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Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

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Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s okay if you’re in a healthy market with many competitive choices. It’s not okay if you’re a duopoly where over 95% of people buy your product as a prerequisite to functioning in modern society.

Their approach yielded arguably the least exploitable general purpose computing devices that people ever actually wanted, without making people feel they were crippled, in a market where there are thousands of alternatives. It's been wildly successful and, like nearly everyone, I'm fine it.

:( where’s the hacker ethos here? I suppose you have a nice Linux machine or something you customize as you see fit, and you can make calls and listen to podcasts on your phone and that’s good enough for on the go…?

I want grandma to have a locked-down iPhone but I want to be able to go through a process to be able to own my own iPhone. Doesn’t feel fine to have something crippled unless maybe it’s rented or something. Or my phone’s in an HOA.

Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

#75
Unrelated but:

Firefox on iOS has a terrible problem with its autocomplete (I think they replaced the algo with a janky Llm-style autocomplete). When I type “news” into the url bar, it will suggest one of it’s marketing partners (or whatever) but incorrectly such as: newsyorker.com

I dont ever visit The New Yorker but even after clearing caches and site data the problem still persists. I can delete the app and the problem goes away for a short while.

I left a review on the App Store about this and the person (bot?) they hire to respond to reviews asks me to open a ticket. No! How about you port my review over as a ticket and fix your damn software.

Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

#76
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox addons target gecko, not webkit. Are they? I've built a few Firefox extension and I cannot recall any part of the API that is Gecko-specific. While parts of the API aren't entirely browser-agnostic, they definitely seem to be engine-agnostic.

It’s not the part you see, its what they see to implement the features you see.

True, but I don't see how that answers the original question of "why does Firefox not support extensions on iOS?". Clearly extensions can run on WebKit. I assume it has much more to do with Apple restrictions rather than with the fact addons are built for Gecko.

Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

#77
post #47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*EU is not one country

The law that requires allowing alternative browsers, the DMA, applies to the entire EU. But I believe there are still zero third party browsers, to publish their browser in the EU Mozilla need an EU development team because developers outside the EU are unable to install it, and Mozilla cannot publish it as their existing app. Enforcement is taking years.

I'm pretty sure the OP knows about the law being EU-wide, but they were referring to "the EU and Japan ... those two countries".

Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

#78
post #59
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI uBlock Origin Lite on iOS is inferior to AdGuard and (I think) Wipr as it's just a WebExtension, so it'll only block ads within Safari itself. AdGuard and Wipr use both the Web Extension and Content Blocker APIs, so they'll block ads in all web views system wide on top of within Safari itself. However as far as trustworthiness goes, uBlock is (imo) #1.

wBlock by an MIT student is open source and seems (just!) about as trustworthy as uBlock, though of course without the track record. Light & fast, especially to update. “wBlock runs entirely within Safari's content blocking API. There's no data collection, no tracking, and no system-level extensions that can monitor your browsing.“ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wblock/id6746388723 / GH: https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlo…

Nice, last time I heard about wblock felt like years ago and I'm not sure why I didn't consider it.

These days I don't run on-device adblock, I just do DNS filtering for the most part but I'll check it out, not sure I wanna keep tunneling all my DNS queries to ControlD perpetually lol

Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

#79
post #53

In case anyone here missed it, there's a native Ublock Origin for Safari. It works great → https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

Also, if you use Orion Browser, they did implement the full Manifest v2 extension spec on top of WebKit, which lets you use full uBlock origin directly.

Does that really matter if virtually no one is going to develop extensions according to the Manifest v2 spec?

Developing for that spec means your extension is incompatible with idk, 98% of the browser market?

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