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Comment by guenthert | Hacker News Reader

Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.

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If nobody is using ad-blockers then disabling them wouldn’t bring in any additional revenue.

Yep, and that's how he arrived at the $number. If a small number of people were using ad blockers, the cited sum would approach $0 since disabling ad blockers would affect very few page views, right?

Is that true? What if Google just pays them $150m to disable ad blockers?

Not sure if that's legal or whatever but killing ad blockers is probably worth it for Google.

Google wouldn't spend $150m to block adblockers if nobody was using adblockers.

Each Firefox add-on has a counter of the number of users. It doesn't require some "data trove of telemetry".

In a purely hypothetical world people could have disabled telemetry and also shared add ons on floppies instead of installing them from the store.

As a decades long Mozilla fan, who has stayed true to the fox even with the rise of Chrome, Mozilla breaking adblocking would make me uninstall the fox and never come back. I feel that many of the so called greybeards here feel similar. Once adblocking is gone, users will be too and Mozilla will fall faster than Nokia did

I think it is him. Chrome making blocking harder is one of the issues that has been pushing some users away (and a good portion of those in the direction of FF). If FF is not better is that regard then those moving away for that reason will go elsewhere, and those who are there already at least in part for that reason will move away.

If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.

Not sure what your point is? It doesn't matter the number of users, because the GP's point is that those users are going to immediately bail, for a browser thsy supports ad block.

So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point.

(You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)

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