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Comment by flashman | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft (not being dependent on ad revenue) could make some big strides by incorporating UBlock into the browser and marketing Edge as "the internet, without ads."

'A faster browser' is why Internet Explorer lost users to Firefox and Chrome in the first place. Microsoft could still win that back.

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In addition to all the points people brought up there is the problem of having a browser block ads without getting banned ("This site will not work with Edge") by the vast majority sites that rely on ads.

Edge doesn't have enough marketshare to deter retaliation and they are easy to detect because they are the only ones to use EdgeHTML so it would be hard to counteract that via spoofing.

Microsoft seems to want to be in the ad business. Ads in Windows, ads all over the Xbox UI. Plus they probably want to think bing will sell ads?

Maybe if MS showed dedication to their hardware and actually cared about users they could pull it off...

Not really. Microsoft has almost no ad business. Most of its ads are actually sold by AOL.

Are you complaining about actual paid advertisements, eg for beer, or the "suggestions" that you can turn off?

Isn't Microsoft behind most Facebook ads?

No, there's no connection, as far as I know.

Facebook bought the Atlas Advertiser Suite from Microsoft. However, Microsoft outsourced its non-Bing ad sales business to AOL, along with 1,200 staff.

http://fortune.com/2015/06/29/aol-is-taking-over-microsofts-...

Bing search ads are actually a non-trivial amount of revenue for MSFT.

Older article but still valid in Q4 as well: http://marketingland.com/microsoft-reports-21-7b-revenue-201...

If they provided a faster alternative to Firefox on Android to get rid of ads without rooting or vpns, i'd install it instantly.

I'm pretty happy with Firefox for Android with the AdBlock Plus add-on. What makes you want to switch?

Its slower on my Nexus 6P than Chrome, although it doesn't have to Deal with the ads. I often scroll on long pages only to end up in some still to be rendered viewports. Doesnt happen with Chrome.

Ok. I also had this "scrolling being faster than rendering" half a year ago or so, but switched to the Nightly version than which had the APZ feature (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/02/smoother-scrolling-in-fire...) integrated already on Android by then. And where this all worked pretty smooth. I thought this was already rolled out for stable, too...

Preinstalled ad-blocking would probably decimate what is left of quality media landscape within a few years. I'm quite happy if it requires at least a tiny bit of effort from the user. Some people simply don't mind ads, and we should all be grateful to them.

(I'm using uMatrix and try to allow all non-terrible ads on quality sites)

There is already a browser that ships with built-in ad blocking: Opera.

Although, as it's less known than others and it has no Microsoft or Google shoving it in users' faces, I guess you could count finding and installing it as "effort".

Opera is a Chromium skin these days and was bought out by a questionable company recently.

If this didn't work 5 years ago with Ballmer, when he should've done exactly that instead of pushing the useless "Do Not Track" thing by default, then it's definitely not going to happen under Nadella, who is filling Windows 10 with all sorts of tracking and ads.

Microsoft is the third biggest internet company in the world by ad revenue. Why would they ever do this?

It's the third biggest internet company by search ad revenue, behind Baidu but ahead of Yahoo. However, it's a very long way behind Google and Facebook by ad revenue.

https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Microsoft-Ad-Revenues-Cont...

I think security was also a big issue. Seems they've made some strides in that department, and now Chrome is the most targeted browser for 0-days. That'll change once Edge takes the remaining IE user market share and they do a Windows-10 style force-grade.

> Chrome is the most targeted browser for 0-days

When was the last time you saw a Chrome 0-day?

The problem with that - and also the reason why for example Mozilla is for the most part not doing that either - is that it takes away pretty much all incentive for webpage developers to support your browser.

intriguing idea. Especially if we could also get Edge on Linux and OSX. Personally I quite like Edge when I have to use it.

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