Mozilla To Bring Ad Blocking To Firefox

Mozilla 2018 roadmap shows ad blocking coming to Firefox

Mozilla, the company behind popular Internet browser, Firefox, has revealed details of its ad ‘filtering’ plans for 2018.

While lots of its intentions are mired in technical terminology, some of it also of interest to the average Firefox user, the most important of which is that the company intends to add basic ad filtering capabilities to its Firefox browser at some point this year.

The fox could be ripping up intrusive ads instead of hen houses, if Mozilla comes through with its ad blocker later this year.

An in house ad blocker for Firefox? Hurrah!

Don’t get to excited just yet. It’s not technically an ad blocker. It’s an ad filterer, and while effectively it probably does the same thing, the devil is in the detail. Firefox wont be blocking ads completely, after all that’s how Mozilla makes it money. Instead it’s going to filter out intrusive ads that track users, or have shadier purposes behind them.

“The web has grown and changed dramatically over the last two decades and not all for the better,” Mozilla says. “Trackers, intrusive ads and other dark patterns threaten to drive people away from the open web and that’s not good for people browsing or publishing. Over the next year or so, Firefox will take a stand against tracking, intrusive ads, and other dark patterns on the web by blocking the worst content and more clearly communicating the privacy and other protections the browser offers.”

Firefox will therefore “filter certain types of ads by default: Firefox will offer users a simple ad filtering option. We’re in the early stages still, researching types of advertisements that should be blocked by default,” and will also “block ad re-targeting: We are working on blocking cross-domain tracking. Details to follow. (Q3)”

If users still want to block out all the ads, they will still have to rely on a third party blocker.

Joining the gang

By adding ad management options to its browser, Mozilla will join Opera who already have a default ad-blocker in place, and also with Google’s Chrome, who have themselves started blocking out some of the more intrusive adverts on its platform.

The proposed ad filtering change is currently scheduled for sometime later this year.

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