Mozilla brings content blocking to iOS with Focus by Firefox There's always a way round everything By Chris Merriman

THE MOZILLA FOUNDATION has announced the arrival of Focus by Firefox, its content blocker for Safari in iOS 9.

 The app goes beyond simply blocking ads, a feature first permitted in iOS 9, to give granular control over trackers used in ads, analytics and social media, based on Disconnect's open source blacklist of tracking sources.
The company claims in its blog that it "may also increase performance and reduce mobile data usage" by blocking web fonts, though this might make your pages look a bit weird.
Focus is at a relatively early stage, but its general availability brings the iOS version of Firefox up to the same level of privacy as the Private Browsing with Tracking Protection that is standard in Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.
While Apple has become a lot more open to the idea of letting users decide whether to block content, the fact that third-party browsers have to go through Apple's WebKit has meant that content blocking is, itself, blocked.
Mozilla has confirmed that it is looking at how it can get around this, and is still intending on bringing it to Firefox OS eventually. Firefox took a long time to get a decent foothold in the iOS landscape because of all these restrictions, but as in cases such as its climbdown over DRM, it has had to make compromises along the way.
This one is, by all accounts, a fairly minor one but nevertheless, Mozilla has remained committed to bringing parity across platforms and in this case, an external app is the temporary workaround.
It's not the first time that there has been a third-party Firefox app. Before the arrival of Firefox for iOS, there was Firefox Home, a cut-down overlay for the native Safari browser offering access to browsing history and other Firefox Sync functionality. µ