It's to cover the stink of Kai Winn. Even venting the room into the cold vacuum of space can't sweep out every stray "my child" that gets stuck to surfaces.
Put in another vote for Vivaldi. It's definitely lightweight. I've got an older server I keep around (for YAR HAR FIDDLE DEE-DEE purposes) and Vivaldi's the Chromium-based browser that works best on it.
That said, the default browser I use on that thing is Waterfox Classic. Vivaldi's lightweight, but it's not as light as that.
Another note: a few years ago I would've actually been able to recommend Edge because to my surprise it actually worked pretty damn well, especially if you were trying to get sites to get Windows-oriented web-apps to function correctly on Linux. Unfortunately they've since pushed several changes that have made it truly obnoxious. Big fat memory hog that tries to load "recommended" content in the background and won't stop sending to/receiving from sites even after you close the window/tab.
That would be easy to challenge under the same reasoning as what's in the article, not to mention various anti-trust laws and ones covering anti-competitive business practices.
Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to stop them, but it's definitely not going to be as easy as them flipping a few switches and saying "watch ads on our browser with no addons or GTFO".
Not even Microsoft in its monolith days was able to spend enough money to stop a legion of angry nerds with a severe case of "fuck you, you can't tell me what to do".
OpenDNS used to do that. Caused a lot of unexpected problems, enough that I stopped using it entirely. I'm still hesitant to even though they've stopped doing it.
As your typical American I can only read English, what do those "news" ads say, roughly? Tinfoil hat nuttery? Increase your Pen-One-Five size?
Either way that's still pretty bad. And there are video popups? Jeez. I'm guessing you either don't have much choice in ISPs or the other options are even worse somehow. My sympathies. Also thanks for sharing.
Bonus if the VOB is encoded out of order and uses the chapters specified in the IFO to play the episodes in the correct order. CW/WB shows did that a lot for some reason.