Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#1

Post by GraemeL » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 3:18 PM UTC

Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson
adguard.com

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#2

Post by jsjddbbwj » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

I miss the days when barely anybody blocked ads. Those of us who did didn't have to worry with defeating anti ad block systems.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#3

Post by gjsman-1000 » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

jsjddbbwj wrote: post #2

I miss the days when barely anybody blocked ads. Those of us who did didn't have to worry with defeating anti ad block systems.

uBlock Origin is shockingly competent at defeating those "please turn off your adblocker" warnings.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#4

Post by mrspeaker » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream".

My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.

Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things.

I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to "stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and "stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels inevitable!

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#5

Post by BiteCode_dev » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

Yes, but doing so, they will lose the ability to be indexed, searched, archived and linked to. Like during the flash era.

Which in turn will start a new trend of website that are "open".

It's a cycle.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#6

Post by notRobot » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

No one (or a much lesser percentage) would use an ad-blocker if ads were just ads, without all the tracking, privacy and malware concerns.

Go back to contextual static-image ads, folks.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#7

Post by karatestomp » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

I think ads will be the reason Web Assembly takes off in a massive way, actually. Much harder to block ads if the site ships its own renderer and manages to hide or obscure its traffic. Then you're in to serious application-cracking territory if you want to block ads & tracking.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#8

Post by ameshkov » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

Actually, Web Components and Shadow DOM bother me more than Web Assembly. You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside and this creates an impenetrable barrier for content blockers. We've already seen examples of whole web pages transformed into a shadow-dom web component.

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#9

Post by karatestomp » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #5

mrspeaker wrote: post #4

Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the…

Yes, but doing so, they will lose the ability to be indexed, searched, archived and linked to. Like during the flash era. Which in turn will start a new trend of website that are "open". It's a cycle.

Plenty of sites already give Google something different from what they show everyone else, right?

Re: Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson

#10

Post by mwsfc » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

Please correct me if I am wrong here regarding Ghostery functionality: In current Firefox & Vivaldi versions it behaves as you would expect....blocks ads according to your settings for every tab load. But in chrome, the default behavior (assume chrome induced) appears to be to auto disable the plugin until you manually re-enable the plugin then reload the tab....repeat process for every new tab load. Do I have a Chrome setting misconfigured or is this another example of Google's "what's best for you is what we say it is" attitude?