Kiwi also allows usage of Chromium extensions. I wanted full ad blocking but Kiwi only had rudimentary ad blocking that was disabled by default. No problem, I installed uBlock Origin!
I already had Kiwi installed and it's neat to pop it open and see this feature hiding in plain sight. I can definitely see myself using it regularly, although I won't use it as a daily driver since it selectively blocks adblockers on a hardcoded list of domains which is just untrustworthy. https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src/blob/master/extensions/re...
kiwi://extensions
Press: + (from zip)
Load uBlock Origin
Finished.
Not that dramatic + auto-update works.
It would be sketchy to offer an out-of-the-box experience that blocks the search pages of Microsoft and Yahoo (they pay us).
Remember the fact that if a browser has an established and visible business model is way better than a browser where you don’t know how they make money.
With Kiwi, if you use Bing or Yahoo, Microsoft and Yahoo share with us the costs and the revenues (both ways).
Simple model and no need to sell crypto, fake VPNs, user history or whatever some others do.
Most likely to add a setting to make it optional.
The main issue we had was with search partners, if we allow adblocking by default, then search engines still pay for the request, and this means… we pay. And by we, I mean “I” pay :)
One solution that some competitors found is to integrate Adblock Plus (when you develop a browser they pay you for that) or AdGuard and let them do the whitelist (so in appearance the blame is on them, but I am fine to take the blame myself).
Some browsers don’t allow external adblockers so they don’t have this issue at all; you can’t block their ads anyway (not 100% sure but I think Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc are like this).
Yandex who was the pioneer of Chromium extensions on mobile (before Kiwi) has similar mechanisms, except they fully block the extension, instead of whitelisting it on certain URLs.
It’s currently possible to go around the whitelist, just by loading manually an extension.
And yes it’s logic that Google Chrome doesn’t block Google search ads by default unless you load a workaround.
The same that Kiwi doesn’t block Microsoft search ads when our main funding is Microsoft Bing, and to be fair, getting funded by search is the cleanest business model a browser can have.
This is just because when people install a third party ad blocker, they are expecting a certain type of behaviour, and quietly changing expectations can have bad results for users who require specific functionality.
On an unrelated note, I would appreciate adding a toggle to disable the "Pull to refresh" gesture on Android. I find myself reloading accidentally during scrolling very often, which can result in data loss.
Since on iOS any browser must use Apple's engine anyway and can only provide a thin layer on top of it, how does that happen?