I seem to remember TamperMonkey being on there but not ViolentMonkey, which I didn't agree with. However, I see neither of them on there. Both are available but not recommended. I wonder what is going on with that.

Automated checks are done for every extension on every update. But their recommend extensions they feature on the Extension store, they do other extensive checks for each update.

what permissions do you suggest?

Websites already can barely be assed to care about supporting Firefox users, doing adblocking by default is a great way to get websites to start putting up banners that say "our website does not work with your browser, please switch to Chrome" en-masse.

And Mozilla did develop anti-fingerprinting tech, but they can't enable it by default because it breaks lots of websites and when a website doesn't work they're not going to appreciate Mozilla for protecting them, they're going to be pissed that it doesn't work.

Admiral and several other of the more obnoxious ad networks already claim that Firefox is an ad blocker simply because of its out-of-the-box blocking support for third-party cookies and those ad networks nag you to use another browser. If Firefox added actual ad blocking out of the box I can't imagine the havoc that would cause and how many more websites would claim that they don't work at all in Firefox.

In one of the monthly update videos Andreas mentioned that although they are working on a basic built-in adblocker for Ladybird, long-term they want extension support and the adblocking functionality to be in an extension.

That's like suggesting that someone using LLMs to assist coding, could save themselves the trouble by writing the code by hand.

Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain.

What stuns me is that most people still use browsers that cannot block ads, seem genuinely annoyed by ads, but don't want to even try switching to a browser that will easily block those ads. It's amazing how much crap people are willing to wade through when the alternative is trying something new.

>since Google basically owns them

Google has been trying to kill them since they moved the Chrome team into the same building as the now defunct SF office.

(Apparently they offered people a lot of money? There are some words I could use to describe people who do things they think are unethical for cash I'll leave unsaid.)

If Firefox baked in ad blocking, they would have to then deal with the financial incentive to make it worse. Sponsored ads, 'good' ads, government announcements, election propaganda... there is a slippery slope they are better off not getting on. A trusted 3rd party from the wider community seems a better option in many ways. The alternative is starting a web browser with a manifesto welded on that essentially states 'death to all advertising', and until that can be crowd funded I can't see that happening in today's world.

What I am surprised about is that none of the browsers or forks have created a specialist plugin API for adblocking and maybe other filtering. Provide what is needed and only that (keeping the surface tiny), and then evolve the general purpose API in the way they need. I don't think we need V2 of the API any more, except for keeping this one absolutely critical plugin working, do we?

People believe ublock because it's reputable and not affiliated with browsers IMO.

See, this is the kind of thing that makes Firefox cool. They have not only just as good of developer console tools as Chrome, they have forward thinking, truly user-oriented policies. They have had trouble in the recent past at securing funding, but something tells me their user philosophy might save them when all the others turn completely to corporate greed as their main operating mechanism (if they already haven't).

After watching them butcher their own side tabs implementation, I don't know if we really want that, unless they're actually hiring the uBO team directly.

Still works for me. The occasional 403 has always been an issue

Rather than introducing additional attack surface and privacy risks with yet another extension you can just use archive.is/archive.ph instead of Bypass Paywalls Clean.

Or, just pay for journalism since it’s not free to do.

You mean Bypass Paywalls Clean? It's illegal and it's not even on the Firefox extension store. You have to download it from some Russian Github alternative and manually install it.

I will say however, it works remarkably well. I haven't seen a paywall in years!

I don't like telemetry being defaulted to opt-in but relax. It's anonymized and it's far and away the least intrusive of the major browsers