security
Baked-in Firefox ad blocking on iOS begins rolling out slowly today, and is off by default
After several weeks of anticipation, Mozilla has started rolling out ad blocking to the iOS version of its popular browser, but you can still expect to see ads on Mozilla's own pages, including the new tab page.The org officially rolled out the new native ad blocking feature for iOS Firefox on Tuesday, moving it out of the experimental phase, while explaining that it had to rethink its desire to give users control over their web experience on iOS due to differences in architecture between it and other OSes.“Firefox already supports a strong ecosystem of ad-blocking and privacy extensions,” Mozilla explained. iOS works differently, though, as Apple forces all web browsers on iOS to use its own WebKit to render sites instead of their own preferred back end. “Bringing ad blocking to Firefox on iOS,” therefore, “meant building it directly into the browser,” Mozilla explained.
Implementing ad blocking in the iOS version of Firefox meant incorporating Apple’s own WebKit Content Blockers. According to Apple’s introduction on the topic, it specifically doesn’t want app extensions to be used to block web content because of how they operate.
