[bpodgursky]

IMO the rise of aggressive ad-blocking extensions has spoiled a good thing for everyone.

I don't believe that Mozilla has any innate desire to lock-down users and prevent them from customizing their browsers, but making a browser is now an expensive and complicated project, and both Firefox and Chrome are bankrolled by companies which make their revenue primarily via advertising (Google + Yahoo, Google).

It's clear that Google will never make the same mistake with mobile Chrome -- it will never be extensible, because they have no desire to sacrifice that advertising revenue. I doubt it will be more than a year or two before the Mozilla app store is purged of ad-blocking extensions, if they ever make it in.

I don't want to get in some flamewar about "oh but ads are so bad, I can't help but install adblock". They suck, and I'm not accusing anyone of acting in anything other than their personal best interests, but I think everyone should acknowledge that this is the natural end-game.

[jacquesm]

There is now a different prong on this fork: adblocking software can help in filtering out drive-by-malware served up through advertising infrastructure. By removing ads you get rid of one possible source of trouble.

So besides the speed and the nuisance factors there is now also a security factor involved in ad-blocking.

[danielweber]

There is no evidence that they are going to ban ad-blocking extensions.