It's not breaking the web, it's breaking part of the web's grasp on users. Is the web for people or is it there to use people?

"Ad blocking will start being a problem"

I live in the days where both all ads and all bullshit responses to my adblocker ("don't block my ads!!") are blocked; it's a breeze of fresh air. Sometimes a site tries to get around it and I block it permanently.

Element picker mode is right at the edge of my patience, so I usually give up if it doesn't work. If I still really want something from the site I view source.

The alternative is what we do now: a select group with tech savvy blocks advertisements, and lets the masses pick up the bill by 'accepting' ads and having their every movement online tracked.

There is no magical solution. The alternative is some kind of payment system.

And many people can't afford paying for each site they visit, so it would limit people's access to the net if there were paywalls everywhere.

Also, if sites can't show ads and not enough people subscribes then many sites will close which would lead to further concentration of the web. Small players would be eliminated, big players would still thrive.

Independent journalism would decrease while sites financed by rich companies and people could keep running and promoting the agenda of the rich players.

Either that, or on-line advertising is not nearly as effective as advertisers think it is, and they are just subsidising the whole shebang while the Facebooks and Googles profit.

As for journalism: yes, that is tricky. Personally, I'm subscribed to one national quality newspaper (NRC in the Netherlands) as my main source of news and research journalism, and just today I've set up an annual subscription for €12 with the Guardian, which I visit occasionally as it is one of the few reliable British sources for news on the whole Brexit ordeal.

Ideally, I would pay a monthly flat fee that I can distribute at the end of each month to participating websites I've visited, but such a system would have to be fair to both the consumers and the publishing websites. If it just ends up a system with yet another FAANG-like Silicon Valley middleman that takes a 30% cut I'm not interested.

You know the answer to that. People can pay with their data, their interests. And if you put the question to people if they want a free web which sells their data or pay for every site then most people will choose the first.

The data is a means to an end: the ability to provide advertisers with a way to reach very specific groups of people, and a way for advertising platforms to track not just the same user, but a very detailed user profile.

Knowing what people's interests are is worth diddly-squat until you use that knowledge to push ads to them that are likely to resonate with them.

And I like it. I know it's selfish; I'm just speaking my mind.

Soon, there will be so many people blocking ads that many websites will simply become pay-per-view, and that's going to be bad for me.

It's also worth noting that anecdotically, blocking all third party cookies and running an adblocker has not lead to "breaking the web" in my personal use. I can count any issues I encountered on one hand, and I've run this setup for years. It might me that my internet use is weird (I don't believe so) but it makes me feel the consequences for users for this is overblown.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170421064522/http://www.montul...

Doesn't Safari already do this (or something like this)?

Safari works pretty well on most web sites. So what will Firefox be doing differently that will "break" the web?

How is this “breaking the web”? Honest question, I would not subscribe to that sentiment, but am interested in other points of view.

A prime example of "if a website tells a browser to load something" is popup windows - if a website tells a browser to open a dozen popups and popunders, then no, the browser should not do so. Earlier browsers did what the websites told them to do, and that was a horrible thing, so that's been changed.

Browsers in the modern web need to defend the user, not execute arbitrary instructions from random websites that nobody cares about.

(Please don't say "if I send you a malformed png file you have to execute the exploit, otherwise your argument breaks down".)

When I buy and read a newspaper, I don't expect the publisher to start following me everywhere and keeping a log of my life. When I read an article online, I shouldn't have to think about that either. But sites have so flagrantly abused the ability to deliver more than just the content I've deliberately requested, in order to track (and monetize) user behavior everywhere, that it's entirely appropriate for my User Agent to take steps to defend me.

I don't mind a site delivering some ads alongside the content I've asked for, just like I accept some ads in a printed magazine. But I don't expect my magazine to come with an embedded tracking device that will stick to me like a burr, even long after I've read the content and recycled the pages.

'We should patch exploits' and 'all things we would like to not load are considered exploits' seems to be rather begging the question. There is a class of things that use legitimate browser features, but we would prefer to not load by default.

You are covering the unauthorized access but disrupting/damaging is absolutely possible using plain old HTML and JS.

Privacy advocates argue that it's not only possible but many trackers are guilty of exactly that.

So the browser is in fact blocking malware.

... And yes, if you think about it, that definition does apply to ads as well. Really says something doesn't it :)

Edit: PeterisP says it much better in a sibling comment.

I recommend updating your adblocker. I haven't seen that kind of crap in ages, because I block that stuff too.

If you can bounce through an SSO provider to set a first-party cookie, you can bounce through an ad tracker. Even with a heuristic that requires action on the interstitial, how do you distinguish between redirects to services like Google that support social login and ad tracking?

Separating SSO and ad tracking is nontrivial and may result in collateral damage.