From digging around in Mozilla’s public bug trackers, it seems their GeckoView - slated to become a drop-in replacement for WebView on Android - just wasn’t ready to ship. The Android WebView version of Focus for Android was initially referred to as a prototype. Mozilla have opted for a staged roll-out so only some users will be using GeckoView now but they intend to move all users over to Gecko in the coming months.ĭoes Mozilla have so little faith in their own rendering engine - which is already available on Android - that they’d choose to release their new mobile web browser product for Android without it? Update ( ): Firefox Focus version 7.0 for Android now ships with both WebView and GeckoView. On Android, however, they could have chosen to use Gecko instead. Notably, Apple doesn’t allow other rendering engines to be distributed through their App Store, so Mozilla had no other choice. Focus was released for iOS last year, using the WebKit WebView rendering engine. Focus is limited to only a single tab and comes with built-in blocklists of known internet trackers and advertisement. However, the first two releases of Firefox Focus for Android have shipped with Android WebView, based on Chromium’s Blink rendering engine, instead of Gecko.įirefox Focus, also known as “Firefox Klar” in some markets, has a quite different design to that of Firefox Mobile. Gecko is used in Firefox for desktop and Android. What makes a web browser unique? To me, one of the essential things that sets Firefox apart from other web browsers is its open-source Mozilla Gecko web rendering engine. Along the way, Mozilla seem to have lost their focus on building a cohesive mobile platform. The new web browser from Mozilla blocks ads and trackers by default, and is branded as a privacy focused alternative to traditional web browsers. Firefox Focus browser for Android has been downloaded 1 million times in just one month since its initial release.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |