Mozilla has decided to discontinue the development of the Firefox Lite web browser, which was marketed as a lightweight version of Firefox Focus, tailored for operation on resource-limited systems and low-speed connections. The project was developed by Mozilla's team in Taiwan and primarily targeted supply in India, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, China, and developing countries.
Development updates for Firefox Lite ceased on June 30. Users are advised to switch to Firefox for Android instead of Firefox Lite. The reason given for discontinuing Firefox Lite support is that, in its current form, Firefox for Android and Firefox Focus fully meet all the needs of mobile device users, making the necessity to maintain another version of Firefox redundant.
It is worth noting that the key difference between Firefox Lite and Firefox Focus is the use of the built-in Android WebView engine instead of Gecko, which reduced the APK package size from 38 to 5.8 MB, allowing the browser to run on low-powered smartphones using the Android Go platform. Like Firefox Focus, Firefox Lite included a built-in ad blocker that removes ads, social media widgets, and external JavaScript tracking code. The use of the blocker significantly reduces the size of downloaded data and decreases page loading times by an average of 20%.
Firefox Lite supported features such as bookmarks for favorite sites, browsing history, tabs for simultaneous work with multiple pages, a download manager, quick text search on pages, and private browsing mode (which does not save cookies, history, or cache data). Among its advanced features are the Turbo mode, which speeds up loading by cutting out ads and third-party content (enabled by default), an image blocking mode, a clear cache button to free up memory, and support for interface color scheme customization.
Source: opennet.ru
