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

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

#221

Post by ficklepickle »

JohnFen wrote: post #190
thekyle wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like if you replace WebAssembly with JavaScript in this comment it makes just as much sense. What is different about WebAssembly?

WebAssembly expands on the ability to do client-side stuff and makes it more accessible, so my fear is that it will make it more common. That's pretty much the entire difference. It's a difference of degree more than of kind. As I said, Javascript is making much of the web inaccessible to me, and WebAssembly, if it becomes popular, will only accelerate this loss.

I wonder how feasible a rendering proxy would be. It would run the JS in a simulated browser environment and return the HTML.

Interactivity would be tricky, but static HTML is better than a blank page.

Edit: Found something very similar, but it targets legacy browsers using clickable image maps rather than privacy/security.

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

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

#223

Post by BiteCode_dev »

Supermancho wrote: post #27
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they will lose the ability to be indexed, searched, archived and linked to Sounds like an API that will be implemented.

If it's not standard, it will be useless. If it is, the browser will eventually put it in the users hand.

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

#225

Post by Noumenon72 »

dvh wrote: post #157
TranceMan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to use imgur on mobile to upload a random image today but couldn't［FireFox］ Using FF on my desktop worked fine.

That is the ultimate end of every free image hosting service.

Being able to work on Firefox but not their own app?

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

#226

Post by DocG »

ayushgp wrote: post #62
bambax wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many websites indeed pester us to download their mobile app but I have yet to find one that forces me to? Do they actually exist?

Reddit forces you to download the app now. You can scroll like 2-4 pages worth of content and then it'll pop up asking you to open in app. On every page you navigate to from within the website you'll first get a pop up asking to choose between browser and reddit app.

Reddit outside of old.reddit.com is a dumpster fire. I specially dislike those JS loading icons on mobile, it's just so slow...

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

#227

Post by kevingadd »

notriddle wrote: post #215
kevingadd wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebAssembly adds new functionality to the browser runtime environment that isn't available to regular JavaScript. It was originally 1:1 with asm.js/JS but that stopped being true relatively quick.

It's faster. That's literally it. There aren't any new I/O facilities.

A few examples of things it adds that are not widely available in JS (if at all, or requiring awkward hacks/hints in JS), off the top of my head:

int64

uint32

popcnt

copysign

reinterpret_cast equivalent (the js hack for this is abysmal)

pthreads

SIMD

AOT compilation

To be fair, it's been a while since I was last one of the authors of the webassembly spec, so I could be missing some things.

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

#228

Post by pixl97 »

tartoran wrote: post #93
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 second this. I also hate how links behave nowadays. I used to right click and open in a new tab or save the link but in many cases it no longer works and is quite annoying. If ads were more expensive to purchase we'd see a lot fewer of them and they would not be as intrusive. But this ain't so and we need adblockers. They (the advertising industry) come back with a stronger system that is harder to ad block and we…

It's probably a prisoners dilemma for those in the industry as an individual. Because everything operates on the short term, there is no moderator of long term goals. If something gives you 5% better hits today, you have to do it, no matter if it's going to kill you two weeks from now. Or your competitors will and you'll see a drop in sales.

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

#229

Post by pixl97 »

krapp wrote: post #200
JeremyNT wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, until all the major corporate sites you actually use stop serving any content in HTML. This future seems inevitable. The only sites you'll be able to actually use without some custom web assembly renderer will be those which don't serve ads at all now - wikis, open source projects, non profits, corporate web sites, etc. Any site funded by ad revenue will effectively remove itself from the web and into i…

It's funny because all the major corporate sites could already have stopped serving HTML and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java, and yet the doomsday scenario never happened. Hell, Android apps are basically the closed "meta apps" you're talking about, and have been around for years, and yet corporate, ad-driven sites still use HTML. I don't see why Webassembly should the inevitable slippery slope t…

>and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java

Not sure what you mean by that. There were plenty of sites not usable at times because of their use of java or flash.

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

#230

Post by krapp »

pixl97 wrote: post #229
krapp wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because all the major corporate sites could already have stopped serving HTML and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java, and yet the doomsday scenario never happened. Hell, Android apps are basically the closed "meta apps" you're talking about, and have been around for years, and yet corporate, ad-driven sites still use HTML. I don't see why Webassembly should the inevitable slippery slope t…

>and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java Not sure what you mean by that. There were plenty of sites not usable at times because of their use of java or flash.

The thesis is that the existence of Webassembly, alone, means that all ad-supported sites will inevitably be rewritten entirely as WASM blobs in order to prevent the use of ad blockers. The typical doomsday scenario also includes the conversion of rest of the web to WASM, with support for HTML being entirely deprecated in all browsers, so that corporate interests can lock down, centralize and control the web entirely.

I'm claiming that thesis is incorrect because prior methods existed and still exist to encode websites as embedded binary applications, yet ad-driven sites still primarily use HTML, and the HTML driven web still exists.

How usable sites using java and flash were isn't relevant. Either all ad-driven sites seek to maximize their control over the end user by any available means at all cost, or they don't. As they evidently don't, the slippery slope of WASM leading to the end of the free web seems unlikely.

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