21–30 of 66 posts
I bet they'll backdown! There's no way they'll loose control over their users. This will be changed and they'll find another way to force ads on their users without loosing them. Wait and see!
Thank God we can change browser user agents :)
> Google is planning to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users only > the software giant is not backing down: It says the only people that can use ad blockers following the change will be Google’s enterprise users. > Google sent me a statement by email, which reads: "Chrome supports the use and development of ad blockers. We’re actively working with the developer community to get feedback a…
The implementation breaks the model of the most effective blockers like uBlock Origin, which are able to inspect every request and block it based on a much more comprehensive set of factors. The claim they are making is that allowing extensions to inspect web traffic makes them vulnerable to abuse by bad actors who can, for example, offer an innocuous extension then later turn it effectively into a keylogger. There are numerous better solutions to this problem that don't require breaking blockers like uBO, but this choice seems to tick a large number of boxes for decisions that benefit Google and their partners at the expense of their users. And the "Enterprise users" part (which really seems to belie the stated reasoning) was only abounded after it became clear that there was a backlash against this terrible decision.
What a bogus story. The issue google is trying to address here is that the adblockers get permissions to basically all browsing data. Google specifically says "Chrome supports the use and development of ad blockers." There is going to be a content filtering approach that doesn't require folks give full access to all browser activity to a third party. For example, google could provide hooks for a pattern list that the…
Google does this such that you can install some sort of pseudo adblock, while Google Ads and Google Tracking (especially) still work - at least behind the scenes.
And this comes directly from the dev of uBlock Origin.
The article is absolutely correct, only that 2B users will of course not switch.
But this move from Google is absolutely, 100%, meant to defeat effective ad blocking and any further privacy extensions that people may come up with in the future.
Okay, so they are crippling the webRequest API. I'm sure we can still block ads by injecting some masterfully crafted jQuery cocktails. Ad blocking will still be possible. (Edit: Whoever just downvoted me -- you work on the Chrome team, I guess?)
There was a time where I had to use some outdated ad blocker. ALL news sites would display this "Disable your Ad blocker if you want to read this site" full screen block (that was, of course, not blockable with an easy host list). This is probably Google's roundabout way to defeat adblocking as a whole. Disable your adblock, or don't visit any website with Google Ads. Your choice.
As long as bytes of content are being sent over my Ethernet cables, I will find a way to render them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430
And not a bogus story in my opinion.
What a bogus story. The issue google is trying to address here is that the adblockers get permissions to basically all browsing data. Google specifically says "Chrome supports the use and development of ad blockers." There is going to be a content filtering approach that doesn't require folks give full access to all browser activity to a third party. For example, google could provide hooks for a pattern list that the…
Painting this as all about user safety when it handsomely rewards Google's largest profit center is farcical. (the new static list of 50k filters will be completely trivial to workaround).
The only thing that is bogus here is the people denying it has nothing to do with ad blocking.
If I had the time i’d do it!
What a bogus story. The issue google is trying to address here is that the adblockers get permissions to basically all browsing data. Google specifically says "Chrome supports the use and development of ad blockers." There is going to be a content filtering approach that doesn't require folks give full access to all browser activity to a third party. For example, google could provide hooks for a pattern list that the…
FWIW that's how content blockers in Safari have worked for while now. I've always been surprised at how accepting people are of using a browser from an ad company.
Do 2B users use uBO, or do most of them use ABP or uBlock? Because I don't see much pushback from the authors of the later, and it anything they have a vested interest in design choices that negate the power of their greatest competitor.
2B is probably the total number of Chrome users. I'd be curious how many Ublock Origin users there are though. The # of installs counter on the Chrome extension store maxes out at "10,000,000+".
> Google is planning to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users only > the software giant is not backing down: It says the only people that can use ad blockers following the change will be Google’s enterprise users. > Google sent me a statement by email, which reads: "Chrome supports the use and development of ad blockers. We’re actively working with the developer community to get feedback a…
Google isn't banning any ad blockers directly. They're just deprecating an API which many major ad blockers use, and the replacement API is different enough that those ad blockers can't be ported to it. They claim that the deprecation is about security and performance. In particular, I don't think it's true that Google said "only people that can use ad blockers following the change will be Google’s enterprise users".
I mean, it kind of obviously is. Giving random extensions downloaded from the internet access to the URLs of every request ever made by the browser is a pretty insane security hole.
My impression is that other browsers (Safari) already removed this kind of API, or never had it in the first place.