Firefox Adds Ad Blocking on iOS, But Botches the Rollout

Mozilla announced native ad blocking for Firefox on iOS (49521973), which should be genuinely good news for privacy-focused users. The thread mood is frustrated rather than celebratory, though: the feature is rolling out as an experiment, meaning most users don't have it yet and there's no way to opt in early. Mozilla has goodwill to rebuild after some questionable decisions, and rolling out a headline feature as a slow experiment to a subset of users is burning that goodwill in real time.

The pattern here is a product team that understands the feature matters but is treating it like an infrastructure rollout rather than a marketing moment. When you're trying to convince people to switch browsers, 'it might show up eventually' is not a compelling pitch.

Commenters who are already Firefox users on Android pointed out that uBlock Origin on Android Firefox already does this and has for years. The iOS moment is real but the execution undermined it.