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Comment by ojosilva | Hacker News Reader

As a happy FF user on Mac, Android and Windows, I'm badly missing FF add-ons for iOS (iPadOS actually) - this is due to Apple's policies on iOS prohibiting apps from downloading plugins outside of the App Store. The web without an ad-blocker and proper cookie cleanup (not to talk about FF containers) is impractical to me right now.

Maybe I (or someone) inspired by custom browser project like the OPs, will someday bundle FF with crucial add-ons for iOS and ship that through Github. It would probably need a dev account to install it in iOS/iPadOS, but it sure would be worth it. What I don't know is if regular FF add-ons (uBlock, cookie autodelete, etc.) will work on iOS FF since it runs with a bundled Safari webkit renderer, another Apple iPhone v1 2008-era-restriction for such delicate piece of hardware (weak battery, mem and cpu) that makes no sense now with powerful 2020 devices.

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It's proprietary (and the full version is 9.99 a year IIRC), but I've found 1Blocker[1] to be very good on iOS/iPadOS. Admittedly I'd prefer a proper port of Firefox (with JIT), but I can't see that happening for a few years at least. iPadOS 14 is rumoured to include Xcode, so I'm hopeful that might herald a reduction in Apple's restrictions on third party applications.

> Maybe I (or someone) inspired by custom browser project like the OPs, will someday bundle FF with crucial add-ons for iOS and ship that through Github. It would probably need a dev account to install it in iOS/iPadOS, but it sure would be worth it.

If you're going to distribute it outside of the App Store, then the restrictions on JIT and third party addons wouldn't apply. You could conceivably have a full port of Firefox installed via AltStore (for non-jailbroken devices) or Cydia (for jailbroken ones).

[1]: https://1blocker.com/

I bought 1blocker like a week before 1blocker X came out and I’m still mad about it. I guess I should just bite the bullet and pay for the new one, 1blocker legacy has worked pretty well but it’s stopped blocking most ads.

How does this compare to AdGuard?

I haven't tried it. But seeing as AdGuard is open source, I'll check it out and compare this week. If AdGuard is any better, then you've just saved me a tenner a year, so thanks.

AdGuard also has public DNS servers that will block requests to ad servers. No additional software required at all.

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

Edge on iOS has a built in adblocker you can enable. Might as well use it since all browsers on iOS are just safari skins anyways

We are building an iOS browser with Firefox/Chrome extension support. Prototype already in place. Ping me if you want to test.

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