If I learned one thing, when talking with people about stuff like that: Most people unfortunately don’t care. Many don’t even have an ad blocker to begin with.
Look, I was among the glorious warriors who installed Firefox on his parents/grandparents PC and replaced its shortcut’s image with IE’s one (because old people hate changes and won’t accept it easily)
- Oh again! They keep changing my Google internet!
- Yes grandma, it’s Windows… (« It wasn’t Windows » says the narrator in a deep and mysterious voice) Do you want me to install Linux? It’s free and open source and…
- Keep that commie thing away from me, I like that meadow picture…
- You know you can change th…
- Don’t you dare!
Anyway. We did it. We killed IE hegemony. It’s up to the new generation to take the baton and fight against the tyranny of Google.
The idea of installing Linux on a grandparent’s computer is just asking for trouble. I convinced my father in law to give a Chromebook a try since he mostly just uses his computer to get online and boy, was that tricky. The average person has no idea what an Operating System is and will call you the minute they can’t install a new program for some reason.
I had a very successful experience! My grandmother had no idea how computers worked at all, so I set up a very stripped-down Ubuntu that didn’t even allow multiple windows open. I could easily remote in whenever she had an issue.
She used it to check her email, read the news, and watch Obama’s weekly address until the week she died. (Unrelated to the computer)
The people who don’t care and don’t have an adblocker aren’t and weren’t ever the target. The people who are being targeted have an adblocker, and they’re all moving to FireFox.
What Google is getting out of this most of all is future compliance as new users coming to Chrome will never know a world in which ad blockers were freely available on Chrome, as well as dog whistling this to other corporate browser vendors.
Don’t forget they’re pushing chrome on the whole internet. Websites are already telling Firefox users to fuck off if we aren’t spoofing chromium and it’s only going to get worse after this.
Firefox is my daily and I very rarely encounter a site that specifically rejects it. Do you have some examples?
Long term they will move to Firefox also.
Because people like us will continue to suggest they use Firefox as their “tech person”.
It’s just a little slower for the people that don’t care.
And many people also do use an adblocker https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
