So is NetSurf, and has been for most of this century already. I mean, it's great to see people even caring about independent browsers, but NetSurf surely needs much more love (and more developers). :-)

69% of the world population doesn't use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.

Not only are we technical folks (only 5% of the population not their target audience, it seems most people don't care enough about ads to ever try to stop them... at all.

If Mozilla starts being aggressive to ad blocking, I'll agree with the common opinion on this post. But for now I'm more less neutral. If the choice is Mozilla dies or they do some ad stuff, I'd rather the latter. Whether the current and former people running Mozilla have made the right decisions or not to get to this point is kind of irrelevant, because people do not want Mozilla to disappear (even if they claim otherwise) because Mozilla is still a major driver of privacy-oriented work in w3c and web in general.

Aside from that... The only real way to stop ads and tracking, or at least prevent selling and sharing of data outside of the 1st party collector, is a legal path. Whether Anonym/Mozilla is as private as they are claiming, their intent is at least what a realistic legal solution to web tracking would condone that would continue to allow for revenue via ads. There is no way ads will ever go away in a capitalist economy, so it'll need to do something, blocked or not.

Thanks but

We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.

We need an alternative before that