> Does ad blocking affect search engine ads?
> No. Ads shown on search engine results pages are not blocked.
A lot of the search results on top of Google are there to scam you, providing phone numbers for pass through services that charge $ for it, like flight cancellation:
A neighbor came to ask for help today. He got locked out of his Facebook account and was getting impatient with their AI, so he Googled "facebook support number" clicked on the first link (almost certainly an ad) and called the number. The person on the other end apparently told him they needed access to his bank accounts to verify his identity and you know the rest of the story.
How is Alphabet not responsible this? They push ads for scams at the top and earn money from it. That should be 100% on them to reimburse, then go after the scammers.
Also they say they will continue to show Firefox’s sponsored links and ads. So, they’ll continue to show first party ads and google’s ads? And likely they won’t be able to keep up with meta’s anti ad blocking. That’s most ads on the internet. No thanks, I’ll stick to ublock origin lite on safari.
There's no reason to hope there is a way to tell a particular source of ads to turn itself off when you can just use a non-gimped ad block on a non-gimped platform and block all ads without caring if any of them are cooperative or adversarial.
Me too, but we are few. Google paid $585M in 2024. I don't think Mozilla can get 58 million users to pay $10 each. That might even exceed the FF user base. Even if they could, they would use it as extra money, not to get rid of Google.
Mozilla has had a lot of funding over the years. They wasted most of it on useless side-projects. If, instead, they had saved up into a foundation, they could have been financially independent like a decade ago. Do not try to pay for Firefox; they'll just waste that too.
That's because browsers should be free. They are infrastructure, just like bridges. And nobody wants a bridge troll sitting on the single bridge crossing the internet river, demanding money from everyone.
You pay for bridges with tax. Tax funded browser sounds good in theory, but I don't trust the people managing my tax money to run a tech project like Firefox. Most likely it gets handed to the lowest private sector bidder, with the stipulation that any privacy preserving — sorry, I meant criminal hiding — features be removed.
What exactly is the problem? I understand a browser is a complex program but is the claim it is impossible to build a browser without continual dependence on advertising toxic dollars?
A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.
I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.
Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.
And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?
Does your hypothetical kernel make it easy or difficult for you to install add-ons that block ads? Does the organization that build it have a conflict of interest regarding advertisting/surveillance interests such as Google/Meta/...?
Not sure what your point is. My comparison was not made to be stretched infinitely. Next question may be "does your kernel render web pages?", but I don't see where it is going.
But to give an answer: if you wanted to bake an ad-blocker in the Linux kernel that would prevent programs from showing ads in a transparent way (the ads just don't show and the programs still work and look fine), I think it would not be trivial at all.
But I don't see the point of going down that discussion.
I'm not criticizing Orion for that; I actually enjoy it quite a lot (and will do even more when they will have ironed out all the UI bugs).
Also I'm eager to see how it will behave on Linux when they will have finished their port; I hope we will finally have a really low-energy consumption browser then.
> Does ad blocking affect search engine ads? > No. Ads shown on search engine results pages are not blocked.
A lot of the search results on top of Google are there to scam you, providing phone numbers for pass through services that charge $ for it, like flight cancellation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1p6h81i/beware_fake_...
So this omission should absolutely be addressed, but they probably cannot because of the Google Search contract...