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I use fennec fdroid quite often, and a myriad of firefox forks like iceraven. But chromium based browsers are undoubtably the better experience for me, they kill my battery far less, they perform better, and have less bugs, especially when you go to utilize things like desktop mode, and ofc you also inherit many of the same issues that desktop browser has like not being able to properly render gradients https://degmods.com/ is an example of one such website.
and while many people may not care about features like webusb, firefox does lack said features too. This all makes it a very hard sell to replace chrome with firefox.
realistically, it’s not like they will replace them with anything else. Chrome just doesn’t have any actual competitors on android yet. Every promising alternative is more or less just a webview wrapper. Maybe one day we might see servo based browser for android take off. It does actually perform quite well on android for what it is currently.
how much of that is due to people actually being able to actually buy a s24, or because that just what happens to be their phone carrier’s option? when selling phone it’s extremely important distinction, most people can get their phones “significantly cheaper” so to speak, via their carrier.
As an ex cellphone salesman I have never seen any carriers here in canada selling phones in like, pretty much the last decade almost now. Canadian here. Rodgers, Bell, Koodo, Fido, off the top of my head, none sell sony phones.
Now I did often try to sell cellphones to folk out right since IMO it’s far better to own the device and pay for a cheap plan, but to do that, phones need to actually be affordable.
Among the other things that have been said, Android auto often makes use of some tricks too. Things like hibernation that phones typically do not do (Probably the biggest one right here), Animations to hide loading time, loading some critical, but not latency sensitive services until after the boot. and some other misc service management stuff.
AOSP has no default PDF viewer, many GAAPS (official roms, custom roms with full gapps etc.) roms do have a pdf viewer by default.
There are many available PDF viewers around making a good pdf viewer is actually pretty hard, I reccomend just trying a bunch on fdroid and seeing what sticks out to you.
I personally use an expected keyboard. Really nice, especially if you use termux. FCITX5 for Android is another good keyboard if you like the more AOSP style keyboard that supports other characters
https://github.com/fcitx5-android/fcitx5-android?tab=readme-ov-file#supported-languages
Keep in mind that other reputable repos like izzyondroid still work, fdroid is more then one thing. We wont loose the apps, nor the 3rd party repos, the only thing really “at risk” here is the official fdroid repos.
this isn’t like some closed source stuff, the entire fdroid ecosystem is fully foss so anyone can sweep in at any time and do their own thing while still being mostly or completely compatible
nah, there are legitimate concerns around chrome’s privacy stuff, a lot of people would be fine if they could run cromite or one of the privacy centric forks. the main issue is that vendors for some reason lock down webview to the google play store provider. I presume this is due to some false security notion around a bad webview being installed. but that would be a lot of steps so…
what do you mean by secure, as far as “is it safe to use this browser” then yes, webview is reasonably secure, it’s still running chrome. you have all of the security benefits and everything else, wont have to worry too much about malware or anything else. however if you mean by private then well, it’s chrome. everything that sketches people out about chrome is all there too
No lol. If an s9+ is considered under powered for Firefox, Then Firefox has to be one of the worst web engines I’ve ever used, including Internet Explorer.
keep in mind as I said, webview and chromium browsers are fine. I’ve even used desktop browsers on this phone without an issue thanks to termux. There is absolutely zero chance my phone is underpowered.
Im currently using a stock S9+ snapdragon (why its still stock -_-). I do have most google stuff disabled and pretty much all my apps aside from android and webview (which fulgris relies on) are from fdroid or ffupdater. It could be the standard A10 shenaigans, but it’s not something i’ve been hitting on webview and chrome based browsers
I think in general, having NPUs on devices is such an underrated value of which Google’s TPU would be classified as. There’s actually a lot you can use them for. The main thing for me personally is definitely voice detection stuff. Although I have to admit FUTO’s voice detect which uses whisper, really great. This reply is being crafted entirely using it.
Background noise removal which definitely helps with Speech detection. So it’s really nice to have that too. And of course you have things like video processing and everything else Google is bragging about.
I don’t think these devices are incapable of doing what Google wants them to. I think it’s a mixture of they’re simply not fast enough to do it real time, which Google needs for their premium feeling this as well as just not wanting to invest the time in it.
I use a program called pixel filter to make my screen less bright, it overlays a black grid, with LCDs this brings the brightness down. however with ovalids it actually straight up turns off the pixels (so it saves some battery too)
I have sometimes have to use my phone in very dim environments. so using this helps me a lot.
app is on fdroid
Is it better to try and fail 10% of the time, or to not try at all and fail 100% of the time?
Play protect is an extremely useful feature that deters uneducated people from installing APKs because yes, the vast majority of times for normal folk, they are malware ridden. Google does try to prevent malware from getting on the play store, and they actually do a phenomenal job, but in the end, it’s always going to be a cat and mouse game, and shits gonna slip through. It’s still better then not trying at all.