Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS
blog.mozilla.org268 points by HieronymusBosch 10 hours ago
268 points by HieronymusBosch 10 hours ago
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-ads-firefox-ios#w...
> Does ad blocking affect search engine ads? > No. Ads shown on search engine results pages are not blocked.
A lot of the search results on top of Google are there to scam you, providing phone numbers for pass through services that charge $ for it, like flight cancellation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1p6h81i/beware_fake_...
So this omission should absolutely be addressed, but they probably cannot because of the Google Search contract...
A neighbor came to ask for help today. He got locked out of his Facebook account and was getting impatient with their AI, so he Googled "facebook support number" clicked on the first link (almost certainly an ad) and called the number. The person on the other end apparently told him they needed access to his bank accounts to verify his identity and you know the rest of the story.
Also they say they will continue to show Firefox’s sponsored links and ads. So, they’ll continue to show first party ads and google’s ads? And likely they won’t be able to keep up with meta’s anti ad blocking. That’s most ads on the internet. No thanks, I’ll stick to ublock origin lite on safari.
There's no reason to block Firefox's sponsored links because you can just turn those off if you don't want to see them.
If only we could pay for Firefox so they could get rid of that Google funding…
... if only their donation links would let you specify your donation goes to Firefox development and no other mozilla service ...
If only we could open source it and load it onto the phone with Sideloadly.
has any browser ever made that work? Opera has to be the most popular by a mile and even they couldn't keep that business model going
What exactly is the problem? I understand a browser is a complex program but is the claim it is impossible to build a browser without continual dependence on advertising toxic dollars?
> a browser is a complex program
A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.
I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.
Not in my knowledge. It would be hard to have the same amount of funding as they have now from Google.
People just expect browsers to be free. And there's no way that can be more than Google money.
That's because browsers should be free. They are infrastructure, just like bridges. And nobody wants a bridge troll sitting on the single bridge crossing the internet river, demanding money from everyone.
I was going to give credit to the direction Mozilla was taking here after their... questionable decisions in the past few year(s).
Only to see that this is neither generally available, nor can you use it without enabling telemetry. I don't know who makes these decisions inside Mozilla, but I just don't get it.
I think you can use it without enabling telemetry, due to a recent change:
> Previously, access to these changes required you to share technical and interraction data (telemetry) with Mozilla. However, as of Firefox version 148, you can opt into receiving remote improvements, even if you have opted out of sharing your telemetry or participating in our experimental studies.
> access to these changes required you to share technical and interraction data (telemetry) with Mozilla
How did that even happen? I sure hope that was a bug and not a product decision, because that sounds very backwards.
I think for their labs / beta features they just require it to get testing data
Mozilla lost the thread about a decade ago with the Mr. Robot crap.
1)Agreeing to it in the first place
2)Hiding it from users
3)Circling the wagons and setting the bugzilla ticket to a secrecy level so high all but upper management couldn't even view it, and marking all the related tickets as 'wontfix' and so on. The tickets are full of complaints that mozilla staff aren't being remotely transparent about what was going on or decisions being made.
Oh, and the kicker? It exposed the fact that Mozilla was employing people from adtech companies. The project manager for the Mr. Robot bullshit had her entire career worked at advertising companies.
The bug kept bouncing between being secret and public, and I remember seeing it was the PM who kept trying to make it secret, and then some unknown dickhead exec at m
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423003
Then there was the fact that the CEO was making more and more money as she drove Mozilla into the fucking ground with cratering market share numbers. Then there was Mozilla's absurdly expensive taste in real estate...
Mr Robot? What?
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/mozillas-mr-robot-promo-ba...
> If you’re a Firefox user, you may have noticed a weird new extension that suddenly showed up in your browser this week. > The extension is called “Looking Glass 1.0.3” and this is its description: MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. Now that sounds ominous. It’s really not, though. It’s a promotional campaign between Firefox and the TV series Mr. Robot that brings an alternate reality game to your browser. This must have sounded like a great idea when somebody pitched it to Mozilla, but the backlash has been fierce.
Besides the other sources, here's the HN discussion at the time:
"Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser" - 757 points - Dec 15, 2017 - 515 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730
In 2017 Mozilla silently installed an extension promoting the TV show in everyone's Firefox.
The extension did not do anything unless you put in a secret setting. It wasn't promoting anything.
If this had been a hardcoded easter egg there would have been no real complaints. But showing up as a mystery extension spooked some people, and then misreporting made it spread a lot further than if all the reporting was accurate.
Well you see Mozilla did one Bad Thing a decade ago and that's a good reason to continue using the Ad Industry's chosen web browser instead; The one that gained most of it's marketshare by taking a page out of the malware industry's books and paying Oracle to include Chrome in the Java installer, among many many others.
You could always tell they didn't mean to install chrome, because these people would also have a malware "Chrome" browser that installed through the exact same pathway.
It's been days (weeks?) and I'm still waiting for the option to appear for me. These "experiments" are super annoying when you are on what I'm assuming is the long tail of a rollout but the marketing/blog posts speak of the feature like it's already launched.
If there's someone at Mozilla reading this: turn it on already! I want to get off Orion, it's so buggy, but the internet is unusable without an ad blocker.
> but the marketing/blog posts speak of the feature like it's already launched.
Yeah, seemingly tons of companies do this in a very weird way. Either make the switch 100% once you publish the press release, or wait until you reach 100% then publish. Starting the experiment with gradual rollout and then making the press release immediately seems like asking for potential problems and confusion among users.
But consider what the alternative looks like: People randomly see unexpected options in their apps, go to look for information about them, and don't find anything, or find some random Reddit discussion where no one is sure what's going on.
"...the internet is unusable without an ad blocker." — for some but not most.
Even worse, two weeks back when the first news appeared (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319633), I had access to the ad blocker for about a week (and turned it on), but after a few days the option disappeared...
Obvious follow-ups: How does the A/B test choose between A and B, and how can it be manipulated into choosing A instead of B (or vice versa)? It's software, it has to be deterministic at some level.
I was under the impression that firefox could already use the Safari "content blockers" (as it uses webkit) like Firefox Focus and uBO Lite, but I'm not seeing that option actually. Been using Orion for a while now so not sure if that changed or I'm just misremembering it.
Is it that buggy ? Orion works pretty well for me. Where you have you ran into bugs ?
Randomly the new tab page stops working. And when the new tab page stops working, all browsing activity stops working until I restart the app. I think the pages load, but I can’t actually see them because it is hidden by the new tab page.
Also sometimes tabs disappear from the tab picker, which makes tab management confusing.
The address bar likes to randomly move off the side of the screen and I have to force restart the app to get it back.
I was using ublock origin lite but now I've converted to wblock.
Absolutely amazing, works inside webviews (e.g. netnewswire).
v3 just released.
Finally. I turned it on immediatedly. Doesn’t seem to block youtube-ads, so unfortunately I can’t uninstall Brave just yet.
I tested and adblockers work on Safari for youtube ads again? Hmm, should I just give in and start using Safari again. Maybe this time it won’t dissappiunt me… Maybe it’s different this time…
Better title suggestions?
Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS [Non-GA]
?FYI: Doesn't block YouTube ads.
Google will stop paying them if they tried that.
A weird line to draw since Google still owns the general ad web space.
It doesn’t cost cost google money to show that content. (It does cost someone else who google would be giving a cut of the ad revenue)
YouTube videos actually have some real world disk space, bandwidth, etc costs just to show so if google doesn’t get to show an ad they lose money instead of an opportunity to make money.
I'm regularly surprised that people are willing to block YouTube ads. I know that Google gets that advertising money too, but you're also blocking revenue that the channel owner would otherwise get. I suppose it might depend what you're watching, but most YouTubers aren't big business, they're just individuals.
YouTube Premium is one of the few subscriptions I am completely happy to pay.
It doesn't have to go through Google. Lots of us support the people they follow through patreon et al, I don't need to make the gigacorp even richer than it is. They have enough.
Why do these creators use YouTube then? Why cant they host it on s3 and the have you directly compensate? Surely the creator is getting some value from YouTube and YT expects to be compensated for that?
> Surely the creator is getting some value from YouTube and YT expects to be compensated for that?
I'd imagine Google would start charging for videos that don't make enough money or heavily deprioritize them from discovery. That seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.
Many people are not aware that for smaller creators, Google forces ads on their videos (without consent) and takes all the revenue
when they stop placing ads arbitrarily in the middle of a sentence or scene Ill stop blocking them
I inherently disagree with the ad model of business. Intentionally worsening a product with ads to convince people to pay to remove them is just rewarding them for enshitification.
So on that front I'd prefer YouTube go out of business so that something like Nebula can take its place. Or the only videos left at\re the ones doing it as a hobby and not as a job.
> "ads shown in search results will still appear"
Is that for a technical reason or a commercial one?
Any reason to use this over uBlock Origin Lite?
No, uBOL blocks more ads and isn’t affected by Firefox’s insistence to not block Google Ads or their own.
> Sponsored shortcuts and other sponsored content shown by Firefox when you open a new tab are separate from ads on the web pages you visit, so Ad Blocker doesn’t affect them.
Just mentioned in another comment, but I'm not sure Firefox on iOS can actually use webkit content blockers? (I thought it could but have been using Orion exclusively for a while now)
Would someone smarter than me mind explaining why FF on iOS can't use extensions? I know every browser has to use WebKit but I've heard Orion is able to use FF and Chrome extensions.
It's a shame that the adblocker is limited, though. I've been using Orion as a replacement for Firefox on iOS, which has support for extensions (including uBlock Origin) and better UI/UX in my opinion, but it is not open source.
UBlock Origin Lite on Safari iOS is still king I guess
It doesn't block the inline ads between story and comments on reddit.. my benchmark for browser ad blocking and ublock-origin is one of the few (only?) that does it. This is why I use the Orion browser on iOS.
Wipr2 ftw
This is the sort of user focused feature you add when you take the phrase "user agent" seriously.
It’s not clear from the post, are they supporting the Content Blocker API? In other words, can I use Adguard with Firefox now on iOS?
How is this different than Firefox Focus content blocker on iOS, which came out many years ago?
Can it block YouTube ads? Would be a killer feature.
For that, there's ProTube[1]. On the surface it behaves like YouTube Premium, under the hood it's just the mobile version of YouTube bundled into an iOS app. I have no idea why ads aren't served, I analyzed the network requests with Fiddler Everywhere and saw nothing nefarious.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/protube-block-ads-on-video/id6...
Why not use YouTube in Safari then? Haven't seen ads in years. Plenty of options to block them already.
Does YouTube in Safari play in background/with the screen off?
I’m doing it right now. It does pause when you switch away from safari but you swipe down to get the control center and then resume play.
Holy crap I didn't know such a thing could exist, thank you. It's so responsive too.
Please delete this before anyone sees it :)
Nope. Only Browser that can on iOS is Brave.
I don’t have YouTube ads with Safari and AdGuard
I just tried AdGuard with safari and got YouTube ads. Do you have to configure something special?
I will check what particular settings I have for AdGuard when I get back home this evening. I don't recall anything particularly hairy but it has been a few years.
With Safari and the very first free-to-use extension I picked years ago (AdGuard, IIRC), I don't see any YouTube ads on iOS.
Is there an ad blocker for Chrome on iOS?
Why they don't use their rendering engine on ios at least in eu?
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319633
Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319633 - Aug 2026 (279 comments)
Didn't see it even after updating, then read https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-ads-firefox-ios:
> This feature is experimental and is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout. It may not yet be available to all users. Additionally, remote improvements must be enabled.
Apparently, you can only block ads if you allow Mozilla telemetry. Thanks, dicks.
> Thanks, dicks.
Must we? Such vulgar swipes only weaken your position, making you seem like the bigger jerk. Please observe the guidelines, not because you owe Mozilla anything but because you owe this community and indeed yourself better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Thanks, dicks.
As opposed to all the browsers that don't have this feature?
It's not done yet. When it's done it will just be a normal feature with no requirements.
Apparently, remote improvements became separated from telemetry in Firefox version 148: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remote-improvements#w_w...
If Mozilla put even half as much time into working on Firefox as they do tarnishing its reputation, they'd dominate the market.
There are some options under the debug menu which look relevant, but I wasn't able to get it to enroll.
Deeply frustrating - I felt like Mozilla was gaslighting me -- I spent 3 minutes double-checking that even after updating Firefox minutes ago the option is still not visible to me.
Making an announcement when fewer than 40% of your customers will see the feature fees like (unintentional) gaslighting.
I HATE it when a company does a staged rollout of something after making a big announcement. If you're going to announce something, then don't stage the rollout. Its off by default after all..