this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 74 points 3 days ago (9 children)

If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox because of MV3, it wouldn't make a single dent in Chromium's dominance. We vastly overstate the amount of people that even know what an adblocker is.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Nah it would make a big dent for sure.

Firefox has ~180 million users

Amount of users using adblockers is ~900 million.

It would massively change the market.

Numbers according to mozilla and statista

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Im using Firefox because fuck Google's monopoly, but Firefox seems to care little for some stuff I think is critical, namely AV codec support. Lack of out of the box support for HEVC and a few others, which my underlying OS supports perfectly, is a big turn off.

May be time to give Opera a spin

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

I wish Firefox would build a tablet/scalable interface. It's horrible on a tablet and breaks on DeX.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 days ago

If you're gonna use Opera anyway, why not just use Brave and disable the crypto stuff? The native adblocker on Brave is on par with uBlock Origin and performs even better. Opera is probably the worst direction you can go from where you are right now...

[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 days ago

That's true. 2 years ago, I come by my friend's house for a drink, and his kid is watching cartoons on YT. My friend's been a gamer for +20 years. Spent most of his life around PC. All of a sudden, I hear ads.

What's that? What? What's with the ads? Oh that, that's YT.

I know it is, but what's with the ads? Well, they have ads. I know they do, but why do you have them...

Installed adblocker for him, he's looking at it in shock. I'm looking at him shocked...

People have no idea, what we take for granted. 😅

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Even here on Lemmy, where most people are tech-savvy, a disturbing amount don't use adblockers. I've seen so many posts of people complaining about ads and they always have comments with people agreeing. A lot of the time they've got some completely illogical and stupid reason for it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes I agree. If you are using adblocker you are already not an average user. Using A adblocker with custom filters put you on the extreme end and most of those users are either already on FF or have migrated to FF since the MV3 announcement.

And let's not forget adblock made for MV3 will work well enough for those users who aren't using adblocker with custom filters.

Even if Google kill off adblock completely with its browser, chrome will still be dominating the market by a huge margin.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

According to both websites, the research was conducted on just 2000 USA citizens. In my opinion, that's a lot of weight being pulled by claiming they represent the entire country. I am unable to download the research papers here, but what does it say about the sample? If they are researching solely on more tech savvy people, then I think the results are very likely to be skewed to one side

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Frankly, I'm not sure about the quality of the Censuswide survey.

Market data from YouGov Global Profiles shows that 51-52% of people globally (in "48 markets") use ad blocking on at least 1 device. That percentage is 45-46% for people in the US.

My point is that when a significant proportion of internet users have ad blockers, they're not just niche tools anymore.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I'm not really trying to disprove or disagree with anything, I just think that knowing the sample is important. For instance, earlier in Hungary, we've had a lot of billboards and other media claiming that 99% of Hungarians were against things like sending aid to Ukraine and gender affirming politics. In a purely statistical sense, this was correct and could dissuade the common folk into thinking that's representative of the country. However when you investigate further, their research was done on just a couple thousand citizens that were all either affiliated someway to Fidesz (the rulling party) or historically voted for them, which overwhelmingly skews the results towards one end.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Hungarians were against things like sending aid to Ukraine

WTF Hungary suffered Kremlin captivity during the entire cold war period and now they are okay with throwing another country under the bus.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Hey, I think you're totally right to challenge a statistic when it looks questionable. Censuswide didn't release the full data publicly, and the survey was commissioned by the Ghostery ad blocker, so there's reason to suspect that the data is biased.

I trust the YouGov data more, since YouGov is also a credible pollster and the data is being provided as market research data for businesses. However, since I don't subscribe to their data service, I don't have details of the methodology here, either.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What is there to recognize? This is a survey conducted on 2,000 Americans. 2,000 is just 0.00057% of the whole US population which is estimated at 345,426,571.

The average user absolutely do not use block ads unless it is enabled by default in the browser. Chrome with the largest market share does not block ads by default and if you are going out of your way to block ads or use a browser like brave that do that by default you my friend are already not an average user.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

You...don't understand how surveys work, I see.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.

If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

I just did research on this. Up to 33% (according to some sources) of Americans use an adblocker. That feels like a dent to me...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Then why is Google fighting against ad blockers?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago

Because they want every little dime they can get, no matter what.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

Because their an ad company and they don't like any threats to their revenue stream. Same logic as video game companies using DRM. Selling a worse product at a bigger expense to tell shareholders their compelling pirates to pay (even tho most pirates will just not play the game rather than suddenly start purchasing it).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It would actually.

Google makes money on ads. They think they can force more money to make. People switching to Firefox makes that a wasted effort for Google as you descibed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

At absolute most, they risk losing the portion of users who use ad blockers because of this decision. They'll certainly lose less, but are practically guaranteed to not lose more.

They probably determined that the additional ad revenue from those who used to use ad blockers was more than the revenue they'd lose from people leaving.

I don't agree with it, but I bet that's happening here. Personally, I'd be surprised if 20% or more of Chrome users have an ad blockers installed. Even fewer would use Revanced or the like.