7
For exactly the reasons you state - Google doesn't want ad blockers in their browser.
Wonder why they haven't nuked them on desktop Chrome then, where extensions are a plenty?
Is mobile a much more juicy fruit for their advertisers, or is it like said elsewhere in here more a technical thing?
Wonder why they haven’t nuked them on desktop Chrome then, where extensions are a plenty?
Extensions are so popular on PC browsers, that Google could really jeopardize their dominant market share, if they were to completely remove extension support. The press would be on it for weeks and there could be a real hit on user numbers.
I think that Google rather tolerates the small number of users who use extensions and doesn't want bad PR for Chrome on PC.
But I wouldn't be surprised, when Google tries this in the future, when their browser market share is over 90%.
The game is different for mobile though – here we have a much bigger majority of unexperienced users who likely have never heard of browser extensions or such possibilities as easy-one-click-installation of ad-blockers.
I suppose a good canary on that then would be Google taking away the manual setting of PrivateDNS and making it only their DNS, in the name of some security threat/other reason.
Probably because the cat is already out of the bag there. Hard to reign them back in and they'd have tons of bad press if they do that.
Outside Chrome, the answer is that the extension support is a very big and fragile (hard to maintain) patch for Chromium.
Here's a list of browsers with extensions:
- Kiwi and Yandex browser support most Chrome extensions
- Firefox, Mozilla's Reference Browser and Firefox forks support most Firefox extensions, but you need to make a "collection" if you want more variety than the default list
- Samsung Internet supports some content blockers as app-based extensions
- SmartCookieWeb, Berry Browser, Sleipnir support userscripts
- Many other browsers also have some form of tracker and/or ad blocking
Extensions were a thing well before Chromium and I'm sure even the developers wanted them, so we got extensions.
There's never been a precedent for extensions on mobile and Google knows they can get away without, because if they do they'll have a hard time taking it back. And they really don't want everyone to have ad blockers on mobile because they know mobile ads is what brings in the cash, and they know mobile is one of the places where ad blockers would be the most useful and effective because the ads are so intrusive and annoying.
Kiwi supports custom extensions
I just block ads via dns (next dns, set in android network and internet settings)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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