Hacker Public Radio

Your ideas, projects, opinions - podcasted.

New episodes Monday through Friday.


HPR4384: Browser and dedicated apps on the mobile phone

Hosted by Henrik Hemrin on 2025-05-22 01:00:00
Download or Listen

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.

Recently I had a discussion on Mastodon about mobile phone applications.


The other person stated "the web belongs to web browsers". I agreed to it as a general good approach.


Some dedicated apps cannot be substituted with the browser, but some can. I do not have so many apps myself, but anyway that statement got me to review a couple of my apps how they works in the Firefox browser.


And actually, I could delete three apps and all functions I needed from them can be managed from Firefox.


Beside traditional bookmarks, those pages can be pinned to the Firefox start page or placed like a webapp on the mobile screen, so they look like an ordinary app.


Using the Firefox browser makes it easier to control the privacy. In addition to what is built into Firefox, I currently also have the two extensions, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin in my Firefox browser.


Beside privacy and in general to be somewhat more in control, this approach also reduces the number of apps to keep updated and reduce storage need.


Sometimes apps are necessary of otherwise beneficial. But I think the traditional browser should not be forgotten also on the smart mobile phone.

Provide feedback on this episode.

HPR Comments


lyunpaw@gmail.com says: I agree.

RE: hpr4384::2025-05-22 Browser and dedicated apps on the mobile phone by Henrik Hemrin
00:02:12 Listen in ogg, opus, or mp3 format.
Many mobile apps act as very restricted browsers. The app will limit the user more than it will ever assists the user; and will require root level privileges for “reasons”.

Thank you for the show, Sgoti.

Mastodon Comments



More Information...


Copyright Information

Unless otherwise stated, our shows are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license.

The HPR Website Design is released to the Public Domain.