Firefox Focus: A Fast Private Mobile Browser from Mozilla
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
There are apparently paid adblockers that route your web requests for all apps through a VPN. Personally, I’m not interested in any aspect of that last sentence. Filtering just Safari locally for free is good for me.
I’ve been against adblockers on the grounds that ads finance the content I want. But lately, ads and trackers have become so egregious on mobile that they, for practical purposes, prevent me from reading content at all. Either the content takes forever to load, or it jumps erratically around the screen for minutes or I’m put off from visiting a political or product related page because of the trackers.
With Focus, the web is usable again! Unfortunately, it’s not financially viable. I’m hopeful for the Brave browser for that. I’ll be trying it soon.
1. Search “Safari” on the phone under “Settings”
2. Find “Content Blockers”
4. Choose “Focus”
If you don’t see “Focus” in the list, or if you want to configure “Focus”, open the “Focus” app, and click on the settings icon (top right corner).
Note if the site you are trying to read is broken (see 1 as an example, ironically), just open up Safari settings as instructed above, undo Focus, then reload the page. When you are done, just slide back on. This is unfortunate though.
1: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-io...
Focus is registered as the default browser on my Android device, so all normal links open up there. When I need to do something where I'd like to keep logins active (or something like that), I manually open up Firefox. The only thing that bothers me is that there are no tabs, so you can only have one session of Focus at a time.
Could you elaborate on this? Granted I'm using ublock origin only on Desktop, but I'm still kinda confused what's the issue there for you because for me ublock mostly does what it's supposed to and when it doesn't it's usually an issue of "not blocking enough".
The ad results on web search engines generally don't have trackers in them, that's why they for example don't get blocked. Also, webpages with privacy-conscious users tend to have privacy respecting ads and webpages that are typically opened in Private Browsing tend to at least have privacy-respecting ads as backup, since Firefox's Private Browsing has this same tracking blocker.
In fact, Firefox Focus is functionally equivalent to Firefox's Private Browsing. They both don't keep Cookies, browsing history and such, and they both have a tracking blocker with the same blocklist (sourced from disconnect.me). Most ads have trackers in them, which is why this tracking blocker also blocks most ads (neither of them have a dedicated ad blocker).
Where they differ is that Focus is obviously just not a full-featured browser - no browsing history, even if you want it, no bookmarks, no extensions, no sync, and tabs are still a bit awkward in it. It's also generally mostly intended for the kind of user that has trouble finding or understanding Private Browsing. It being in a separate app makes it accessible from a place they know, the app launcher, and it explains nicely that browsing history and such won't be shared, as data is generally not shared between separate apps.
On a technological level, the big difference is that Focus uses Android WebView (on Android; on iOS it uses WebKit) instead of Gecko as browser engine. This helps to keep the APK size really small, which is desireable, because you sort of expect users to install it as secondary browser in addition to their full-featured browser, and well, it wouldn't help Mozilla's market share that much anyways, if they'd put Gecko into it, since it blocks most ads (and users will probably use their full-featured browser for online shopping and such, too), therefore hardly generates revenue for webpage owners, therefore wouldn't really incentivize them to optimize for Gecko either.
Some advanced users like to have Focus around alongside a full-featured browser, because you can tell Android to open links in Focus by default, meaning all the random links that you might click on in other applications will open in it, not cluttering up your browsing history and not leaving behind cookies or just in general fingerprinting you further. And if you then do want to open a webpage in your main browser (maybe also just to save it into your browsing history), then Focus does have a convenient button for that.
I hope Firefox 58 improves the situation.
It's light and fast: great for my old phone.
But Apple does not allow third-party rendering engines on iOS, so Mozilla and other vendors have to build theirs on top of Webkit.
Google has made iOS code available in Chromium repository by supporting both Blink and Webkit. See [1]. Not sure about Mozilla.
Note you cannot read the blog article without turning off Focus as content blocker (but you don’t have to quit (see 2).
Also, when I was young I was very confused which rendering engine was used because the user-agent header in HTTP was such a piece of mess (thanks to the browser war in the 90s). You are going to see webkit, blink, mozilla and NT in there.
[1]: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-io...
EDIT: I say "google, apple, whatever", but I should clarify. There's this talking point on HN that Apple is so good for user's privacy. It's not, hence "google, apple, whatever".
Firefox sending my data to a marketing company should not be on by default... Heck, it should not even be an option.
Mozilla is not even sneaky about it. On the Google Play download page, the privacy notice for the app tells you that optional usage tracking is on by dafault. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/focus#w_privacy
Perhaps you should read the privacy notices for apps if you are concerned? It seems perfectly acceptable to me.
Could you clarify what is the third party that Mozilla is sending analytics to?
Mozilla has a promise from Google that Google will not use this data for their own analysis. If you do not trust Google to honor this agreement, Mozilla employees said on a GitHub issue about this, you should stop using Mozilla products.
That said, I believe they do intend to switch to Gecko at some time in the future, but no idea how soon that would be...