Yeah you can bet that Google will do anything they can to stop adblockers once their FLoC replacement is online. After all, in their view they have solved the "privacy problem".

Chrome is only going downhill from now. So is Edge, Microsoft has already at the stage where they don't prioritise user experience and appeal anymore and are priorising monetisation. Like with the "buy now and pay later" scams they're including. It's IE4 all over again, once they arrive at the desired marketshare the user is just a dumb sheep to them again.

Unfortunately Mozilla is far from perfect, they're becoming too corporate and weaseling in monetisation schemes totally in conflict with their goals. But they're still a world better.

Can you elaborate on the Mozilla corporate weasel part? As far as I can tell, they are just a) poorly managed and b) desperately trying to diversify revenue away from search prioritization contracts.

True but they are looking in all the wrong places. Including pocket "featured headlines", vpn services that are just a resell, just lowhanging fruit that does nothing but annoy the users that still care about them.

Meanwhile they try to make the browser as mainstream friendly, not understanding that the mainstream has long given up on them and they only have the last remaining bastion of hardcore privacy users left. Whose user patterns they're not seeing because they focus too much on telemetry.

I think since they became Mozilla Inc they started thinking like big tech and are slowly becoming just like it. But because their foundation origins the declining marketshare is not ringing their alarm bells like they, in a real company, would.

If they really wanted to diversify and get me to pay for something, they have to do more than just resell mullvad. I'm a mullvad user but I much rather pay for that directly as it gives me a lot more features. I love mullvad but I want to use it in more than just a browser.

What I'd want to see and would pay for:

- A service like Apple's iCloud Private Relay that really makes browsing more anonymous (rather than a basic VPN which they offer now, that's too little too late).

- Paid Sync storage (with full E2E so I have no reason to self-host)

- An archiving service of webpages (also E2E). Because onenote sucks more and more

Basically things other than 'quick wins' but that need some serious vision and development. Right now they're thinking way too much like a lazy CEO, doing a quick tie-in with another service hoping for some takeup or some cheap marketing benefit.

If they want to diversify and get people to pay they really have to offer some real benefits that are a gap in the market. Those exist but they need some more work than just a quick joint marketing effort.

I would pay for Firefox itself, no extras necessary or wanted. But there's no way to do that.

>The article specifically talks of Google breaking those AdBlock extensions

I bet there will be a Chromium for without that + Brave is already working on it. Power of open source I guess?

Every feature removed by Google will have to be maintained by the open source community instead. That's going to be a workload that I'm not sure who is going to pick up. After all Chromium right now is maintained by Google. There's some forks like degoogled chromium but they are mainly focused on removing features, not rebuilding ones that have been deprecated.

Brave is an option but I don't really like where they're heading with their crypto tokens.

Oh, no, Microsoft, Brave, and all the other companies that repackage Chrome will have to actually contribute to the base (or a fork). /s

The crypto aspect is opt-in

I know but it's a core integrated part of the product.

If you don't care about that, firefox with uBO is really much better IMO.

Only for now, they will bait and switch soon enough. We have seen this happen too many times.