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Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

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Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#401

Post by AStonesThrow »

linguae wrote: post #398
bigfatkitten wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Africa didn’t have the U.S. Government and its allies actively propping it up, and punishing anyone who tried to boycott it.

The history is a little more complicated than this…it is true that South Africa was eventually sanctioned by the US for its apartheid policies, and this helped lead to the end of apartheid. However, the US supported South Africa during much of the Cold War period as a bulwark against communism. Some US politicians were willing to look the other way when it came to apartheid before support for South Africa became incr…

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Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#402

Post by pjmlp »

brookst wrote: post #273
pjmlp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monopoly achieved thanks to everyone that forgot about IE lesson, and instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application.

Consumers never really pick products for ideological reasons, no matter how galling that is to ideologues

Except, many developers contributed to the actual situation.

The same excuse was given regarding IE.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#403

Post by quacksilver »

azangru wrote: post #330
pjmlp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monopoly achieved thanks to everyone that forgot about IE lesson, and instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application.

> instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application I am confused. - The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article. - The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps i…

Devs, particularly those with pressure to ship or who don't know better, unfortunately see 'it works in Chrome' as 'it works', even if it is a quirk of Chrome that causes it to work, or if they use Chrome related hacks that break compatibility with other browsers to get it to work in Chrome.

- Sometimes the standards don't define some exact behavior and it is left for the browser implementer to come up with. Chrome implements it one way and other browsers implement it the other way. Both are compatible with the standards.

- Sometimes the app contains errors, but certain permissive behaviors of Chrome mean it works ok and the app is shipped. The developers work around the guesses that Chrome makes and cobble the app together. (there may be a load of warnings in the console). Other browsers don't make the same guesses so the app is shipped in a state that it will only work on Chrome.

- Sometimes Chrome (or mobile Safari) specific APIs or functions are used as people don't know any better.

- Some security / WAF / anti-bot software relies on Chrome specific JavaScript quirks (that there may be no standards for) and thinks that the user using Firefox or another browser that isn't Chrome or iOS safari is a bot and blocks them.

In many ways, Chrome is the new IE, through no fault of Google or the authors of other browsers.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#404

Post by thayne »

glandium wrote: post #282
sensanaty wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent. Indeed, even in the codebase at $JOB that I'm responsible for, we have had some instances where we randomly check if people are in Chrome before blocking a browser API that has existed for 2 decades and been baseline widely available. These days 99% of features that users actually care about are pretty…

Where did "check feature, not browser name" go?

Some developers are lazy. Some probably don't know that that is the right way to do it. There is a lot of legacy code from when checking user agents was more acceptable. It is much more difficult for server code to know the capabilities of the client (although in practice this isn't usually much of an issue).

Also, sometimes the feature exists so the feature check is positive, but there is a bug in one browser that breaks your functionality, so you put in a user agent check. Then the bug gets fixed, but the user agent check isn't removed for years. I've seen that happen many times.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#405

Post by pjmlp »

bayindirh wrote: post #244
pjmlp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monopoly achieved thanks to everyone that forgot about IE lesson, and instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application.

Chrome was made to fracture, and everything started with the aptly named “Atom” editor (they “invented” Electron). Everybody choose convenience over efficiency and standards, because apparently nobody understood what “being lazy” actually is.

Microsoft invented Electron, when Windows Active Desktop came to be.

Mozzilla also invented Electron, when XUL applications were a thing.

Both failed, as shipping regular processes with the default browser kept being used.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#406

Post by quacksilver »

1oooqooq wrote: post #299
chrsw wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox. But not nearly enough to keep me from using it on my personal machines. (My employer doesn't allow any browser except Chrome and Edge). For me, the most important feature of a browser is the web experience. I guess it should be security but I try to be careful about what I do online, regardless of what browser I'm using. Many years ago I used to run the Fi…

> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox. find that hard to believe. but even if you find something using an api not implement by firefox, chances are you definitely do not want that feature anyway, the firefox gave in to really awful stuff and only drew the line on obviously egregious privacy violation ones.

Sometimes devs rely on Chrome specific quirks, or are shipping broken apps that Chrome manages to make the correct guesses for it to be functional.

Many see 'it works on Chrome and mobile Safari' as 'it works' and they can get project signoff / ship / get paid / whatever and don't care about other users

The company that has the application may not know until a few users complain (if they complain) and by that point it could be too late due to the contract, or they may not understand what a different browser is or care either.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#407

Post by pjmlp »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #323
pjmlp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monopoly achieved thanks to everyone that forgot about IE lesson, and instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application.

Excuse me. If it's on MDN, I'm going to use it if it's useful for my app. Not my fault if not all browsers can keep up! Half JK. If I get user complaints I'll patch them for other browsers but I'm only one person so it's hard and I rely on user feedback. (Submit bug reports y'all)

Welcome to Microsoft world of IE.

Re: Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

#408

Post by spenczar5 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #390
arcfour wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read the article before commenting; your comment is a non-sequitur.

I don’t know. Eventually you read enough of this stuff and you would rather the next breath be, take leadership on a real solution. To me it’s a “sequitur” to say, the biggest fuck you is to convince people to stop using Chrome, not to fix bugs for their extremely highly paid engineers for free.

Uh sir the article is about JavaScript Browser APIS
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