So that you would notice sites that are serving obnoxious ads, and remember not to visit them in the future.
Maybe you are saying "the whole internet is like that now, it's impossible to find good sites without obnoxious ads", but I don't think it's that bad yet (hacker news is a good counterexample). But if everyone keep visiting user hostile sites, the site operators will see no incentive to change.
The "ad" as described in my comment isn't really an ad in the typical sense, it's baked into the website. But the real reason is, I'm on my work computer and unable to install browser extensions.
I'm in the IT department. Unfortunately massive global corporations routinely make extremely misguided decisions and don't particularly give a shit about what people like me have to say on the matter.
I'm well aware of all this, but I think you folks might be underestimating the hubris of gigantic corporations and how little my input as one IT guy at one little factory in one little part of the world means to the people who actually make decisions. Even if I wanted to bring these things to their attention, there is absolutely zero chance they'd ever so much as open an email from me. Whatever the company decides is gospel, only a fool would question their genius.
The site hides its content after a few seconds when using an ad blocker (on mobile Safari), showing a modal prompt asking to disable the ad blocker.
Of course there are ways around this, but at that point I don’t bother which such blogs anymore. It is a bit ironic given the subject of this blog post.
Save page, speed, battery life, bookmark sync, tab sync, and password sync are all slightly better in Chrome.
I used Firefox on Android for probably 11 years before switching to Dolphin (RIP) and then stock Chrome when Firefox made it a huge pain to install extensions. I keep waiting for someone to fully enable extensions on Chrome for Android.
Maybe you are saying "the whole internet is like that now, it's impossible to find good sites without obnoxious ads", but I don't think it's that bad yet (hacker news is a good counterexample). But if everyone keep visiting user hostile sites, the site operators will see no incentive to change.