> This feature is experimental and is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout. It may not yet be available to all users. Additionally, remote improvements must be enabled.
Apparently, you can only block ads if you allow Mozilla telemetry. Thanks, dicks.
I HATE it when a company does a staged rollout of something after making a big announcement. If you're going to announce something, then don't stage the rollout. Its off by default after all..
Deeply frustrating - I felt like Mozilla was gaslighting me -- I spent 3 minutes double-checking that even after updating Firefox minutes ago the option is still not visible to me.
Making an announcement when fewer than 40% of your customers will see the feature fees like (unintentional) gaslighting.
Must we? Such vulgar swipes only weaken your position, making you seem like the bigger jerk. Please observe the guidelines, not because you owe Mozilla anything but because you owe this community and indeed yourself better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Appending "Thanks, dicks" weakens the comment because it demonstrates they have nothing to say other than vulgarity, which means they have nothing to say at all. We never object to profanity by itself on HN. We do object to abusive swipes and name-calling, because it pulls discussion away from HN's primary purpose, which is curious conversation, and drags it towards the gutter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was going to give credit to the direction Mozilla was taking here after their... questionable decisions in the past few year(s).
Only to see that this is neither generally available, nor can you use it without enabling telemetry. I don't know who makes these decisions inside Mozilla, but I just don't get it.
I think you can use it without enabling telemetry, due to a recent change:
> Previously, access to these changes required you to share technical and interraction data (telemetry) with Mozilla. However, as of Firefox version 148, you can opt into receiving remote improvements, even if you have opted out of sharing your telemetry or participating in our experimental studies.
Mozilla lost the thread about a decade ago with the Mr. Robot crap.
1)Agreeing to it in the first place
2)Hiding it from users
3)Circling the wagons and setting the bugzilla ticket to a secrecy level so high all but upper management couldn't even view it, and marking all the related tickets as 'wontfix' and so on. The tickets are full of complaints that mozilla staff aren't being remotely transparent about what was going on or decisions being made.
Oh, and the kicker? It exposed the fact that Mozilla was employing people from adtech companies. The project manager for the Mr. Robot bullshit had her entire career worked at advertising companies.
The bug kept bouncing between being secret and public, and I remember seeing it was the PM who kept trying to make it secret, and then some unknown dickhead exec at m
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423003
Then there was the fact that the CEO was making more and more money as she drove Mozilla into the fucking ground with cratering market share numbers. Then there was Mozilla's absurdly expensive taste in real estate...
Well you see Mozilla did one Bad Thing a decade ago and that's a good reason to continue using the Ad Industry's chosen web browser instead; The one that gained most of it's marketshare by taking a page out of the malware industry's books and paying Oracle to include Chrome in the Java installer, among many many others.
You could always tell they didn't mean to install chrome, because these people would also have a malware "Chrome" browser that installed through the exact same pathway.
The bug is still hidden to this day. And they have done many other bad things since then, including adding more ads to FF. And if you need to compare them against Chrome to make FF look good then you are only proving the point that they have lost the plot.
I hate. Absolutely hate that you can't say anything directly anymore without sugarcoating stuff in HN. Downvotes follow. I mean, the hell is HN for then?
Even the most obvious stuff needs to be said like... I don't know... but it looks like Google might be slightly bad here.
---
The CEO literally paid her hell a lot of money while she sold MDN to competition. While Rust to competition. While market shared shrinked from 9% (or 7%, forgot the exact number) to where it's now. Citing - NO MONEY!!!
We still have her controlling Mozilla right even though she is not CEO? And apparently we are not supposed to criticise em.
Virtue signaling the hell out of all posts and stuff saying we are for the people and doing everything against their interests gets super tiring as well.
The thread is about a marketing piece where Mozilla plays their usual "look we're the good guys" spiel. Pointing at their dirty laundry (which they still try to hide instead of learning from their mistakes) is very much appropriate.
Narrowing it from "every post about Firefox" to "every post about Firefox doing something good" still leaves it tiring. That extension wasn't even a bad core idea, it was a bungle of implementation choices. Oh no they hid the ticket. The real criticism is bad management and while it's valid it really doesn't need to come up on every article.
For that, there's ProTube[1]. On the surface it behaves like YouTube Premium, under the hood it's just the mobile version of YouTube bundled into an iOS app. I have no idea why ads aren't served, I analyzed the network requests with Fiddler Everywhere and saw nothing nefarious.
It's web scraping, and occasionally falls behind yt changes (2 years ago it was unusable for about a month). It could be described as an arms race, but Google appears to suffer it to live.
I suppose they understand that zero is not the optimal corruption target. (Because, as you asymptotically approach total control, the user cost also rises asymptotically.)
I'm regularly surprised that people are willing to block YouTube ads. I know that Google gets that advertising money too, but you're also blocking revenue that the channel owner would otherwise get. I suppose it might depend what you're watching, but most YouTubers aren't big business, they're just individuals.
YouTube Premium is one of the few subscriptions I am completely happy to pay.
It doesn't have to go through Google. Lots of us support the people they follow through patreon et al, I don't need to make the gigacorp even richer than it is. They have enough.
Why do these creators use YouTube then? Why cant they host it on s3 and the have you directly compensate? Surely the creator is getting some value from YouTube and YT expects to be compensated for that?
> Surely the creator is getting some value from YouTube and YT expects to be compensated for that?
I'd imagine Google would start charging for videos that don't make enough money or heavily deprioritize them from discovery. That seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.
I inherently disagree with the ad model of business. Intentionally worsening a product with ads to convince people to pay to remove them is just rewarding them for enshitification.
So on that front I'd prefer YouTube go out of business so that something like Nebula can take its place. Or the only videos left at\re the ones doing it as a hobby and not as a job.
Isnt that part of the deal of uploading to YouTube? YouTube promises distribution and in return they show ads to make up for lost {storage,bandwidth} etc.
I'm surprised that YouTube doesnt ask $100 per year and then also show ads. Like App Store (which requires "developer fee" for doing far less)
Just mentioned in another comment, but I'm not sure Firefox on iOS can actually use webkit content blockers? (I thought it could but have been using Orion exclusively for a while now)
No, uBOL blocks more ads and isn’t affected by Firefox’s insistence to not block Google Ads or their own.
> Sponsored shortcuts and other sponsored content shown by Firefox when you open a new tab are separate from ads on the web pages you visit, so Ad Blocker doesn’t affect them.
This is different because Firefox Focus, a separate app, only blocks ads while using Firefox Focus. Firefox Focus can also be set as a Safari Content Blocker which allows Safari to benefit from Firefox Focus's ad blocking. (It's not the best ad blocker, I've found wBlock - https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock - is more effective, anecdotally and via adblock.turtlecute.org)
Regular Firefox (non-Focus, the app from the article) can not benefit from Safari Content Blockers, and therefore does not benefit from Firefox Focus's ad blocking.
> Does ad blocking affect search engine ads?
> No. Ads shown on search engine results pages are not blocked.
A lot of the search results on top of Google are there to scam you, providing phone numbers for pass through services that charge $ for it, like flight cancellation:
Good executives that have achieved an ever shrinking market share while continuing to piss of enthusiast users? At this point they could pay someone with zero experience minimum wage and would probably do no worse. Have you considered that a "good executive" (i.e. someone good at maximizing shareholder values and his own compensation) is the last person Firefox needs?
That's because browsers should be free. They are infrastructure, just like bridges. And nobody wants a bridge troll sitting on the single bridge crossing the internet river, demanding money from everyone.
You pay for bridges with tax. Tax funded browser sounds good in theory, but I don't trust the people managing my tax money to run a tech project like Firefox. Most likely it gets handed to the lowest private sector bidder, with the stipulation that any privacy preserving — sorry, I meant criminal hiding — features be removed.
I'm not criticizing Orion for that; I actually enjoy it quite a lot (and will do even more when they will have ironed out all the UI bugs).
Also I'm eager to see how it will behave on Linux when they will have finished their port; I hope we will finally have a really low-energy consumption browser then.
What exactly is the problem? I understand a browser is a complex program but is the claim it is impossible to build a browser without continual dependence on advertising toxic dollars?
A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.
I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.
Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.
And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?
Perhaps not riddled but Mozilla has added ads to Firefox itself and considering their acquisitions and behavior in general you can expect them to add more.
Me too, but we are few. Google paid $585M in 2024. I don't think Mozilla can get 58 million users to pay $10 each. That might even exceed the FF user base. Even if they could, they would use it as extra money, not to get rid of Google.
Mozilla has had a lot of funding over the years. They wasted most of it on useless side-projects. If, instead, they had saved up into a foundation, they could have been financially independent like a decade ago. Do not try to pay for Firefox; they'll just waste that too.
Also they say they will continue to show Firefox’s sponsored links and ads. So, they’ll continue to show first party ads and google’s ads? And likely they won’t be able to keep up with meta’s anti ad blocking. That’s most ads on the internet. No thanks, I’ll stick to ublock origin lite on safari.
There's no reason to hope there is a way to tell a particular source of ads to turn itself off when you can just use a non-gimped ad block on a non-gimped platform and block all ads without caring if any of them are cooperative or adversarial.
A neighbor came to ask for help today. He got locked out of his Facebook account and was getting impatient with their AI, so he Googled "facebook support number" clicked on the first link (almost certainly an ad) and called the number. The person on the other end apparently told him they needed access to his bank accounts to verify his identity and you know the rest of the story.
How is Alphabet not responsible this? They push ads for scams at the top and earn money from it. That should be 100% on them to reimburse, then go after the scammers.
I tested and adblockers work on Safari for youtube ads again? Hmm, should I just give in and start using Safari again. Maybe this time it won’t dissappiunt me… Maybe it’s different this time…
It doesn't block the inline ads between story and comments on reddit.. my benchmark for browser ad blocking and ublock-origin is one of the few (only?) that does it. This is why I use the Orion browser on iOS.
It's a shame that the adblocker is limited, though. I've been using Orion as a replacement for Firefox on iOS, which has support for extensions (including uBlock Origin) and better UI/UX in my opinion, but it is not open source.
Would someone smarter than me mind explaining why FF on iOS can't use extensions? I know every browser has to use WebKit but I've heard Orion is able to use FF and Chrome extensions.
You can send a tab to/from your Firefox desktop instance. Also synced passwords. Those aren't the only reasons -- Firefox on iOS has a lot of code in that wrapper -- but sync is the main one for me.
(There are also reasons why it's significantly worse than Safari, which has special privileges, so your question is valid.)
166 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 6.0 ms ] thread> This feature is experimental and is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout. It may not yet be available to all users. Additionally, remote improvements must be enabled.
Apparently, you can only block ads if you allow Mozilla telemetry. Thanks, dicks.
Making an announcement when fewer than 40% of your customers will see the feature fees like (unintentional) gaslighting.
Must we? Such vulgar swipes only weaken your position, making you seem like the bigger jerk. Please observe the guidelines, not because you owe Mozilla anything but because you owe this community and indeed yourself better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As opposed to all the browsers that don't have this feature?
It's not done yet. When it's done it will just be a normal feature with no requirements.
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.
Also sometimes tabs disappear from the tab picker, which makes tab management confusing.
Only to see that this is neither generally available, nor can you use it without enabling telemetry. I don't know who makes these decisions inside Mozilla, but I just don't get it.
> Previously, access to these changes required you to share technical and interraction data (telemetry) with Mozilla. However, as of Firefox version 148, you can opt into receiving remote improvements, even if you have opted out of sharing your telemetry or participating in our experimental studies.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remote-improvements
How did that even happen? I sure hope that was a bug and not a product decision, because that sounds very backwards.
1)Agreeing to it in the first place
2)Hiding it from users
3)Circling the wagons and setting the bugzilla ticket to a secrecy level so high all but upper management couldn't even view it, and marking all the related tickets as 'wontfix' and so on. The tickets are full of complaints that mozilla staff aren't being remotely transparent about what was going on or decisions being made.
Oh, and the kicker? It exposed the fact that Mozilla was employing people from adtech companies. The project manager for the Mr. Robot bullshit had her entire career worked at advertising companies.
The bug kept bouncing between being secret and public, and I remember seeing it was the PM who kept trying to make it secret, and then some unknown dickhead exec at m
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423003
Then there was the fact that the CEO was making more and more money as she drove Mozilla into the fucking ground with cratering market share numbers. Then there was Mozilla's absurdly expensive taste in real estate...
"Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser" - 757 points - Dec 15, 2017 - 515 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730
You could always tell they didn't mean to install chrome, because these people would also have a malware "Chrome" browser that installed through the exact same pathway.
Even the most obvious stuff needs to be said like... I don't know... but it looks like Google might be slightly bad here.
---
The CEO literally paid her hell a lot of money while she sold MDN to competition. While Rust to competition. While market shared shrinked from 9% (or 7%, forgot the exact number) to where it's now. Citing - NO MONEY!!!
We still have her controlling Mozilla right even though she is not CEO? And apparently we are not supposed to criticise em.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/protube-block-ads-on-video/id6...
Please delete this before anyone sees it :)
It's web scraping, and occasionally falls behind yt changes (2 years ago it was unusable for about a month). It could be described as an arms race, but Google appears to suffer it to live.
I suppose they understand that zero is not the optimal corruption target. (Because, as you asymptotically approach total control, the user cost also rises asymptotically.)
YouTube Premium is one of the few subscriptions I am completely happy to pay.
I'd imagine Google would start charging for videos that don't make enough money or heavily deprioritize them from discovery. That seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.
So on that front I'd prefer YouTube go out of business so that something like Nebula can take its place. Or the only videos left at\re the ones doing it as a hobby and not as a job.
I'm surprised that YouTube doesnt ask $100 per year and then also show ads. Like App Store (which requires "developer fee" for doing far less)
> Sponsored shortcuts and other sponsored content shown by Firefox when you open a new tab are separate from ads on the web pages you visit, so Ad Blocker doesn’t affect them.
Is that for a technical reason or a commercial one?
Regular Firefox (non-Focus, the app from the article) can not benefit from Safari Content Blockers, and therefore does not benefit from Firefox Focus's ad blocking.
> Does ad blocking affect search engine ads? > No. Ads shown on search engine results pages are not blocked.
A lot of the search results on top of Google are there to scam you, providing phone numbers for pass through services that charge $ for it, like flight cancellation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1p6h81i/beware_fake_...
So this omission should absolutely be addressed, but they probably cannot because of the Google Search contract...
maybe they should go get some then
But it will still have tolls.
If anyone's interested I have a very pretty one listed in Brooklyn. See my Google search ad for details. :P
Also I'm eager to see how it will behave on Linux when they will have finished their port; I hope we will finally have a really low-energy consumption browser then.
A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.
I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.
Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.
And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?
(and I love ff)
so basically less than 1 percent chance
Absolutely amazing, works inside webviews (e.g. netnewswire).
v3 just released.
https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock
You can send a tab to/from your Firefox desktop instance. Also synced passwords. Those aren't the only reasons -- Firefox on iOS has a lot of code in that wrapper -- but sync is the main one for me.
(There are also reasons why it's significantly worse than Safari, which has special privileges, so your question is valid.)
Can we get tab management on iOS too please?