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StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

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Re: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

#41

Post by shreyshnaccount »

noodles_nomore wrote: post #13
lysozyme wrote: post #2

I’ve tried a lot of ad blockers over the years. Browsing mainstream news on the internet, in particular, highlights the absolute cesspool of pop ups and auto-playing videos that characterize the contemporary web. None, least of all Stop the Madness, have worked as well and on as many devices as this simple bookmarklet, whose author I don’t know but who has saved me countless aggravations javascript:(function%20()%20%…

This is great. I just discovered that in firefox you can have bookmarks without a title. So if you put this as the only item and without a title into the "Bookmarks Toolbar" folder, you have a simple button that you can add to your toolbar. This is hacky, but good enough for me.

Love it!

Re: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

#42

Post by fsflover »

dynm wrote: post #25
ohCh6zos wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're at the point where both MacOS and Windows have an advertising ID. It can be anonymized, but I can't just turn it off.

Not sure if this is true, but according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers you can opt out of this on MacOS by choosing the "Limit Ad Tracking" setting.

Note how it says "limit", not "stop" ad tracking.

Re: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

#43

Post by lapcat »

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #27
saagarjha wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why a standalone browser when you can just disable the extension when you don’t want to use it?

Good point... I guess I’d still be a bit uneasy about it.

Hi, the company is just me, Jeff. I've been a Mac developer for over 15 years. There's a link to my résumé from the product page, as well as links to reviews of the extension from well-known tech media.

This is just the nature of JavaScript, it has the power to do pretty much anything in a web page. My goal is to write "good" JavaScript to counteract the "bad" JavaScript of user-hostile web pages.

Re: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

#45

Post by HWR_14 »

fsflover wrote: post #42
dynm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this is true, but according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers you can opt out of this on MacOS by choosing the "Limit Ad Tracking" setting.

Note how it says "limit", not "stop" ad tracking.

Yes, it says "limit" because Apple cannot guarantee all 3rd party ad tracking stops in every piece of software. What it does is set your personalized advertising ID to all 0s, making you indistinguishable from 20% of Apple users. That is, it completely opts you out of Apple's tracking ID that the poster was complaining about.

I mentioned you can also turn off Windows personalized ID, but for some reason that post (and the instructions) were downvoted. The point remains that the advertising IDs the poster was talking about are optional from both Windows and Apple. Unless you consider the API returning a universal dummy value and not an error to be an issue.

Re: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

#47

Post by registeredcorn »

gumby wrote: post #33
registeredcorn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds great, but I wonder, have you run into issues with compatibility? That is, for sites that do incredibly annoying things like that, have you found that it ends up breaking things?

I haven’t noticed any problems and I’ve been using it for years.

That's good to hear! I might have to give it a go, then.

Honestly, I'm still a little conflicted in that, I don't know if it's "ethical" for me to block ads, if I myself use ads for one of my businesses to drum up sales. It seems kind of like a way to say "Others have to deal with this, but I don't." You know?

Either way, if it makes the browsing experience better, it might be worth it regardless.

Re: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

#48

Post by lapcat »

registeredcorn wrote: post #47
gumby wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t noticed any problems and I’ve been using it for years.

That's good to hear! I might have to give it a go, then. Honestly, I'm still a little conflicted in that, I don't know if it's "ethical" for me to block ads, if I myself use ads for one of my businesses to drum up sales. It seems kind of like a way to say "Others have to deal with this, but I don't." You know? Either way, if it makes the browsing experience better, it might be worth it regardless.

> I'm still a little conflicted in that, I don't know if it's "ethical" for me to block ads

StopTheMadness is not an ad blocker, so there's no ethical dilemma in that respect.

Re: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

#49

Post by oneplane »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #19
oneplane wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be a slogan that gets advertised more, but users don't give a crap about choice when all they want is read misinformation on social media, post personal data in public and watch cat videos on ticktock. The amount of 'taking things back' might only apply to those who 'had' things to begin with, and only a subset of those that still want to 'have' things. I fear most people neither know nor want to know about…

> but users don't give a crap about choice when all they want is read misinformation on social media, post personal data in public and watch cat videos on ticktock. I really don't mean to direct this at you personally, I suspect you're just repeating things you've heard, or what you think other's think, but I sincerely believe this kind of latent contempt for users needs to stop. Are we all experts on what "users don…

I'm basing it on metrics from networks I manage (and where a signed policy is in effect that law-mandated decryption proxies are in use). The crap people will still do on such networks is baffling, and we're not talking just white collar tech workers or something like that, it's all across the board. (granted, it's only about 150k users in western EU, 10k in Africa and 25k in canada, so may not be representative of the world at large) That experience combined with the number of visitors/users for those platforms I mentioned results in what I wrote.

For you and me, we already have plenty of options, there is no 'taking it back' because we already have it. If you use Iceweasel on Debian fore example, you're pretty much there already.

Re: StopTheMadness – Take back your web browser

#50

Post by nonrandomstring »

oneplane wrote: post #49
nonrandomstring wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but users don't give a crap about choice when all they want is read misinformation on social media, post personal data in public and watch cat videos on ticktock. I really don't mean to direct this at you personally, I suspect you're just repeating things you've heard, or what you think other's think, but I sincerely believe this kind of latent contempt for users needs to stop. Are we all experts on what "users don…

I'm basing it on metrics from networks I manage (and where a signed policy is in effect that law-mandated decryption proxies are in use). The crap people will still do on such networks is baffling, and we're not talking just white collar tech workers or something like that, it's all across the board. (granted, it's only about 150k users in western EU, 10k in Africa and 25k in canada, so may not be representative of t…

This does sound like useful empirical data. I'd love to hear more but suspect you're constrained by good manners/duty (if not actual confidentiality law) to say no more. Ping me if you feel like saying more about it please.
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