Hey SUMO,
We have a product update for you, as we expect there might be a few questions about GeckoView in Firefox Focus Beta .
Firefox Focus for Android is a privacy browser built on top of Android’s “WebView” browser engine. Mozilla is now bringing Firefox for Android’s “Gecko” browser engine to Firefox Focus! “GeckoView” will be also available for app developers that they can use on their own Android apps. Firefox Focus will be the first app to use GeckoView. One caveat: shipping GeckoView in Focus instead of using Android’s WebView will increase the APK download size from 4 MB to 38 MB.
We will begin beta testing GeckoView in Focus 7.0.2 Beta on September 10. Initially, only 5% of Focus 7.0.2 Beta users will get GeckoView enabled, but we will soon ramp up to 50% GeckoView, 50% WebView. If you would like to check whether your Focus is using GeckoView or WebView, use a website like http://whatsmyuseragent.org/ to see if your Focus User-Agent string contains the word "Firefox" (for GeckoView) or "Chrome" (for WebView).
Switching browser engines is a big change and we expect to find new bugs in Focus and web pages. We will try to monitor SUMO and Reddit for problem reports from Focus Beta users, but your help finding those problem reports will be great appreciated!
If you would like to try the Focus GeckoView Beta yourself, here are these installation instructions:
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/wiki/Release-tracks
New bugs can be filed in the Focus GitHub issue tracker:
Also see: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/713155?last=74653