There seems to be a browser war looming on the horizon again. Chrome has dominated the market for a while based on two things: speed, and not being Internet Explorer (IE). Chrome, however, has been taking a hit for being a CPU hog, with some even joking that in a quad core processor, one core is for your OS, and the other three are for your Chrome tabs. Microsoft, meanwhile, has put a lot of solid effort into Edge--the standards compliant successor to IE.

What about Firefox? Firefox was great and fast long before Chrome hit the market, but complacency, and Mozilla's failure to evolve their technology stack resulted in a bloated and slower browser. As much as I love XML, their XUL user interface language wasn't winning any track-and-field races for performance.

Things have improved for Firefox greatly over the last year, and if you support open source, non-profits, or just hate the fact that a company who makes 95% of its revenue from advertising has all of your browsing data, then recent initiatives from Mozilla should make you happy. Firefox 57 looks like a beast in the making.

Mozilla, however, has several browsing initiatives, and one to keep an eye on is Firefox Focus--a mobile browser focused on security, privacy, and ad-blocking. Mozilla came to the realization that a lot of cell phone browsing consists of searching for specific information (rather than truly browsing), getting that info, and then jumping off--quick searches for exact data. As a result, they created a browser that makes it simple to search, and then prominently presents you with a button to clear your data. It's fast and simple, and if you combine it with DuckDuckGo for your search engine, that's an awful lot of privacy.

Now admittedly, I don't use Firefox Focus a whole lot. I prefer the standard mobile Firefox with its tabbed interface and pinned recent sites. I use DuckDuckGo through there, and then periodically clear my browsing data. Despite this, Focus is a solid tool if you're looking for that added privacy, and the built in ad-blocking (as well as session tracking blockers) will kill at least some of those annoying popups that ruin a mobile session.