
Firefox Focus: A Fast Private Mobile Browser from Mozilla - bharatkhatri14
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/mobile/#focus
======
awhiskeyshot
Previous discussions:

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15049171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15049171)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12977719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12977719)

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corysama
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.

~~~
yeukhon
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...](https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-ios.html?m=1)

~~~
planb
If you long-press the refresh button in mobile safari, you will get the option
to reload the current page without content blockers.

~~~
yeukhon
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.

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bhaavan
What changed? Why is this being posted now?

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dotdi
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.

~~~
paulhilbert
There are tabs. To open links in new tabs hold instead of tap. Couldn't find
out how to open an "empty tab" though...

------
paulhilbert
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.

~~~
lorenzhs
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.

~~~
aceoflala
Klar also doesn’t send analytics to a third party like Focus does.

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akkat
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.

~~~
freeflight
> 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".

~~~
akkat
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.

------
slig
Is there any advantage of using this instead of the classic Firefox + uBlock?

~~~
Sylos
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.

~~~
slig
Thank you very much for your detailed explanation!

------
znpy
Brave on mobile is by far the best browser I've seen so far.

------
chenshuiluke
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.

------
gcthomas
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.

------
thewhitetulip
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.

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cup-of-tea
That is surprisingly fast compared to standard Firefox for Android. Is there
any downside to using this as the default browser?

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fwdpropaganda
Wasn't there someone on HN a while ago saying that Focus was built on WebKit
which makes it basically a Google thing?

~~~
yeukhon
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...](https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-ios.html?m=1)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16069623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16069623)

~~~
fwdpropaganda
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".

~~~
aceoflala
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.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
> 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?

~~~
kuschku
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.

