Firefox has recently introduced its native ad block on iOS since v155, however the feature is not already available but the users have to wait for the gradual rollout.
Firefox said users have to turn on “Allow Remote Improvements” on settings.
But it is not totally true. They also need you to turn all of the following things on, especially Send Technical and Interaction Data.
As a privacy oriented browser, it doesn’t make sense to exchange my telemetry for ad blocking when the iOS version can’t allow extensions like uBlock Origin due to Apple’s restrictions. In fact, many browsers like Brave, Orion and DuckDuckGo have their native own ad blockers which works much better than Firefox, and telemetry can be turned off (and even off by default).
I really don’t understand why Firefox can’t make this feature immediately available once v155 is shipped, and needs telemetry to be on.
I am really disappointed with Firefox, and it is absolutely a shady act trying to make users sacrifice their privacy.
The ad blocker is currently being rolled out progressively. We use our remote experimentation system for this so that, if we discover an issue after release, we can pause or roll back the feature without requiring users to install another app update.
Because of that, users need to allow remote experiments/improvements while the feature is being rolled out this way. That’s different from requiring telemetry as a condition for using ad blocking itself.
Right now, most users should already have access to it, and we expect the rollout to reach everyone soon. Once the rollout is complete and the feature has stabilized, it can be enabled by default for everyone.
Thanks for your explanation, but why do I also need to turn on Send Technical and Interaction Data (and thus Feature Studies), as well as Daily Usage Ping and Automatically Send Crash Reports?
I always, and am happy to turn on Remote Improvements, but I am concerned about the telemetry to exchange for the new features which you didn’t answer.
The ad blocker toggle disappears after I turn Send Technical and Interaction Data (and thus Feature Studies), as well as Daily Usage Ping and Automatically Send Crash Reports off.
I expect only Allow Remote Improvements is needed for the ad blocker.
