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Comment by janitor61 | Hacker News Reader

I think the next move will be disabling other ad-blockers from the chrome plugin store with an excuse that it "will interfere with native chrome functionality"

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There are no plugins available for mobile chrome anyway, which is where I do 90% of my surfing. If anything this half-assed ad blocking will drive people to Firefox where you can block ads (and trackers and auto delete cookies etc) properly.

You can use system-level addons that will filter a web traffic, providing that you can trust the publisher.

As long as Chromium is open source, either filter lists will be supported in the new add blocker or someone is going to fork Chromium to keep list-based adblock support.

Is Chromium actually used by many people? I was under the impression that people mostly use Chrome because of Google's advertising & bundling. [1] supports my theory with desktop Chrome amounting to ~25% usage and Chromium amounting to ~0.03% usage.

[1] http://caniuse.com/usage-table

Some people use it. I think it's especially common on Ubuntu since they have it in their "Software center", whereas if you want to get Chrome proper you have to go to their website and get the .deb.

However, as you say, it's a very small % of people. I think most people don't even know Chromium exists, let alone what the differences are between it and Chrome. That might change though if Google starts abusing their position and doesn't get this ad blocker right.

I've been around long enough to know that no browser dominates forever, especially if companies start taking their users for granted. It happened to Netscape, IE, and Firefox. It could happen to Chrome too. If they screw this up I'm going to a Chromium fork + uBlock Origin. :)

I use Chromium on macOS for development and occasional browsing. Chrome Dev Tools is really in a league of their own. But my primary browser is Safari, because it performs much better during regular usage on my 2012 retina macBook Pro which only has a paltry 8GB RAM.

On my mobile android device I use Firefox, since it allows you to install extensions. Running uBlock Origin makes mobile web a vastly superior experience. I also use Firefox on Ubuntu and Windows, since it has the least invasive defaults and it lets you easily sync content across devices.

I think browsers are actually in a great state. People have lots of incredibly high quality options to chose from! Although I'll admit I'm a bit worried that there appears to be a bit of a Chrome monoculture growing.

This is my concern as well. This could well be the result of advertisers pressuring Google to do something about ad-blockers.

We all know how much they're willing to do to please advertisers after the YouTube demonetization apocalypse.

I doubt they'd go for it.

Otherwise, this would give a huge boost to Firefox.

Chrome's own adblocker would only reduce the incentive to install another adblocker. Especially if it's natively implemented as part of the browser.

Google's apparent quest is to make it so that the web only really works with Chrome anyways. I doubt they honestly see Firefox as a threat enough not to take this blatantly obvious next course of action.

Chrome was, and has always been about giving Google full control over content from their servers to the users. They've spent the past decade relentlessly removing middle-men out of their way (most obviously Adobe, but also other advertisers, and now the search engine is even extracting information from sites so you don't even need to click on links anymore, see AMP and their various "search enhancements") - they aren't about to stop at removing "misbehaving" apps. You already can't get AdBlock on Android without rooting - it's an easy equivalence for them to make and base their rules around, however false it may be.

DNS66 [0] works (albeit somewhat unreliably on my phone) without root.

[0] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.jak_linux.dn...

My thinking exactly. Hopefully this will provide a good enough experience to 90% of current adblock users to go with this instead of blocking everything, so that Google never gets forced into a position where it has to choose between removing ad-blockers or taking big ad revenue hits, and heat from advertisers. Like how netflix, hulu, hbo now were the best ways to reduce piracy because they treated the problem, not the symptoms.

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