Bringing Ad Block into the core would violate the wink, wink, nudge, nudge arrangement between Mozilla and their default search provider Google. If Mozilla did this, the value of being a default search provider in Firefox would fall to around zero, and Mozilla would close up shop as 90% of their revenues disappeared.
Bringing Ad Block into the core also sounds like a violation of the browser abstraction to me. A browser is supposed to show me what I give it. Specifying and implementing policies about what content is "good" or "bad" and should be treated specially seems logically separate to me.
You realise that such features can come with a on/off setting right?
Plus there's no such a "browser abstraction". A browser is just supposed to be useful for surfing the web, and if blocking ads is part of that, then so be it.
Nobody talks about a "mailer abstraction" ("a mailer is supposed to show me what is coming into my account"), when mailers have built-in spam email filters.
Not to mention that similar things already exist in browsers. Browsers eg. stop you going into "bad" content ("fishing", "malware" etc sites). They stop your visit, show you a warning page, and ask if you're sure you want to continue. Technically those are just other pages, they are content too (and sometimes they even have been labelled wrongly).
Interesting, and concisely put. Now I'm wondering whether FF users are obliged to use google (the same way we get obliged to turn off adblock on sites we don't wish to hurt).
I'm pretty sure at least Bing has a revenue sharing program with Mozilla for search results from the search bar (they did as of Firefox 4[1], at least). Google just won the auction to be the default. Not sure about the other default search engines, though.
