Google's biggest source of revenue is from web ads. They deliberately choose to not have extensions on the mobile version as it would mean that users could install ad block extensions, causing them to miss out on potential earnings from mobile ads.

This led me to install Brave after being irritated at the umpteenth mid-article malvertising redirect. Definitely recommend Brave. They even pay you about 75 cents an ad for fairly unobtrusive, plaintext, notification area ads.

This comes up so often on HN that I feel like no-one is going to be converted in either direction at this point but I suppose just for the sake of completeness:

"No, you shouldn't use Brave.": https://web.archive.org/web/20210531085250/https://aspenuwu....

That was actually quite helpful, thank you. Guess I'm a HN 10,000er today.

Okay, I am converted. Now is duckduckgo safe? Or is there an article like this about it too?

As far as I know DDG is fine. It's harder for a website to be quite so malicious, anyway.

Wow seeing this for the very first time. Very eye opening I must say.

I didn't know that. Do you know how much do they gain from that ad? Is it possible not to see any ad anyway?

It's opt-in, you can turn them off entirely if you want.

> it's been downloaded 1B+ times

Play store download numbers are meaningless for a pre installed app. Chrome is installed by default on all Android phones and you cannot remove it. If you disable it, often some other things like webview do not work well.

Firefox's app (at least on Android, not sure about iOS) lets you install some extensions, notably uBlock origin.

It used to let you all extenstions, before mozilla went full google and crippled it.

Firefox Nightly allows you to set whichever set of extensions you desire as the "blessed" extension collection, so you can also create a custom collection and choose that.

But the Firefox rewrite isn’t handling all extensions well.

Container Tabs break hilariously, spawning tenthousands of tabs.

Tampermonkey and similar extensions that spawn popup windows or custom tabs fail, too.

Sidebar extensions like vertical tabs break as well.

But you can get them to work :)

Google Play changed their policies to disallow downloading and executing code from sources other than the Play Store. The blessed extensions in Firefox for Android are actually shipped in the APK.

False. When they rolled this out i was trvially able to replace the allowed extensions id's with a root shell and they downloaded and worked just fine. Also, a website is also downloading and execing js, the same as an extension.

There are other browsers that allow custom extensions, and Firefox Nightly does with a bit of finagling.

'Firefox Klar' literally includes an adblocker

> and nobody complains about it.

Lots of people complain about it. Maybe fewer for a few years now that we know it is missing and Google really doesn't care about adding this feature... ever.

I complain about mobile chrome being a hostile anti user shit show multiple times a quarter on the internet. it's an incredibly cursed thing that the place users need the most chance to improve their lot, they are given nothing.

Seems like an opportunity for another browser, e.g. Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, etc.

Moved off it to Vivaldi, haven't looked back.

It's maybe not that they don't support extension per se, just that they implement much more features and include much more feedback on mobile, so no need to let people do it themselves ?

I use less and less extensions, not even the dark mode ones now that websites are changing too (I wish HN would too)