Giving people choice in how they experience the web is important to us. Advertising helps fund much of the open web, supporting the publishers, creators and websites people rely on. We also know that ads can sometimes crowd the screen or interrupt what you’re trying to do.

Cross-website tracking and data collection, to the point where it has become an FBI-recognized threat, seems like the opposite of the "open web," and it's pretty clear there are problems with it other than being an annoyance.

(Mozilla knows this. They created Tracking Protection years ago. They mention it in this post. Ad and tracker blocking are closely related subsets of content blocking.)

That’s why Ad Blocker is optional: you decide whether it’s part of how you browse.

Ad blocking is disabled by default.

It’s part of a broader approach across Firefox to give you more control over your experience, from the extensions you use to how AI shows up in your browser.

AI is enabled by default.

I just downloaded Firefox iOS and the instructions from the article are inaccurate. There is no ad blocker.

In the Support Article it says:

This feature is experimental and is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout. It may not yet be available to all users. Additionally, remote improvements must be enabled.

Would've been nice if that had been in the article.

To add to the confusion, Remote Improvements used to require extra data collection, and you may have inadvertently been opted out of it.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remote-improvements

I don't think you're automatically opted out of remote improvements if you had turned off extra data collection though.

Remote improvements will be toggled OFF by default, if you deliberately opted out of studies in Settings prior to Firefox version 148.

It's worth double-checking if you happen to be digging through privacy settings anyway... Nice that you can now disable everything on one screen, before enabling Remote Improvements in the advanced one

Ah I stand corrected!