[luckylion]

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.

[hvis]

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.

[luckylion]

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.

[hvis]

> 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...

[luckylion]

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

Yes, and doing so will escalate the arms race. I believe that browsers will come out as the winners, and that's a good thing for privacy.

> This is starting to change, and a lot of websites still have ads as their main source of revenue.

Sure, but then again, most sites I see on a daily basis in Google are pure shit - made only to display ads, with the same content that is also on a million other pages, slightly rewritten so Google considers it unique. Nothing of value will be lost if the all burn up and go away.

I'm sure you're right, there will be unforeseen consequences, but I feel like appeasing the adtech industry by not stopping their surveillance is not going to be helpful.

Better Ads focuses only on perception: A flashy, dumb static banner is bad, a stalking text-ad that sends information back to its creepy owner where it is then correlated with MasterCard payment data, your location, the interests of your friends etc and saves all of that into a shadowy profile that follows you around is fine, because it's text only and is labeled "advertisement". I can't decide whether it was just an extortionist cash-grab or a smart way to redirect the attention from the actual problem to the surface problem ("it's bright, and it's animated").

[hvis]

> believe that browsers will come out as the winners, and that's a good thing for privacy

Even if I agree with you on the rest, we're back to Firefox not having a majority marketshare.

Mozilla could make a choice to only serve our particular niche, to the exclusion of less-technical users, but I don't think it's a good choice for it, or for the whole web.