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Firefox For iOS Gets Tracking Protection, Firefox Focus For Android Gets Tabs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Mozilla today released Firefox 9.0 for iOS and updated Firefox Focus for Android. The iOS browser is getting tracking protection, improved sync, and iOS 11 compatibility. The Android privacy browser is getting tabs. You can download the former from Apple's App Store and the latter from Google Play. This is the first time Firefox has offered tracking protection on iOS, and Nick Nguyen, vice president of product at Mozilla, notes that it's finally possible "thanks to changes by Apple to enable the option for 3rd party browsers." This essentially means iPhone and iPad users with Firefox and iOS 11 will have automatic ad and content blocking in Private Browsing mode, and the option to turn it on in regular browsing. This is the same feature that's available in Firefox for Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as the same ad blocking technology used in Firefox Focus for Android and iOS.
I give it two months following the first widespread implementations before there's a open source library the accurately duplicates the mandatory closed-source portion. Maybe three if they did an especially good job on the algorithm.
Why do they have a second browser for Android? Textbook Mozilla fragmentation.
The providers of browser usage share statistics probably count every iOS browser as Safari, as all* browsers on iOS are skins around the Apple WebKit engine.
* With the exception of Opera Mini, which is less a browser than an X session to a browser running on Opera's server.
2.0 Build 12571412 does not make it obvious that it has tab support. Does anyone else see tabs?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Does it even matter if Firefox has no users on iOS? I remember a /. discussion on this topic that happened some time ago... The gist of it was that the rendering engine used on iOS could not be changed, making all so called browsers on that platform little more than window dressing used to create brand awareness (except for Safari, of course). Has the situation changed?
What these numbers seem to show is that most people tend to use the default browser that came with their phone. Those IE installs are probably running on Windows phones. I just don't see any browser in that list that seems like it's being installed because of its merits. The situation cannot be compared to the desktop, where Chrome is massively popular in a large extent because of the amazing visibility it gets on the Google homepage and that it can be installed easily even in corporate environments without administrative rights.
TLDR: In my opinion, Firefox is failing on the cellphone market because of the market structure more than anything else.
Ublock Origin and Ad-Block Plus are both available as add-ons for Firefox for Android. That to me is FFA's killer feature: add-ons. The mobile versions of Chrome and Safari don't have them because FU that's why. They don't even try to compete in that area, as they know most people will just use the browser that came with the phone. Makes one wonder if Chrome would even have add-ons on its desktop browser had it not had to compete with a then-already established Firefox, which did.
I recommend Firefox for Android for anyone who doesn't want to accept whatever Google serves them. Would you use a desktop browser without ad-block and other add-ons available for it? No? Then why do you accept it on your mobile device.
I'm not in the tank for Firefox. I don't even have it installed on my PC. To me its the only browser that makes sense to use on Android right now, though. Its not perfect, but it doesn't deliberately deprive you of add-ons (including ad-blockers) to make money off of you the way Chrome does. Chrome is taking you for granted on the Android platform.
Techies really should be pushing Firefox for Android, at least until such a point as another viable regularly updated contender offers add-ons as well on that platform.
Wat, it didn't be have tabs? I use chrome beta (pretty good stability, pretty much same features as dev, but still more than normal edition. Canary is just too much unstable for me)
Mozilla even realized this and so started the Firefox OS project.
The people who ridicule Mozilla's lack of market share on mobile are the same people who complain about Mozilla's "lack of focus" for ever working on Firefox OS.
Mobile is where all the growth is for browsers and Firefox is shut out without an OS it controls. Its market share will continue to drift down as desktops make up a smaller and smaller part of the pie. With no good way of matching the integration of mobile to desktop that Google, Apple and even Microsoft offer, how can it compete? When it finally shuts down for good, all the complainers will switch to "why isn't there a non-Google/Apple/Microsoft browser"
Only if you're too lazy to actually change it - Web Views could change the User-Agent since iOS 3, and iOS 5 made it even easier. Knowing what is sent, you can differentiate between someone u sing the mobile Safari, an app using Web Views, and Chrome for iOS.
Of course, if's up the maintainer of the website to notice the differences - if you only look for WebKit or KHTML and assume it's Safari, well, you're gonig to count it all as Safari then. But that's a problem with the website gathering the usage stats.
Of course, if's up the maintainer of the website to notice the differences - if you only look for WebKit or KHTML and assume it's Safari, well, you're gonig to count it all as Safari then. But that's a problem with the website gathering the usage stats.
You say "problem"; I say "appropriate detail".
Say someone starts a website about the extent to which web developers can rely on features of the web platform, such as caniuse.com. The operator of this particular website wouldn't consider it "a problem" to conflate all iOS browsers into "Safari" because all browsers using Apple WebKit have the same set of unimplemented features. What's labeled "Safari for iOS" in the charts might be labeled "Safari for iOS and other browsers using the Apple WebKit engine" in the prose.
A website about the advertising market, on the other hand, would need to collect more data about what skin around WebKit is in use, as these skins can interfere with advertising display. For example, Firefox's tracking protection feature blocks connections to hosts known to track a user's activity across sites, including most popular ad providers, and anti-adblock scripts routinely confuse it with an ad blocker instead of serving self-hosted replacement ads. (To see what I mean, try browsing TV Tropes in the Private Browsing mode of Firefox for desktop PCs.) Readers of this website would care more about the modifications that a skin makes to the user experience than readers of caniuse.com.
Sorry to reply so late in the discussion. I agree that, in retrospect, the Firefox OS makes a lot more sense than what I've given them credit for until now. With that said, I still think that Mozilla is not free of blame. They used to get massive amounts of money from Google (300 million in at least one year, I heard). They've been known to give relatively large compensations to their executives... My opinion is that, being a charity, they did not have the skills required to make something out of the money they were showered in, and the opportunity to become a major player on the Internet was squandered.