[runtime_blues]

Google is big, wealthy, and tech-savvy enough to, at the very least, make ad blockers unreliable and annoying most of the time for most of the users.

This is not good news, and it's probably not going to be a lesson in humility for the company.

[tedivm]

The fact that they control Chrome should scare everyone.

[joshmanders]

And doing anything with Chrome to undermine people will not only harm them in this ad-blocking race, but also cause them to lose massive market share in the browsers... They won't do that. They're not that dumb.

[juliangoldsmith]

Chrome has no effective competition in the browser market, so Google has no need to worry about market share.

Firefox's user base has shrunk to the point where it's barely relevant. (And I say this as a user myself.) Beyond that, Mozilla currently needs to follow Google's lead just to stay alive. They rely on Google financially, and need to keep up with Chrome's features to maintain what market share they have left.

Brave and the like could be easily killed off by taking Chrome closed-source. Microsoft would probably strike a deal to keep Edge alive. I doubt Safari supports extensions, and Apple wouldn't have any qualms about pulling a few to keep the peace with Google.

Getting us out of this will be difficult. Barring Google returning to their old slogan, the only option I can see is a move to a new set of standards. Hopefully things will move back towards decentralization as peoples' technical literacy increases.

[stOneskull]

> Firefox's user base has shrunk to the point where it's barely relevant.

it would come back for sure.

[IggleSniggle]

Everyone still remembers Firefox fondly. The wrong move from Google and everyone (who will take a step to manually download a browser) will return to it.

[juliangoldsmith]

The problem is that Google still pays Mozilla's bills. If their biggest donor suddenly pulls out completely, they'll be in trouble.

[tedivm]

I've been using Firefox exclusively for a few years now and it's really great.

[pseudalopex]

You could have looked up if Safari supports extensions. It does. More limited than other browsers however.

[AlexandrB]

That ship has already sailed with manifest v3, which cripples ad blockers.

[cynicalsecurity]

It's not about tech, it's about human psychology, monetisation and business planning.

A YouTube user with an AdBlock is highly unlikely to click on any ads making them pretty much useless. So why keep bothering them?

[paulryanrogers]

They are likely affluent enough to afford Premium

[ghusto]

Sure, but I still won't be paying. There's nothing so important in YouTube that I'd ever even consider paying, I'd drop it like a hot turd if I couldn't block ads.