Comment by vimacs2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vimacs2 | Hacker News Reader

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Considering the fact that Firefox has had less than 5% coverage of the browser market for years now, this is not very reassuring. It's also quite frankly missing the point.

It shows a clear case of mission statement in conflict with business model and shakes my confidence of Mozilla as the champions of privacy and freedom they paint themselves as.

Keep in mind that they don't even need to make it built in, they could instead bundle ublock origin as a preinstalled add-on and provide a little bit of money to the developer. It would simultaneously improve the security and browsing experience of many of its users while attracting many new ones and funding the fight against invasive online advertising.

But big daddy Google would get so cross then and Mozilla would be forced to adopt an actually privacy respecting alternative like duckduckgo and lose a lot of their funding.

I don't want to main Brave as I currently do, both because of its use of chromium and my ill feelings of the CEO's donations to political movements against the LGBT community but Mozilla management have lost my confidence over the years despite the actual deveopers remaining world class.

> But big daddy Google would get so cross

I don't think Google would be as mad as every other publisher on the internet who relies on ads for their living. They would go on campaigns to block Firefox from their websites entirely. They already rail against adblockers with full-site popups and blocking content until you disable your adblocker, making adblocking a default would escalate the situation exceptionally quickly.

Firefox's marketshare would drop even more quickly if people couldn't visit their favorite sites with it (and were likely directed to Chrome or Edge).

Without an alternative, readily available method of monetizing websites, it's realistically going to have to remain opt-in (i.e. installing uBlock).

Except there are already anti-anti-adblockers out there like REEK which work very well. Their campaigns might escalate but so would the efforts of the adblockers and in a fight between an established tech player like Mozilla and even a very large old media conglomerate, I don't fancy the latters chances at winning that tech arms race especially with all the bad press their efforts would generate.

This whole argument is largely invalided by the mere existence of Brave anyway. You could argue that their crypto based mode of monetisation is not the absence of rather the reimagining of ads but regardless of how you feel about crypto, it's definitely superior for the end user and offers effective monetisation that is optional.

doesn't brave just substitute in its own ads with their crypto scheme? that doesn't really strike me as better than just not blocking ads by default

Regardless of your feelings on crypto, it absolutely is superior than the default. With Brave, you only need to trust them. With Firefox, you need to trust every Tom, Dick, and Harry with access to Google Analytics.

Also, you can choose to disable all the crypto and still get the built in adblocking. With Firefox, you can only turn to add-ons.

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