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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Tried to read this on my Android.

Got sent to a page claiming my Android had four viruses, spawned endless popups and dialogs and I had to force close the browser :(

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Going to plug Firefox for Android here because using it with ublock is the only thing I've tried that can make the mobile web tolerable these days.

Being able to install any of the full-desktop-version of Firefox plugins in the android version of Firefox is immensely useful. Highly recommend ublock origin on firefox.

I've switched to Firefox on Android (and elsewhere). It means I can install all the tracking/ad protection I'm used to on a 'full' browser.

Does Firefox for iPhone have the same capability?

Unfortunately it doesn't. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios details why.

You can use Firefox Focus. It's a private navigation browser, and also acts as an ad-blocker for Safari

It was probably one of your viruses ;)

More seriously, I've had similar problems on iOS with unclosable tabs where even force quitting didn't work because it'd restore to the same page. The workaround ended up being "Click a link in Mail and that tab will be frontmost, then you can go in the tab switcher and kill it."

Hasn't happened in a while, IIRC the problem was javascript popups forcing focus off the rest of the UI. Maybe it's been fixed on the iOS side.

Of course the other side of the problem is webpages letting insecure ad networks run arbitrary javascript in all of our browsers. It's not great.

Usually in such cases, at least on Android, I get around by going to the settings and cleaning the browser cache.

JavaScript pop ups don’t block the rest of the UI anymore; this has been fixed in Safari in both iOS and macOS.

Here's an archive

http://archive.is/6Hj3V

Brave for Android is not bad and it runs Chromium.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...

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