[matheusmoreira]

> So firefox can't do much about it without actively trying to circumvent YT and YT specifically.

There's no reason why Firefox couldn't do that.

> Also, you can't have an ad-free experience if the price of using a service is that the ad is delivered to you.

Sure I can, uBlock Origin provides exactly that. They are not entitled to my attention. If they have a problem with that, they can return 402 Payment Required.

[_cenw]

That's excessive scope creep. Adding site-specific workarounds for some sites feels uncomfortable. Who decides what websites get "fixed", and how? That's a great bit to move to addons. Maybe recommend them more visibly instead.

Also, remember how Mozilla is funded.

[matheusmoreira]

> That's excessive scope creep. Adding site-specific workarounds for some sites feels uncomfortable.

Not to Google and its fellow corporations apparently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29707078

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

They have site-specific fixes for their own sites. Instead of fixing their stuff, they fixed the browsers instead. We can obviously apply the exact same strategy to dealing with every single website out there. If a website is broken or generally annoying to use, just fix it by providing a site specific version of the browser.

They don't even need to reinvent the wheel. Port yt-dlp to Firefox. That will fix YouTube and literally every other video website out there. What yt-dlp does should be a core feature of every browser out there. It's that good. uBlock Origin too.

> Who decides what websites get "fixed", and how?

Whoever develops the browser or its extensions. Arguably the whole of uBlock Origin and its filter lists are just databases of site specific fixes. If people can maintain an extremely huge list of advertisers and blockers for every website out there, surely they can maintain something like this.

> Also, remember how Mozilla is funded.

I remember Mozilla has about a billion dollars in the bank. Who cares about their Google funding? I doubt they're gonna drop them anyway. I bet they pay them just to ward off risk of antitrust lawsuits.

[progval]

Firefox has this kind of workaround too: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensi...

[matheusmoreira]

Every browser does. I'm arguing they should have even more extensive workarounds for website idiocy than they do now. They're our user agents. Their purpose is to make the consumption of data from remote servers as painless as possible. They should totally fix sites in pursuit of that goal. Whether the sites want to be fixed or not.

[atleta]

There are a lot of reasons why Firefox or other browsers can't do that, but my claim was that FF (or any browser) can't do it without writing code specifically to get around YT. And this was a response to the parent who said that FF should (and could) simply just ignore the CSS.

> Sure I can, uBlock Origin provides exactly that.

Obviously, I meant that it doesn't work financially so there is no point being upset about it. If enough people block the ads then they'll do something about it. Actually it's not hypothetical anymore, I just started to see these warnings a few days ago. (I wasn't deliberately blocking the ads, I've been just using ghostery which, it seems, started blocking YT ads.) So yeah, in the end, as you also say, people in general can't consume ad supported services without paying with their attention. It just doesn't work business wise.