At Firefox, we’re passionate about providing solutions for people who care about safety, privacy and independence. For several months, we’ve been working on a new strategy for our Android products to serve you even better. Today we’re very happy to announce a pilot of our new browser for Android devices that is available to early adopters for testing as of now. We’ll have a feature-rich, polished version of this flagship application available for this fall.
This version does not yet support extensions, making it a bit useless for me at this stage. I hope they address that soon.
I’ve been using Firefox Focus on my Android phone since it came out a year or so ago, and I must say, I do not miss the extensions. Focus is extremely barebone, which also makes it very fast. And it blocks most scripts and advertising, by default.
Currently, Firefox Focus is the only browser I have on my phone. I deactivated Chrome the day set it up.
I’ve been using Fenix for a while as part of our internal testing (I work for Mozilla) and while it’s still missing a lot of functionality it’s so fast that it makes up for it in speed. At this point having extensions and some core functionality back would be nice, but if I were to chose between those and raw speed I’d pick the second any time. Especially for mobile browsing which is usually quite atrocious to start with.
I installed FF Preview and it is definitely faster on Android! I am aiming to be able to use FF only in Android, as it makes sense “philosophically”. But the regular version is just too slow. I enjoy FF Focus, but the lack of functions is sometimes an issue. On Windows, I am ok with using FF as my main browser. I also use Brave (on both Android & Windows), but somehow FF seems to make more sense as the last “non-Chromium” browser standing.
The only bit missing for me is the syncing of passwords. It syncs history and bookmarks but not passwords.