Please, ublock has a big fat off button. Also, it is trivial to have am instance of chrome or safari available if your locked down firefox is blocking your course work

Honestly, I would considers users who run Chrome or Safari without extensions to be safer than users who run Firefox with this guide's "few simple steps" applied. I'd rest more easily at night knowing they're protected by someone who's making judgement calls appropriate for non-technical users who have no support if something goes wrong.

But again, most users that can't operate an adblocker also cannot be trusted to browse the Internet without one.

You're describing this setup like it's a choice between complicating someone's life or giving them a simple browser that just works. Phishing attacks are nasty. No matter what choice you make, a new user is going to have a complicated element they need to be educated about. You either have to teach them to use an adblocker, or you need to teach them Internet security best practices.

To jump back to the same comparison I made earlier, this is like wiring a house without circuit breakers because the owner is too scared to mess with the little switches. Is it simpler? Sure, but it stops being simpler when their house burns down.

Nontechnical users click on things; they particularly click on flashing banners that tell them they've won prizes, and they particularly click on images with scary fonts that tell them that their Facebook has the virus and needs to be updated. If you're going to give a nontechnical user a browser without an adblocker, you need some kind of other defense against phishing attacks, fake download links, cryptocurrency miners, and compromised Ads/CDNs that scrape credentials out of payment forms.

Do you have an alternative defense? If not, then I really feel like for someone as tech-illiterate as you're describing, giving them a bare browser is roughly the equivalent of throwing them naked into a hostile environment.

The example I provided, about school courseware and a browser damaged by an expert and the student dropping the class, wasn't a made-up example.

I have to follow up on this though -- Did the person in question just not have your phone number or email?

Disabling uBlock Origin is literally two clicks. I understand someone not knowing how to do that -- I don't understand not being able to explain how to do it.

And even in the crazy case where someone drops a course, that's still a preferable scenario to me over helping an Uncle remove a keylogger because a big scary box told him to click it on it.

When I set up a computer for someone I either need to teach them how to whitelist a site, or I need to teach them Internet security, which is not always possible to do. I think it's irresponsible to put someone online who's not an expert without at least some protection to keep them safe.

I was posting business cards offering my repair services on university posting boards at the time, and due to the volume of requests during the new semester I couldn't schedule the visit before they had to make the drop decision. (No, I wasn't the 'expert' who damaged their browser before they called me.)