Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar

Did you know that Apple does in fact get more money from Google than Mozilla does, for keeping their search engine as the default? 12 billion dollars in 2019. Do you think Apple would activate ad blocking by default and risk losing that many billions of dollars? Speaking of which, Safari's ad blocking is the joke of the industry.

You could make the case that Safari might survive if Google cuts its funding, but judging from the history of IExplorer, I have my doubts. One could make the case that Safari is alive just because Apple is making a shit ton of money on it.

Did you know that Microsoft's Bing Ads platform made them 8 billion dollars in 2019? Do you think Microsoft would do anything to jeopardize that ads revenue? Did you know that Windows 10 has an "advertising ID" used to personalize ads, that via Edge is transmitted to Bing?

Did you know that Brave, that leech which is piggybacking on other people's work, that's supposedly blocking ads by default, is effectively replacing publisher ads with their own, then forcing those publishers to enter into deals with them for a piece of the action, while making it really hard to detect and block Brave? All the while pushing shady cryptocurrency affiliate ids straight in their source code?

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Mozilla might not push for ads blocking by default.

But they do block trackers by default and their browser is afaik the only one that has legitimately supported uBlock Origin on top of Android. And uBlock Origin is the best, most aggresive ads blocker available and given Google deprecating the blocking ability of the WebRequest API, Firefox might remain the only one with a uBlock Origin implementation.

Could Firefox survive without Google?

I don't know, but can any other browser survive without Google or Bing? I have my doubts and you'd be naive to think otherwise. Plus this is just whataboutism.

Users with the level of paranoia that puts Google in the "untrusted site" space should be sidestepping this whole conversation by avoiding using the browser Google develops regardless of what Google does to its URL bar.

The whole idea of AMP pages is sketchy by default, as it's Google taking content from websites run by news media outlets and hosting it on their own servers so they have even more control over user-tracking.

In the long term, this has the potential to further centralize the Internet, something the Internet was never meant to be.

It's not that difficult to imagine a future where news media won't even host their own stuff anymore but instead outsource it all to Google.

Very comparable to how Facebook has become the de-facto place for small businesses, with little to no IT knowledge, to have their own little web-presence.

Which has certain advantages, but it's dangerous to belittle the very real disadvantages that kind of centralization of content will have in the long term.