Because in reality, "meeting the needs of advertisers" is not a prerequisite to "protecting people's privacy." It's a false premise that Google constructed and which only exists because the dominant browser is created by an advertising company.
A browser that truly protected people's privacy would definitionally not meet the needs of advertisers, because those needs are in direct opposition to people's need for privacy.
Protecting people's privacy is not the sole job of a browser. The web in general needs to look at the needs of all of the stakeholders and come together to find a solution that all parties can find agreeable. A browser should care about not just the users, but also the rest of the people in the ecosystem. If Chrome shipped an update that blocked all ads it would kill many sites and would cause a disaster to the health of the web ecosystem. Chrome should try and improve the ecosystem.
> A browser should care about not just the users, but also the rest of the people in the ecosystem.
Hard disagree. A browser is supposed to be my user agent. It is supposed to work for me. It should not be engaging in compromises to my wishes in order to benefit others.
> Chrome should try and improve the ecosystem.
I think that there is much disagreement about what "improving the ecosystem" would look like.
>I think that there is much disagreement about what "improving the ecosystem" would look like.
Sure, but enabling sites to be financially viable to run is almost universally considered good. If something is not viable on the web either it will be built on another ecosystem or it won't be built at all. It ends up making the web a worse place to be and strengthens the competitors to the web.
If an industry in a very competitive market is polluting rivers we don't find a way to maintain its ability to pollute, we stop the pollution through rigorous action while trying to keep it competitive.
If collectively we decide that intrusive advertising has to go and we need to more directly pay for labour online, then so be it. It doesn't necessarily have to stay the old way forever.
> enabling sites to be financially viable to run is almost universally considered good.
That isn't what's on the table, though. This impacts the ability to target ads. Targeted ads are absolutely not required for a website to be financially viable.
> If something is not viable on the web either it will be built on another ecosystem or it won't be built at all.
The history of the web demonstrates that this isn't true. There's an excluded middle there.
> It ends up making the web a worse place to be and strengthens the competitors to the web.
What are the competitors to the web?
But aside from that, in my opinion, advertising has made the web a much worse place as it is. Advertising has made the web more like interactive cable TV, and limits the variety of activities because only the ones advertisers approve of are effectively allowed.
>Targeted ads are absolutely not required for a website to be financially viable.
There is a subset of sites where it is required. Or at least it is with how much resources they are investing into the site and free services they offer.
>What are the competitors to the web?
The biggest competitors are Google's Play store and Apple's App store.
>Advertising has made the web more like interactive cable TV, and limits the variety of activities because only the ones advertisers approve of are effectively allowed.
The existence of sites with advertising doesn't mean that sites without advertising can't exist.
The econmics don't work out for someone making a browser specifically for you and no one else. Products typically are designed to support the needs of many people instead of optimizing for a single person at the detriment of everyone else.
If that is the metric you want to go by, users outnumber advertisers by several orders of magnitude, so in this sense, anything that makes online ads easier is optimizing for the few at the expense of the many.
In any case, why in the world would I want to use a browser that is working against my interests and in favor of the interests of an industry that has done nothing but been abusive for a very long time?
> If Chrome shipped an update that blocked all ads it would kill many sites and would cause a disaster to the health of the web ecosystem.
I think this would be the best thing that could possibly happen for the health of the web, tbh. Imagine Google search results if every blogspam page plastered with ads no longer had a financial incentive to exist.
EDIT: It would kill some useful sites too, undoubtedly, but I think it would be worth the cost.
Blog spam sites are not expensive to host and they would just pivot to referral links. What it hurts are sites that generate user value and give it away for free by subsidizing it with ads.
Remember, the nickname "Browser" was invented after the fact, to describe the program that loads URLs and displays them to the user. The proper name of such a program is "User Agent". It is a program that acts as the agent, or the servant, of the user.
My "browser" runs on my computer, by me, for me. It is not beholden to "all of the stakeholders", or "the rest of the people in the ecosystem". If my agent acting in a manner that User Agents were originally intended to, only fetching the URLs that I - the user - want it to fetch, "would cause a disaster to the health of the web ecosystem", then maybe the current web ecosystem is bad and deserves to meet with disaster.
The web managed to explode in usefulness and popularity before surveillance capitalism became a thing, not because of it.
A web browser implements the web standards. The web standards are put together by organizations that do respect all stakeholders. If the web ignores stakeholders then people will migrate off the web. This is how you get into a world where you have to use mobile apps and the web is near barren.
Currently you often have the option to use either, but in theory the option to use the website could go away from many services if it's not worth it to have.
It doesn’t protect “privacy”, it at best limits a subset of reidentification attacks, and only in a vacuum where other fingerprinting vectors don’t exist.
If it’s so great it would be any easy opt-in for users. But it’s not.
It is definitely about meeting the needs of advertisers, by implementing new methods to violate user privacy. Every other browser has simply blocked advertisers from collecting this information, but Google is an ad company, and hence is anti-consumer at heart.
