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Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission

Eh yeah, killing the #1 reason why people still use your product is pretty much off-mission yes. I don't really understand how this would make money for them but either way it is the worst idea possible.

I understand more that he wants to be all in on AI. It's the big thing now. Billions are splashing around and Mozilla badly needs money. But everyone is doing AI browsers now. What would make Firefox so different from the rest? What is their moat? Better to focus on what makes it different rather than trying to play the same game as everyone else.

And yeah the web is in an existential crisis, but that's not really up to Mozilla to fix. I definitely won't stop adblocking that's for sure.

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It's disconcerting that he's on the fence about this. They obviously seriously considered the option and worked out an estimate of how much money it would bring in. Would they have done it for $175 million?

It also seems at odds with the user being in control of their own data, which he says "there is something to be said about". Mozilla wouldn't be able to impose that sort of restriction on the user if the user were really in control, so I suppose that's why he only voices weak and vague support of user control.

How is that a realistic estimate? It's more likely their revenue would go to zero than increase $150M.

Do any of the big-four (counting Edge as its own thing) browsers not easily allow and facilitate ad blockers? Chrome and Safari definitely do, I assume Edge does too?

What a deeply weird thing to even bring up, under those circumstances. Why was that kind of a thing even kicking around in his head?

It's so incredibly baffling that I wonder if it was a mistaken transcription of something else similar.

Chrome NERFed the filtering API which limits the effectiveness of ad blockers in Chrome. I think that's the one point of technical superiority that Firefox has.

I think Firefox is not alive based on being "a better product" in most respects, it's alive because it's the anti-Chrome, I mean, that's why I run it. In the early 2000s I despaired for the future because I was afraid it would be impossible to browse the web without Internet Explorer and thus, Windows -- Mozilla and Firefox kept hope alive.

Mozilla might not be happy with it but a large chunk of their user base are the kind of anti-big tech people who will explode on Mastodon if you confess that you make an AI generated image once in a while. It might not be rational, but the fury is deep. The thing though is that people's connection to Firefox is not rational it's about wanting to feel you have some choice, control and agency in technology. This article which is the top story on HN expresses this sentiment and it's success shows that a lot of HN users [1] feel this way

https://blog.mathieui.net/this-is-not-the-future.html

Firing your customers so that you can get some imaginary new customers is a story that rarely has a happy ending.

[1] who I think like those Mastodonsters are inclined to like technology but want to be in control, like political Linux enthusiasts.

I know it's been nerfed, but honestly I can't say that I really notice a difference using ublock lite on manifest v3 compared to before.

I think the difference is really more noticeable if you're on a limited connection. For example, on Starlink I only have 50 GB to play with. It's entirely ineffective if the browser downloads the ads and only scrubs them out of the view after the fact. Same with anybody using a mobile hotspot over LTE. In those situations bandwidth is super limited (I have 5 GB of hotspot data a month) unless you can convince the carriers to zero-rate data pulled for advertisements (they won't) I'll continue blocking ads before they can be loaded.

Edit: and I'm not on some cheap MVNO, I'm paying over $80 a month with AT&T on their post-paid plan. The phone gets unlimited data but any other device I may need to share that connection needs to be as efficient with bandwidth as possible. Only Firefox and derivatives provide proper ad blocking at this time.

Switch to an AT&T MVNO that gives you a lot more than 5 GB of hotspot for less than $80/month:

https://prepaidcompare.net/

Dang that's expensive. I am paying $35/mo and getting 100GB tethering on my AT&T phone plan per month.

Also, all those ads that are still loading, are still tracking you.

Didn't the most recent manifest version update for Chrome extensions drop the ability to block ads at the network level? Extensions can still prune them from the DOM but only after the request has finished; something like that, I don't remember clearly.

I'm pretty sure that's what the quote is a reference to.

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