Google pays Apple 20+ billion dollars annually to be the default search engine in Safari. I don't know whether the absence of ad blocking is a stipulation in that deal or not, but I have to imagine that if Apple blocked ads in Safari by default, that deal would not be renewed.

Apple is worth nearly $4T. I think they can afford to take a principled stand here, especially considering the current mood about big tech.

And I don't think Google would lightly give up being the default search engine on the dominant mobile platform in the USA, and significantly more dominant among upper-income users.

Browsing the web without a web blocker for me is a wonderful experience every day and has been since the beginning. Diff'rent strokes.

At least with Chrome i can use ublock - not so with safari. The best browser is ofc Firefox but everyone seems to have forgotten that bc of bad publicity or whatever

The best browser is either Waterfox or Librewolf since they're Firefox-based but don't steal your data or claim copyright on it.

It would be news to me that Firefox steals data or claims copyright on my data - do you have anything concrete to back that up?

It was their terms of service change at the start of 2025. It caused quite a shitstorm.

So essentially a bunch of noise that didnt really mean anything concrete?

Mozilla backed down due to the backlash. It still means Mozilla is untrustworthy.

This implies they had some sinister plan to claim all your data as theirs or something which is ridiculous - they didn’t back down from anything but changed the wording of the legal text to make it easier to parse for non-lawyers.

There is no other interpretation of changing "we respect your privacy and do not sell your data" to "we respect your privacy".

Mozilla even tried to claim the old wording was bad because some governments erroneously define "sell" as "to exchange something for valuable consideration, such as money".

>Browsing the web without an ad blocker is a miserable experience.

That is your experience. Mine is the opposite.

>Users who have never tried or don't know how to set one up would be delighted.

Perhaps.

"I would prefer not to." — Bartleby, The Scrivener

https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/bartleby.pdf