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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

If Mozilla genuinely prioritized its users' interest it would block ads and tracking networks, which are the major way people's private information is leaked and also a primary vector for hacking.

And yet for some mysterious reason Firefox hasn't broken ranks with Google by incorporating ad blocking. Even though its an obvious major feature and Firefox is losing marketshare every year.

We know why Google won't prioritize the interests of Chrome users but why is the only major independent browser seemingly corrupt in the same way?

Mozilla should be helping society by pushing it past an era of internet advertising and the clearly terrible clickbait-fake-news culture it creates. And yet, it does not.

Is Google using the money it pays Mozilla to "discourage" Firefox from going forward with ad blocking? As a concerned citizen, I sent an email to antitrust.complaints@usdoj.gov requesting an investigation. Anyone with insider info should send it there.

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If Firefox disabled ads by default, a large number of sites would likely block Firefox or set up angry messages telling the user to switch browsers. Yes, you could bypass that, but most people wouldn't bother. Add in the logistical issues, and the fact that some of the things blocked are beneficial, then I see no reason to expect the conspiracy you suspect.

If a major service blocks Firefox users it could lead to a massive boycott. Users could rally around Mozilla if it stopped selling out their interests.

More people use ad-blockers than Firefox has users. The best way to attract more users is to make the best possible browser. That means incorporating ad-blocking as users have loudly demanded for a decade.

> If a major service blocks Firefox users it could lead to a massive boycott.

... of Firefox.

Most people don't care as much about their browser choice as about the ability to access those major services. I would continue using Firefox, but only because I don't care about most of the popular sites. The majority would switch browsers in a heartbeat.

It wouldn't lead to a massive boycott, most people barely care about browser choice. And what would a boycott accomplish? If they're blocking you for not giving them ad revenue, your refusal to go there changes nothing.

Over the past decade, I've had to switch ad blockers several times to deal with performance and privacy issues, and I still have to deal with a ton of broken sites that would make most people just assume their browser was broken. The logistics of including the blocker in the browser are a nightmare, and I doubt the results would lead most people to call it the "best browser."

Because advertising funds the internet, including the Mozilla Foundation.

You mean like the "tracking blocker" that is built-in to Firefox?

No. I obviously mean real ad blocking that users are currently required to install as a third-party Firefox extension.

You don't find it curious that Mozilla has made the decision not to implement the most user-demanded browser feature for over a decade?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Webpage owners need a way to make money. A whole class of webpages, those that are financed by ad revenue, would stop being tested/built against Firefox. They might even block Firefox users from accessing their webpage, so that people switch to other browsers which do make them money. They have no real reason not to block them.

There's a whole load of politics like this in being a browser vendor. Just because users demand a change, does not mean that it's the best for users. Users want broken webpages even less than they want ads, they are just too short-sighted to realize that blocking ads will lead to that.

And Mozilla really is already gambling hard with such things as Tracking Protection or this referrer blocking when Chrome has no such restrictions in place and has the majority market share. For many webpage owners, blocking Firefox users would probably not even drop their revenue by 10%. Leaving it unmaintained much less so, in the short term.

So, unless Mozilla manages to create perfect compatibility with Chrome, they cannot afford to block revenue from webpages. And creating perfect compatibility with Chrome would also mean blindly following all of Chrome's webstandard choices, ingraining tracking- and ad-supporting technologies into the web, which again would be shit for users in the long run. And really, just use a Chromium-fork, if this is what you're looking for. You don't need Firefox for that.

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