Reading the comment section, I am really happy and uplifted that people expose Mozilla's wrongdoing by trying to look for ways to add <<ads>> into the browser.
And I am curious, is anybody aware of a good alternative browser or even just an alternative way to what Mozilla should be doing instead?
I use brave mostly but I am not sure if their ad blocking is any good under the hood or not... Seeing a company like Mozilla behaving like this, I honestly don't know who or what to trust anymore...
Servo is being worked on as an alternative (after Mozilla excised it in one of the dumbest decisions they could've done), with the devs recently starting work on adding browser chrome, but it'll probably take years before it can be considered to be a useful alternative.
For now your best bet is probably to use a Firefox fork (Icecat will probably not shit the bed, but there's many other forks although a good chunk of them also modify the source code in ways that might not be desirable to casual browser users since they started usually with the goal to privacy harden Firefox and privacy focused forks have a bad habit of disabling features you probably do want enabled) or a user.js for Firefox to turn off undesirable features, at least until the situation becomes truly unusable; not sure what the best choice is after that because none of the Firefox forks have the manpower to step up and become a new main browser.
Ad blocking works quite well in Brave and in Firefox with (ubo). Any other browser is just an almost carbon copy of one of those two methods. Are you seeing something that I’m not? I really don’t see 99% of the ads that would without ad blocking in browser. Also Mozilla is fine and most of us nerds freak out when they try something new like this.
>I am really happy and uplifted that people expose Mozilla's wrongdoing
I remember up until around 10 to 15 years ago when Mozilla enjoyed seemingly limitless good will from basically anyone who had anything to do with computers.
Now they're arguably more reviled than even Big Tech, and rightfully so especially since they're deceiving about it.
They have some good stuff like offline page translation.
But most importantly they have a good review process for popular browser extensions. Google controls Chrome store, and they have conflict of interest when it comes to hosting stuff like Ublock.
So for daily browsing locked down Firefox. For banking and office stuff vanilla Chrome.
> they have a good review process for popular browser extensions... [Google] have conflict of interest when it comes to hosting stuff like Ublock.
It's serendipitous you mentioned that extension, because Mozilla recently came under fire after its treatment of that developer[1], and people started talking about how tedious it is to publish extensions. Mozilla is now also an ad company, so it has the same conflict of interest as Google.
I see that conflict as a sign this process actually works. That extension had a few thousands of downloads, and should not get automatic pass, just because it is from famous developer.
Ublick Origin is different from "Ublock Origin Lite"
All Chromium and Firefox-based browsers are tainted by association. The most promising options are Ladybrid, forked from the SerenityOS browser, but it's a long wait to 2026, and Servo-based browsers like Verso:
It all comes down to web engines. There are many browsers built on top of Chromium and a few that use Gecko or WebKit. Some of these try to make as few changes to the underlying engine as possible to ease the engine upgrades in their codebases, and due to the nature of the web they have to keep updating their engines.
So, a big question then is if Google, Apple, or Mozilla decide to change their engine in such a way that it would improve user tracking on the web how many of these custom browser companies and individuals (Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, Tor, folks, etc.) would be willing to undo those changes, or add code to mitigate the tracking? And then how many of them will keep migrating their patches from one version of the engine to the next? And how many of them will continue doing so when the engine maintainers will actively try to make this work harder? And how many investors will keep giving money to these browser companies?
The web is very vulnerable, and Mozilla with its board slowly leeching off all the resources out of it has long been loosing its ground for a long time. I'm afraid that we are at a point when the only way to preserve user privacy is via regulatory means. EU is clumsy, but at least they make the user tracking more annoying for advertisers, and some actors like Apple would be more hesitant to blatantly add ad supporting code to WebKit just to avoid further confrontations with the EU.
On top of uBlock origin, I can also recommend plugins to remove tracking elements from the URL, remove cookies, and running an own unbound + adblock (or similar).
Sadly then this becomes hard to maintain for non-IT people (i.e. the majority).
