[bad_user]

> Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google

That's hyperbole.

Firefox was the first browser that made switching search engines or dealing with multiple search engines easy. Firefox was also the first to have usable add-ons for blocking invasive ads and trackers, always promoted as the best add-ons in their addons.mozilla.org. The pro-privacy culture has basically grown on top of Firefox.

I'm using DuckDuckGo on Firefox and I installed it on iOS too, because it makes it easier than Safari to deal with multiple search engines.

As for Google Search, people forget that Google Search is first and foremost the best search engine and most people expect nothing less. And when they tried switching that default to others, people bitched and moaned about it. Google is so far ahead of everybody that for the general population it has no competition. The same reason for why Apple cannot replace Google's Search and cannot build their own search engine, so might as well make some money off of Google.

This is not selling the users to Google, this is simply providing a good user experience by default. If anybody wants to help and fight this, then the first step would be to provide a better search engine. Don't get me wrong, I like DuckDuckGo and will keep using it due to privacy concerns, but for many searches, especially local ones, the difference is night and day. Not to mention that DDG is also dependent on Microsoft's Bing and it will be a sad day when Microsoft closes access to its APIs. Because apparently it's pretty expensive to have your own web crawler ;-)

[user812]

What would Google do if Mozilla blocks all ads browser wide by default? (Which they can't do adhoc because it is probably explitically forbidden in their contract with Google)

The answer will give you a clue about the question who is the product.

Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.

Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.

[bad_user]

Irrelevant.

If Mozilla blocks ads by default, the question isn't what Google would do, the far better question is what will the publishers do.

If big publishers start to block Firefox's User-Agent, it's game over for Firefox. And yes, publishers are increasingly more aggressive in blocking users with ad-blockers installed.

Or did you think that the content producers will simply stand by while their revenue vanishes?

Nope, not going to happen and it will be getting worse, before it gets better. Ad-block users have been ignored only because they were a minority.

Want to bet that they'll try extending the DRM support to the HTML content itself and thus make it illegal to block ads? It's going to be fun.

[consto]

Deciding who can see what content based upon User Agent is nothing new, it's why User Agents are such a mess in the first place.

[Yoric]

> What would Google do if Mozilla blocks all ads browser wide by default? (Which they can't do adhoc because it is probably explitically forbidden in their contract with Google)

Just a few things:

1. Mozilla did explore this a number of years ago, concluded that

  a. if you block all ads, you break the revenue of pretty much the entire web, so that's probably not something you want;

  b. if you block all ads, you break loading of many websites, and that's not something an established browser can afford to do;

  c. if you do either, websites are just going to block your browser;

2. Mozilla actually came up with ideas for blocking all ads without breaking the web, decided that there were too many variables, too many ways to break everything by accident, and did not pursue this plan – however, as far as I can tell, Brave either reinvented the same ideas or picked up that plan.

Also, to answer your specific question, Google pre-emptively reacted against any attempt of Mozilla by launching Chrome. If you recall, they launched Chrome pretty much because they could not buy Mozilla.

> Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.

While we live in a world where ads = privacy invasion, this doesn't have to be the case. If you look at recent versions of Firefox and ongoing projects, Mozilla has stepped up on privacy protection and keeps doing so.

Again, it's hard to do without breaking the web. But some can be done, one step at a time, and Mozilla is working on it.

> Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.

True.

[user812]

Thanks for the explanation.

I don't blame or rate Mozilla, I was just trying to explain why they are unable to move, due to their ties to Google.

I don't think it's a good or bad thing, but it's the reality.

Mozilla is probably trying it's best under this conditions.

Besides that, solving technical problems is possible if there is the will to do it.

[Yoric]

> Besides that, solving technical problems is possible if there is the will to do it.

Right now, the problem is that it breaks either the web or the browser.

The alternative currently being pursued by Mozilla (and the W3C) is WebPayments, which should pave the way for websites paid for by micropayments, rather than ads.

[user812]

Until Mozilla is free from Google et al., all "problems" related to blocking ads are merely theoretical.

[mverwijs]

Yet it was (the company) Opera that first included adblocking by default.