Firefox has a vested interest (money) now for people to watch (their network) ads. Expect to move Firefox to drop uBlock too (written in Firefox with uBlock)
You say that like web rendering engines grow on trees...
At this point your (multi-platform) options are:
- Chrome + its kin
- Firefox + its kin
There is one/two new "third" browsers/engines in the works that will be ready "who knows when".
The shift you'd make is from Firefox to something based on Firefox / Chrome... then you wait and hope that Ladybird actually gets somewhere or that the Servo engine doesn't take another forever to mature... and someone builds a browser around it. I'd call that mighty slim pickings. Especially considering how beholden the downstream browsers are to the upstream ones, particularly for smaller projects.
I have ADHD and I cannot use a product if there is ads. In any form they exist in, they take up time, energy, and attention, all of which I have precious little of compared to the average person.
Ensuring I still have PiHole or NextDNS to block ads at a DNS level, I'd use Safari with any adblock extension.
Failing that, I'd browse the compatible web with a TUI browse in terminal.
Failing that I'm reading books and taking notes on paper or in Vim. No internet for me.
I'm a screen reader user. It's similar for me, accept if I really wanted to navigate around the ads I suppose i could. However i do have chronic migraines, so that reduces my ability to care about ads. Or X embeds, Or facebook sharing widgets. So no, it isn't just an ad thing, it's a let's not take a whole bunch of energy to navigate a page thing.
I sympathise. It annoys me to no end that accessibility seems to be an afterthought on the modern web.
Another thing for me is that popups annoy me. If I get too many modals pop up on a page, I get emotionally frustrated. This is quite common these days with some websites– all it takes is one GDPR cookies modal and an AI chat popup in the bottom right corner– and that's already way more frustration than my brain can handle.
I really do not like cookie consent popups! I've installed extensions to try and block them, oh and you know what else I try and block? Those AI overlays that say they're trying to make the web more accessible. Because they really aren't doing the thing they say they're supposed to be doing.
If Mozilla proves unviable we’ll move from Firefox to the next entity that isn’t hostile to their user base or make one that isn’t.