Hacker News Reader

Comment by OptionOfT | Hacker News Reader

I think this should come to the USA too. We don't have any browser choice.

What choice do you have if you want and adblocking and syncing with a Windows computer?

Firefox has Firefox Focus, without sync, but Firefox itself has no built-in adblocker. Makes you wonder whether that's because of their contract with Google?

View on HN

It's really annoying when tech companies section off user freedom and privacy protections to specific regions. Maybe if there was a ton of countries that had contradictory laws, but these app store decisions for sure could be implemented in the US, but alas... they want to squeeze as much out of us as possible.

This reminds me of Amazon, they allow users to cash out their gift card balance in a few states, but not in most. They have the technical implementation but still limit their users.

Firefox lets you use uBlock Origin on Android. After the EU's recent moves, that will come to iOS eventually.

All the browsers on iOS are running the Safari rendering engine underneath so Firefox et al can't do their own extensions like ad blockers. Apple restricts apps so you have to only use their engine.

The new EU regulations apparently require them to allow third party engines but I'm not sure if that will happen anytime soon.

The support is already there, via BrowserEngineKit. The problem is that no browser company wants to put the effort into maintaining an entirely different version of their browser that works only in the EU.

This is, presumably, exactly as Apple intended. So sneaky.

The Orion Browser [1] has rudimentary WebExtension support on iOS despite being a Safari wrapper. Apple's policy also doesn't prevent browsers from bundling adblockers in, which both Brave and Edge do.

[1] - https://kagi.com/orion/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com