This is indeed annoying; there's no UI option to select anything from your collections or top sites in the current tab.
There are a few other issues that annoy me:
- tab management is a bit of a mess relative to the previous version. I seem to end up with the same websites open in many tabs because the UI for selecting an icon from top sites or collections always opens a new tab. IMHO that's a UX failure and something that needs rethinking.
- Neither top sites or collections are part of the normal bookmarks or synced to my desktop browser. This seems like an odd choice to me as bookmark syncing works great. I've repeatedly lost collections by switching to different versions of firefox preview, firefox nightly, etc. This makes me reluctant to buy into the feature because I know I will lose all collections at some point again.
- Page caching is way too aggressive. It's not acceptable to show days old versions of a website in a new tab. Yet, this happens to me on pretty much all news websites and blogs that I visit. Including HN. I have to reload freshly opened news websites to get the current version. To me this feels like a bug and I hope this is not actually intended behavior (that would be seriously misguided).
- The back button history does not stop with the opening of the tab (which is what I expect). With HN, if I repeatedly hit the back button I get back to the login screen I used months ago. The old browser would go back to the main screen so I could open up a new tab. IMHO that behavior is nicer.
- You have to be really careful manipulating collections via the touch screen. I've repeatedly deleted sites from there by accident because I wasn't scrolling perfectly straight or trying to open the site. Swipe to delete without confirmation is broken UX. Really annoying and it seems overly sensitive to this. Every delete I've done this way was unintentional.
Despite this, I kind of like it because adblocking (aka. the #1 use case for extensions) works great and I also enjoy privacy protection, which on Android normally is kind of a bad joke with Google tracking your every move.
There are a few other issues that annoy me:
- tab management is a bit of a mess relative to the previous version. I seem to end up with the same websites open in many tabs because the UI for selecting an icon from top sites or collections always opens a new tab. IMHO that's a UX failure and something that needs rethinking.
- Neither top sites or collections are part of the normal bookmarks or synced to my desktop browser. This seems like an odd choice to me as bookmark syncing works great. I've repeatedly lost collections by switching to different versions of firefox preview, firefox nightly, etc. This makes me reluctant to buy into the feature because I know I will lose all collections at some point again.
- Page caching is way too aggressive. It's not acceptable to show days old versions of a website in a new tab. Yet, this happens to me on pretty much all news websites and blogs that I visit. Including HN. I have to reload freshly opened news websites to get the current version. To me this feels like a bug and I hope this is not actually intended behavior (that would be seriously misguided).
- The back button history does not stop with the opening of the tab (which is what I expect). With HN, if I repeatedly hit the back button I get back to the login screen I used months ago. The old browser would go back to the main screen so I could open up a new tab. IMHO that behavior is nicer.
- You have to be really careful manipulating collections via the touch screen. I've repeatedly deleted sites from there by accident because I wasn't scrolling perfectly straight or trying to open the site. Swipe to delete without confirmation is broken UX. Really annoying and it seems overly sensitive to this. Every delete I've done this way was unintentional.
Despite this, I kind of like it because adblocking (aka. the #1 use case for extensions) works great and I also enjoy privacy protection, which on Android normally is kind of a bad joke with Google tracking your every move.