I kept forwarding Worldometers’ COVID-19 data site [1] to friends and families, then later realized it’s full of banner ads if viewed without ad blocking.
Just had a look at it with uBlock Origin disabled, and wow, how do people browse the internet like this?
Edit: elaborated on my final point.
Google actually got that right with their ads - they were non intrusive and fitted in. Facbook started ads well, but these days they are getting annoying.
The web ads tend to bed more intrusive and outside the UX, more irrelevant, and more malware like.
I don't like those apps either, but the UI is definitely better.
I'm not sure why Firefox just doesn't build adblocking into the browser as a first class feature - maybe because they rely on the Google funding?
All of the "ad-supported business model supports creators, ad-supported businesses allow more people to access to the content" just feels like after the fact rationalization.
The same with how good targeting is because the ads are relevant.
If your content is valuable then charge for it. If browsers actually blocked all the ads like users wanted (and made a better product) then sites that couldn't support themselves without ads would die.
Wouldn't that be nice.
They kinda do. They keep building APIs requested by the adblockers so that adblocking can continue to work efficiently/effecitvely. They're also blocking the underlying abuses of advertising by increasing privacy by making it more difficult to track/fingerprint, increased security with the safe browsing checks (phishing/malware), and anti-cryptomining.
I am glad that they do not. I doubt that mozilla would be able to make anything nearly as good as ublock origin. They already tried something similar with "tracker blocking" - it is uncustomizable and generally inferior to ublock.
I firmly believe that if the users could see what these client apps are actually doing on their device, they would never use them.