101–110 of 326 posts
Nice to hear adblocking performance is set to have a huge boost as soon as extension authors figure out how to hijack the filter to return a BETTER_ADS violation for all sites.
This is confusing. EasyList is not bound to the "Better Ads Standards", its purpose is to block all ads, regardless of their perceived intrusiveness.
Also, I failed to understand why would EasyPrivacy be used: its purpose is outside that of "Better Ads Standards".
The article further claims:
> Google’s ad blocking capabilities will be on par with the best tools available from day one.
How is this even possible if the web sites targeted are only those which are not compliant "Better Ads Standards"?
The blockers making use of EasyList do not care about "Better Ads Standards", so the result can't possibly be "on par with the best tools available"[1]
I would like to know how the author of the article got the information about EasyList and EasyPrivacy, I find it difficult to believe these would be used by Chrome's integrated blocker given its claimed purpose.
* * *
UPDATE: After looking around a bit, I understand better now how this works. As per ghacks.net[2], excerpt (my emphasis):
> Google Chrome will download rules from EasyList and EasyPrivacy at regular intervals and apply them to sites that failed reviews automatically.
So EasyList/EasyPrivacy are used on sites which fail to comply with "Better Ads Standards".
In retrospect I suffered reading comprehension, the sentence in the article was clear enough:
> These lists are used to limit what resources are loaded on websites identified by Safe Browsing as being non-compliant with the Better Ad Standards.
* * *
[1] Add to this that EasyList is just a complementary list on top of more advanced blocking features found on blockers such as uBlock Origin or Adguard.
[2] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/02/details-about-googles-ad-b...
I think there's good intentions by Google here. That said, let's talk about the worst-case scenario, the thing that Google could actually do that is entirely anti-competitive. Step 1: Google finds a large number of competitors who are doing pretty well playing by their rules. Google finds some trait they all have in common. Google then modifies their own ads to not have that trait. Step 2: Google declares the given t…
1. Lots of people are using adblockers to block all ads, including Google's, and they don't like that.
2. People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.*
3. By building in an adblocker that blocks annoying ads, people will stop installing full adblockers that also block Google's ads.
*There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking, but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.
This is a good thing. Advertising is one of the most effective ways companies have to let people know about their products - I'd say they're essential in free market economies. But having ads is one thing and completely disrupting the user experience is another. Finding a balance is a better approach than blocking all ads.
It sounds like Google is using it's Monopoly position to control the ad space. Microsft used these tatics to get like 90+% marketshare before the government stepped in.chrome is open source it shouldn't be too hard to modify the code so it block Google ads too. I publish a browser which is a modified version of chrome which block ads. The issue is a lot of sites now detect this and tell you to disable it. They seem t…
Did you read the article?
This is what I saw.
Google have announced that their Google Chrome web browser will block every ad on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards by default. Google admits that they’re taking action against the types of web advertisements that annoy people the most in an order to halt the rise in ad blockers that block all forms of advertisements on all websites.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That article's sentence that you're pointing to does not explicitly address the specific whitelist scenario I laid out. The article's sentence: "Google appears to be shipping the entirety of EasyList and EasyPrivacy; which includes blocking rules for Google’s own AdSense and DoubleClick advertisement platforms as well as Google Analytics," ... is only talking about the existence of AdSense on EasyList -- because the…
The article states google will block _every_ ad on websites that violate the standard, which means google’s own ads as well.
>The Better Ads Standards are a set of rules, one set for desktop and one for mobile, that define unacceptably intrusive, distracting, and annoying advertisement formats.
If so, "Better Ad Standards" is orthogonal to "AdSense standards".
Or put another way, "unacceptably intrusive, distracting, and annoying" is orthogonal to blocking "AdSense" url _domains_. E.g. See layout rules from AdSense guidelines.[2]
Why are we parsing the text differently? Are we talking about 2 different abstraction levels? I'm talking about EasyList as a network traffic filter. Maybe others are talking about EasyList as a rule source for _rendering_ DOM elements. (E.g. if AdSense is rendered in an intrusive popup overlay which already violates Google's rules and wil get AdSense accounts banned even before "Better Ads Standards" was adopted.) These are 2 different concepts.
Let's not over-read things in the article that are not actually there.
The owners of DoubleClick are going to protect you from obnoxious ads! That’s So Googly!
oops
> Google appears to be shipping the entirety of EasyList and EasyPrivacy; which includes blocking rules for Google’s own AdSense and DoubleClick advertisement platforms as well as Google Analytics, and other Google services. This is confusing. EasyList is not bound to the "Better Ads Standards", its purpose is to block all ads, regardless of their perceived intrusiveness. Also, I failed to understand why would EasyPr…
and that's what chrome's adblocker will do. The purpose of chrome's adblocker is not to block ads that don't conform to the better ad standards, it's to block ALL ads on websites that don't conform to the better ad standards. There's no way to block individual ads that don't comply, since the standards define things like the number of ads you can have visible at a time, or how close ads can be to each other. if your site is 90% ads and 10% content, which of those ads are intrusive and which ones should you allow through? So what google is doing instead is flagging the site as "has intrusive ads", and then blocking all advertising on that site.
>I would like to know how the article author got the information about EasyList and EasyPrivacy
the author says at the beginning of the article that this information comes from inspecting the chromium source code.