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Comment by adriancr | Hacker News Reader

If they want to dig an early grave for chrome, sure, there's always firefox

Chrome on Android does not support extensions at all. It's still the biggest mobile browser. Sure, it will make a lot of technical people mad, but a lot more won't care.

Brave and Firefox on Android blocks ads just fine.

Sadly I suspect that may change. Manifest v3 was added to FF in 109 which is why I am on ESR and will probably stay on it as long as I can. Mozilla get funding from Google and that could potentially come with the price of blocking ad-blockers using manifest v3 at some point.

AFAIK FF manifest v3 will maintain the webRequest interface.

they've explicitly said it won't. If somehow that ever changes you'll see huge news about it.

We've always said the same thing about the Firefox for Android extension ecosystem.

Despite Mozilla's explicit denial of the intention to kill extensions on Android, there is an allow list that effectively bans almost all extensions on Android.

There is no justification for this; extensions work just fine on Firefox for Android, which can be tested using the nightly and jumping through a few artificial hoops.

tl;dr: There's little evidence that there will be any big news once adblockers get finally axed on Firefox.

Great but they barely have market share. People apparently don't care enough about blocking ads.

internet explorer used to be the biggest browser at some point

Firefox’s main source of revenue is Google paying them to be the default search provider. They essentially exist at Google’s whim.

They can probably do just fine with another provider and less money if google gives up, so power dynamic isn't all what you say.

Regardless of who the patron is, that's still a patronage operation, rather than a freestanding commercial enterprise.

(I'm not defending market-based approaches, nor do I think they're well-suited to all domains, and most especially not information services. But I am pointing out the relationship of Mozilla to its Daddy Moneybags. I sincerely hope better alternatives will be found.)

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