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Comment by a_imho | Hacker News Reader

Most ad blockers work by blocking certain network requests that are initiated by the page. DDG Privacy Essentials reduces the number of network requests by 95% and the download weight by 80%.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials reduces the CPU time of the article page from 31s to just 1.6s. All other tested extensions also bring CPU time down to at most 10s.

It seems the single most important thing regarding Real Word Performance is a good content blocking functionality (not to mention other boons). Why don't browsers come with one by default?

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Because the most popular browser is made by a company that makes the vast majority of their money from ads.

And the other browsers are sponsored heavily by said company - either financially or technologically.

And to large extent, the same developers that complain about ads are the ones to blame that Chrome has reached that market leadership.

Firefox does. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

It blocks some tracking, but is it a good content blocker? Last time I checked I still needed to install ublock or equivalent for acceptable performance. How hard it is to incorporate something an extension already provides?

Not hard at all, they could include uBlock add-on by default (as they did with Pocket) except allow people to disable it this time.

They do rely on Google's advertising revenue for multiple $100M of funding; so they presumably don't want to be too successful in democratising ad-blocking.

Eich used to be a controlling influence on FF (as Mozilla CEO), since he was ousted he heads Brave browser which includes content blocking by default (and a content revenue model).

In short perhaps FF/Mozilla are curtailed by financial considerations.

Not unless they buy uBlock first, which is what they did with Pocket. And unlike Pocket, which was already a company looking to get bought, uBlock is very much not that.

Nit: you must be talking about uBlock Origin, because uBlock was actually bought[1].

[1] https://blog.getadblock.com/the-adblock-family-gets-a-new-ad...

But even Brave doesn't block some google ads.

Aggressive content blockers also tend to break websites. Not big sites like Washington Post for very long, but all sorts of small sites and in confusing ways.

For example, we had to rearchitect part of our site that was talking about marketing and advertising because various ad blockers decide any url pattern with '/advertising/' shouldn't be loaded.

We had to rename our cookie police modal so unlock users could get into our app.

Because a web browser should be fundamentally neutral by default. All content should get rendered the same way, regardless of which server or domain it comes from.

That doesn't preclude the browser from making choices to protect privacy and security, but all sites should be treated equally (as Safari does with its tracking protection, for instance).

I don't think I agree with that. Do you want spam treated the same as your regular email for example? It is up to the implementation to decide what is {spy|mal|track|junk}ware.

The reverse is also problematic, sites treat browsers (or even user agents) very differently. Why should browsers not do the same?

For email, I agree some sort of spam filtering is necessary—but I wouldn't want an email client to alter the contents of messages depending on who the sender is. (By default at least—customization through plugins is great!)

> Sites treat browsers (or even user agents) very differently. Why should browsers not do the same?

But isn't that exactly why browsers are now phasing out user agents? I'm all for that—I shouldn't have to fake my user agent in order for Slack to work in a mobile browser.

If there's a certain browser feature that a website needs, and the website detects this feature isn't present and changes its behavior accordingly, that's quite different!

Brave Browser is Chrome with that built into it.

... and that inserts its own spam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

to be fair, affiliate codes don't spike the CPU

Can you back that statement up. You're saying that Brave inserts spam content in to pages? Do you have examples?

Never seen that myself in my time using Brave.

FWIW I quite like the BAT and affiliate link model and was made aware of both prior to my install.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...

Noted, and bad, but I don't consider altering links to be "inserting spam".

That's not spam and I personally don't even have an issue with it

When you fire up the Brave browser, it pings Google's servers and starts collecting your data. google doesnt give away multimillion dollar software applications without the ability to capture data with them.

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