iOS Ad Blocker - Experiment

[andyf]

Hi everyone,

We’re starting to test an Ad Blocker in Firefox for iOS.

If you’re included in the test, you’ll see a new Ad Blocker option in Settings that you can turn on. This is off by default.

We’re testing this with a limited group first so we can understand what works, what breaks and what needs to improve. 

If you try it, we’d like your feedback. In particular:

• Does it block what you expect?
• Do any sites break? (broken sites can we reported using the site reported) 
• Are there cases where you would want more control?

This is something people have asked us for in Mozilla Connect, app reviews and other feedback channels. We’re starting small, listening closely and improving from there.

Thanks for helping us test it.

[Kvin]

Hi, are there any plans to release a built-in ad blocker for the Android and PC versions?

[lackey]

Mozilla almost certainly won't answer this so I will try instead: They easily could, but they probably won't. 

They easily could: Recently Mozilla integrated Brave's popular ad-blocking engine directly into Firefox. The code ships in the browser. If you're brave yourself, you can tweak a few settings and actually enable it. There is no user interface, but the popular Waterfox fork is integrating it. 

They probably won't: Firefox development is funded almost completely by Google. Ads are Google's business. Firefox has an incentive to not encourage people to block ads. 

[andyf]

Hey! Thanks for your interest. We're starting with iOS because of the lack of extensions there and want to test offering a native blocking product to see how people respond and what feedback they have. We're looking forward to using the insights from user feedback and community reception to inform future direction across all platforms.

[Jackbravoo]

This is a great feature to test. If some ads still appear, try updating to the latest Firefox for iOS version and make sure the Ad Blocker is enabled in Settings. If a website doesn't work properly, reporting it through the built-in site reporting tool will help improve the feature. It would also be useful to have an option to whitelist trusted websites while keeping ad blocking enabled everywhere else.

[hi_bye]

Thanks, this is a feature I'm really looking forward to. But I'm not seeing the option in settings now, is there another way to try it out?