Firefox maker Mozilla, on Thursday, launched a new browser for Apple iPhones and other iOS-powered devices. Called Firefox Focus, the new mobile browser was developed for iOS users that put private browsing at the forefront of the user experience.

The new browser by default blocks web trackers, including advertising, analytics social networks. It also erases and leaves no traces of the user's browsing history, including user's passwords, username and cookies.

Although it blocks web trackers, analytics trackers, and social network tracers by default, it also allows some limited tracking. This can be done or simply disabled in the browser options, as can the somewhat incongruous "Send anonymous usage data" option to Mozilla browser, where Mozilla explains what kind of data it collects.

Firefox Focus has originally launched on the App Store almost a year ago, but at that time was designed only as an ad-blocking utility that could be used could remove ads and trackers from iPhone's browser. The said feature still available and continues to operate as a Safari content blocker and ad-blocking utility on iOS-powered devices. But today, it's different, it's now it aiming to compete more directly with the iPhone Safari web browser.

Mozilla claims that the browser doesn't have any bells and whistles compared to its rival browsers. However, the new browser has some limitations. It has no tabs, no list of favorite sites, not even the various other configuration options that we often saw in today's browsers.

But Mozilla has answers for this, instead of using the same things, Mozilla offers users a trip to the Settings section where they have been provided an option to toggle on or off the data they want to block, like analytics trackers, ads trackers, social trackers and other content trackers.

According to the company, the primary goal, for now, is to build a simplified browser that may load web pages more quickly, given that ads trackers and other content trackers can hit and bog down web pages and impact browsing performance.

Firefox Focus is currently available as a free download on the Apple App Store. No word yet on if or when an Android version will be coming in the Google app store.

Tags Apple, Firefox