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0 pointsluckylion6y ago0 comments

It's hard to demonstrate anything if you don't have a control group and can't turn the thing in question on and off. Conflicts of interest are real, you don't need to demonstrate that they are, though it's not clear how much they sway Mozilla's decisions.

And you're right, the non-profit-status doesn't imply that, they could just as well do the same as a commercial enterprise. It would be more obvious that way.

Would Mozilla make the step to ship an adblocker with Firefox? It would certainly be what their users want (the most popular extension by far being uBlock Origin), but it would pretty much decrease their worth to Google to zero, hence kill the funding. And there's your conflict of interest.

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hvis6y ago· 2 in thread

It's a difficult problem. Unless a majority-marketshare browser does that as well (and we know that Chrome certainly won't), a lot of websites might choose to block all Firefox users instead.

And perhaps you and I know how to disable an ad blocker selectively. An average user might simply see problems with websites and uninstall Firefox as "not working", tanking its marketshare even more.

So Google doesn't necessarily factor into that decision, really.

luckylionOP6y ago

True, though I think that would be a short (and just!) war that would get us to a much better place: hiding the type of user agent you're using from the site means less finger printing opportunities.

It very much could lead to the opposite too. "Oh hey, the web works when you're using Firefox". My mother has become a missionary (for adblockers, not firefox) since she's once witnessed how websites look on a friend's PC. She told her "I think your computer is broken", which lead to confusion & a presentation on my mother's PC... which lead to them calling me asking how to make her friend's PC do that too.

It might, ironically, also be a great signal for Google's bots. I've never seen a quality site that tried to block me for using an adblock, and even "hey, please turn adblock on" is a strong signal for me that it's SEO content and I should go on looking for something else.

hvis6y ago

> hiding the type of user agent you're using from the site means less finger printing opportunities

There are other (maybe a bit more complex) ways to tell what browser you're using, and whether you block ads.

> I've never seen a quality site that tried to block me for using an adblock

...yet. This is starting to change, and a lot of websites still have ads as their main source of revenue. Either that, or subscriptions, and the latter (for online newspapers, for example) is taking off very slowly.

Again, our usage patterns are in the minority, so whatever tough choices we might want to make are not necessarily to everyone's benefit right now.

At least in theory, I support the Better Ads initiative by Adblock Plus. Even though I've mostly been using uBlock Origin lately...

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