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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

I used Firefox Focus on my Pixel for a few weeks and was blown away by how fast it was. The mobile web went from borderline unusable to borderline pleasant with it, I imagine largely due to its tracking and limited ad blocking. Sadly, I migrated back to Chrome because anything that needs to work with Google login or opening an app simply doesn't work. This causes issues with a lot of things I use.

I feel like I'm being ActiveX'd into using Chrome now which is very non-Googly. Not sure how feasible it is to use a different mobile browser until Mozilla and Google work together to make sure they're all on the same API page on Android. Ironically enough, Windows is far more open and friendly to competing browsers than Android.

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It's not as fast as Focus, but if you want an alternative to Chrome Firefox for Android should work better with Google Apps that are (probably) broken due to Focus's anti-tracking features. It is based on the same rendering engine as desktop and should benefit from many of the future speed improvements of Firefox 57.

On Android Chrome is arguably better if you want Google account integration or raw speed, but Firefox for Android has a more traditional UI, extensions, and is fast enough for most of my browsing.

I was blown away by Firefox Focus as well. I ended up making it the default browser, so its used when I read an article on HackerNews, Reddit, Twitter, etc. But when I need the "logged in" experience - autofill passwords, bookmarks, cookies, etc. - I launch Chrome. Best of both worlds!

I'm the same but my "logged in" mode browser is Brave. It's chrome + privacy

Yes! I do this as well after reading about it on some Reddit thread. Fantastic use case for opening random links from email and chat (and Focus is actually very smooth)!

> Firefox Focus

Sorry, but unless you have a Gecko-based version (which - AFAIK - is not what you can get from Google Play or F-Droid), it's system WebView (i.e. Chromium) under the hood.

I haven't had any issues using Firefox for Android... Firefox Focus is not a general purpose browser, so some issues are probably expected. Try Firefox for Android and install uBlock, or any of your other favorite desktop extensions!

Focus is, uh… WebKit/Chromium with no traditional browser session features (history/bookmarks/etc.) and a tracking blocker. Useful, but not "true Firefox" :)

I like Firefox Nightly on Android though, it's really good.

> I feel like I'm being ActiveX'd into using Chrome now which is very non-Googly

Define "googly"

(If you're saying it's atypical of the behavior you'd expect of them: based on what?) Considering there's no trivial way to log into one of their services (gmail) without automatically doing so on others (yt etc) without fucking around with browser sessions - among many other non-customizability gotchas from them - saying google doesn't want to control how their offerings are used is going to be a very tough sell.

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