Focus By Firefox A New Content Blocker For iOS

Focus lets you block categories of trackers such as those used for ads, analytics, and social media, and also promises to increase performance on mobile devices by blocking Web fonts. Seeing as more and more people express discontent at all the data collecting and privacy issues they face with other browsers like Chrome, Safari and with Windows 10, Mozilla found it the best time to introduce a new content-blocker for iOS users around the world. According to Mozilla’s release announcement, this isn’t by choice as Apple specifically prevents content blockers from working on third-party browsers.

But it seems like these new arrangements aren’t producing the kind of income the one with Google did – possibly because users are switching their default browsers back to Google soon after installing Firefox, and possibly because Firefox is losing users to Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s new Edge browsers. Earlier this year, the organization published a set of principles for content blocking. The feature basically ads inside blank tiles in Firefox’s New Tab page.

And now they’re gone, because Mozilla has decided that while “Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn’t the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users”. Although they are trailing along Chrome and Safari, Firefox might be evolving towards a better future.

So what makes Focus by Firefox different?

While being named Focus by Firefox, the app only supports Safari on iOS and it now doesn’t support Firefox for iOS. Firefox is trying to find a way to make this work on its own iOS browser, but for now Apple’s restrictions are in the way. “We want this product to encourage a discussion about users and content providers, instead of monetizing users’ mistrust and pulling value out of the Web ecosystem”. Fortunately for us, Mozilla has just announced a solution for that in the form of Focus by Firefox.