I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Linux, and haven't seen an ad in years. It's not like ads weren't a thing 20 years ago. Pop-up windows were particularly bad. Javascript, in particular, has been constantly abused against the user ever since it was created.
Same setup and same experience. I've recently joined another company which only provided chrome with no extensions by default. I know the web is filled with ads but I'm shocked again and again when I get a glimpse into what it's like without an adblocker.
Blocking ads will also prevent malware scripts, unscrupulous information collection, and deceptive virus infection messages. I've got friends who've been infected because they believed the popup that told them their computer had a virus, and they needed to click the link to remove it.
Some demographics are heavy ad blockers, 90%+.
I bet if you open YouTube, even with Adblock and sponsorblock, you'll see ads. "Tech" channels are nothing but ads because all they do is present products for people to buy.
Even channels that do legos are ad channels.
YouTube itself has become a platform for serving videos that are advertisement at their core. These videos are popular, get good engagement, pay the content creators and come in cheap for brands. This style of "journalism" extends to many other platforms.
Prior to Brave, ublock origin on Firefox provided a similar ad-free Youtube experience.
I don't consider ad content like the tech channels you mention to be a negative. Informing people about new products is a useful service. The ads that are negative are those that impose themselves over other content or mess with normal internet browsing experience.
It's a different story if it's a person that's used a device that they bought for a year. But these tech youtubers, they are extremely dependent on a good relationship with the brands because what brings them money is doing the "reviews" on day 1 (if not before) and they can only do that if they have a good standing with the brands. Meaning they will can only talk the product in a way that they know the brand is going to be okay with, mentioning obvious flaws that are easy to disregard ("it's not the best value for the money" is a classic).
This is bad because this type of journalism is constantly moving the window of what's acceptable. Channels that are truly critical (for example gamersnexus) don't get any support from brands. Channels like that are rare, of course, they do exist.
So, to reiterate my point, these channels are not informing: they're selling. There's a really good documentary with Noam Chomsky called "manufacturing consent" that really gives a good overview of this topic. Well, it's about politics, but the same applies for marketing.
Also, adding `Before: YEAR` in search takes you back to a more wholesome time.
Firefox (the product) and Mozilla (the for-profit company) are lost causes. Firefox (the technology) is still there, for now.
I can probably turn it off somehow but I feel like it should be opt-in or at least live elsewhere.
LoneWolf and LobreWolf are still available ;)
Another aspect of ads from the early 2000: they were individually made for particular places, rarely generating any controversy. For example, I used to be a moderator on a forum dedicated to ActionScript, and we had a sponsor, who, basically paid our hosting expenses, and that sponsor had a banner in the header of the forum advertising lessons in Web design / programming. The banner was designed to match the overall forum appearance, it didn't track anyone's browsing history, didn't collect cookies... it was simply a big and fancy button linking to the sponsor's Web site.
The problems really started with the "media buying" waterfalls, i.e. the automated ad delivery. Ad agencies automated their job by providing customers with (semi-, but increasingly fully-automatic) ways to design their ad campaigns. In order to make these campaigns at least somewhat effective, they needed to somehow automatically reproduce the situation similar to the one I described having in the ActionScript forum: they needed to find a good match between the audience and the ad, but they had to cut corners because of the automation and resort to the unsavory mechanisms of tracking users' behavior. The decrease in quality had to be compensated for by increase in quantity. And that's how we got here...
Google pretty much declared war on those back then, providing reasonable-looking ad formats that could be integrated discreetly on the page (and as far as I remember, they had a limit of how many banners you could show). I really wish we could back to that. Now they serve animated/video ads.
Manifest v3; Android
No you don't need Mullvad VPN to use Mullvad Browser.