's much more to it than that. It's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why they haven't done it—any team needs to prioritise what they work on. But it's also reasonable for a user who values that feature to choose a competitor that has delivered it over one that has not. That's the natural trade-off.
I'm dumb, and had to reread what you wrote. I thought you meant tabs this whole time (doh). I haven't even used an iPad before, so I didn't know that feature existed. I don't believe I've ever seen multiple windows of Firefox on Android (but you can have multiple apps open side-by-side).
I think it is unlikely Mozilla would support that feature, given the lack of resources and demand; iPad's are niche.
Yeah and that's fine. I'm not saying Firefox is evil for not having this feature or anything like that. I'm merely explaining why it is that I find it to be a sub-par option, and why I choose Edge instead, for the moment.