this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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I hope they end up killing Chrome.
I think you're being optimistic about the number of people who both use adblockers and who care enough to switch browsers.
Yeah I fear society will get to the point in corporate autocracy, or corporate-feudalism where Google sues uBlock Origin out of existence (for lost revenue).
...and that'll be a dark day, and it will be hard not to blame the people who just put up with ads and a loss of privacy. Who can just stomach Surveillance Capitalism's incredibly flawed and one sided nature.
Those people are laying bricks for the foundation of a society I don't agree with, and don't want to participate in.
Based on every browser statistic page I can find, about 2/3 of mobile traffic is through Google Chrome. There's no ad blocker on that.
And mobile traffic is significant nowadays - it comprises around half of all traffic anywhere, despite requiring the viewer to be hunched over a phone or tablet.
Not that many people use real computers any more. At work, you may need to use a computer, but you probably can’t change the browser. At home, you have the PCMR folks who use a computer and probably also care about browsers. Everyone else just uses a tablet or a phone for browsing the web.
Speaking of the web, most people interact with specific websites through an app and an API, so they don’t even launch the mobile browser until they have to visit a site that doesn’t have an app. The world has changed and browsers aren’t as relevant as they used to be.
Are there raw numbers on how many people use web browsers in general? Firefox releases a report, and it's definitely been dipping, but that dip might be accounted for by a switch to other browsers (based on its percent of market share).
I'd be curious if you had any good sources for this, because my searches are mostly yielding crappy listicle blogs.
I don’t have numbers that would directly address that. However, there are lots of statistics on the number of mobile users vs desktop users when it comes to the traffic in general. This trend has been clearly visible for about 15 years now.
Here’s something I found on a short notice. link
What? They’re not going to kill their own browser that they virtually exclusively control. Why would they kill one of their biggest cash cows? Google is an ad company, and they want control of the client software that we use which they pump ads to and exfiltrate our identities from.
Whoosh
I think they were talking about Chrome becoming obsolete. Unlikely but not impossible