Mozilla said Focus, which is based in part on Disconnect’s open source blacklist, is more transparent than many other content blockers, which are sometimes shady about the standards used to determine what gets blocked.
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Focus allows users to block several different types of code that track their behavior across websites, including ad trackers, analytics trackers and social trackers. However, they are looking into providing this feature in Firefox for iOS and will deliver it as soon as they can. This was not our choice-Apple has chosen to make content blocking unavailable to third party browsers on iOS.
Apple’s iOS 9 paved the way for ad-blockers on the iPhone, and Mozilla is the latest entrant. 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.
Currently, Focus by Firefox only works with Safari, not Firefox for iOS. Focus by Firefox takes the high ground with a commitment to transparency. In addition to making your mobile browsing more private, the blocker can also speed up performance by blocking things like web fonts. “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”. This means that for users completely new to Firefox, they will see some Mozilla-specific tiles as well as some suggestions, though these tiles will eventually give way to visited sites once the new user has started using the browser more. While Mozilla is now bringing a content blocker to Apple’s Safari Web browser running on iOS 9, it doesn’t have any plans to bring the same technology to Safari running on Apple’s Mac OS X desktop operating system.
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In the meantime, Herman says that Mozilla wants to “reimagine content experiences and content discovery in our products”.
