Google have been doing this for 10+ years and people are only now starting to see it, it seems.
the Microsoft antitrust trial original verdict was reached in 1999 by the way (appeals kept it alive a bit longer, though, into 2001). you are probably referring to the 1990s Microsoft, I imagine.
these days many website don't work in firefox. And the worst thing is you never know it was firefox that was causing problem. Last time I tried to login verizon it didn't work. Same with many website I can't remember on top of my head.
I still can't leave firefox due to multi containers tho :(
I've found that many times when a site doesn't work in Firefox it's actually extensions causing issues rather than Firefox itself. That being said, there are still compatibility issues from time to time!
Firefox is a legitimate alternative, it works for >99% of the world's websites and is an actual alternative i.e. not a clone of Chrome. I've been using it for nearly the last 5 years full-time and have never needed to open Chrome. I am not sure how one can pretend otherwise, so no, I don't think just saying it's "bad" and ignoring it as an alternative is viable.
Do some Google websites perform worse on Firefox? Sure, but the entire reason that's because people don't use Firefox enough i.e. some websites are worse on Firefox. You just go around and around. If the audience of HN is not able to make that sacrifice (not use some of the GOOG's website) then we deserve the monopoly of Chrome.
Other than that, I also think we need a third alternative for Browsers. Ladybird is in the news these days, and if you're a dev and care about this issue, we should all be contributing to it.
I agree about your clone comment ala Brave, and so on.
no bc they are leveraging monopoly in search to advantage their other products and undermine competition.
im a relatively happy firefox user, but at this point to say mozilla significantly mitigates googles monopoly is as plausible as when microsoft claimed that BeOS somehow mitigated theirs.
If you block third party javascript files (e.g. google analytics) other code required for the website to function correctly might fail, since it relies on that third party javascript. So uBlock doesn't block certain javascript files, and instead replaces them by its own version which contains dummy functions that avoid those errors.
>OK that doesn't have to do with blocking Google AdSense ads nor does it have to do with proxying so I'm kind of confused.
When a website wants to load an ad, it uses javascript[0]. The website can call a function in the included javascript file and tell AdSense "hey load an ad". If you simply block the JS file the website can break due to trying to call functions that don't exist.
uBlock (supposedly, I haven't verified this) instead of blocking the JS instead replaces it with it's own version. That version just basically says "yeah sure cool" whenever the website tries to display an ad, but doesn't actually do anything.