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Help Firefox browser - can you recommend a replacement?

brandonAndroid

brandonAndroid

Newbie
Hi, I have a cheap Obama phone, ul40 and I only get 2G a month, it is several years old. So I will go to a free public WiFi place, spend a few hours downloading, then I go home and use a USB cable to transfer them to my old Dell home PC.

My phone has been acting up, so I factory reset it. I installed the Firefox browser, I like it because I could save web pages as a PDF.

I installed the new Firefox and had some problems. I saved a bunch of items, but when I linked to my PC there was only one item in downloads, everything else was now in Collections. Collections was new to me and I thought it was just labeling things.

I will check my phone's memory, I have dozens of items in Collections, I tap them and I can read the articles, but I can't seem to access them from my PC.

How do do this? Is there a way to go back to the previous...print, save as PDF, method? It seems like you fixed something that wasn't broken.

Frankly I don't know why there isn't a Save/Download button on display at all times when you see something interesting. What is the logic in starting to Print something, than previewing it, then saving the preview?

Sorry if I seem a bit irritated. Is it simply time to apply for a new phone?

Thanks

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I sent that email to Mozilla support yesterday. No response yet. I scrolled through browser reviews, I looked on Firefox and apparently a lot of people are having this problem. Can anybody recommend a no frills browser? Ads are ok as long as they not videos sucking up my gigs. I used to be able Google raw confessions , then save cool threads, also daily comics. Why do they insist on adding features instead of improving speed and reliability?!
 
Well in Mozilla's defence the current Firefox is a lot faster than the previous one, so they did address one aspect of your final wishlist.

"Collections" are like bookmark collections, they're not something for transferring to another device. The best I can suggest there is trying the "share" option: tap the little 3 dots icon on the bottom bar then the share icon at the bottom of that. That includes "send to device" (which will let you send the page to a firefox browser logged in to the same account on another device, such as your PC, though it is the web page rather than a PDF which opens - but on the plus side no cable is needed). What other options it has will depend on what other apps you have on your phone (most of those on mine are just ways of sending or copying the link: I'm not going to find out what the "save as Adobe PDF" does because I'm not paying a subscription to $%^& Adobe for the privilege of doing this ;)).

I've had a quick look at the other browsers on my phone but they are no different in this respect. I suspect that the reason no Android browser I know has a permanent save/download button is that with small screens you don't want to permanently add icons unless they are essential, and while you may do this all of the time I'm sure most people don't do it at all (the "modern" way would just be to sync bookmarks or tabs between devices). You can of course add a "save page" button to Firefox on a PC, but that has a lot more space - mobile browsers are designed first and foremost with small screens in mind.

Unfortunately I don't think changing phone will change this, as it's a feature of the browsers rather than the device.
 
Thanks. I am hoping to hear from someone who had this problem and fixed it. So the stuff I saved is not retrieveable? I tried the sending it to device. Whenever I try to save to the drive it causes problems. Is there a browser where I can just download into Downloads?
 
Tried chrome, already had it so I updated it. Now it will download and save, but I see grey folders that won't open, yes there are 30kb stored in them.
 
What do you mean by "the stuff saved is not retrievable?". How did you "save" it? If you added to collections you can go into those and reload the pages in Firefox. Of course if the page has changed since you'd have to hunt through the site to find the older content (so if e.g. you saved a particular article there then no problem, if you saved the front page of a site the contents will have changed).
 
I am rather picky about my browsers.

Chrome sucks, and FireFox blows.

I don't know what you are trying to download or save, but I have been using the same browser now for years- after an exhaustive search.

Anyway, what I use now is a modded version of Lightning.

There is no browser faster than Lightning when it is set up properly, and downloading something is often as simple as a longpress- or sometimes a longpress and a couple menu selections.

The browser is so simple it should be built into every Android device.

In fact, the Web View portion actually does that, using what is aleady built into the device.

This makes for a very compact, fast browser.

Here I will include links to the original Lightning browser, and some more links to other browsers that are derived from Lightning that offer additional features.

As I have used this format of browser for quite some time, feel free to ask me about any issues, questions, or problems- including setup.

Lightning (Lightweight web browser) - https://f-droid.org/packages/acr.browser.lightning

SmartCookieWeb (A secure web browser with tracking protection and an adblocker) - https://f-droid.org/packages/com.cookiegames.smartcookie

Midori (Unknown application) - https://f-droid.org/packages/org.midorinext.android

Be sure to thoroughly investigate the settings to get the most out of the browser.

Once you get the hang of using it, if you are really into downloading, then I can recommend some great downloader apps as well.

The problem is that one is usually not enough.
At one point I had five different downloaders on one device, all with different settings, functions, and methods.

Finally, I found one that did the work of all of those- and it also has (a version of) my beloved Lightning Browser at its heart!

It is called IDM+.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=idm.internet.download.manager.plus&hl=en_US&gl=US
 
With either Chrome or Brave you can
share to "print"
select "save as pdf" instead of your printer
save it to a chosen folder on your phone
 
Old thread, I know.

But I recently noticed what may be a simple way to help with this.

You can e-mail what you want to download to yourself.
(There is like a 20 MB limit.)

Then open your e-mail and save the file as a PDF.
 
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