Mozilla says Firefox won't defang ad blockers – unlike a certain ad-giant browser On Tuesday, Mozilla said it is not planning to change the ad-and-content blocking capabilities of Firefox to match what Google is doing in Chrome. Google's plan to revise its browser extension APIs, known as Manifest v3, follows from the web giant's recognition that many of its products and services can be abused by …
Except that when you surf the web, you are choosing to stay in a peep show, not a hotel. Selling naked videos of you is their business model. So it's nice of them to let you opt out.
That said, if you use uBlock Origin on Firefox and watch no TV, you can live ad-free. When I do see ads, they seem... extra peculiar.
Which is why I quit using uBlock Origin the moment I learned ABP was taking bribes to let some ads through.
I'm thinking you meant that you quit using ABP and switched to uBlock Origin at that moment, ja?
I switched at around that time too, many years ago (right after the checkbox appeared for the first time). When I found out that uBlock is also a lot easier on RAM and CPU than ABP, that just cemented the decision.
I go to great pains to not be bothered by ads. I will spend 15 minutes figuring out how to permanently block a 5-second ad. On some of the more militant ad-delivering sites that cannot be blocked or worked around, I will find a different site. And I will intentionally not purchase anything aggressively and annoyingly marketed, even if it's something I had my eye on--I will go to a competitor.
If everyone would refuse to be annoyed by ads, hopefully it would send a message to the bottom-feeding purveyors of annoying ads when the products being advertised experience an actual drop in sales as a result of aggressive marketing.
It's a lovely idea, but it really wouldnt have any effect. There's a great quote attributed to John Wanamaker "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
When a product starts selling amazingly, marketing are the first to say its because of us, but they have no idea if thats actually true.
If a product starts performing badly, the seller would have no idea why, and marketing would be the first to say its because they're not spending enough on advertising - "We need more ads!".
The only way the info would get through is through talking to customers/people put off buying their products, but a) the people asking the question are in marketing, so are hardly going to admit that advertising is causing the loss of sales (it might reduce their budget!), and b) it would require people like you answering questions from the company or contacting them in some way to tell them this info, and frankly, if you're so annoyed you wont buy their product, I doubt you'll go to the effort of trying to help them understand your decision...
@Iglethal: There's a great quote attributed to John Wanamaker "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
So by blocking ads you help advertisers - you are not interested in seeing their ads in the first place, and ad blockers ensure that you will not click on ads that you don't see, and advertisers pay for clickthroughs, right? Advertisers don't want to pay for the ads shown to you - that would be money wasted.
So, advertisers should support ad blockers. It's those who host ads and ad brokers - the Googles and the Facebooks - who hate ad blockers because they reduce the probability they would get paid.
Umm I wasnt arguing against Adblockers, I'm a big fan of them myself. i was merely pointing out unicornpiss's actions of boycotting a company who's ads he finds annoying wont have any effect.
And No, Advertisers WANT to show you Ads. They want their Product in front of your eyeballs. They may not like the Google/Facebook duopoly, but thats what they want, you seeing their Product, even for just 5 seconds. Why do you think companies pay a fortune for product placement in films? There's no specific ad in the film, but you see the Product, you become aware of it, and maybe then next time you think, oh I could use a new product, maybe i should get the Product that was in that film. Job done.
So No, its not just google/facebook who want to serve you ads, the advertisers do. Google and facebook probably are not that worried if you look at the ads or not. Just so long as they get paid, but these days they have to show that a person actually looked at the ad to get paid. Hence why they fight ad blockers so much...
Actually, not quite.
The people who make the product would be quite happy not to have to display their adverts to people who want to block them. After all, this means less money spent on advertising to people who could not care less.
The *advertisers* (i.e., the people who make money from showing you adverts), on the other hand, want to show the adverts to all and sundry so they can put out their hand and say "we've shown your product to X amount of people - pay up" (I'm looking at you Alphabet).
"There's no specific ad in the film, but you see the Product, you become aware of it, and maybe then next time you think, oh I could use a new product, maybe i should get the Product that was in that film. Job done."
That's why I've never bought an Apple laptop - I'm not a spy, drug dealer, criminal mastermind...
I have an ad blocker on iOS. I recently reloaded it, and forgot add back the ad blocker. I quickly noticed the problem...the web was unusable. It was unbelievable how much garbage was trying to be loaded...
Content creators are morons... they literally ruin their own websites.
After reinstalling the ad blocker, I still see ads but the web is useable again.
I don’t mind ad supported content, but it has to be reasonable...
It's going to be very tempting for Google to try to kill off Firefox. At some point they'll decide that the search referrals they're paying for from the <5% browsing share Firefox has is worth less than the advertising losses due to ad blockers. The interesting thing will be to see whether Google's API changes dent the usage of Chrome due to its ad blocking becoming less effective. Ad blocker usage is well over 10% according to some stats and I'm sure Mozilla would love to grab some of those people if they abandon Chrome.
Because Firefox can't slap a huge link over their search index/results pages saying "Hey, upgrade your browser!"
So long as Google continue to hold dominance over web search, they can effectively push any other product they want. And since "Google it" has become common parlance for the action of searching the web in general, I don't see that changing any time soon...
...Google maintains, "We are not preventing the development of ad blockers or stopping users from blocking ads," ...
Yup. In the same way that TV Networks who want to get rid of a show don't simply cancel it outright. They stick it in an unpopular timeslot (say, Thursday 10pm) then wait for the ratings to drop so they have an excuse to not renew it.
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