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maxwell demon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Mozilla seems to be hell-bent on alienating users, as they did it again: [theregister.com]

An update to the Android flavor of Firefox left fuming punters thinking a bad experimental build had been pushed to their smartphones. In fact, this was a deliberate software release.

A Reg reader yesterday alerted us to an August 20 version bump that was causing so many problems, our tipster thought it was a beta that had gone seriously awry. "To sum it up, on 20th of August, Firefox 79 was unexpectedly forced on a large batch of Firefox 68 Android users without any warning, way to opt out or roll back," our reader reported. "A lot got broken in the process: the user interface, tabs, navigation, add-ons."

Meanwhile, the Google Play store page for the completely free and open-source Firefox has a rash of one-star reviews echoing similar complaints: after the upgrade, little seemed to work as expected.

Among the complaints are a missing back button, frequent browser crashes, and extensions not working.

Sounds like a buggy release for sure. But:

Unfortunately for our source, and the other Firefox for Android users, this isn't a mistaken release or a broken beta build: it's the new version of Firefox for Android, and it's set to hit the UK today, August 25, and the US on the 27th.

Original Submission