Long-press back button no longer summons history on Android?

[LoKaa2]

I thought last week's Samsung update broke my phone or something over the last few days, but after trying Beta, Focus, and Nightly; I finally found a 2-week-old 133.0.3 Fennec build on F-Droid where it still works; so it can't be my phone after all.

Did you decide to remove this feature, or did it break in the 134.0 update? It was the app's most useful feature for browsing, imho.

I know you can tap the three dots and long-press the menu's arrows, but having to pause to check which of the two arrows isn't grayed out and thus clickable is such a flow killer compared to the global long-press action, and I've been constantly running into it since this change.

[CharlieTed]

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@LoKaa2 wrote:

I thought last week's Samsung update broke my phone or something over the last few days, but after trying Beta, Focus, and Nightly; I finally found a 2-week-old 133.0.3 Fennec build on F-Droid where it still works; so it can't be my phone after all.

Did you decide to remove this feature, or did it break in the 134.0 update? It was the app's most useful feature for browsing, imho.

I know you can tap the three dots and long-press the menu's arrows, but having to pause to check which of the two arrows isn't grayed out and thus clickable is such a flow killer compared to the global long-press action, and I've been constantly running into it since this change.

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Hi! It seems the long-press back button feature was removed in recent updates. While the three-dot menu with arrows is a workaround, it’s not as smooth as the previous method. I’d suggest sharing feedback with Mozilla, as they might consider bringing it back in future updates. Hope that helps!

[LoKaa2]

Never mind, I found an older Nightly bug report for it  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1932300 , it just doesn't appear to have been addressed yet and moved on to Stable.

[billyswong]

From the bug report, it looks like the bug came from an API en**bleep**tification of Android itself. The old API is gone in Android 15 and the new API doesn't support native detection of back button long-press. Thus devices older than Android 15 but have implemented the new API already are also affected.

[anon743]

Just discovered this very issue on the Note 10 Lite (up to Android 13).  Long-pressing return ("back") button on bottom navigation bar no longer deploys the history on the very same page tab.  To access history on that very tab you must go to the main Menu and long-press the left/right arrows.  Problem is that the same thing happens to Chrome as well: long-pressing the bottom back (return) button results in no history showing up.  Very, very annoying indeed!!

However, some older phones are not affected.  I have these Samsung models and the problematic symptom does
NOT show up:
- Note 4 (Android 6.0.1)
- Note 9  (Android 10)
- XCover 5 (Android 11; yet to update to newer version esp. 13)

So what exactly is going on?  Can someone please investigate??
Also pls spread this post to raise awareness of the issue concerned.  Thx