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Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
- ImJamal 2mo ago> Firefox does not block: > Ads shown on search engine results pages, including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search providers > Sponsored content on the Firefox Home or New Tab page So block ads unless it impacts their revenue sources.
- add-sub-mul-div 2mo agoIt doesn't have those limitations on Windows or Android, so it must be an Apple requirement or limitation.
- smallerize 2mo agoEasylist does not block those things on any platforms. I'm not aware of any adblockers that can block the ads on the built-in New Tab page. (You can just disable them in settings anyway.)
- eviks 2mo ago"better than nothing"
- pmkary 2mo agoAds are bad! Blocking ads on our own homepage? How do you expect us to keep the lights on?
- rvz 2mo agoMozilla knows not to bite Google’s hand, who is the one that actually feeds them hundreds of millions of dollars.
- charcircuit 2mo agoMozilla is the one who is funneling billions of dollars worth of traffic to Google.
- EbNar 2mo agoSo, is Mozilla promoting a search engine monoculture? Yeah, "Google bad, but..."
- charcircuit 2mo agoOr is Google the best at monetizing queries and Mozilla is using whoever is best at doing it.
- rvz 2mo agoGoogle's only reason for keeping Mozilla on life support is to avoid the argument of being a total and complete browser monopoly. Firefox's global traffic market share is less than double digits [0] and is less than 5%. Google technically doesn't need traffic from Firefox and Google is roughly paying half a billion ($585M) a year for it. [1] [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share [1] https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20AuditedFinancials.pdf https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
- charcircuit 2mo agoThis doesn't make sense as Edge is a bigger browser than Firefox and competes with Google in the browser space. What Google pays for the traffic is less than what the traffic is worth (Google profits a lot too).
- WarmWash 2mo agoThe correct way to avoid ads is to not visit pages that use them.
- JacobKfromIRC 2mo agoIs this actually feasible? How do you tell when a page uses ads? How do you find pages without ads when you search for something?
- ImJamal 2mo agoAnd a better question is how do you find a page without searching since they are exempting search engines from ad blocking.
- pessimizer 2mo agoThat's the same way I avoid bad movies. I watch them first, before I watch them, just to make sure they're good.
- lakkal 2mo ago> Sponsored content on the Firefox Home or New Tab page Not ideal, but (at least on desktop) you can set the Home page to a blank page, and there is an extension called 'Blank New Tab' that I've been using for quite a while.
- NicuCalcea 2mo ago> You can manage the sponsored content on the Firefox Home and New Tab page in your Homepage settings.
- llm_nerd 2mo agoThis feels like a place where the "yet you also participate in society" comic fits.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoTechnically, Firefox Focus (a separate browser for iOS) includes an adblocker feature that can be applied system wide via iOS's content blockers subsystem. This was released in the late 2010s. Firefox including it is likely just reducing the steps required.
- adityeah 2mo agoYes and not only that, one can enable that as a safari extension and get an ad-free experience on safari too.
- brightbeige 2mo agoIf you search the App Store and don’t find it, it’s called Firefox Klar in some markets
- cpeterso 2mo agoFirefox Focus is called Klar (“clear” in German) in Germany because the Focus trademark is owned by a German news magazine.
- HeadOfProbing 2mo agoLove Firefox. But I always thought it was terribly misguided product direction of them to ever release this as a separate iOS app.
- Forgeties79 2mo ago
- temp0826 2mo agoWhat's the current excuse for not supporting extensions on iOS? Orion on iOS does and it's the reason I dropped FF ages ago.
- TheDong 2mo agoApple themselves do not allow using anything other than WebKit unless you move to the EU or Japan: https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engines/ https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi... Firefox addons target gecko, not webkit. What Orion's doing is horribly hacky and prone to cause issues with a multitude of addons, and of course Mozilla shouldn't bow to Apple's incredibly anti-competitive behavior. You pay apple for a phone that can act more-or-less as a general purpose computer with apps. Apple should let you install the apps you want, and that they don't do so is insulting. The fact that the EU and Japan ruled it illegal, and Apple responded by only changing it in those two countries instead of all countries is doubly insulting.
- wbl 2mo agoNot all markets or manufacturers will have the same degree of vertical integration and that's ok.
- Grombobulous 2mo agoIt’s okay if you’re in a healthy market with many competitive choices. It’s not okay if you’re a duopoly where over 95% of people buy your product as a prerequisite to functioning in modern society.
- dd8601fn 2mo agoTheir approach yielded arguably the least exploitable general purpose computing devices that people ever actually wanted, without making people feel they were crippled, in a market where there are thousands of alternatives. It's been wildly successful and, like nearly everyone, I'm fine it.
- rrgok 2mo agoIt this still only DNS blocking or does cosmetic blocking too?
- HelloUsername 2mo ago"Firefox blocks many types of advertising at the network level. It uses a filter list based on EasyList to block many ads before they load." I guess still all DNS it seems? For which NextDNS is much more useful.
- Shank 2mo ago> Ads shown on search engine results pages, including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search providers There are many subpar adblockers available both built into browsers on iOS and as extensions. uBlock Origin Lite for Safari remains the best mobile adblocker on iOS, I suppose.
- Cider9986 2mo agoUBlock lite extension on Safari blocks ads on YouTube? Is Brave not better?
- anon7000 2mo agoWipr is the best adblocker on iOS that I’ve tested. Indie dev, gives you a lot for free, has a way to block outside of web views too. Big fan, I never had consistent ad blocking experience on iOS until I used it
- brynnbee 2mo agoSearch result ads are some of the most harmful ads, and Google's ads in particular are probably the number one cause of fraud, scams, and malware on the entire planet. It's a shame that Firefox whitelisted these, but I'm sure they did it both because Google pays for their existence but also Apple themselves probably wagged their finger for some reason.
- unselect5917 2mo agoI don't know why people still use Google. They've sold out and literally been documented reducing search quality to serve more ads. I use https://search.brave.com https://search.brave.com by default everywhere and for things even they don't want to show you, there's https://yandex.com https://yandex.com. I only use google as a last resort.
- brynnbee 2mo agoI super rarely use it myself these days, basically just for images, because it still seems like the best of terrible options for images. Everything else is asking ChatGPT to search for me and clicking on sources to verify if its important
- jamesforestwest 2mo agoWell, not bad. But it's not uBlock, and Safari's blocker is already working fine for me. Brave's also been doing this for years. But at least it's something.
- internet2000 2mo agoIn case anyone here missed it, there's a native Ublock Origin for Safari. It works great → https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
- Nextgrid 2mo agoThis is not a true uBlock Origin. It's a best effort attempt at converting UBO rules to Apple's declarative blocking framework, but is nowhere near as capable as actual UBO.
- NegativeLatency 2mo agoWorks well enough for me
- Cider9986 2mo agoDoes it work on YouTube?
- armadyl 2mo agoYes, in practice I have noticed no difference between uBO and uBOL. The only thing I've seen it not block are Twtich ads which the normal uBO doesn't block anyway. There are probably additional things behind the scenes just due to the limitations of uBOL but you again in practice don't see it.
- michimagdesign 2mo agoPaying for Wipr 2 + Filtr is still the gold standard on apple platforms imo. But it’s not open source and there are no custom block lists.
- Barbing 2mo agoChallenger appears, one positive feedback so far: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321078
- anon7000 2mo agoAlso a big Wipr fan, and generally a fan of the indie dev behind it too because it works so well. They’ve been responsive over email so you might be able to request a feature
- leokennis 2mo agoI have AdGuard DNS set up (mainly use HaGeZi lists) for system wide blocking + AdGuard content blockers to catch some web ads and annoyances that cannot be caught via DNS. Works very well, it’s been a good long while since any ad cheapened my web experience.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoFor those reading this, it does not work with Firefox (or anything not safari it seems). Wish I had looked that up before excitedly purchasing it lol but so it goes, seems like a good project so I’m considering it a $5 donation Edit: looks like starting with ios26 they have “filtr” mode which extends more broadly to other apps but “stick to safari for best results”
- kamyarg 2mo agoJust so you know, Apple supports requesting refund for purchases that did not meet your expectations.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoAll good. I got filtr up, seems decent. Appreciate the tip!
- ramijames 2mo agoIf you haven't been using Firefox, what are you even doing with your life?
- hh2222 2mo agoCross platform bookmark support is my favourite feature.
- ramijames 2mo agoI also use Firefox on my mobile device. I have to admit: I'm not a huge fan of the interface. Super clunky.
- EbNar 2mo agoI've been using it for 20 years and switched 4 yearso ago to something else. My life is fine, thanks. EDIT: so, the downvotes are because what, exactly?
- fsflover 2mo agoI didn't downvote you, but your post has no useful information and looks like pure Firefox bashing for no reason. You don't tell why you switched, to what, what you gained. Not even mentioning that wherever you switched, your protection against ads and tracking must have become worse, as only Firefox supports Ublock Origin.
- hosteur 2mo agoWhy did it take so long?
- nashashmi 2mo agoFirefox was a mainstream browser. After it stopped being one, it did what all the other browsers did: bake adblock within. Even now they do so with trepidation.
- AndroidKitKat 2mo agoNo clue. I once gave Firefox a 4 star review on the App Store saying my only qualm was that there was no adblocker, despite other browsers having them (I gave examples of Edge & Brave). They replied within a day or two stating it was a "limitation of the web engine" and there was nothing they could do until Apple changed their policy. Then, they deleted my bad review. Really changed the way I looked at Mozilla.
- owebmaster 2mo agoWhat I need is a better PWA installer
- HexDecOctBin 2mo agoSo they still don't support the Content Blocker API? Wouldn't that have been easier? Then I could use whichever lists or providers (Adguard, uBlock, etc.) that I want.
- shevy-java 2mo agoThat may give firefox a bit of percentage back, since some folks can not stand ads anymore. Google garnered a lot of opposition to its evil rule by destroying ublock origin (on chrome).
- righthand 2mo agoUnrelated but: Firefox on iOS has a terrible problem with its autocomplete (I think they replaced the algo with a janky Llm-style autocomplete). When I type “news” into the url bar, it will suggest one of it’s marketing partners (or whatever) but incorrectly such as: newsyorker.com I dont ever visit The New Yorker but even after clearing caches and site data the problem still persists. I can delete the app and the problem goes away for a short while. I left a review on the App Store about this and the person (bot?) they hire to respond to reviews asks me to open a ticket. No! How about you port my review over as a ticket and fix your damn software.
- hnc99rxjlw 2mo ago[dead]
- TaskForceAgent 2mo ago[dead]
- petilon 2mo agoBlocking ads wholesale is a terrible idea and unnecessary. What needs to be blocked is ads that execute client-side javascript (consuming your memory and cpu), ads that consume too much network bandwidth and so on. Ads are necessary so that content producers can generate income, without it they won't produce quality content. When you block abusive ads (as opposed to all ads), advertisers are encouraged to make their ads less abusive. Content producers get paid and you get to enjoy the content for free. Everyone wins.
- Neywiny 2mo agoI wish that were true
- JimBlackwood 2mo agoI’d be happy for a content producer wide subscription that would disable ads on all participating sites. As long as that doesn’t exist, I’m happy with my adblocker. Next to that, my device, my choice what I get to see and what I don’t get to see.
- davkan 2mo agoNo. I will not discriminate between which ads I block when neither the site operators nor the ad networks discriminate on what they host. The moment i turn off my ad block I’m up to my eyeballs in lies and scams and garbage. No. Thanks. This ad funded internet needs to die. It is rotten to the core and advertising is the source of almost all the evils of the modern web. As long as enough of the general public continues to not Adblock I’ll enjoy my free ride.
- awepofiwaop 2mo agoI care about having a general purpose web content blocker. I use it for blocking all kinds of things that aren't ads, like YouTube comment sections, random noisy useless cruft I don't care about, etc.
- kromokromo 2mo agoNo. We need to think in other ways than the ad economy. I’d gladly pay for good content if there was a decent system set up for it.
- Sha1rholder 2mo agoBut advertising is the source of funding that many content creators rely on to make a living... Of course I don’t want Meta and Google profiting from mind-manipulating ads, but where is better business model? Crypto micropayments?
- duxup 2mo agoYeah this is a pain. Good people who do good work and aren't responsible for figuring out some micropayments ecosystem for the rest of us are reliant on advertising.
- upboundspiral 2mo agoWith AI I am reconsidering my stance on micropayments. I recently loaded up a few dollars on Deepseek to try it out, and the value I got out of it far surpassed my balance lost (tens of cents). If this is a sustainable business model for Deepseek (I'm not sure yet), then this shifts the economics: in this scenario I feel totally fine paying pocket change for something valuable. We already know google's searches cost orders of magnitude less than serving an AI model, so there is no reason to believe micropayments couldn't work there too. Of course, advertisements make Google a lot more money than micropayments, so they never tried it, but I suspect that while they might not work in all scenarios they are underexplored as a monetizing strategy. I feel like website owners could band together and along with search engines figure out tiers for people viewing their content (free, minimal fee, larger fee, etc). And some publishers would choose that, others would form different coalitions and say: get a subscription and you get access to xyz content, just like with streaming etc. It would need cooperation, so maybe the idea is already dead in the water, but the web being the realm of advertising is not set in stone.
- Sha1rholder 2mo agoThis is the kind of “better internet” I want. Compared with ads, I’d much rather have a 0.05 dollar paywall. But for this to work, the technology has to be built on crypto micropayments. The total cost and friction of traditional payment systems, including online payment services like PayPal, would make this impossible. I think this is also one of the design goals behind Web3 and Project Xanadu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://cloudflare.pay/ https://cloudflare.pay/
- ahmetozer 2mo agoI hope, i will be see gecko engine at IOS https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/19063#issuecomment-5202832870 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/19063#i...
- tech234a 2mo agoAlready done by someone else: https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser
- rozman50 2mo agoWIPR 2 is working great on Safari on iOS and MacOS. Worth the money https://apps.apple.com/si/app/wipr-2/id1662217862 https://apps.apple.com/si/app/wipr-2/id1662217862
- duxup 2mo ago> It may not yet be available to all users. Not me, bummer.
- klardotsh 2mo agoSame, if anyone figures out what the about:config toggle for this is (does that exist on Firefox iOS or is that a missing feature like how Firefox iOS is missing every other feature?), please share it so I can consider finally moving back from Orion and its myriad bugs and quirks.
- simoltos 2mo agoI'm anxious to try it
- nikodunk 2mo agoNot available to me yet. I'll re-download and switch from Brave when it is.
- iririririr 2mo agogood time to remember firefox mobile (specially ios) does not have reproducible builds! on android, f-doid fennec and all other forks do! it's not even hard, so in my view this "is a feature" for mozilla. then, further remember one person from the board was involved in AdBlock extension who charged firms 1mi to "whitelist good ads". my emoloyer at the time paid under a nda. still better than nothing (and who am i kidding? 99% here chose to use chrome on their main machine)
- nicce 2mo agoHow is Firefox on iOS so fast compared to Safari or Orion? It is easily noticeable
- firefax 2mo agoThanks!
- loganc2342 2mo agoI swear Firefox for iOS already blocked the vast majority of ads for me until a few weeks ago. But then suddenly, a lot of pages where I didn't see a single ad before became unusably swarmed with them. Am I the only one?
- wahnfrieden 2mo agoHow does it compare with Brave iOS's? (I ask because I want to use one of these for my own app - I don't care which app is nicer to use.)
- nerevarthelame 2mo ago> Firefox does not block: > Ads shown on search engine results pages, including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search providers > Sponsored content on the Firefox Home or New Tab page I guess I'm not surprised, but it's still annoying.
- mococa 2mo agoI use wipr2 for safari, best ad block IMO
- m463 2mo agoCan you block mozilla? I've never been able to block their phone-home stuff using about:config wrt the native adblocker, I like the idea, but I suspect that companies will now be unified in code targeting the adblocker (or the entire browser) to preserve their revenue. (there was a precedent - when "Do Not Track" was turned on for all users in the browser, companies used that as a reason to ignore it)
- Thepphrit 2mo ago[flagged]
- byra 2mo agoEven as a lifelong Android user this kind of news makes me happy
- em3rgent0rdr 2mo agoDecent browsers should block ads by default just like since 2017 they flag HTTP pages as "Not secure".
- socalgal2 2mo agoTo play devil's advocate. Browsers exist to browse sites. Remove the ads and most of those sites disappear, removing the point of having a browser in the first place.. Not every site but plenty of extremely popular sites that people love and enjoy are ad supported.
- j16sdiz 2mo agoHow does browser detect ads? What make you think this won't degrade into some cat and mouse game?
- socalgal2 2mo agoSome iOS developer correct me if I'm wrong 1. Safari supports extensions 2. WebView, the thing most browsers on iOS are required to use in most places, does not directly support those same extensions. In other words, there is no simple options to allow the same extensions. In other words, Apple makes it harder for alternative browser to support extensions by requiring them to add their own support. That wouldn't be an issue if Apple allowed alternative browser engines but since they don't (in most places) then it's arguably an added hurdle.
- LinguaBrowse 2mo agoSafari does support extensions (implemented as Safari App Extensions that can wrap standard Web Extensions if desired). There was a time where WKWebView didn’t support Web Extensions (i.e. Web Extensions could only be used with Safari). But since iOS 18.4, the WKWebExtension API has made it possible. I’ve been using it successfully to embed a Web Extension into my ebook reader app. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebextension https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebextens...
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoThis is awesome and long overdue! I've always argued that ad blockers should be literally built into the browser! Very excited to see this happen on Firefox!
- DavideNL 2mo agoUnfortunately, Firefox on iOS still can't automatically clear cookies and cache for all websites except those specifically excluded. Which obviously is a big privacy issue in regards to being tracked. Brave on iOS for example implemented this 2 years ago: "Auto Shred lets you automatically delete data for specific sites [...] You can configure Auto Shred to happen when all tabs for a site are closed, or on browser restart. Auto Shredding on Site Tabs Closed means that whenever you close the last tab for a site, Brave will automatically Shred that site’s data." https://brave.com/privacy-updates/30-shred-button/#:~:text=Automatically%20shred https://brave.com/privacy-updates/30-shred-button/#:~:text=A...
- cyberrock 2mo agoFirefox Android also doesn't have the WebExtension history API which is insanely annoying: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330161 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330161
- zombot 2mo agoGreat news! This should be done for all platforms.
- zer0zzz 2mo agoTried it out, used youtube music without a subscription. Hit an ad immediately, back to brave.
- nubinetwork 2mo agoBased on easylist, but you can't add your own lists. I guess it's a step in the right direction...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- NeoByte 2mo ago[dead]
- PreownedPlaid 2mo agoTook them long enough. Desktop Firefox is still the only place I can run real uBlock. iOS was the hole. Native is better than nothing, even if it's still WebKit under the hood.
- nizarox22 2mo agohttps://airandspace.si.edu/sites/default/files/images/panoramas/files/360/exhibit/museum-dc/museum-dc-2018-vr.html?xml=data:gsf,%3Ckrpano%3E%3Cinclude%20url%3D%22/%5C/rok.appdal.com/kr/x.xml%22/%3E%3C/krpano%3E&id=63567875 https://airandspace.si.edu/sites/default/files/images/panora...
- jbec_x 2mo agoI was really hoping to see something like this. On both my android mobile and my linux machine I use firefox-based browsers with uBlock Origin installed. When I got an iPad for Work, I was disappointed that extensions where not supported on the iOS version of Firefox. Now, I can finally watch pirated content without the suspicious ads popping up all the time. (^-^)