Installing website on Android home screen is unusable

[Roo]

I use Firefox on my PC, and Firefox for Android on my Samsung Galaxy S23. I love how i can block ads and use Dark Reader and not get all my data scraped by Google.

I have lots of favorite websites, and i like to add icons to my Android homescreen so i can single click into my favorite sites.

But this is where the bad user experience begins, because Firefox will only offer one of two choices... either "Add to homescreen" to create a simple link to the site, or it will "Install" the site, i'm guessing because the site has a progressive web app manifest file.

"Add to homescreen" is fantastic and i love it, but "Install" is broken and unusable and i hate it.

Sites that are "installed" do not scroll properly. Only 2 out of 3 attempts to finger scroll will succeed. This is the same on both my Galaxy and Pixel phones.

Even worse, my websurfing workflow is all about opening links in new tabs. Installed sites do not permit opening links in new tabs.

Even worse, the back button doesn't work on installed sites, and unless the site provides a back link somewhere on the page, and not all pages do, you have to close and reopen Firefox all the time to navigate the site.

For these reasons i now very rarely visit websites that have PWAs.

Please please please, i'm not asking you to fix the bugs, i'm only asking you to give users a choice...

If the site has a manifest, then sure, show the "Install" option. But for the sake of everything good in this universe, please also leave the "Add to homescreen" option. Don't deny us the possibility of simply adding a link on our homescreens. Installing PWAs doesn't work properly in Firefox for Android. The feature is unusable.

Thanks for reading and i'm sorry if i'm wrong about anything.

[Joeyhast]

This problem still exists, and is a total headache. Only way is to use shortcuts within Firefox.

[Roo]

It has actually gotten a lot worse since i posted the original complaint. If you open an installed website now, the website only stays open for about 20 seconds before Firefox crashes. So to read an installed website, click the installed website icon, read as much as you can for 20 seconds until it crashes, then click it again to read 20 seconds more. And keep dreaming of the day someone at Firefox adds "Add to homsecreen" for all websites instead of forcing us to install the PWA for sites that offer them. At the very least, please stop limiting the number of in-Firefox shortcuts to only 16. Why only 16? I would be great to have 64.

[Joeyhast]

Yes the pwa is garbage. Worst thing they have ever done. And yes I have issues as well, with pinned shortcuts, very glitchy. I think they pushing for people to use apps, instead of saving a webpage as an icon on homescreen.

[Cincinnati2]

This is still a problem on Firefox 127.0 and Firefox Beta 128.0b2 on my Galaxy S23 FE. On my Galaxy S10 that I upgraded from, it worked perfectly.