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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, it was a bit shocking that big players allowed ad blocking to go on for so long. The next logical step is for google to pull funding from Firefox unless they implement it too. (They still pay a lot of money for google to be the default search engine, right?)

Between this and Reddit casually crushing third party clients out of existence, we’ve probably entered into a new era of the web.

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Are we entering the period of the true 'dark web' like the dark ages where web innovation is stifled? If dark mode and other features are disabled, then chrome will go the way of navigator, long forgotten. Intelligence will reign victorious over greed, I guarantee that.

But why is it shocking? Isn't it antithetical to what a browser is to have "content" (ads) be given special privileges?

It’s shocking because Alphabet is in the business of making money at the expense of their users. They aren’t building Chrome because they believe in the open web, they build it to extract every last cent out of us. Ad blockers cost them millions, perhaps even billions, a year. Despite having the ability to stop it, they allow it to occur. And that is shocking from a capitalistic point of view.

> Honestly, it was a bit shocking that big players allowed ad blocking to go on for so long. The next logical step is for google to pull funding from Firefox unless they implement it too. (They still pay a lot of money for google to be the default search engine, right?)

Isn't it a "Microsoft has shares in Apple so it has a competitor so they don't get sued/dismembered for being a monopoly" ? So, the next logical step for Google is to keep funding Moz/ff ?

No, during the recent antitrust trial Google was forced to reveal how much they pay each platform to be the default search engine. This is not a Chrome vs Firefox share deal thing. This is a Google Search vs "all other search engines" issue. Google pays most browsers to be the default engine, and has done so for many years.

The legality of it is not my area of expertise and I won't comment on that.

Google can not stop funding Firefox

The era of enshittification.

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