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Comment by fwdpropaganda | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't there someone on HN a while ago saying that Focus was built on WebKit which makes it basically a Google thing?

Chromium-based browsers such as Google Chrome run on Blink rendering engine. Blink was forked from Apple’s Webkit, Safari’s rendering engine.

But Apple does not allow third-party rendering engines on iOS, so Mozilla and other vendors have to build theirs on top of Webkit.

Google has made iOS code available in Chromium repository by supporting both Blink and Webkit. See [1]. Not sure about Mozilla.

Note you cannot read the blog article without turning off Focus as content blocker (but you don’t have to quit (see 2).

Also, when I was young I was very confused which rendering engine was used because the user-agent header in HTTP was such a piece of mess (thanks to the browser war in the 90s). You are going to see webkit, blink, mozilla and NT in there.

[1]: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-io...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16069623

I think Focus uses WebKit (or at least the regular webview) on Android as well, due to Gecko not being that amenable to embedding yet and this being a quicker way to get to market.

That said, I believe they do intend to switch to Gecko at some time in the future, but no idea how soon that would be...

Ok, Google, Apple, whatever. When I see the Firefox brand I'm hoping for a product that focuses on privacy. Not an Apple product with a Firefox sticker on top. Apparently this is just my misconception.

EDIT: I say "google, apple, whatever", but I should clarify. There's this talking point on HN that Apple is so good for user's privacy. It's not, hence "google, apple, whatever".

I might be mistaken, but I don't think the rendering engine is the part with which you need to be concerned if you worry about privacy. So Mozilla could very well make a Webkit based browser that cares about your privacy just as much as the vanilla Firefox.

Right now, after the Cliqz and remotely installed addon controversies, and the fact that Firefox Focus sends analytics data to a third party (Adjust Inc.), I'd say Apple is more privacy focused than Mozilla.

> Right now, after the Cliqz and remotely installed addon controversies, and the fact that Firefox Focus sends analytics data to a third party, I'd say Apple is more privacy focused than Mozilla.

Could you clarify what is the third party that Mozilla is sending analytics to?

Firefox Focus (but not Firefox Klar) sends usage data to Google Analytics.

Mozilla has a promise from Google that Google will not use this data for their own analysis. If you do not trust Google to honor this agreement, Mozilla employees said on a GitHub issue about this, you should stop using Mozilla products.

I am sure the mobile devs will jump in and give an authoritative answer, but you can refuse to send usage data to Mozilla by toggle off in Focus’s settings.

The usage data is not sent to Mozilla but to a marketing company called "Adjust Inc.": https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios/wiki/Install-Tra...

Firefox sending my data to a marketing company should not be on by default... Heck, it should not even be an option.

Usage data isn't much of a privacy issue, but if you are a concerned user, don't you already have the habit of going through the settings of each new app? I found this one 2 minutes after installing and though nothing more of it.

By the time I have disabled it they have already pinged the "Adjust, Inc." servers at least once with my information. That's unacceptable.

If that is unacceptable in general, then why don't you check the settings of apps before you give them permission to access the internet?

Mozilla is not even sneaky about it. On the Google Play download page, the privacy notice for the app tells you that optional usage tracking is on by dafault. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/focus#w_privacy

Perhaps you should read the privacy notices for apps if you are concerned? It seems perfectly acceptable to me.

Every browser on iOS has to use WebKit as Apple won’t allow any other rendering engine (they say it’s for security reasons but I doubt this is the main motivation)

The main motivation is that the web will take over apps because apps are today's flash and apple wants to make sure it has a stake in the platform.

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