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Comment by CodeGlitch | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest issues with a web browser is how to keep it updated with security updates. It's not mentioned how they are planning to accomplish this?

Also how are they performing ad blocking? Are they just shipping it with u-block origin or their own technology?

Not to put anyone down, but I don't think people realise how hard it is to deliver a secure and working web browser. They are basically OS scale.

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Moreover, I don't understand how having a built-in adblocker is seen as a selling point. Wouldn't it be more powerful to rely on a third-party add-on like uBlock Origin?

At some point it's nice to stop tracking which browser addon has not yet sold out to sketchy third party and just let the browser do it.

Only one "purchasing" decision to make at that point.

I know I can consistently rely on uBlock Origin, and they have established a pretty good reputation. Plus I really like the "block element" feature, an opinion I've seen mentioned here before.

You could have made this same argument for AdBlock Plus a few years ago.

It was trustworthy, until it wasn't.

To be fair, the same could be said of a browser fork.

I trust Gorhill more than I trust Mozilla... let alone makers of a Firefox fork. Of all of them he is the only one with years of proof that he explicitly doesn't want money involved in the work. This project is already promoting sponsorship and Firefox is an entire organization that lives on selling their userbase.

These things don't make them inherently evil, the world isn't black and white and people doing good still need money, but it flips your idea about singularizing trust in the browser maker on it's head.

That’s a weird argument when the browser project has multiple orders of magnitude less backing than the add-on.

In this case sure, I was just making the argument for integrating ad blocking into the browser in general.

I would prefer a world where all browsers have integrated ad blocking, in which case I only have to make a decision on browser, not browser + ad blocking extension.

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