Firefox Focus: A Fast Private Mobile Browser from Mozilla
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A nice trick with Focus on iOS is that you can set it to be the adblocker for mobile Safari. So, you install it, but don’t have to switch browsers to partially benefit from it.
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.
Incidentally I enabled this yesterday because I was grtting tired of “Congraulation! You won an Amazon gift card!”. I feel the loading speed has improved since. I am not sure how effective Focus will be against popups but let’s see...
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...
If you long-press the refresh button in mobile safari, you will get the option to reload the current page without content blockers.
Thank you! I am glad I know this trick now! I cited your comment in my other comment. This trick is so thoughtful from Apple - I have to mention this.
So the content blockers can also submit my traffic details to some server? I was under the impression that they can only add to the rule list in Safari. I am suddenly very afraid of adguard. Can someone clarify on this?
What changed? Why is this being posted now?
I've been using Firefox alongside Firefox Focus (Klar, since I'm from a German speaking country) for a few months now and I like the setup.
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.
There are tabs. To open links in new tabs hold instead of tap. Couldn't find out how to open an "empty tab" though...
Is there a real difference between Firefox Focus and Firefox Klar? Is use the latter for a while now (and love it) and wonder if I am missing something. Wikipedia tells me something about "Klar" being used in a german context because of the "focus" magazine ambiguity (which is kinda weird as this magazine didn't have any relevance since forever). Edit: Ah... further reading in the german wikipedia revealed that the publisher of the magazine is partnered with Mozilla making the disambiguation a form of transparency I guess.
Klar is just Focus for German-speaking countries, the name is the only difference. As you note, the name change is due to the eponymous magazine.
Klar also doesn’t send analytics to a third party like Focus does.
I have been using Firefox focus for a while and I have 2 main problems with it. The adblocker is worse than ublock origin (eg. try to google Kindle) and there is no simple way to use tabs. I still use it to open links, but a lot of the time I end up having focus open it on Firefox.
That's because Firefox Focus doesn't actually have an ad blocker. What it has is a tracking blocker. It just so happens that almost all ads have trackers in them, that's why it still blocks most ads.
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.
> The adblocker is worse than ublock origin (eg. try to google Kindle)
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".
That is exactly the issue, focus doesn't block enough. I am not at home so I cannot give you a visual comparison but when googling "Kindle" with ublock origin the first link I see is to the Amazon website, while on focus I see 3 big ads that require me to scroll down to see the search results. Obviously this is a constructed example but there are other websites (I can't remember which exactly) with lots of ads that origin doesn't block.
For me, the lack of easy tabs is a feature. I don't ever have more than four or five tabs open on desktop, but I have twenty open continuously on mobile Chrome and it encourages idle browsing.
Is there any advantage of using this instead of the classic Firefox + uBlock?
If you enable the additional privacy lists in uBlock Origin and clear your Cookies frequently, then not really.
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.
Thank you very much for your detailed explanation!
Brave on mobile is by far the best browser I've seen so far.
I use Firefox Focus on my phone for most of my casual browsing. It launches and loads pages much faster than Firefox does. For some reason, Firefox insists on stalling for a few seconds before starting to load the web page whereas Focus does it instantly. I only use Firefox when I need session management.
I hope Firefox 58 improves the situation.
I use Naked Browser for my normal web browsing, nothing faster or cleaner, but all web links from apps go straight to Firefox Focus. Who knows where the obfuscated links are taking you?
It's light and fast: great for my old phone.
It is far from fast and it is annoying to switch tabs. I used to use it initially, but I found the features a bit too restrictive so I uninstalled it.
That is surprisingly fast compared to standard Firefox for Android. Is there any downside to using this as the default browser?
Wasn't there someone on HN a while ago saying that Focus was built on WebKit which makes it basically a Google thing?
Chromium-based browsers such as Google Chrome run on Blink rendering engine. Blink was forked from Apple’s Webkit, Safari’s rendering engine.
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...
I think Focus uses WebKit (or at least the regular webview) on Android as well, due to Gecko not being that amenable to embedding yet and this being a quicker way to get to market.
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...
Ok, Google, Apple, whatever. When I see the Firefox brand I'm hoping for a product that focuses on privacy. Not an Apple product with a Firefox sticker on top. Apparently this is just my misconception.
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".
I might be mistaken, but I don't think the rendering engine is the part with which you need to be concerned if you worry about privacy. So Mozilla could very well make a Webkit based browser that cares about your privacy just as much as the vanilla Firefox.
Right now, after the Cliqz and remotely installed addon controversies, and the fact that Firefox Focus sends analytics data to a third party (Adjust Inc.), I'd say Apple is more privacy focused than Mozilla.
> Right now, after the Cliqz and remotely installed addon controversies, and the fact that Firefox Focus sends analytics data to a third party, I'd say Apple is more privacy focused than Mozilla.
Could you clarify what is the third party that Mozilla is sending analytics to?
Firefox Focus (but not Firefox Klar) sends usage data to Google Analytics.
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.
I am sure the mobile devs will jump in and give an authoritative answer, but you can refuse to send usage data to Mozilla by toggle off in Focus’s settings.
The usage data is not sent to Mozilla but to a marketing company called "Adjust Inc.": https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios/wiki/Install-Tra...
Firefox sending my data to a marketing company should not be on by default... Heck, it should not even be an option.
Usage data isn't much of a privacy issue, but if you are a concerned user, don't you already have the habit of going through the settings of each new app? I found this one 2 minutes after installing and though nothing more of it.
By the time I have disabled it they have already pinged the "Adjust, Inc." servers at least once with my information. That's unacceptable.
If that is unacceptable in general, then why don't you check the settings of apps before you give them permission to access the internet?
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.
Every browser on iOS has to use WebKit as Apple won’t allow any other rendering engine (they say it’s for security reasons but I doubt this is the main motivation)
The main motivation is that the web will take over apps because apps are today's flash and apple wants to make sure it has a stake in the platform.