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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

It's been days (weeks?) and I'm still waiting for the option to appear for me. These "experiments" are super annoying when you are on what I'm assuming is the long tail of a rollout but the marketing/blog posts speak of the feature like it's already launched.

If there's someone at Mozilla reading this: turn it on already! I want to get off Orion, it's so buggy, but the internet is unusable without an ad blocker.

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> but the marketing/blog posts speak of the feature like it's already launched.

Yeah, seemingly tons of companies do this in a very weird way. Either make the switch 100% once you publish the press release, or wait until you reach 100% then publish. Starting the experiment with gradual rollout and then making the press release immediately seems like asking for potential problems and confusion among users.

But consider what the alternative looks like: People randomly see unexpected options in their apps, go to look for information about them, and don't find anything, or find some random Reddit discussion where no one is sure what's going on.

If the new feature looks random and unexpected and causes users to go to Reddit -the developer is doing terribly bad UX, and equally bad marketing and customer support.

A proper announcement done the day of the release, or an embedded notification like what Firefox already does (a "What's new" tab) that can be easily dismissed without any "Reminder me later" cr*p solves the issue.

Yeah release notes, in-app help, intuitive UIs, and version documentation hosted on your own website are definitely not possible. Gotta instead cater to the LCD of people who won't be using Firefox in the first place, it's reddit spam or nothing.

My point is that you need to put out that documentation before the start of the rollout, or people won't find it when they look for it.

I guess you could quietly update documentation at the start of the rollout, then make the blog post at the end.

I was under the impression that firefox could already use the Safari "content blockers" (as it uses webkit) like Firefox Focus and uBO Lite, but I'm not seeing that option actually. Been using Orion for a while now so not sure if that changed or I'm just misremembering it.

You are correct. I’ve been using firefox focus as Safari content blocker to block ads on ios Firefox for years. Works well

I think gp means the other way: Firefox can not use Safari's content blockers to benefit from them.

Safari + the Content Blocker Wipr works well for me.

Is it that buggy ? Orion works pretty well for me. Where you have you ran into bugs ?

The address bar likes to randomly move off the side of the screen and I have to force restart the app to get it back.

Randomly the new tab page stops working. And when the new tab page stops working, all browsing activity stops working until I restart the app. I think the pages load, but I can’t actually see them because it is hidden by the new tab page.

Also sometimes tabs disappear from the tab picker, which makes tab management confusing.

It doesn’t even remember what tabs are open so you can’t reopen them if you close them by accident. Orion is a disaster of an app.

Even worse, two weeks back when the first news appeared (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319633), I had access to the ad blocker for about a week (and turned it on), but after a few days the option disappeared...

Obvious follow-ups: How does the A/B test choose between A and B, and how can it be manipulated into choosing A instead of B (or vice versa)? It's software, it has to be deterministic at some level.

This is frustrating, I think this a great development as someone who has been a Firefox user from the beginning but just switched to iOS. I see this new feature advertised and then it’s just not there, I update, still gone. The FAQ should at least be updated to say, this feature is only available at random due to a progressive experimental roll out and they should mention what version it requires etc. At least be up front when promoting something. I suppose I’ll just have to wait and then check periodically for it to show up.

Why not use a DNS based solution like nextdns? or an extension like wipr?

Same here. Why do they do it do it this way?

"...the internet is unusable without an ad blocker." — for some but not most.

> the internet is unusable without an ad blocker

As someone who successfully uses the internet day in and day out with zero ad blockers, this stance always amuses me. It's not hard to just ignore ads.

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