In the settings there's an option to add a 'Quit' button to the menu, which will clear all cookies / history / etc. when you quit FF using menu->quit (so your session is still saved if you just go to the home screen and come back later). IMO that's better than Firefox Focus, which has adblocking and ephemeral sessions built in but doesn't let you have tabs.
There's a specific plugin for it, Google Search Fixer.
I like it because:
- syncs with desktop Firefox - has extensions (I mostly use Bitwarden and an ad blocker) - interface is nice to use - available in F-Droid
It's fast enough for me, though I haven't used mobile Chrome for years, so I guess I don't know what I'm missing.
Standard Firefox for Android has used Gecko from the start. It is gradually being upgraded using the Quantum improvements, but the rate of change seems slow. I thought that the emphasis on multi-threaded processing in Quantum would be particularly useful for mobile, because the single threaded processing capability of mobile (and particularly non-Apple mobile chips) is very limited, but there don't seem to have been massive improvements.
I think it’s a shame they relegated Servo to a research project, integrating Servo into Gecko has been long-winded, and the most important target of porting a parallel/multi-threaded layout engine isn’t even being discussed. Frankly, given their $500m budget, their core mission of browser development, and the massive importance of mobile, they probably should have pursued both Gecko and Servo at the same time. Even if Servo only supported flexbox layouts it could be very useful as a wrapper while wider compability was being pursued. The emphasis now is on WebVR, which seems not very relevant to the mass market.
Unfortunately, it's trying to hit a fast-moving target, and that's really hard. Which is the reason for which I believe nobody else is currently pursuing any new web engine.
I run Nightly so I get the improvements quickly, but even with that Firefox is still far behind Chrome.
- Firefox does not have a JIT for 64-bit ARM (AArch64). Didn't benchmark but this does make a difference.
- Running a extension based ad blocker seems to degrade performance and the difference visible on a smartphone SoC. I think Brave has it written in native code and deeply integrated, and it seems to perform without making things super slow.
- While I can't judge on the UI (actually I miss the tab gestures on Firefox), Firefox often glitches like not loading custom tabs, page search getting stuck and some others. This was quite stressful.
- The sync is super glitchy. It can easily be days outdated unless you trigger it manually.
Fennec (Firefox for Android) is basically in maintenance mode.
FWIW: Firefox Focus Nightly is a much better implementation of Gecko on Android than Fennec ever was, with the caveat that Sync, sessions, or extensions are not available.
It's great to know that every site I visit now can't track me (easily). It's like a have a fresh new browser every time. I recommend them both.
On Firefox beta, I also have installed uBlock Origin, Cookie Auto-delete, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere and Decentraleyes. Quite happy with my setup.
It was a bit tougher a year ago but recent versions are spot on, I've largely forgotten it's not chrome as it just stays out the way.
[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/get-started-firefox-lit...