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Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

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Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#181
post #77

Another big issue is that if chrome makes it difficult to disable ads such that 99% of chrome users aren't able to do it, websites may simply choose to block Firefox as it would be easy to do so without losing a large part of user base while making sure no users are blocking ads. Right now there are far too many users using ad blockers.

Blocking a user agent? Oh no, whatever shall we do? Thankfully, we can still just change it, though I suppose a really insidious web site could use feature checks.

I mean, those annoying “join our newsletter”, “quit using adblockers”, and “allow us access to cookies and all your data or else” popovers went from nonexistent to everywhere in the span of 2 weeks.

Once one major site does it, they all will.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#182
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has been doing a few rather questionable things. They had the Mr Roboto add-on which was pushed out to advertise a TV show, they stuck ads in the "Recommendations" [1], they proactively destroyed peoples' bookmarks when they dropped support for RSS, they dropped support for RSS (because, apparently, a decentralized way to track website updates is anti-Google), and they destroyed a lot of useful add-ons. I bas…

Which browser do you recommend then?

Waterfox is good if you miss the old add-ons from pre-quantum Firefox. But it is the old model, and one lagging page will still hose the whole browser.

I tolerate it because I need my Downloadthemall extension, amongst others.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#183

I recently setup Pihole as the DNS server for my entire home network and said farewell to my Adblock extensions. It's glorious.

DNS / domain based blockers are entirely too coarse in my experience. There are plenty of cases where an ad or a tracking script comes from the exact same domain as real content. A real ad blocking extension can match only parts of the URL, or block certain file types, etc. Ad blocking extensions can also do CSS to clean up the page after blocking the ad, or "display: none" ads that for some reason can't be blocked any other way.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#184
post #121
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the embedded framework... We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7/8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome. The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in t…

People depend on Chromium/Blink because there's no other options. You can't really embed Gecko, and WebKit (Safari) can sometimes lack desirable web platform features.

You can't embed Gecko? Patently false.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#185
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft might just have the horsepower to keep up with any particularly shitty changes that Google might potentially try to push through, better than some of the other Chromium skins. At least if they want to.

Microsoft displays ads within their OS. They would join arms with Google if they honestly decided to tackle adblocking.

Why settle for some petty ad revenue when Google is handing you the opportunity to regain some browser marketshare in a silver plate ?

It's not like MS is dependent on ads as much as Google.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. The fact that Eyeo has >150 employees tells us something about the amount of money to be made from ad blocking. Although they have only…

>almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. This makes me wonder if there's any way we can give gorhill a bunch of money in donations. He's in a much more important position than I previo…

If he explicitly says "No donations sought", wouldn't it be kind of rude to throw money at him?

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#189
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork. (The train has already left the station for anything besides WebKit or Blink, since the lack of accessibility of Gecko means it will never be adopted by anyone else.) But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground…

Is that true? IE was incumbent and Firefox unseated it. They had the legacy of Netscape, sure, but they didn’t throw the towel and reskin IE the same way other browsers of the time did. Besides that, at which point does the dominant search and advertising company of the internet get an antitrust case for this? People think google is trustworthy yet they do nothing to earn that trust.

This kinda erases history. IE was riddled with security flaws and stagnant beyond belief when Firefox usurped it. There was a compelling reason to use an IE alternative back then - they actually offered something IE couldn't give.

Chrome doesn't have that problem.

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