Mozilla confirms Firefox will soon block ads out-of-the-box

Mozilla is working on ad-blocking, built directly into Firefox. Ajit Varma, the Head of Firefox, confirmed this in an interview with Techlore published on June 6. The confirmation came during a discussion focused on Firefox’s new free VPN feature.

You can find the relevant video of the interview attached below.

In the interview, Ajit stated that the team is experimenting with test implementations using common filter lists such as EasyList. He emphasized that these are preliminary tests. The aim is to provide a simple, out-of-the-box solution for users who do not want to install separate extensions for blocking ads, since it’s a common feature that a lot of people want.

Firefox already includes Enhanced Tracking Protection, which blocks trackers and many ads in “Strict mode.” However, this doesn’t apply to regular browsing; Firefox will finally catch up once they add it natively.

An earlier sign pointing to native ad-blocking testing is that Mozilla has added Brave’s open-source adblock-rust library to Firefox 149 as part of ongoing tests. The feature remains hidden from regular users and requires manual activation through about:config, along with manually added filter lists.

However, in the interview, when asked about “adblocking from other browsers,” Varma said they’re not using any technology from other browsers (which may have come up in articles). He emphasized that there’s a lot of misinformation about it on the internet, and that the final public release would be natively developed.

Most commentary online viewed the development positively, though others expressed that they’d continue using alternatives such as uBlock Origin for features and customization. A native implementation could still have some potential benefits to the performance of the browser, since extensions take up resources.

Case in point: Firefox users running uBlock Origin are facing update delays due to the 8-week review queue of Firefox extensions. We covered that here.

It is worth noting that the interview did not mention a specific timeline or provide more details about the rollout, and only hinted that native ad blocking is on the way.

In other Firefox news, the Bitwarden password manager extension seems to be causing performance trouble on specific heavy websites. You can read about that here.

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