and like, yes, capitalism and all that, sure, fine, whatever. bargained well and done, that's table stakes¹.
it boils down, at heart, to "the cold war between browsers and annoying monetization schemes just stopped one day."
firefox blocked popup ads, firefox drove new web features, firefox had a plugin system and community that thought obtrusive ads were actually a problem.
chrome too, at first.
and then, well, browsers were expected to stick to standards instead of pushing them to change. and now we have ads increasingly able to circumvent ad blocking things, while websites further lock themselves down to end-user modifications.
instead of the times in the 2000s where both browsers went "this behavior is pathological, fuck you, evolve or perish"
1: when Marx said "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." he didn't mean for you to go and say "yeah it's capitalism duh" like a smug child to every tweet you see mentioning a thing it involves.
please stop being a philosopher, if you keep doing it. it's not even "cringe" it's just tacky to literally every political tendency on the spectrum.
