this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Unfortunately, there are only 3 companies developing browsers right now: Google, Apple and Mozilla.
Apple's browsers are only available on Apple platforms. In fact, if you're on iOS you have no choice, you have to use Safari. Even browsers labelled as "Chrome" or "Firefox" are actually Safari under the hood on iOS. But, on any non Apple platform, you can't use Safari.
Google is an ad company, so they don't want to allow ad blockers on their browser. So, it's a matter of time before every kind of ad blocking is disabled for Chrome users.
Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google, so there's a limit as to what they can do without the funding getting cut off. They seem to be trying to find a way forward without Google, but the result, if anything is as bad as Google if not worse:
"investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term;"
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
All these other browser people like are basically reskinned versions of Chrome or Firefox. They have a handful of people working on them. To actually develop a modern browser you need a big team. A modern browser basically has to be an OS capable of running everything from a 3d game engine, to a word processor, to a full featured debugger.
It looks like it's only a matter of time before there will be 0 browsers capable of blocking ads, because the only two companies that make multi-platform browsers depend on ads for their revenue, and both of them will have enormous expenses because they're obsessed with stupid projects like AI.
Apple has a conflict of interest too: they need to keep safari gimped so that users have to install apps instead of using PWAs, so that Apple can keep getting 30% of the app sales.
As a result, Safari is terrible and very far behind in standards. It's the new internet explorer.
I don't know if I'd take it that far. Firefox and the Chrome engine are open source projects. Anyone can modify the browser to enable ad-blocking in some form if a user is sufficiently determined. Now, will it be possible to write and distribute a popular an effective adblocker under these conditions? It appears to be getting harder.
Technically, sure. But, these are extremely complex software products, and it would be one hobbyist vs. an entire software division of a trillion dollar company who are determined to make sure you see ads.