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Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

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Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#161

Post by glenstein »

tapoxi wrote: post #120
polairscience wrote: post #40

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it w…

Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%. Saying "you can use uBlock Origin instead of uBlock Origin Lite!" won't change this.

I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the recent Google monopoly case, which could have been used to give users a dialog box to select a browser from a list instead of starting with Chrome as the pre-installed default.

It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company.

It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#162

Post by archerx »

rschiavone wrote: post #128

I remember when they first announced it years ago and they pretended to care by walking back the change. As always, the strategy is to wait for the dust to settle and then push the changes again.

Well it got me to uninstall chrome so that’s something.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#163

Post by CharlesW »

jmcphers wrote: post #116
aleqs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on Android supports ublock, not sure why it wouldn't support it on iOS

It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS. Firefox on iOS is just a skinned version of WebKit/Safari. See 2.5.6: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#per...

> It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS.

That's incorrect, and Firefox doesn't blame Apple for this. Many 3rd-party iOS browsers do ad blocking natively and/or via extensions. https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/ios

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#164

Post by OkayPhysicist »

Noaidi wrote: post #123

I do not mind advertising on websites. What I mind is bad ads, ads with malware, way too many ads, and ads that track me. This is where Google gets the whole ad thing wrong. They are focusing on the wrong problem. If you think about the economics of it, a very popular website could survive on only on ad because the advertiser would pay a premium to be seen on the website. So that is my other argument, bad websites ne…

The problem with that logic is that if one advertiser is willing to pay a premium for placement on the site, more advertisers likely are. Which creates a perverse incentive to inject exactly as many ads as most users will put up with, which shifts the users' perspective on the amount of acceptable ads, which encourages more ad placement. Rinse, repeat until you reach the current state of affairs.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#166

Post by bastawhiz »

GeekyBear wrote: post #56
whitepoplar wrote: post #18

A lot of people have been very vocal about this. I use uBlock Origin Lite and haven't noticed a difference between it and uBlock Origin. Am I missing something?

> For uBlock Origin users on Chrome, there’s uBlock Origin Lite. However, the Lite version “allows some tracking, its blocklist is a fraction of what the original blocked, and it can't perform the dynamic filtering that made the original effective,” https://www.pcmag.com/news/googles-next-chrome-update-will-f...

I guess that's what the GP and I are both saying we didn't feel. I have no idea what benefit "dynamic filtering" provides. It sounds good on paper but having tried both versions, I can't tell the experiences apart. I don't see ads, pages load fast, and that seems like enough?

Actually, I'll take that back. I used to see far more stuff get blocked (e.g., when clicking links) than with Lite. Which is to say, Lite feels like it has fewer false positives.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#167

Post by vohk »

petesergeant wrote: post #48
warpfactor wrote: post #41

Firefox is great, and the community "zen" fork is even nicer.

Maybe you could expand inline in your comment about what makes Zen “even nicer”

Not the OP, but I appreciated its attempts to declutter and rethink the layout. It encourages a full screen, minimalist style, and jumping between workspaces for different task sets. Hovering and slide out menus rather than permanent bars (although those are still an option). It also brought in some features like Split View before they hit mainline Firefox releases.

Unfortunately, I found it had some unfortunate video playback bugs for me on Linux, so I ended up bouncing back to Firefox. I'm also bit leery of relying on smaller projects with all the supply chain issues these days...

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#168

Post by maxloh »

_flux wrote: post #147
Legend2440 wrote: post #92

Bad headline. Popular ad blockers have already switched to MV3, and MV2 has already been disabled for all users.

I was under the impression MV3 is stricly less capable in terms of blocking ability than MV2?

Yeah. MV3 is a faster but less capable version.

With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.

There is a limit on how large the list can be, depending on the browser.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#169

Post by capitainenemo »

maxloh wrote: post #159
capitainenemo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Take Firefox choosing to create PDF.js to have a clean minimalist sandboxed PDF parser. Chrome instead used an existing one that has been the source of dozens of vulnerabilities. Or Firefox pulling in a ton of anti-fingerprinting measures from the Tor team. Not even worth talking about anti-fingerprinting as a serious consideration in Chrome. Rust - a mozilla effort that resulted in code from servo being pulled…

Did you know that Mozilla spends so much of their budget on their CEO's compensation that they actually had to lay off the entire Servo team?

Cite? I think the timeline has issues there. That predates the CEO controversies AFAIK. They did ditch a lot of R&D as their userbase kept shrinking due to chrome growth. 'course this sort of thing keeps coming up - yeah, I do think their CEO is overpaid ... and? Solution is what. Kill firefox off completely, hand internet over to chrome? Basically, where is this point going?
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