It seems like Chrome is going to make a massive fortune from webmasters or organizations that rely on ads, since it will unblock the ads for them by blocking the ad-blocker extensions. Quite silly, given the fact that Google used to pay "adBlock Pro" a good sum of money to whitelist their ads. Man, Internet Advertising has turned into a huge pile of clusterfuck. Why? disable your adblocker for 5 minutes and visit some websites and you will instantly notice that ads on the internet have gotten way nastier than ever.
Strangely enough, Firefox has held its ground. It fell behind in marketing which is why Chrome (and Safari/Edge) took over, but Firefox still remains popular for being that unshakable browser. I went back to it recently and wondered why I wasn't using it in the last 5 years or so.
I don't know if any marketing could have helped Firefox not lose to the shitty dark practices from the three other browsers you mentioned:
- Chrome: Spam ads for Chrome on all Google services (incl. YouTube and Google Search which probably are the two most visited websites on this planet?)
- Safari: Make it the default and prevent users from using any other browsers (on iOS every browser is Safari under the hood and will reports as such to browser census)
- Edge: Make it suck less and also make it really hard to remove it from your system or switch to a different browser
Defaults matter and, especially when they are this toxic, they are hard to beat :/
I honestly solve that issue by just not visiting those sites.
Sites with ads so obtrusive they interfere with my use of the site don't need my traffic. The web is a hugely redundant datastore and I can just find the info elsewhere.
How does this work? Do you have a fixed list of websites you visit and never stray from? Do you avoid clicking on links you don't recognize? How do you use HN, which by its very essence points you at new, unrecognized web sites every day?
I'm not the same person, but I have a similar philosophy. HN tends not to link to sites with really bad ads. If I find that it happens, I just close the tab. I don't intentionally have a whitelist of websites, but in practice maybe I practically do.
This is why I don’t use an automatic adblocker. I block ads by closing pages that have ads. (And if the information really is quality information, then I reward and support the website.)
> you will instantly notice that ads on the internet have gotten way nastier than ever
Anyone that remembers the advent of pop-ups and pop-unders, never ending cascading popped windows, flashy, shaky, and just terrible ads might beg to differ with you.
I remember those. The interesting thing about those is that browsers went out of their way to add features disabling those, only to then implement the infrastructure for them to be re-implemented in-page in ways that are harder to block.
Strangely enough, Firefox has held its ground. It fell behind in marketing which is why Chrome (and Safari/Edge) took over, but Firefox still remains popular for being that unshakable browser. I went back to it recently and wondered why I wasn't using it in the last 5 years or so.