It’s too easy for apps to get bloated after years of updates. While the extra functionality is usually not harmful, burdening an application with unnecessary functionality defeats its purpose if it is designed with performance in mind. Firefox Lite was intended to be a lite version for certain markets, but effective June 30, Mozilla stopped supporting it.

Firefox Lite started out under a completely different name: Firefox Rocket. Designed specifically for Indonesia, Rocket launched in 2017 with a focus on speed of execution while minimizing data usage. A year later, Mozilla changed its name to Firefox Lite to better explain the purpose of the app (although it did go back and forth until its 2.0 update).

Unfortunately, in 2020, Mozilla’s lightweight browser was quickly becoming a bloated mess. Firefox Lite has been criticized (no pun intended) with its users for adding advertisements throughout notifications and New tab page. Last February, he added a new travel feature that, even if it had been good (it wasn’t), would have been rendered useless about a month later anyway. In the end, there wasn’t a whole lot of reason to keep using Firefox Lite as each update seemed to hurt its purpose.

Mozilla says it is ending development and support for its browser because the redesigned Firefox application is fast enough to make the “Lite” version redundant. While users are free to continue using the app, the app will not receive any additional updates and will not be available for re-download from the Play Store. Firefox Lite managed to achieve 5 million downloads over its lifetime, which is half the number of beta version for the standard browser.

If you were using Lite and looking to upgrade to full-fledged browser, you can download it from the link below or grab the latest APK from Mirror APK. Rest in peace, Firefox Lite.