They may kill this iteration of ad blockers. But there will always be another and another. Google has a lot of smart people working for them. There are also a lot of smart people in the FOSS community that will eventually find a way around it.
At the end of the day there will still be people recording songs by holding two boom boxes together.
Make software that runs on your computer that uses machine learning to detect ads on you screen and put kitties and puppy pictures over them. Browser and sites couldn't do shit about it unless they start acting like anticheats scanning your computer for that software etc..
Donate to orgs like the EFF, Mozilla, and the FSF. Lobby your congressperson, your senators, and Biden to make the FTC to start doing its goddamn job again and enforce antitrust law.
The only real solution to this creeping megalomaniacal monopolistic behavior is legislative.
I mean, yeah, that's why I said it wouldn't work. Maybe if there was a website that was big enough that it would drive people to use non-WEI browsers if they couldn't access it, but any website big enough to do that would also want WEI for ad venue.
The only big website that could even come close to doing this (they won’t, and if they did it wouldn’t work, but they’re big enough that the attempt would at least be noticed) is Wikipedia.
A slightly more “productive” (sort of) avenue of approach would be another large corporation for whom Google is a competitor, and who themselves doesn’t rely (as much) on advertising, interfering with WEI for their own self-interested reasons. Apple is the most likely candidate here, although again, I don’t think that’s likely to happen.
Except safari of course (almost 20% market share).
Also, there are plenty of other browsers using Mozilla’s gecko engine. A quote from Wikipedia:
“ Other web browsers using Gecko include GNU IceCat, Waterfox, K-Meleon, Lunascape, Portable Firefox, Conkeror, Classilla, TenFourFox.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software))
Yes, certainly, but all of these, if they want to sync their data, or use a own selfhosted server or have to use those of Mozilla with an account, giving with it datas to Alphabet (Google) and googleanalytics. Sync is essential if you use the browser in several PC, PC and Mobile or simply as backup if the PC fails or you buy a new one and don't want to lose your bookmarks, passwords and other data. Forks are a lot out there, also very nice ones, but most of these lacks the basic infrastructure, depending on a lot of third party services.
A browser isn't only an app to surf the web, it's a continuos work, maintance, servers and most important, a good and active community. How many forks offer all this?
There are almost 100 different browsers out there and other 70 which had said Game over for us, from people which thought "Nice, its easy to fork this engine making it to my like and gain a lot of customers", nice short dream with a product oversaturated in the market.
Firefox have the same problem with the WEI filter, they also have to insert in Firefox the Google Token, same as any other, if he want to enter a Web with this fucking filter, anyway Mozilla will do this in FF precisely because several Google devs in Mozilla which are working on FF (Bad decision of Mozilla to have Google as main sponsor). Ad/trackerblocker are not the problem in Vivaldi, it has inbuild the needed filters (even those to block Cookie advices and adblocker warnings) and until now it has gutt out every Google intent with FloC, IdleAPI and others to control the Chromium base (remember, also Chromium is FOSS and customizable,above with first class devs Vivaldi has), also don't have and don't depends on extern inversors, but this fucking WEI DRM of websites is a greater problem and need to be avoided by ALL browser companies which are not Google in common, if there is not a genius which invent something to fake this Google Token. We'll see.