Comment by meerita
9 days ago
Question for everyone: I'm building two browsers: a terminal browser (https://github.com/meerita/puma-browser) and a new GUI browser.
For the GUI one, I'm focusing on privacy and reliability, and I was wondering if having a built-in ad blocker would be a good feature.
Why don't the major browsers have one? Have they had legal problems with ad blocking, or do they simply not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?
Should I build a native ad blocker?
There are many browsers which come with native ad-blocking. See Brave, Vivaldi, Opera.
Most browsers are built on Chromium, and that has certain ad-block limitations now. See Manifest V3.
Many people care a lot about ad-blocking, but still, most of the world does not use an ad-blockers. So it's a cost/market reach equation. What's your target demo? If it's tech enthusiasts, we'll appreciate the ad-blocking built in, but we can also easily install one ourselves if it's built on Chromium.
You are unlikely to face legal issues. There have been a few test cases around the world, with most siding with the user. The argument is usually that no one should be forced to download or render something they do not wish to download or render.
Chrome is made by an advertising company that also fund almost entirely the budget of Firefox. Even Safari is made by an advertising company. FWIW most of them have some blocking for egregious ads, so they will happily kill someone's else goose.
Personally I think the easiest would be to support uBO or at least have a built-in engine that can load filters written for uBO. Anything else is just wasting development time.
Google builds the biggest browser. Mozilla receives most of its funding through Google (though they have mobile browsers with a default ad-blocker). Microsoft is in the ad business too.
I'm not surprised, why are you?