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Comment by panglott | Hacker News Reader

"Currently, Focus by Firefox only works with Safari, not Firefox for iOS. This was not our choice—Apple has chosen to make content blocking unavailable to third party browsers on iOS. We are exploring how we can provide this feature on Firefox for iOS and will deliver it as soon as it’s possible."

The main reason I went back to Safari after getting Firefox for iOS.

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To be fair, I would be incredibly surprised if creating a built-in Android content blocker is something Google would even consider, let alone implement.

It is disappointing that they aren't making that API public, but just having that be a core feature of their operating system is pretty huge. Hopefully they have plans to make it public or Firefox will just implement their own ad-blocker into IOS firefox.

To be fair, Firefox can and does ship their own browser engine on Android, something that is forbidden on IOS.

Complete with full extension support, including good ol' uBlock.

It's just surprising to me that "Focus by Firefox" wasn't first made a Firefox Extension for mobile and desktop...

Firefox desktop has numerous adblockers/tracker blockers already available. Mozilla is even sourcing the list from one of the more popular ones, Disconnect. I assume they didn't feel the need to reinvent the wheel in that ecosystem.

Disconnect may be available on Firefox mobile as well, I'd need to check. I never bother beyond uBlock Origin and Self-Destructing Cookies.

Firefox for Android ships with their own browser engine and access to a vast extension library including AdBlock Plus and uBlock. Apple doesn't permit this on iOS which is why Firefox for iOS is using the Mobile Safari engine, doesn't support extensions, and doesn't support ad blocking.

>Apple has chosen to make content blocking unavailable to third party browsers on iOS.

Someone has some context to this? I am using Ad-Blocker Browser on iOS and it blocks ads just fine.

is it doing its own ad blocking or is it doing ad blocking as a safari ad block extension? There is a very specific high-performant ad block mechanism in iOS now.

It's a browser shell which has been doing ad blocking for over a year, so it would probably do it's own thing.

If it's anything like the ones I looked at a while back, it goes through a proxy to strip the ads. So all of your web browsing goes through a 3rd party. I'm no technical wiz on such things, but I can't think of how else it could work without being an Apple-approved Safari extension.

It could run a local proxy on the device itself, perhaps. I know iPhone apps can expose HTTP servers to other devices on WiFi for file sharing, so I wouldn't be surprised if you can expose it to localhost too.

Mm, good point, and given that I actually wrote a baby web server for serving up docs a long time ago, I'm disappointed that it didn't occur to me. In fact, I wonder why more don't do that. All of the ones I looked at (and it's hardly an all-encompassing list) seemed to do it through a proxy that the dev hosted.

> it blocks ads just fine.

In Safari? Working as intended. In Chrome or Firefox? Unexpected (according to their link).

If the ad blocking is built-in to the browser, it should work fine. It's the new content-blocking plugins that only work in Safari.

Apple doesn't let custom browsers use anything other than their WebView component for rendering, and WebViews are pretty limited when it comes to modifying page content.

The new Safari View Controller can use content blockers, but it basically opens a Safari window over the top of the app you're viewing (doesn't adhere to the app's design at all).

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