Lets break the near monopoly they have and give what google wants the finger.

https://duckduckgo.com/windows

You know how nearly every browser is now based on chromium? And firefox when its not chromium, ~~and even forefox adopted the extension limitations of chrome~~? Well I hear Duckduckgo's new browser something new finally instead of based off an existing browser.

It doesn't have extensions yet but those are coming and adblock is baked in.

Ed: my 1st downvotes of my time on the fediverse. <3 you to folks.

This is super fucked up. I use Stylus extensively to customize the UI on so many sites. Not even for adblocking or that kind of thing, but for accessibility. I actually learned to code many years ago specifically so I could write my own userstyles so that popular websites would be more accessible for me. This is not just predatory on an ads and money level but on an accessibility level too.

Firefox gang come on!

I find it hard to see how they could protect content from ad blockers without also crippling pages that self modify their own content. Perhaps they could put headers akin to content security policy that forbids external modification. Assuming a browser were to honour that header I could see bad publicity and a lot of people just moving to another browser which doesn't. Additionally, ad blockers aren't the only things that modify pages - breaking accessibility add ons could be more negative publicity (just like with Reddit).

I think browsers would be best off to let websites develop countermeasures if they're so sore about ad blockers. Perhaps they could use "self healing" Javascript libraries that put back content which is removed. Or they could just refuse to work if they detect an ad blocker, e.g. they stick some canaries in the DOM or along blocked paths to see if an ad blocker is present.

stop using their services

Makes me want to donate to Firefox, not the Mozilla Foundation. To Firefox.

I hate the fact that one of the biggest and richest corporations in the world, is just a massive ad spamming dumpster fire. Imagine the good a powerful company like this could do, if 90% of their effort wasn't put into cramming ever more ads into people's eyeballs.

If they overcome / disable ad blocking, they will lose browser market share - and people don't design websites for marginal browsers with exotic features.

Having thought about it for a bit, it's possible for this proposal to be abused by authoritarian governments.

Suppose a government—say, Wadiya—mandated that all websites allowed on the Wadiyan Internet must ensure that visitors are using a list of verified browsers. This list is provided by the Wadiyan government, and includes: Wadiya On-Line, Wadiya Explorer, and WadiyaScape Navigator. All three of those browsers are developed in cooperation with the Wadiyan government.

Each of those browsers also happen to send a list of visited URLs to a Wadiyan government agency, and routinely scan the hard drive for material deemed "anti-social."

Because the attestations are cryptographically verified, citizens would not be able to fake the browser environment. They couldn't just download Firefox and install an extension to pretend to be Wadiya Explorer; they would actually have to install the spyware browser to be able to browse websites available on the Wadiyan Internet.