Firefox Focus Celebrates 1M Android Downloads With New Features

Firefox Focus is a bit of an odd duck. It launched first on iOS, where Firefox itself launched last. It had very limited features and a singled-minded focus on privacy. And yet it seems to have struck a chord with many mobile users, even on Android where the app has been around for less than a month. It managed to rake in 1 million downloads already in that time, encouraging Mozilla to roll out even more futures for the simple browser.

Truth be told, 1 million downloads isn't exactly that large in the grand scheme of things. Especially considering Google just boasted having over 2 billion monthly active devices. Downloads also don't take into account daily active users. A data that is probably a bit more difficult to get, or disclose, considering the browser is not supposed to be tracking you in any way.

Still, 1 million for an almost featureless browser is still quite an achievement, especially considering there's already a full-featured Firefox browser that has its own incognito feature. Firefox Focus, however, is more like a burner browser, that you use for one-off browsing activities and then throwaway afterwards, chucking along browsing cache and data.

Simple as it may be, Mozilla has still found ways to improve the app, without flooding it with features. Some, like Full Screen Videos, is something you would have expected. That said, Mozilla says that there is a bug with YouTube that prevents it from working with the feature. There's also a download functionality, in case you do want to save files during your browsing session.

While there is no update for the iOS version of Firefox Focus, Mozilla did roll out a new version of Firefox itself for the Apple faithful. That includes a new night mode that dims the brightness down a bit as well as a built-in QR code reader so you won't have to install yet another app for that.

SOURCE: Mozilla