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We just pushed the button on stage at the Mozilla All-hands. It should by live in most countries now. https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1055677337 https://itunes.
by st3fan 11y ago
We just pushed the button on stage at the Mozilla All-hands. It should by live in most countries now.
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1055677337 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1055677337
Ask us anything you want to know about this product.
Also, keep an eye on the Github repo.
https://github.com/mozilla/focus https://github.com/mozilla/focus
We are still watching the Keynote but will flip the switch soon.
- milescrabill 11y agoThat Github URL isn't working. Cheers to the team! (I'm way off in the corner of the room) :)
- st3fan 11y agoShould be live now! And we are working on some better landing page.
- mikeash 11y agoWhat's the two-word summary of why I'd want to use this app over one of the other content blockers?
- pistoriusp 11y ago"It's free!"
- mikeash 11y agoThat's certainly an item in the "pro" column, but there are lots of other free ones out there.
- pistoriusp 11y agoIf someone were to gain some traction in this space I would prefer it to be a credible organisation. I long thought that this should be driven by a foundation , rather than a private enterprise, but I wanted the additional benefit of delegating the profits to a particular donation. The hooks are implemented by Apple and the data is crowd sourced. I don't see any reason why anyone should profit in this space.
- s73v3r 11y ago"I don't see any reason why anyone should profit in this space." Because there's still work in putting it together and maintaining it? And because profiting from doing this means they're less likely to take money from an ad company?
- s73v3r 11y agoIf it were anything other than Mozilla, wouldn't that be a Con? Because then it'd be more likely that the maintainer would take money to let ads by.
- pistoriusp 11y agoWell... One of the best selling paid versions, Crystal, is going to allow companies to pay for "acceptable ads." Personally, I think the people who paid for blockers were ripped off, there's nothing special or difficult in building a content blocker: 1. The majority of the value, the blocking list, it readily available and actively maintained. 2. Performance and integration into iOS is provided by Apple, you simply produce a format that Apple approves. So what are you paying for? Marketing, packaging, and giving a 3rd party control?
- s73v3r 11y agoSo why should anyone make a content blocker, unless they're someone with a mission to do so, like Mozilla or the EFF?
- pistoriusp 11y agoI get the feeling that you have some deep seated capitalistic ideals. Do you do anything that you can't make money from? I can think of a few reasons to make a content blocker: 1. Improve privacy for users on the Internet. 2. Decrease cost and speed for people who pay for data, or have bad connections. 3. Challenge revenue streams of large corporations. 4. Fame. 5. Improve strangers lives.
- s73v3r 11y agoThose are good reasons. But I don't see anything about why one shouldn't be paid for it.
- masukomi 11y agocan't do a two word, but you don't have to worry about maintainer accepting $$ to allow certain ads through, as has happened with at least one other iOS content blocker
- newscracker 11y agoAgain, can't sum up in two words, but can sum it up in two points. This would be better because: * It's by Mozilla, and it's more likely (probability wise) to be maintained and kept up-to-date than those that happen to be a single person's hobby project. * I believe that big players in the web like Mozilla and EFF (eff.org) really fight for us, the common people. :) The more these things become popular, especially from bigger names, the better the chances of the whole ad-tracker-privacy ecosystem to improve for our good.
- mikeash 11y agoThe "two word" thing is a joke, but your two points are pretty good. The combination of "maintained by decently large organization" and "non-evil" is probably unique in this space.
- profeta 11y agowhat about besides "known household name"? any technical merit? anything you know you do better than the alternative, for a fact? and in the process of fairness, any other blocker doing anything better that you plan to add to yours?
- newscracker 11y agoTechnical merit? I don't really know. This is based on the open source tracker list from Disconnect (disconnect.me). FWIW, I was never into paying for an ad-blocker on iOS since that comes with its pitfalls. I have tried a couple of other free ones, and I did like Adblock Fast [1], the one I was using until Focus by Firefox and the one I still have. It's open source and is available for Chrome (not iOS), Opera (not iOS) and Safari (iOS 9). I'd suggest reading through the GitHub page to see some stats as well as the philosophy (of not making money or compromising it with acceptable ads). [2] [1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock-fast/id1032930802 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock-fast/id1032930802 [2]: https://github.com/rocketshipapps/adblockfast https://github.com/rocketshipapps/adblockfast
- profeta 11y ago
- saucetenuto 11y agoHow about: "Reliable curation"
- davidgerard 11y ago"credible nonprofit"
- mikeash 11y agoUpvote for rising to my absurd challenge and making a decent argument too.
- Munksgaard 11y agoYou Github repo is unaccessible at the moment :/
- hardwaresofton 11y agoWording makes it sound like you pushed a button and an app was on the app store globally in less than a week... Are you a magician?
- stephenr 11y agoI was under the impression a developer had the final say in when an app goes live once it's passed Apple's review, thus allowing them to submit it in advance, have it reviewed, and then make it public at a time of their choosing?
- themartorana 11y agoYou are correct. Google Play just added this feature as well.
- profmonocle 11y agoYep. I used this a few times back when I did App Store development. (Though it still takes a few hours to show up for everyone, at least as of a few years ago.)
- mikeash 11y agoStill does. Apple continues to completely fail at any sort of distributed system. It amazes me that Google is able to index the entire web so quickly that I can post a comment on a random web site and have it show up in search results two minutes later, while Apple takes hours and hours for something to show up in their store after you push a button on their own control panel.
- patmcc 11y agoGoogle has the same problem; submit changes to a Play Store listing (or a new version) and it takes a couple hours to be universally visible. So it's not an Apple vs Google issue. Source: I've done far too many app deployments for work (200+)
- edd 11y agoAny reason you're not supporting the iPhone 5 or 5C? Is there something you need which they don't support?
- RKearney 11y agoThe 5 and 5C do not have 64 bit processors, which is a requirement for Content Blockers.
- angersock 11y agoApparently blocking ads is harder than landing on the Moon. :|
- golergka 11y agoSaturn V rocket is not yet required for content blockers.
- zem 11y agothe moon isn't actively altering its surface and orbital pattern to prevent you from landing there
- pc86 11y agoMaybe it is and that's why they faked it! /s
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y agoModern designer and UI experts demand better--really worse--UI than the moon lander had[0]. This can make almost any project harder than landing on the moon. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj2IETkScWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj2IETkScWA
- uremog 11y agoThe moon doesn't generate as much money as ads.
- 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 212d1d 11y agoJust a curiosity I have found: why does no ad blocker, Focus included, block ads on 4chan (4chan-ads.org, IMC)?
- nv-vn 11y agoBecause 4chan's ads aren't invasive and they don't track you. They're just small banner images displayed at the top and bottom of the page with no JS, no flash, etc.
- forrestthewoods 11y agoI can determine what ads I do and do not want to block. How many other ads does Focus by Firefox not block? Edit: Y'all downvote weird shit sometimes. Marco quit the ad blocking game because he didn't want to be the arbiter of what did and did not get blocked. It's perfectly reasonable to question what a given blocker will and will not block. And perfectly valid to wish to have that control.
- mahranch 11y agoPrecisely the type of ads we should be celebrating since they subsidize the content we consume. A lot of people either are oblivious to their actual importance, or just don't care. The internet simply wouldn't be what it is today without them. True, there has been plenty of bad (trackers, malware, etc), but the good that has come from that subsidization has lead us to where we are today. A vast majority of the innovation on the internet has been directly or indirectly related to that subsidization.
- Rotten194 11y agoAlso, on a more technical level 4chan's ads aren't served from a well known ad host like Google, so they wouldn't be blocked by a typical blacklist without filtering URLs containing ad -- which some adblockers do, causing [all kinds of problems] [0]. [0]: https://medium.com/medium-eng/the-unluckiest-paragraphs-751dd36d2d30 https://medium.com/medium-eng/the-unluckiest-paragraphs-751d...
- 11y ago
- golergka 11y agoSo much Swift! All iOS developers I know are hopeful about Swift, but say that they wouldn't use it for a serious, large-scale project yet. (I'm a Unity developer that only occasionally touches native iOS or Android code). What was your experience with it?
- robbyking 11y agoThat's interesting, I've had almost the opposite experience. The team I work on is slowing migrating over (new classes and classes that need refactoring are done in Swift), and most of my friends who are iOS developers have told me they're doing the same. FWIW, I work at a medium sized company (~300 employees) who is owned by a larger company (15k employees).
- HaloZero 11y agoI'm a small development team (there are only 5-6 engineers, and I'm the only iOS one right now). I've gotten the go ahead to move to Swift as well. It's been fairly easy with only one strange crash so far.
- st3fan 11y agoSwift is ready. For a much bigger project in Swift, look at https://github.com/mozilla/firefox https://github.com/mozilla/firefox It was a rough road while we went from Swift pre-1.0 to 2.1 but it was totally worth it.
- spdustin 11y agoI guess you meant to link this one: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios In any case, Swift has been an eye opener for me, and I'm always keen to read someone else's code to learn more. Thanks for your contributions :) Does st3fan refer to Sublime Text 3, perchance?
- kibwen 11y agoFirefox isn't written in Swift (and Firefox isn't hosted on Github anyway), I'm guessing that you meant https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios .
- benologist 11y agoWhat about desktop Firefox?
- mkskm 11y agoWhy don't you charge for this? I would be more than willing to pay.
- st3fan 11y agoMake a donation to the Mozilla Foundation?
- mkskm 11y agoThat's not as easy, though. :)
- schiffern 11y agohttps://mozilla.org/donate https://mozilla.org/donate ? edit: ahh, you want a "donate $X" IAP.
- cadecairos 11y agoHow about https://donate.mozilla.org https://donate.mozilla.org? Disclosure: I'm a Mozilla Foundation employee, who helped build that