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Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

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Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#191

Post by m-p-3 »

msla wrote: post #141
mises wrote: post #75

For what it's worth, I've had a great experience with firefox for the past year (since quantum convinced me to give it another chance). All though, it recently basically factory-reset itself. Signed out of sync, extensions gone, custom settings gone. Any one else have this happen? It's also got a weird memory leak, which I think is related to the pdf viewer. Never really checked in detail or tried to measure.

Firefox has been doing a few rather questionable things. They had the Mr Roboto add-on which was pushed out to advertise a TV show, they stuck ads in the "Recommendations" [1], they proactively destroyed peoples' bookmarks when they dropped support for RSS, they dropped support for RSS (because, apparently, a decentralized way to track website updates is anti-Google), and they destroyed a lot of useful add-ons. I bas…

I tried to like RSS feeds in Firefox but I ultimately decided to self-host my own TinyTinyRSS server among all my other stuff (Plex, Wireguard, SFTP)

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#192

Post by bscphil »

kunday wrote: post #163
OrwellianChild wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you help a newbie understand why I'd want to use this instead of Firefox + uBlock Origin? Seems like a lot of extra maintenance overhead...

If you are keen to try out how it works, give https://www.nextdns.io/ a try. I'm not the maker of the app not can vouch for its integrity but you get a sense of how much network bandwidth ad and tracking takes up on your network.

This doesn't really explain how a PiHole compares to an ad blocking extension. Both block ads at the network level so your browser never has to download them.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#194

Post by bscphil »

greenyoda wrote: post #187
bscphil wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. This makes me wonder if there's any way we can give gorhill a bunch of money in donations. He's in a much more important position than I previo…

If he explicitly says "No donations sought", wouldn't it be kind of rude to throw money at him?

That may be fair (though there's some ambiguity to me in the word "sought"), but I hope he knows that if he loses his day job or has health problems or something like that he can go to the community. uBlock origin is worth hundreds of dollars a year to me, and I'm by no means rich.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#196

Post by mccr8 »

ljm wrote: post #134
user17843 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork. (The train has already left the station for anything besides WebKit or Blink, since the lack of accessibility of Gecko means it will never be adopted by anyone else.) But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground…

Is that true? IE was incumbent and Firefox unseated it. They had the legacy of Netscape, sure, but they didn’t throw the towel and reskin IE the same way other browsers of the time did. Besides that, at which point does the dominant search and advertising company of the internet get an antitrust case for this? People think google is trustworthy yet they do nothing to earn that trust.

Microsoft basically shut down the IE team after they beat Netscape, which gave Firefox a chance to produce a better product. Web browsing is so closely tied to Google's core business that they're unlikely to mothball Chrome development.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#197

Post by btown »

user17843 wrote: post #109
ljm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the embedded framework... We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7/8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome. The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in t…

The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork. (The train has already left the station for anything besides WebKit or Blink, since the lack of accessibility of Gecko means it will never be adopted by anyone else.) But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground…

> smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork

Google can and does use DRM to block even this from happening: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...

Even Mozilla needed to license Widevine from Google to support modern video: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm

Based on the policy evidenced in Maddock's post, it seems impossible to develop an open-source browser in 2019 that supports video streaming.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#198

Post by ineedasername »

greenyoda wrote: post #187
bscphil wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. This makes me wonder if there's any way we can give gorhill a bunch of money in donations. He's in a much more important position than I previo…

If he explicitly says "No donations sought", wouldn't it be kind of rude to throw money at him?

Well, I'm not seeking money when I walk down the street, but I wouldn't consider it rude if someone decided to throw some at me. (assuming cash, not coins thrown at my head though even then, if they're quarters, I'm picking those up)

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#199

Post by jamiequint »

rayiner wrote: post #37
axaxs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong about what it boils down to, but, I'm all for it. I didn't mind ads, generally, until I did. Until they started hijacking your browser, redirecting you, doing popups. Ad people have shown they cannot be trusted on the whole. What Brave seems to be doing is doing their own 'safe ads' system, and sharing the money. It will likely be less for the content creators, but as a 'at-my-wits-end-with-ads' Brav…

If you look at the benchmark results, aggressively stripping ads and tracking can result in pages loading twice as fast and hours of extra battery life. I'm happy to pay money to view your website, but modern web ads are a ridiculous and punitive payment scheme.

What you're doing is the equivalent of walking into a store, picking up $100 of merchandise, slapping $10 on the counter and walking out because "I'm happy to buy your products, but your prices are ridiculous". It's not a very moral position to take.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#200

Post by josephorjoe »

comboy wrote: post #168
o10449366 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "as good." I've tried every release of Firefox for the past decade. On Linux and Mac the video performance is noticeably worse than Chrome with significant frame drops, lag, and tearing. Yes, I've tried enabling/disabling hardware acceleration, flash, and all sorts of other flags and options, but the two are still incomparable. Furthermore, even with the quantum update Firefox is still slower for general web…

Yup, let's not sugar coat it. Most HN says "switched to Firefox and haven't looked back" but Chrome does a lot of magic that makes everything faster (or at least seem faster - doesn't matter to me as a user). Firefox also still occasionally freezes even for a few seconds with some busy javascript, haven't had that experience on Chrome in a long time. I'm using FF for ideological reasons but currently Chrome is simply…

Well, once the web pages in chrome are bloated with ads that you can block in firefox, its apparent performance edge will fade.
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