> Does ad blocking affect search engine ads?
> No. Ads shown on search engine results pages are not blocked.
A lot of the search results on top of Google are there to scam you, providing phone numbers for pass through services that charge $ for it, like flight cancellation:
A neighbor came to ask for help today. He got locked out of his Facebook account and was getting impatient with their AI, so he Googled "facebook support number" clicked on the first link (almost certainly an ad) and called the number. The person on the other end apparently told him they needed access to his bank accounts to verify his identity and you know the rest of the story.
How is Alphabet not responsible this? They push ads for scams at the top and earn money from it. That should be 100% on them to reimburse, then go after the scammers.
Also they say they will continue to show Firefox’s sponsored links and ads. So, they’ll continue to show first party ads and google’s ads? And likely they won’t be able to keep up with meta’s anti ad blocking. That’s most ads on the internet. No thanks, I’ll stick to ublock origin lite on safari.
There's no reason to hope there is a way to tell a particular source of ads to turn itself off when you can just use a non-gimped ad block on a non-gimped platform and block all ads without caring if any of them are cooperative or adversarial.
Mozilla has had a lot of funding over the years. They wasted most of it on useless side-projects. If, instead, they had saved up into a foundation, they could have been financially independent like a decade ago. Do not try to pay for Firefox; they'll just waste that too.
Me too, but we are few. Google paid $585M in 2024. I don't think Mozilla can get 58 million users to pay $10 each. That might even exceed the FF user base. Even if they could, they would use it as extra money, not to get rid of Google.
That's because browsers should be free. They are infrastructure, just like bridges. And nobody wants a bridge troll sitting on the single bridge crossing the internet river, demanding money from everyone.
You pay for bridges with tax. Tax funded browser sounds good in theory, but I don't trust the people managing my tax money to run a tech project like Firefox. Most likely it gets handed to the lowest private sector bidder, with the stipulation that any privacy preserving — sorry, I meant criminal hiding — features be removed.
What exactly is the problem? I understand a browser is a complex program but is the claim it is impossible to build a browser without continual dependence on advertising toxic dollars?
A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.
I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.
Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.
And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?
Does your hypothetical kernel make it easy or difficult for you to install add-ons that block ads? Does the organization that build it have a conflict of interest regarding advertisting/surveillance interests such as Google/Meta/...?
It's been days (weeks?) and I'm still waiting for the option to appear for me. These "experiments" are super annoying when you are on what I'm assuming is the long tail of a rollout but the marketing/blog posts speak of the feature like it's already launched.
If there's someone at Mozilla reading this: turn it on already! I want to get off Orion, it's so buggy, but the internet is unusable without an ad blocker.
> but the marketing/blog posts speak of the feature like it's already launched.
Yeah, seemingly tons of companies do this in a very weird way. Either make the switch 100% once you publish the press release, or wait until you reach 100% then publish. Starting the experiment with gradual rollout and then making the press release immediately seems like asking for potential problems and confusion among users.
But consider what the alternative looks like: People randomly see unexpected options in their apps, go to look for information about them, and don't find anything, or find some random Reddit discussion where no one is sure what's going on.
If the new feature looks random and unexpected and causes users to go to Reddit -the developer is doing terribly bad UX, and equally bad marketing and customer support.
A proper announcement done the day of the release, or an embedded notification like what Firefox already does (a "What's new" tab) that can be easily dismissed without any "Reminder me later" cr*p solves the issue.
This is frustrating, I think this a great development as someone who has been a Firefox user from the beginning but just switched to iOS. I see this new feature advertised and then it’s just not there, I update, still gone. The FAQ should at least be updated to say, this feature is only available at random due to a progressive experimental roll out and they should mention what version it requires etc. At least be up front when promoting something. I suppose I’ll just have to wait and then check periodically for it to show up.
I was under the impression that firefox could already use the Safari "content blockers" (as it uses webkit) like Firefox Focus and uBO Lite, but I'm not seeing that option actually. Been using Orion for a while now so not sure if that changed or I'm just misremembering it.
Randomly the new tab page stops working. And when the new tab page stops working, all browsing activity stops working until I restart the app. I think the pages load, but I can’t actually see them because it is hidden by the new tab page.
Also sometimes tabs disappear from the tab picker, which makes tab management confusing.
Even worse, two weeks back when the first news appeared (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319633), I had access to the ad blocker for about a week (and turned it on), but after a few days the option disappeared...
Obvious follow-ups: How does the A/B test choose between A and B, and how can it be manipulated into choosing A instead of B (or vice versa)? It's software, it has to be deterministic at some level.
As others have mentioned it doesn't stop YouTube ads or search ads. Most likely because Mozilla is still quite dependent on Google for it's income.
Which is why I think we need to be less critical everytime Mozilla tries to make money some other way. They need to become more self sufficient in order to improve Firefox.
That's correct. Soon there will be Ladybird, hopefully in a few years a very good competitor to Chrome/Firefox.
The thing I'm worried about with Ladybird is it's core logic is being coded by AI. I don't mind AI in other regions of code but I think core logic should be carefully written. They're also not very organized. Deciding to rewrite the whole codebase from CPP to Swift, then the decision changes to Rust shows uncareful decision making.
I am using DNS filtering on mobile, and noticed a new trend on some websites that detect an ad blocker: they force a browser native alert message which effectively blocks the page, followed by a page reload when the alert is dismissed. Wonder if there is a solution for that.
I was going to give credit to the direction Mozilla was taking here after their... questionable decisions in the past few year(s).
Only to see that this is neither generally available, nor can you use it without enabling telemetry. I don't know who makes these decisions inside Mozilla, but I just don't get it.
I think you can use it without enabling telemetry, due to a recent change:
> Previously, access to these changes required you to share technical and interraction data (telemetry) with Mozilla. However, as of Firefox version 148, you can opt into receiving remote improvements, even if you have opted out of sharing your telemetry or participating in our experimental studies.
> If you’re a Firefox user, you may have noticed a weird new extension that suddenly showed up in your browser this week.
> The extension is called “Looking Glass 1.0.3” and this is its description: MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. Now that sounds ominous. It’s really not, though. It’s a promotional campaign between Firefox and the TV series Mr. Robot that brings an alternate reality game to your browser. This must have sounded like a great idea when somebody pitched it to Mozilla, but the backlash has been fierce.
The extension did not do anything unless you put in a secret setting. It wasn't promoting anything.
If this had been a hardcoded easter egg there would have been no real complaints. But showing up as a mystery extension spooked some people, and then misreporting made it spread a lot further than if all the reporting was accurate.
Adds an effect to certain words on websites (like puppet, control, economy, robot), sends an extra header to red-wheelbarrow.com that changes what you see.
Well you see Mozilla did one Bad Thing a decade ago and that's a good reason to continue using the Ad Industry's chosen web browser instead; The one that gained most of it's marketshare by taking a page out of the malware industry's books and paying Oracle to include Chrome in the Java installer, among many many others.
You could always tell they didn't mean to install chrome, because these people would also have a malware "Chrome" browser that installed through the exact same pathway.
I hate. Absolutely hate that you can't say anything directly anymore without sugarcoating stuff in HN. Downvotes follow. I mean, the hell is HN for then?
Even the most obvious stuff needs to be said like... I don't know... but it looks like Google might be slightly bad here.
---
The CEO literally paid her hell a lot of money while she sold MDN to competition. While Rust to competition. While market shared shrinked from 9% (or 7%, forgot the exact number) to where it's now. Citing - NO MONEY!!!
We still have her controlling Mozilla right even though she is not CEO? And apparently we are not supposed to criticise em.
I once met a person that claimed they worked on iOS Chrome (the Safari wrap version) and when I asked them why the ad blockers didn't work they claimed they were unaware that the Safari iOS ad blockers didn't work in WebViews. I found that really hard to believe they didn't know.
Aren't they like 10+ years late with this? So after all this time, Mozilla comes with a minimal ad-blocker that hardly blocks anything (easylist only, and worse [1] ), compared to all other ad-blockers that have been available on iOS for many years.
I don't understand, maybe i'm missing something...
[1] "Ad Blocker won’t block every ad. Ads served directly by the site you’re visiting and ads shown in search results will still appear."
I tested and adblockers work on Safari for youtube ads again? Hmm, should I just give in and start using Safari again. Maybe this time it won’t dissappiunt me… Maybe it’s different this time…
It doesn’t cost cost google money to show that content. (It does cost someone else who google would be giving a cut of the ad revenue)
YouTube videos actually have some real world disk space, bandwidth, etc costs just to show so if google doesn’t get to show an ad they lose money instead of an opportunity to make money.
Firefox with uBlock Origin has blocked YouTube ads just fine on Android for years, and Google kept paying. uBlock Origin doesn't actually get installed by default on Firefox Mobile, but I'd wager that it effectively does.
I'm regularly surprised that people are willing to block YouTube ads. I know that Google gets that advertising money too, but you're also blocking revenue that the channel owner would otherwise get. I suppose it might depend what you're watching, but most YouTubers aren't big business, they're just individuals.
YouTube Premium is one of the few subscriptions I am completely happy to pay.
Isnt that part of the deal of uploading to YouTube? YouTube promises distribution and in return they show ads to make up for lost {storage,bandwidth} etc.
I'm surprised that YouTube doesnt ask $100 per year and then also show ads. Like App Store (which requires "developer fee" for doing far less)
It doesn't have to go through Google. Lots of us support the people they follow through patreon et al, I don't need to make the gigacorp even richer than it is. They have enough.
Why do these creators use YouTube then? Why cant they host it on s3 and the have you directly compensate? Surely the creator is getting some value from YouTube and YT expects to be compensated for that?
> Surely the creator is getting some value from YouTube and YT expects to be compensated for that?
I'd imagine Google would start charging for videos that don't make enough money or heavily deprioritize them from discovery. That seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.
I inherently disagree with the ad model of business. Intentionally worsening a product with ads to convince people to pay to remove them is just rewarding them for enshitification.
So on that front I'd prefer YouTube go out of business so that something like Nebula can take its place. Or the only videos left at\re the ones doing it as a hobby and not as a job.
No, uBOL blocks more ads and isn’t affected by Firefox’s insistence to not block Google Ads or their own.
> Sponsored shortcuts and other sponsored content shown by Firefox when you open a new tab are separate from ads on the web pages you visit, so Ad Blocker doesn’t affect them.
Just mentioned in another comment, but I'm not sure Firefox on iOS can actually use webkit content blockers? (I thought it could but have been using Orion exclusively for a while now)
It doesn't block the inline ads between story and comments on reddit.. my benchmark for browser ad blocking and ublock-origin is one of the few (only?) that does it. This is why I use the Orion browser on iOS.
Would someone smarter than me mind explaining why FF on iOS can't use extensions? I know every browser has to use WebKit but I've heard Orion is able to use FF and Chrome extensions.
It's a shame that the adblocker is limited, though. I've been using Orion as a replacement for Firefox on iOS, which has support for extensions (including uBlock Origin) and better UI/UX in my opinion, but it is not open source.
For that, there's ProTube[1]. On the surface it behaves like YouTube Premium, under the hood it's just the mobile version of YouTube bundled into an iOS app. I have no idea why ads aren't served, I analyzed the network requests with Fiddler Everywhere and saw nothing nefarious.
It's web scraping, and occasionally falls behind yt changes (2 years ago it was unusable for about a month). It could be described as an arms race, but Google appears to suffer it to live.
I suppose they understand that zero is not the optimal corruption target. (Because, as you asymptotically approach total control, the user cost also rises asymptotically.)
It's not a perfect solution - I have occasionally noticed it leading to some buggy behaviour in the YouTube/YouTube Music sites using Safari, but nothing anywhere near as bad as using those websites without it!
The only odd behaviour I can call to mind was one time that it continued playing audio when I answered a phone call. It was easy to stop the music playing, and the other person on the call couldn't hear the music. I was actually disappointed that the other person couldn't hear the music, and I've been disappointed every time I've taken a phone call since and the music hasn't continued playing. I wish that was a feature :)
I think Vinegar was well worth the small one-time price, and I like supporting the developer. I've heard that Brave allows playing with the screen off, but I like my setup enough that I don't want to install Brave just for that.
There‘s a checkbox called “Enhanced Protection” (name might vary, I have the app in another language) that specifically says it’s for stuff like YouTube
I will check what particular settings I have for AdGuard when I get back home this evening. I don't recall anything particularly hairy but it has been a few years.
Safari with the uBlock Origin Lite extension works well for me - even with "Web page Contents and Browsing History" permission set to 'Deny' for all websites.
> This feature is experimental and is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout. It may not yet be available to all users. Additionally, remote improvements must be enabled.
Apparently, you can only block ads if you allow Mozilla telemetry. Thanks, dicks.
Must we? Such vulgar swipes only weaken your position, making you seem like the bigger jerk. Please observe the guidelines, not because you owe Mozilla anything but because you owe this community and indeed yourself better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Appending "Thanks, dicks" weakens the comment because it demonstrates they have nothing to say other than vulgarity, which means they have nothing substantive to say at all. We never object to profanity by itself on HN. We do object to abusive swipes and name-calling, because it pulls discussion away from HN's primary purpose, which is curious conversation, and drags it towards the gutter.
While I have you: could you please have a re-read of the guidelines and have a think about if you really intend to participate here earnestly? We've asked you several times to lift your game, and we're not seeing any effort to reform. This place only continues to exist because we have guidelines and uphold them daily, and enough other people make the effort to contribute positively. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Deeply frustrating - I felt like Mozilla was gaslighting me -- I spent 3 minutes double-checking that even after updating Firefox minutes ago the option is still not visible to me.
Making an announcement when fewer than 40% of your customers will see the feature fees like (unintentional) gaslighting.
I HATE it when a company does a staged rollout of something after making a big announcement. If you're going to announce something, then don't stage the rollout. Its off by default after all..
> Does ad blocking affect search engine ads? > No. Ads shown on search engine results pages are not blocked.
A lot of the search results on top of Google are there to scam you, providing phone numbers for pass through services that charge $ for it, like flight cancellation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1p6h81i/beware_fake_...
So this omission should absolutely be addressed, but they probably cannot because of the Google Search contract...
so basically less than 1 percent chance
(and I love ff)
If anyone's interested I have a very pretty one listed in Brooklyn. See my Google search ad for details. :P
But it will still have tolls.
A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.
I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.
Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.
And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?
If there's someone at Mozilla reading this: turn it on already! I want to get off Orion, it's so buggy, but the internet is unusable without an ad blocker.
Yeah, seemingly tons of companies do this in a very weird way. Either make the switch 100% once you publish the press release, or wait until you reach 100% then publish. Starting the experiment with gradual rollout and then making the press release immediately seems like asking for potential problems and confusion among users.
A proper announcement done the day of the release, or an embedded notification like what Firefox already does (a "What's new" tab) that can be easily dismissed without any "Reminder me later" cr*p solves the issue.
Also sometimes tabs disappear from the tab picker, which makes tab management confusing.
Which is why I think we need to be less critical everytime Mozilla tries to make money some other way. They need to become more self sufficient in order to improve Firefox.
The thing I'm worried about with Ladybird is it's core logic is being coded by AI. I don't mind AI in other regions of code but I think core logic should be carefully written. They're also not very organized. Deciding to rewrite the whole codebase from CPP to Swift, then the decision changes to Rust shows uncareful decision making.
Only to see that this is neither generally available, nor can you use it without enabling telemetry. I don't know who makes these decisions inside Mozilla, but I just don't get it.
> Previously, access to these changes required you to share technical and interraction data (telemetry) with Mozilla. However, as of Firefox version 148, you can opt into receiving remote improvements, even if you have opted out of sharing your telemetry or participating in our experimental studies.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remote-improvements
How did that even happen? I sure hope that was a bug and not a product decision, because that sounds very backwards.
> If you’re a Firefox user, you may have noticed a weird new extension that suddenly showed up in your browser this week. > The extension is called “Looking Glass 1.0.3” and this is its description: MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. Now that sounds ominous. It’s really not, though. It’s a promotional campaign between Firefox and the TV series Mr. Robot that brings an alternate reality game to your browser. This must have sounded like a great idea when somebody pitched it to Mozilla, but the backlash has been fierce.
"Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser" - 757 points - Dec 15, 2017 - 515 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730
If this had been a hardcoded easter egg there would have been no real complaints. But showing up as a mystery extension spooked some people, and then misreporting made it spread a lot further than if all the reporting was accurate.
There might have been another way to do it later but we'll never know.
https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr/blob/master/addon/backgr...
You could always tell they didn't mean to install chrome, because these people would also have a malware "Chrome" browser that installed through the exact same pathway.
Even the most obvious stuff needs to be said like... I don't know... but it looks like Google might be slightly bad here.
---
The CEO literally paid her hell a lot of money while she sold MDN to competition. While Rust to competition. While market shared shrinked from 9% (or 7%, forgot the exact number) to where it's now. Citing - NO MONEY!!!
We still have her controlling Mozilla right even though she is not CEO? And apparently we are not supposed to criticise em.
I don't understand, maybe i'm missing something...
[1] "Ad Blocker won’t block every ad. Ads served directly by the site you’re visiting and ads shown in search results will still appear."
Brave is doing it, Firefox can do it too. And maybe I can recommend that kind of browser to the average Joe again.
YouTube videos actually have some real world disk space, bandwidth, etc costs just to show so if google doesn’t get to show an ad they lose money instead of an opportunity to make money.
YouTube Premium is one of the few subscriptions I am completely happy to pay.
I'm surprised that YouTube doesnt ask $100 per year and then also show ads. Like App Store (which requires "developer fee" for doing far less)
I'd imagine Google would start charging for videos that don't make enough money or heavily deprioritize them from discovery. That seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.
So on that front I'd prefer YouTube go out of business so that something like Nebula can take its place. Or the only videos left at\re the ones doing it as a hobby and not as a job.
Is that for a technical reason or a commercial one?
> Sponsored shortcuts and other sponsored content shown by Firefox when you open a new tab are separate from ads on the web pages you visit, so Ad Blocker doesn’t affect them.
Absolutely amazing, works inside webviews (e.g. netnewswire).
v3 just released.
https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/protube-block-ads-on-video/id6...
It's web scraping, and occasionally falls behind yt changes (2 years ago it was unusable for about a month). It could be described as an arms race, but Google appears to suffer it to live.
I suppose they understand that zero is not the optimal corruption target. (Because, as you asymptotically approach total control, the user cost also rises asymptotically.)
It's not a perfect solution - I have occasionally noticed it leading to some buggy behaviour in the YouTube/YouTube Music sites using Safari, but nothing anywhere near as bad as using those websites without it!
The only odd behaviour I can call to mind was one time that it continued playing audio when I answered a phone call. It was easy to stop the music playing, and the other person on the call couldn't hear the music. I was actually disappointed that the other person couldn't hear the music, and I've been disappointed every time I've taken a phone call since and the music hasn't continued playing. I wish that was a feature :)
I think Vinegar was well worth the small one-time price, and I like supporting the developer. I've heard that Brave allows playing with the screen off, but I like my setup enough that I don't want to install Brave just for that.
Please delete this before anyone sees it :)
Can we get tab management on iOS too please?
> This feature is experimental and is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout. It may not yet be available to all users. Additionally, remote improvements must be enabled.
Apparently, you can only block ads if you allow Mozilla telemetry. Thanks, dicks.
Must we? Such vulgar swipes only weaken your position, making you seem like the bigger jerk. Please observe the guidelines, not because you owe Mozilla anything but because you owe this community and indeed yourself better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
While I have you: could you please have a re-read of the guidelines and have a think about if you really intend to participate here earnestly? We've asked you several times to lift your game, and we're not seeing any effort to reform. This place only continues to exist because we have guidelines and uphold them daily, and enough other people make the effort to contribute positively. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As opposed to all the browsers that don't have this feature?
It's not done yet. When it's done it will just be a normal feature with no requirements.
Making an announcement when fewer than 40% of your customers will see the feature fees like (unintentional) gaslighting.