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by dhimes 2822 days ago
Anybody else trying Firefox Focus on iPhone? It seems pretty nice but I haven't used it much yet.
2 comments

Firefox Focus has been my go to browser on iOS since the time it launched. The premise is a single tab, which you use and then erase all data from once you're done. As it says, rinse and repeat! If you want multiple tabs, this is not the browser for you (though Firefox iOS could be).

I use Firefox Focus more than any other app, including for browsing and reading through HN comments. It's got a good ad blocker (though not the fastest [1]), but no options to control ad blocking on a per site basis.

The browser has been improving over time. It also includes an extra layer of passcode/biometric protection that can help prevent others from seeing what you've opened in it. The only issue I've noticed is that it sometimes forgets the page you've loaded after sometime (may be because it doesn't save them to the disk, and when iOS removes it from memory, it starts out again as a blank slate).

[1]: https://brooksreview.net/2018/09/safari-content-blocker-eval...

Once I started using Firefox Focus, I was surprised at how rarely I actually needed to browse the web un-anonymously. I don't need to be logged in to search, use Wikipedia, or read news online.

Focus is perfect for bite-sized browsing. Read and then throw the session away.

Requires iOS 11. I don't want to update my iPhone SE -- it's fine as it is and I don't need it slower; I made that mistake with a previous iPhone.
It’s a bad thing that Apple doesn’t allow older versions to be downloaded. Firefox Focus was there before iOS 11 too, though it’s not as feature rich as the latest one. If you had downloaded it on iOS 10, you could still continue to use it or redownload that version.
I had an SE, 11 didn't slow it down. 12 was made to be faster than 11 even on the oldest supported devices. The SE has the internals of the 6S, only a couple generations behind, so it'll be fine.
iOS 12 is benchmarked to be much faster than 11 in pretty much every case I believe.
I've used it for a couple months now. It's great, and I can't remember any sites that plain didn't work, though some were pretty ugly.

The one thing I miss is tabs, which FFF doesn't seem to have.

I'm glad to hear this. The "about" says it bans loading web fonts- which is good for speed and perhaps privacy but bad for pretty.
It has (global) settings for a few things, and blocking web fonts is one of those settings. So you can turn that off and get web fonts to load. Sites don't have to be ugly if you prefer them otherwise.