What's weirder is Firefox should be rising in popularity. The world in general has been getting more interested in privacy and data breaches and it's the only modern unaffiliated browser that doesn't have an advertising and telemetry motivation.
Nowadays running a browser without an ad blocker is as irresponsible as running a Windows XP machine without antivirus nor firewall a decade ago.
Any browser that doesn't implement countermeasures that have been proven to be effective and are available free of charge under a permissive license should be considered defective or having ulterior motives.
(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on this)
Furthermore, considering uBlock Origin and the underlying filter lists are available under a permissive license, what's the point behind developing & maintaining your own (inferior) implementation?
FF is still the "least bad" choice but I'm still not happy that I have to fix it by installing an add-on where that add-on (or at least the core parts of it such as filter lists) are licensed in a way that would allow the browser to have this fix out of the box.
Even if you just blocked trackers (as does ETP Strict Mode), many ads get blocked because those ads bundle tracking code within them. This, again, would cause there to be little to no incentive for most website owners to support Firefox.
What Mozilla is currently doing makes sense. They are being lax on the standard setting so that websites can still make ad revenue and have an incentive to support the browser.
If Firefox had a lot more marketshare, it might have been possible that this could slide.
> many ads get blocked because those ads bundle tracking code within them
uBlock filter lists can provide fallback shims that would be loaded in place of ad scripts to deal with this exact problem. The shim implements a neutered version of the original script so that all the surrounding (non-malicious) code can continue to run without errors.
You'd be surprised. Apple Business Manager does not support Firefox, for example.
> uBlock filter lists can provide fallback shims that would be loaded in place of ad scripts to deal with this exact problem. The shim implements a neutered version of the original script so that all the surrounding (non-malicious) code can continue to run without errors.
My point was that ads were being accidentally blocked and that websites wouldn't get their ad revenue.
Blocking ads would be the point - ads are malware.
Over a decade ago, one of the best things that Firefox did to compete against IE6 was to include a built in popup blocker that was on by default. Exactly the same criticisms were made.
It was called irresponsible and disruptive, since so much revenue came from popups, and horrible flash-based full screen pop-under ads. But I am glad that Firefox didn't let the pleas of the established market prevent them from siding with users.
I don't think you can compare the web of a decade ago to the web of now.
And I don't think they will be able to make progress if they refuse to challenge existing web technologies. They could do it, but they won't.
In fact, Mozilla seems terrified of losing favor with any of the major platforms. Which means that they are beholden to them.