For years, I asked myself why Mozilla did not add a good content blocker to Firefox. It would be a great fit. An organization that values privacy, an open source browser that blocks most tracking out of the box.
However, for Mozilla, integrating a content blocker would also mean torpedoing its main revenue stream coming from Google.
Mozilla never made the step and others, including Brave, led by Mozilla’s ex-CEO, stepped in to fill that gap.
This changed recently
Mozilla did integrate Brave’s Rust-based adblock engine into its Firefox browser. More precisely, it is part of Firefox 149 and Mozilla describes it as a prototype rich content blocking feature.
It is not yet available as an option in the user-facing interface, let alone as something similar to the Shield feature of Brave. Still, users who run Firefox 149 can enable the content blocker and make use of it right away for testing.
Here is how that works:
- Load about:config in the Firefox address bar.
- Search for privacy.trackingprotection.content.protection.enabled
- Set the value to True with a click on the toggle on its right.
- Search for privacy.trackingprotection.content.protection.test_list_urls.
- Paste https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt|https://easylist.to/easylist/easyprivacy.txt as the value.
- Restart Firefox
This enables two EasyLists, but you can add any other list that uses the same format. Separate lists with the character |.
Clearly, this is done for testing purposes. Mozilla would very likely add controls to the preferences or another user facing interface to make this easier to configure and use.
For now, it is a work in progress implementation, but one that shows that Mozilla could finally integrate what many users of its browser have wanted (or did not know they wanted) for a long time.