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Now, none of us like intrusive ads and being followed around the web especially on our mobile devices as performance, battery life and privacy are impeded. Last year content blockers were all the rage on iOS, some of them good, some of them bad and some rather expensive but the problem has not gone away but it seems as though the Mozilla Foundation are still thinking about this with their new iOS app FireFox Focus.

Now to be clear Focus was an app released last year with privacy hooks but now it is it's own beast.

This latest iteration of their mobile browser claims you can surf the web ‘as if no one is watching’ and from my initial tests this does seem to be the case. With it you can block ad, analytics and social trackers. Also on visiting a site you have the option from the menu bar to delete that sites data just by hitting an erase button.

This is obviously a handy thing if one, you’re a bit dodgy or you’re searching for that perfect pressie for a loved one that you’d rather them know about until that special day.

I’m a Chrome user on iOS just as I am on my other mobile and PC devices but as we all know it’s a bit of a memory hog and ads and trackers don’t help. I do run ad-blockers on my Macs which ease the pain but there is no real solution for Chrome on iOS and the blockers released last year only really worked with Safari so trying out Focus was a no brainer.

The browser itself is clean and snappy and something that I would be more than happy to use in situations that warrant it but then when you look into it the blocking of features offered by Focus can also be applied to Safari, just configure it in settings.

I think that it’s really important to have a private internet, that is our right. So if you are looking for a content blocker from a reputable vendor and for free then this is well worth a look.

And just as an update it seems there is no such thing as a free lunch. There is some tracking if you can live with it.

Author

Paul Wright

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