After spending over a decade with various Android phones, I finally made the switch to an iPhone. Here’s why I made the switch and what I’ve discovered since.

The Struggles with Samsung/Android

1. Slow Shutter on Samsung Flagships: One of my biggest gripes with Samsung’s flagship phones has been the slow shutter and shutter lag. Trying to capture a moving subjects often resulted in blurry photos or missed shots entirely. This has been an issue with Samsung phones for many years.

2. Google’s Service Abandonment: Google has a notorious history of abandoning services. The most recent one being the Podcasts app. The podcast experience on YouTube Music is just terrible.

3. Hardware Design: The Samsung S24 Ultra has sharp corners that make it uncomfortable to hold. The Pixel 8 phones have issues with connectivity and overheating. The S24+ comes with an inferior Exynos processor.

4. Performance: No matter how fast the hardware is, Android phones always seem to slow down and stutter after a few months of use. It’s like they age in dog years. (My most recent Samsung phone was the S23+, and it already started lagging).

5. Apps: Android apps have an inconsistent look and feel. It’s like a patchwork quilt made by someone who doesn’t know how to sew. Also, a lot of Android apps require excessive permissions.

6. Disaster: A Samsung update once made my phone unbootable. I had to do a full reset and lost some data. People said I should have made a backup before the update, but Android doesn't provide an easy way to completely backup the phone. That was the last straw.

The iPhone Revelation

1. Shortcuts: The Shortcuts app on iPhone is a game-changer. It automates tasks in ways I never thought possible.

2. Face ID: Face ID on the iPhone is leagues ahead of Samsung’s version and even better than Touch ID. It’s fast, reliable, and just works. With the amount of unlocks I need everyday, this turns out to be more impactful than I expected.

3. Files App: The Files app is actually useful, and it has built-in support for Windows file shares.

4. Look & Feel: Everything on iOS feels smoother and more premium. The animations, the UI design – it’s all just so polished.

5. Audio: It’s much easier to select audio output in-app when connected to multiple Bluetooth devices and AirPlay.

6. Driving: CarPlay is a joy to use compared to Android Auto. Plus, Apple Maps has better voice directions.

7. Emulators: Emulators are now possible to use on iPhone without jailbreaking.

Switching to iPhone has been a breath of fresh air. While Android gave me more freedom and customizations. The consistency, reliability, and overall experience of iOS have won me over.

What was your experience switching to/from "the dark side"?

Amazon (AMZN.O) is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, according to people with direct knowledge of the company's plans.

According to zombbo, the developer of Censor Tracker: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/censor-tracker/

I am one of the developers of the Censor Tracker add-on, which is listed on Mozilla’s add-on repository. We recently noticed that our add-on is now unavailable in Russia, despite being developed specifically to circumvent censorship in Russia.

We have not changed any visibility settings, nor have we received any emails regarding this action.

Our Russian users now see this message when they visit the page of Censor Tracker:

*That page is not available in your region.

The page you tried to access is not available in your region.

You may be able to find what you’re looking for in one of the available extensions or themes, or by asking for help on our community forums.*

Can anyone suggest or explain what this is related to? Was there some request from the Russian authorities to make the extension unavailable in Russia or is there some other reason for this decision on Mozilla’s part?

Once my work day is over and my baby is asleep, there’s nothing I love more than settling in with my weighted blanket, grabbing some pillows, and playing video games. I don’t get to play video games as much as I’d like to anymore, so I need every tool at my disposal working for me to make sure I can maximize my time. I reached out to my fellow gamers here at Mozilla, and here’s how we use Firefox to help us game.

Firefox Nightly, a special channel where users can try out the latest features and changes, received a new feature that should make life easier for tab hoarders: tab previews. You can now hover the cursor over a tab and get a thumbnail with what is happening in that tab.

Firefox 130 will introduce an experimental new capability to automatically generate alt-text for images using a fully private on-device AI model. The feature will be available as part of Firefox’s built-in PDF editor, and our end goal is to make it available in general browsing for users with screen readers.

Mozilla plans to add artificial intelligence features to its Firefox web browser. At the WSJ’s Future of Everything Festival Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers and Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman shared their vision for the future of the web with WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims. Plus, new research questions how much screens before bed actually delay sleep.

Mozilla, maker of the open source Firefox web browser, has launched an investigation to analyze the impact of Telemetry on the browser's performance on Android.

Fixed an issue with reading tagged PDF documents in a screen reader. (Bug 1894849)

Fixed not displaying localized text for non-en-US locales in the Crash Reporter dialog box on macOS. (Bug 1896097)

Fixed issues with drag-and-drop functionality on Linux. (Bug 1897115)

Fixed an issue causing high GPU memory usage on certain versions of AMD cards. (Bug 1897006)

I removed the click bait part of the title.

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Over the past few months, we’ve been accelerating our ability to execute outstandingly, make faster decisions, and realize our multi-product ambitions. To help facilitate this, I’m excited to announce an organizational change within the product team. This change will enable us to better develop and scale products at different stages of development and maturity.

Today, we have multiple groups across various teams working on new ideas and emerging products: Fakespot, PXI, Mozilla Social, and the Innovation Ecosystems team, plus some newer emerging pods around new product design sprints and ideation. To simplify and accelerate this work, we are consolidating our emerging and seed product portfolios under a single umbrella, led by Adam Fishman, as our SVP of New Products, reporting directly to me.

By setting up Firefox as a standalone product organization, we will also be able to bring more focus to our continual efforts to improve the Firefox experience for everyone who uses it. Firefox is already a leader in foundational qualities like speed and privacy, and now we will be able to faster in developing solutions that bring more useful tools and more joyful experience to our users. Our recent announcement of new Firefox features is just the start, as we close in on Firefox’s 20th birthday in November.

I am really excited about these changes as they help us accelerate our path to a strong, multi-product future as we simultaneously expand on our investment in our flagship core product, Firefox.

Laura Chambers

CEO, Mozilla Corporation