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> Or...hear me out: Firefox gets into the adblocker business and lets the big boys paya fortune to be exempted by default. That will make Firefox a very attrac

> Or...hear me out: Firefox gets into the adblocker business and lets the big boys paya fortune to be exempted by default. That will make Firefox a very attractive browser to people who want to block as many ads as possible, and they will then install an add-on which also blocks the ads that Firefox whitelists, perhaps using Firefox's own whitelist as a source if it's easily available. Then if Firefox tries to pull a Google and be evil and lock down their add-on API so that ad blocker add-ons can no longer be made, these people will just switch to a fork with no such limitations. And in the first place I don't think Firefox has enough usage for them to be able to charge a "fortune" for such an ad blocking exemption in the first place. By "EU and US govs mandating it as the only default browser" I assume you mean for government employees and not for the entire populace (which would be straight up despotic), but either way it would probably be unenforceable.

NegativeK 3y ago
> but either way it would probably be unenforceable. A healthy IT organization shouldn't allow the average user to install their own browser of choice. But government orgs tend to be underfunded to the point that Firefox mandates are nowhere near their top tech priority.
_8j50 3y ago
> By "EU and US govs mandating it as the only default browser" I assume you mean for government employees and not for the entire populace Yes, for their own gov pcs not the people in general. > and they will then install an add-on which also blocks the ads that Firefox whitelists You are the third commenter I had to explain this to, so maybe my fault in not making this clear but there is no need for that, the whitelist is just a default "moderare" adblock setting which you can change to "aggressive" to block everything. And exisiting adblockers will continue to work if you prefer them. This is similar to how you can set your search engine to duckduckgo but google pays a fortune to be the default.

NegativeK 3y ago

> but either way it would probably be unenforceable. A healthy IT organization shouldn't allow the average user to install their own browser of choice. But government orgs tend to be underfunded to the point that Firefox mandates are nowhere near their top tech priority.

_8j50 3y ago

> By "EU and US govs mandating it as the only default browser" I assume you mean for government employees and not for the entire populace Yes, for their own gov pcs not the people in general. > and they will then install an add-on which also blocks the ads that Firefox whitelists You are the third commenter I had to explain this to, so maybe my fault in not making this clear but there is no need for that, the whitelist is just a default "moderare" adblock setting which you can change to "aggressive" to block everything. And exisiting adblockers will continue to work if you prefer them. This is similar to how you can set your search engine to duckduckgo but google pays a fortune to be the default.