Mozilla’s Firefox Daylight browser for Android is out

Mozilla released Firefox Daylight on Tuesday August 25th, an overhauled version of its Firefox browser for Android phones that marks a new step to claim some influence player in the crucial mobile market. The new browser, with better speed and stronger privacy, is available in Europe and will be released in North America on Thursday. About 33 million people use Firefox on Android each month, about one-sixth the 208 million browser’s total users.

But Firefox still pales in comparison to Google Chrome, with more than a billion people using it across 2 billion devices. Mozilla’s Firefox Daylight offers a number of improvements over the previous Firefox for Android. Mozilla’s Firefox Daylight opens web pages about 10% faster than the previous version. Mozilla’s Firefox Daylight is also more responsive when you’re scrolling or tapping.

Firefox Daylight has new privacy muscle in the form of Mozilla’s Enhanced Tracking Protection, designed to block advertisers and publishers from logging your online behavior. The new version features Tab collections that lets you organize sets of tabs into a named group that you can open in bulk later. Firefox Daylight adds Mozilla’s list of recommended extensions, which are add-ons that let you customize the browser, making it easier to find ones that are safe and useful.

If you already have Firefox for Android installed, the new version will replace it without much disruption.

If you are new to mobile Firefox, you are more likely to stick with Firefox Daylight than people were with its predecessor. New user retention was higher in Firefox Preview than in the previous version of Firefox. Mozilla tested Firefox Daylight for more than a year under the name Firefox Preview. Firefox for Android uses Mozilla’s own browser engine technology, a contrast to other third-party browsers like Brave and Samsung Internet, which are based on Google’s Chrome technology.

Firefox Daylight employs Mozilla’s new GeckoView, an updated foundation other browsers and apps can use too. If you want somebody besides Google charting the entire future of the web, installing Firefox for Android is a good first step. Firefox usage has steadily dwindled in recent years, and the company is suffering financially. It cut about 250 of its 1,000 employees in August to cope with declining revenue from search partners, notably Google.

Mozilla named the new version Firefox Daylight in an effort to set it off more dramatically from its predecessors in the same way it released Firefox Quantum for personal computers in 2017. That was part of a major effort to reclaim Firefox influence and users lost to Chrome, but so far, it has not worked. Monthly Firefox users dropped from about 250 million two years ago to today’s 208 million.

Mozilla offers a separate version of Firefox for iPhones that about 7 million people use monthly.

But because of Apple‘s rules, Firefox is not allowed to build atop GeckoView. Instead, Mozilla and all other browser makers must use Apple’s WebKit browser foundation.