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by andrewla 23 days ago
I may be a bit unorthodox here but to me the user interest is in minimizing the amount that it attempts to modify the web. Ad blocking is frankly not something I want my browser to do. I want it to make it hard to advertise -- things like forbidding third party cookies, preventing browser fingerprinting, allowing text selection always, supporting dev tools and inspection, etc. Basically trying to respect the fact that it is a user agent and not a "server agent". This means killing off features like integrated sign-in and probably search result pre-fetching.

The reality is that if you are using ad blocking, you are free-riding off of users who are not using them. It's an illusion to believe that "ad blocking" can actually work. If "ad blockers" were universal, then sites would just work around it -- instead of serving from third-party domains they would use plugins to serve on the first-party page. This will make everything slower and more heavyweight. Right now it's just not worth doing it.