Mozilla Firefox (for iPhone)

Firefox, our Editors' Choice for Windows Web browsers, has been available on most major computing platforms with one major exception: Apple's iOS operating system for phones and tablets. Even though (as with all non-Safari browsers on iOS), the new Firefox for iPhone is actually just a shell on top of Safari's webpage-rendering code, it offers advantages such as syncing and a friendly interface. In general it's a very well-done first release, though it's not as polished as the Windows version of Firefox.

Starting Up

The fairly small 40MB download from the iTunes App Store requires iOS 8.2 or later, and it runs on iPhones, iPads (including the new iPad Pro), and iPod touches. It's available in 41 languages. I installed the browser app on my iPhone 6s. On first run, you're treated to a five-page tutorial showing its features. After this, you see a sign-in page, but you can cancel out of that if you just want to start browsing. After I signed in, I was greeted by a request to let the app send notifications.

Using Firefox on an iPhone

Tab implementation may be the most important aspect of mobile browser design—how do you easily switch among webpages on that small device? Safari doesn't use actual tabs in its interface, instead changing the view to a 3D stack when you hit a switcher button. Firefox uses the tried-and-true tab at the top, which looks similar to that of the Android version of Firefox, except you don't get a settings menu button till you press the tab button and are in tabs view. The downside of having a tab at the top is that it takes up valuable screen space from mobile sites.

Happily, though, when you scroll a page up a little, the tab bar disappears, giving the whole screen over to the site. The tab bar does make it much easier to open a new tab or switch to existing ones than the default Safari browser, which shifts interface gears quite a bit for the same actions.

When you open a new tab, Firefox presents five buttons across the top: Tiles of frequently visited sites, bookmarks, history, cloud-synced tabs from another instance of Firefox you've logged into, and a Reader View/Reading List button. That last one is kind of interesting, since most browsers consider Reading List and Reader View as separate features. If you're on a cluttered page, tapping the button suppresses annoying ads and auto-play videos, but if you're starting a new tab, it shows pages in your Reading List. You can only add to the Reading List while viewing a page in Reader View. For me, they're two separate actions, but combining them into a single button on a small mobile screen makes some sense.