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Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

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Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#151

Post by insanitybit »

THENATHE wrote: post #147
insanitybit wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't see how this would impact Google at all. Obviously as one of the biggest advertisers all of Google's advertising will fit within the limit and will be highly prioritized over others.

Yea, I would be okay with spending all 30k of those on just YouTube ads, and pihole for the rest. Google is the biggest advertiser, so logically their ads would go first or close to the top

If anything Google would be incentivized to increase the size, since that would impact competitors. So I'm just curious to learn more about the justifications - like I said, they've made a number of changes to the APIs already in the last two years or so.

Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#152

Post by snailmailman »

Solvency wrote: post #144

Can anyone explain why there isn't a robust and thriving adblocking solution available at the router or OS level? Why are we all forced to grasp at the straws of the browser?

DNS-based solutions do this somewhat.

But nearly all web traffic is encrypted. And without being able to inspect the traffic more closely ad block is quite limited. So DNS blocking or router firewalls have trouble. Pihole can’t block YouTube ads. The ads still come from the same domain as the video.

Extensions have access to the live page and can do much more inspection, with finer control over the page. (Manifest V3 limits this somewhat)

On iOS it can kinda happen at the “OS” level as there is only one web browser. But that has its own drawbacks. The only adblocks are those the AppStore allows.

Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#153

Post by johnny22 »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #102
stephc_int13 wrote: post #11

Google is going to lose this war. We don't need Chrome.

*Technically inclined users don't need Chrome The average user is going to open Safari or Edge and go to Google or YouTube. They'll see the "this page runs better in Chrome" popup and install Chrome. The installer asks to make it your default browser, so they do. The idea that you can install an addon to the browser isn't even in their toolbox. They aren't aware of the anti-competitive nature of Google. To them, a br…

We used to see "Designed for Internet Explorer" or other recommendations. Firefox still took off anyways.

Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#154

Post by [deleted] »

sharps1 wrote: post #95
derefr wrote: post #15

Two questions I haven't seen addressed by any coverage of this change: 1. Will the ultimate removal of Manifest V2 support affect other Chromium-based browsers, or only Chrome itself? If the support for Manifest V2 isn't removed upstream in Chromium, but only disabled in Chrome, then I would expect that we will end up in a world where other browsers (e.g. Edge, Brave, Opera) continue to allow the installation of Mani…

Edge is following chromes lead. Vivaldi and Brave are going to maintain the code so at least uBlock Origin can work. Nobody knows how this will play out as the forks won’t want to stray faraway from the chromium code as that would add a lot of overhead. I tried a bunch of the forks, didn’t like Vivaldi, don’t like some of Braves crap, and won’t use the Chinese browser Opera. Ended up moving our family back to Firefox…

[deleted]

Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#155

Post by jacooper »

Justsignedup wrote: post #78
layer8 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason Google wants to remove V2 support is to make implementation changes that V2 currently prevents. This means that a Chromium fork that preserves V2 support will likely have to diverge further and further from Chromium over time (or rather, Chromium will diverge).

which hopefully means Brave and friends will switch to being based on Firefox instead. Could lead to some positives. Alternatively it could be that all alt browser companies will maintain one chromium fork that preserves manifest v2. Or V3 but with a lot more rules.

Brave isn't affected by this anyway, brave shields don't depend on the extension API.

Also Gecko is just a factually worse engine, that's why they didn't use it.

Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#156

Post by _cenw »

eigenvalue wrote: post #93

I thought Brave made very little sense when it was first launched. Who would want an ersatz Chrome browser? Now it's starting to look very smart. Sure, it's open source so anyone can fork Chromium. But it does take a lot of sophistication to do it properly and add back the usability bits in a nice way. And if you could basically have Chrome but without losing the ad blocking, that starts to sound pretty compelling.

Despite being made by that homophobe I will never financially support, you seem to be right. Unfortunately.

Brave funnily enough is also the only Chromium-based browser that lets you set policies to turn off their optional features, none of which I want.

Vivaldi has some downsides (no gesture navigation is a dealbreaker) and installs its bookmarks every time you sync a new browser. It also feels crowded no matter what settings you use.

Edge just does absolute asinine stuff. Yesterday it disabled my new tab page without asking (and it also asks every day) and today it asked if it could submit my Kagi search results to Microsoft to help them make Bing better, which I refused. Weirdly enough the refuse button was blue... and sure enough, Edge set my default search engine to Bing in that moment. Apparently you can switch to a non-consumer Windows SKU to turn down these shenanigans. An Antitrust needs to read that source code, badly.

Unfortunately I can't use Firefox because an app I'm forced to use wouldn't support it.

The world is ripe for a Chromium fork that just works. Maybe Ungoogled-Chromium can bring back some creature comforts eventually...

Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#157

Post by prox »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #94
fbdab103 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is truly unbelievable how bad it has become. Even informational articles might only have a paragraph of text between ads. Plus, the frequent animations/pop-unders/whatever. Everyone can decry the loss of the "small web" as much as they want, but the cram-ads-into-every-pixel dystopia means why should anyone bother? Even big brands are not immune to this behavior. At least if someone stays on the Instagram/Reddit/T…

> Even informational articles might only have a paragraph of text between ads. The thing that made me realize how bad it's gotten was ironically an inability to use ad blockers. At one job, we weren't allowed to install any adblockers to the browser (there was a lot of bureaucracy so I never figured out why). Ended up writing my own JS bookmarklets to remove ad elements from sites I commonly visited. Also started bro…

Wasn’t there a protocol (?) with just text, Gemini or something like it?

Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#158

Post by wslh »

candiddevmike wrote: post #39
wslh wrote: post #23

In a few years: LLM: Hi! Me: Please develop a browser that is full HTML, etc, etc compliant LLM: No problem... download the source here. Me: Thank you, but could you please optimize it for speed? LLM: No problem, done. Me: I have only 5 more minutes, could you please write a version in Rust, and two more in Go and C++? Ah, and support Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS. Don't forget to use the native WebView in i…

If it's that sophisticated, why even have it develop a browser, just use it as your user agent and have it filter ads for you.

That is good for general queries and content reading but I don't imagine using an spreadsheet via an agent but interacting with the UI directly. I agree that a vast amount of browsing could go to a chat session.

Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#159

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #150
Solvency wrote: post #144

Can anyone explain why there isn't a robust and thriving adblocking solution available at the router or OS level? Why are we all forced to grasp at the straws of the browser?

My guess is less variety on browsers than routers but no clue with OS’s.

Also, most consumers don't know how to configure their router. Most can figure out how to install an ad blocker.

Re: Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

#160

Post by asylteltine »

Solvency wrote: post #144

Can anyone explain why there isn't a robust and thriving adblocking solution available at the router or OS level? Why are we all forced to grasp at the straws of the browser?

Because most blocking is removing DOM elements and you can’t do this outside a browser
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