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Comment by clouddrover | Hacker News Reader

And similarly for Firefox with Tracking Protection turned on. The speed gains come from reducing the amount that's downloaded and rendered or executed:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/20/firefox-private-bro...

You can set Firefox's Tracking Protection to "always" so it's on all the time, inside and outside of private browsing mode.

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People who do that might like Firefox Focus, which ships with tracking protection, adblocking, and no history by default: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/mobile/#focus

I like the effort, but I think their target is slighty off. The privacy with regards to the network (ads, tracking, fingerprinting, etc.) and the privacy with regards to other users of the same machine (browsing history, downloads, etc.) are orthogonal. FireFox Focus lumps them together into one, just like FireFox private mode. I think they should be seperated. I want locally all the convenience of usability, but towards the outside all the protection and privacy features. FireFox doesn't offer that :-/

Install Privacy Badger? https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

I honestly love the package as it is for this very reason - the browsing experience is top notch, and the ephemeral nature of cookies, open sites etc. keeps me off the phone, and social media in particular.

I like it so much that I can't help but dream with Focus for desktop. I realized most of the times the browser can be amnesic (maybe should?) and completely involve websites in private bubbles with mitigations.

The robust version of the browser ends up being the home of long therm, trustworthy pages.

Sorry, j_4, reply was to parent.

My client is broken, it was meant to you. Hope this one goes to the right place.

Or Firefox Klar, the German version (UI is still localized, I think the difference is that even telemetry is disabled?)

Thought it was just a weird version of Focus.

I use this almost exclusively. Couple of weird things that I don't like:

There's no accessible "new tab" option without long pressing a hyperlink. If I want to open a new tab (so I don't lose my current page) and web search for something, I do it by long pressing any hyperlink on the current page.

Also, tabs are reloaded every time they're brought to focus, so I can't queue up three or four tabs to read later in a moment where I don't have data service (subway train, remote area, etc).

Oh, and oddly, they also have a "send usage data" option in Settings. Seems pretty contrary to the general purpose of the browser, but what do I know.

My biggest gripe is probably a lack of find-on-page. It's on a roadmap, somewhere, but no idea when it will land.

I belive the tab generation constraints are a feature! They are meant to avoid the clutter most browsers become. Seriously, tabs are extremely overrated. Focus on something, delete it or archive it (Pocket, Instapaper, org, etc) and tag it, move on with a clean slate. This way you are always 100% focused on the task at hand. You leave archiving to archiving tools and not to tabs.

I agree on your last point though. Mozilla's heavy dependence on user data (and aggressive decisions like opt-out telemetry) goes against their speech. I choose to share with Mozilla if I trust them. But they understand "collected with permission" to be "poweruser data" and they want to suck information from the "other users". And that drug is a dangerous one when you point fingers all the time at others addicted to the same thing. In Focus it is plain wrong. "Here, we help you block tracking by everyone, since it is evil, except from us, cause sugar".

Works pretty well on Firefox for iOS, but it blocks twitter embeds (sometimes just their images and other media content).

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