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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit hyperbolic though. I imagine a high percentage of HN users block ads, but the overall rate is more like 25%[1] I suppose Forbes' editors weren't so excited about "Google gives about 500M Chrome users a reason to switch..."

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...

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As far as I know on Android Firefox is the only one that does ad blocking well. That't because it supports plugins, including uBlock Origin. It's market share is 0.36%

It was ad blocking that drove me to Firefox on Android. Screen space is precious on mobile, and ads taking up a lot of it drove me nuts. I found I preferred the UI but sorely missed Chrome's "translate page option". (I changed my search engine to DuckDuckGo for the same reason - google search now shows so much "useful" ancillary information I have to scroll past to get to the actual search results I switched to DuckDuckGo just to avoid the scrolling).

But at 0.36% I'm in the noise region as far as browsers concerned, which I assume means most people don't care about ad blocking or noisy search results, apparently.

I have fellow developers that live in ad-infested browsers... Like wtf!?

Consumers have demonstrated repeatedly that they will react strongly to losing the option to do something even if they're not currently doing it.

And it's even worse coming from an ad company. Undermines trust massively, even for people who've never changed a default (no) privacy setting.

It's more like "25% and counting". It was ~3% 10 years ago. Tendency is pretty obvious and omnious for Google and like.

Add blocking is not consistent between browsers. Desktop chrome users are much more likely to block advertising.

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