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Google Chrome's next update will mark the end of popular ad blockers (9to5google.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 67 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (10 children)

I think that the concern is whether a number of websites might stop working with Firefox if Chrome users consistently represent ad revenue and Firefox users generally don't.

I use Firefox, but it has relatively-limited marketshare in 2026. A lot of people just browse on mobile devices and on Android devices, and there Chrome's probably the default browser.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/

Chrome at 70.25%.

Safari at 15.72%.

Edge at 5.14%.

Firefox at 2.19%.

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  • [–] 30 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    That's going to change though with ad blocker not working on chrome, more people will install Firefox for android.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

    Yeah, that's true. But...if a website derives its revenue from ads, a non-ad-viewing user

    and users who switch browsers so as to use an ad blocker would presumably be blocking ads

    loses that website money rather than generating it. Like, for such a website, the issue would be how many Firefox users that do view ads would be lost if their website didn't work on Firefox.

    Those of you who remember the early 2000s, when Internet Explorer had very high marketshare, probably remember a number of websites that didn't work with other browsers.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago

    Google is already killing the ad revenue model of the web by presenting the content it scrapes with AI for search — effectively stealing their content for profit — instead of ranking links so users navigate to their sites. Many have ahead seen a 70-90% drop in traffic, resulting in a 70-90% drop in ad revenue.

    Capitalism is a blast, huh? Crime is very legal and very cool!

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago

    Broad rule of thumb for me:

    If your website needs ad revenue to either exist, or that's fundamentally its entire business model?

    That website does not need to exist.

    Now sure, are their caveats to this? Yes. But broadly, its usually true. The website should exist as a small loss leading part of your whole shebang, or should have some kind of membership or donation model or something else, to fund itself.

    Its also not that hard to make a website follow broswer agnostic standards. If the website can't figure out how to do that, if they think its fine to be a browser-vendor exclusive website, I don't need to use it.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Because people weren't testing to work on the various browsers, which is pretty much what happens now with many sites and Firefox. People don't adhere to the webstandard so Firefox doesn't always work, but if we see a huge surge in Firefox then websites might put effort into them working in hope to catch some revenue of oerson doesnt have a blocker

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Useragent Detection - Your Current Useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/149.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

    Browser userAgentData HighEntropyValues: { "platform": "Android", "platformVersion": "10.0.0", "mobile": true, "model": "K" }

    Browser Name: Chrome
    Browser Version: for Android
    OS: Android 10.0
    Hardware Vendor: Unknown
    Hardware Model: Unknown
    Screen Width:
    Screen Height:
    Is it a desktop device: No
    Is it a mobile device: Yes
    Is it a tablet: No
    Is it a crawler/robot: No
    Is it a console: No

    That's what is returned by their browser detection tool for Vanadium on graphene.

    Cromite is even more privacy oriented, returning

    Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/148.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

    { "platform": "Android" }

    Browser Name: Chrome
    Browser Version: for Android
    OS: Android 10.0
    Hardware Vendor: Unknown
    Hardware Model: Unknown

    Their stats combine ALL versions of chrome (chromium) which would also include things like cromite, degoogled chrome, cromium itself, possibly vivaldi, apps that use webview (doordash, voyager for lemmy, bank apps, etc) might even be included as they are chrome/chromium on android, would all tally for chrome with no differentiation even though some versions are light years apart.

    Cromite/vanadium and chrome are the same browssrs the way chocolate and vanilla are the same ice cream.

    Oh, and to muddle things some more, on Android, viewing using desktop site gives this:

    Browser Name: Chrome
    Browser Version: 148.0
    OS: Linux 0
    Is it a desktop device: Yes

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    If that happens, Google becomes a monopoly, if it isn't already. They don't want this (or at least they haven't, but they might think it won't matter now). If they continue wanting Firefox to be relevant to help their argument that they aren't a monopoly, they'll do what they can to ensure Firefox continues to work.

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