Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ImJamal | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

ImJamal

> Firefox does not block:

> Ads shown on search engine results pages, including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search providers

> Sponsored content on the Firefox Home or New Tab page

So block ads unless it impacts their revenue sources.

View on HN

Ads are bad! Blocking ads on our own homepage? How do you expect us to keep the lights on?

Mozilla knows not to bite Google’s hand, who is the one that actually feeds them hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mozilla is the one who is funneling billions of dollars worth of traffic to Google.

So, is Mozilla promoting a search engine monoculture? Yeah, "Google bad, but..."

Or is Google the best at monetizing queries and Mozilla is using whoever is best at doing it.

Google's only reason for keeping Mozilla on life support is to avoid the argument of being a total and complete browser monopoly.

Firefox's global traffic market share is less than double digits [0] and is less than 5%. Google technically doesn't need traffic from Firefox and Google is roughly paying half a billion ($585M) a year for it. [1]

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

[1] https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...

This doesn't make sense as Edge is a bigger browser than Firefox and competes with Google in the browser space. What Google pays for the traffic is less than what the traffic is worth (Google profits a lot too).

The correct way to avoid ads is to not visit pages that use them.

Is this actually feasible? How do you tell when a page uses ads? How do you find pages without ads when you search for something?

And a better question is how do you find a page without searching since they are exempting search engines from ad blocking.

That's the same way I avoid bad movies. I watch them first, before I watch them, just to make sure they're good.

> Sponsored content on the Firefox Home or New Tab page

Not ideal, but (at least on desktop) you can set the Home page to a blank page, and there is an extension called 'Blank New Tab' that I've been using for quite a while.

It doesn't have those limitations on Windows or Android, so it must be an Apple requirement or limitation.

Easylist does not block those things on any platforms.

I'm not aware of any adblockers that can block the ads on the built-in New Tab page. (You can just disable them in settings anyway.)

> You can manage the sponsored content on the Firefox Home and New Tab page in your Homepage settings.

This feels like a place where the "yet you also participate in society" comic fits.

"better than nothing"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com