Sites with ads so obtrusive they interfere with my use of the site don't need my traffic. The web is a hugely redundant datastore and I can just find the info elsewhere.
Content is basically never important enough of it's behind one of those.
Anyone that remembers the advent of pop-ups and pop-unders, never ending cascading popped windows, flashy, shaky, and just terrible ads might beg to differ with you.
Ah, these were the MVP stars of the show back then.
- Chrome: Spam ads for Chrome on all Google services (incl. YouTube and Google Search which probably are the two most visited websites on this planet?) - Safari: Make it the default and prevent users from using any other browsers (on iOS every browser is Safari under the hood and will reports as such to browser census) - Edge: Make it suck less and also make it really hard to remove it from your system or switch to a different browser
Defaults matter and, especially when they are this toxic, they are hard to beat :/
Strangely enough, Firefox has held its ground. It fell behind in marketing which is why Chrome (and Safari/Edge) took over, but Firefox still remains popular for being that unshakable browser. I went back to it recently and wondered why I wasn't using it in the last 5 years or so.