Firefox, I doubt it. They love the ad money so biting the hand that feeds them is risky, never know who will feed them next and how much.

Microsoft might, even though Bing is profitable and in 2015 brought in ~ $1b a quarter https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/ . Might be too much money for Microsoft to ruin it.

All Apple right I think, but if they wanted to hurt Google they could start a search engine, maybe by buying DDG.

As a browser vendor, yes, you have to try to not piss off advertisers, because if website owners don't make money off of your browser, they're not going to test against it much, but why would you list that reason specifically for Firefox? Firefox is the browser that's willing to bite advertisers' hands more than any other browser. They even ship effectively an ad blocker in Private Browsing.

DDG is not a search engine.

Can you elaborate? DuckDuckGo[1] sure looks like a search engine to me.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/

OP probably means that DDG uses Bing search results to populate the index

Is it ice-cream? Dance Dance Gelato?

You may wish to visit this link:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/1/15726778/chrome-ad-blocker...

By the way, a friendly reminder that EFF is happy to take donations and there are a variety of ways to do so.

Blocking a few egregious ad types is not at all the same as the blocking of privacy-invading cookies as Apple is doing.

> The Chrome ad blocker doesn’t just help publishers, it also helps Google maintain its dominance. And it advantages Google’s own ad units, which, it’s safe to say, will not be in violation of the bad ad rules.

Don’t be evil, indeed.

Right, but it's a start - meaning they might eventually get there. It means there is pressure and that they may be obligated to take notice. It's not the end, it is the beginning.

> Right, but it's a start - meaning they might eventually get there.

Get where, exactly? 88% of Google money comes from Ads[0], if you think their plan is to remove them from web you are either crazy or stupid.

[0] - http://www.businessinsider.de/how-google-apple-facebook-amaz...

It means it's a start towards protecting the user and working towards privacy and security goals. They will still make money selling ads.

It means it's a start towards removing competitors ads as "bad ones," meaning "use Adwords if you your ads to show and bypass the ad-blocker."

This is needlessly cynical. At the end of the day Google ads are unobtrusive and sane and have some standards in their construction. No fake download buttons, flashing gifs, and so on. It’s not their fault that most of the ad industry sucks.

Actually, I spoke to a Googler about this a couple months ago, and this is actually false! Despite Google's Chrome/Security teams planning to penalize sites with fake download buttons in early 2016 (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/googl...), a Google employee actually confirmed for me that they weren't against the Ads team's policies, which is why they were still prevalent on sites with Google Ads this past year.

Which presumably means one division of Google could make money on a fake download button ad while another division of Google was penalizing a website for displaying it.

The employee in question said he was going to bring up the concern internally and try to get the policy changed, but I haven't heard anything since.

HN is full of cynics today. Google commits to taking a step in the right direction and people just refuse to believe it. I don't mind the downvotes, I've got karma to spare, but it is pretty silly. They should be applauded and encouraged, and we should be happy they are going this far.

It's in Google's best interest to make ads less intrusive and offensive. That way, people have less incentive to block them. Google can, and will, still profit from ads. However, they need to be good stewards or more people are going to just block them.

Firefox already has some protection implemented [1], but I don't know exactly how much is blocked.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-pbm...