Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible • Hacker News Board

Re: Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

#481

Post by southernplaces7 » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 10:13 AM UTC

kibibu wrote: post #399

southernplaces7 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to use Firefox, if it wasn't so persistently such an utterly slow piece of shit if you open more than a few tabs or use it much. Across every laptop I've ever owned and across every version of FF I've ever used, this has been the case despite all promises. So unless i'm haunted by some magical digital browser curse, Chrome at least performs rapidly, even for a tab hoarder like me. I barely use anything b…

Microsoft's Defender was, until recently, drastically slowing down Firefox on many configurations.

I'll look into that on my laptop and see if it may just possibly have been a major cause of problems all this time. I'm skeptical, but thanks for the tip.

Re: Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

#482

Post by smeej » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 10:19 AM UTC

heisenbit wrote: post #479

smeej wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It terrifies me that I'm actually unsure whether this comment is sarcastic.

Rest assured it is sarcastic. It is terrifying because you start sensing what power shift that is. And it is not theoretical in the slightest, my wife starts complaining about dynamic pricing in web shops where she used to find deals at seasons end. Or what is wrong with meeting politicians what have always a very good brief in their hands telling them what words have maximum impact on the small group before them? It…

I think for me it's terrifying because it sounds like the same line of reasoning as, "Why should I care about encryption? I don't have anything to hide," and people say (and mean) that a LOT.

So many people genuinely don't understand what would be wrong with this scenario, and that's why I'm afraid.

Re: Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

#483

Post by thuuuomas » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 8:53 PM UTC

px43 wrote: post #121

KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #11

A good and measured article marred only by a silly, clickbait title. Unless there is a plan to allow attesters that are independent bodies then this is absolutely a threat to the open internet, or what's left of it. The biggest dead canary for me is the lack of calling this out explicitly by Google or Apple. We're left to assume that Google is hand-wavingly saying "don't worry we can take care of that" when the priva…

[flagged]

People in your personal life deserve the assumption of positive intent.

Corporations, corporate communications, public figures, etc. are not deserving of the assumption of positive intent.

Re: Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

#484

Post by wizzwizz4 » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 9:36 PM UTC

nequo wrote: post #473

paulmd wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if I donate to American Petroleum Institute I can help tilt their agenda in a more green direction. Maybe if I donate to NRA-ILA I can tilt their agenda towards gun control. you’re not going to tilt a think tank against its master, and the point of Mozilla is controlled opposition so google can point out they’re not quite a monopoly.

What do you propose as an alternative? Safari?

There are many, many, many web browsers that are not corporate-controlled. Some of my favourites lately are the Argonaut Constellation [0] – mostly because of the interesting technical decisions going in the development (particularly the CSS and the Haskell), but also because Rhapsode is already better than eSpeakNG + AT-SPI2 + Firefox.

There's also the venerable lynx, and elinks (which I reluctantly admit is better than lynx, even if I don't use it much), and Dillo+ [1] (a fork / continuation of Dillo that supports Gopher and Gemini). And could I forget NetSurf, with its graph-y history navigation? And of course, Ladybird, [2] probably the best-funded of the lot.

These are just the ones I've heard of. There are surely dozens more you'd be interested in, and thousands of little hobby projects. Why not try making your own web browser?

[0]: https://argonaut-constellation.org/

[1]: https://github.com/crossbowerbt/dillo-plus

[2]: https://ladybird.dev/

Re: Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

#485

Post by CatWChainsaw » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 1:51 PM UTC

dillydogg wrote: post #153

cft wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Edge. I think Edge is a realistically viable competitor, especially with Bing chat sidebar. It's also faster than Safari on MacOS

I think the person you are responding to would say that edge is just another chromium skin. It doesn't exactly relieve Google's monopoly on browser technology

another chromium skin with extra tracking. I believe Edge tracks by hardware ID more aggressively than Chrome or chromium.

Re: Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible

#486

Post by jabbany » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #465

phh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make browsing the internet possible only on CPUs allowed by Apple, Microsoft, Google. So no RISC-V just yet, and even when RISC-V will be supported by them: No competition allowed in CPU. Make browsing the internet possible only on SoCs allowed by Apple, Microsoft, Google. No competition allowed in SoC. [0] Make browsing the internet possible only on form factors approved by Apple, Microsoft, Google. So no calculator…

You don't need this is stop innovations in CPUs, any new CPU will be for non-computers or for servers - for the same reason that Linux is not yet king of the desktops, which is that people need their computers to run old software.

> people need their computers to run old software

So? They can force you to pick between running old software or running new software. This is hardly new if you look at the broader "compatibility" scene. Old hardware and software are being dropped all the time. (Remember when MacOS dropped 32-bit support and wiped out a huge chunk of older games?)

If you want to stay in the old chain, you're free to do so, just like how you can still pick up a word processor made a couple decades ago and make documents on it. It only affects you if you want to use the Internet as that keeps evolving. (If you load up some '00s or '10s era browsers you'll see that many of them do not work at all for the popular Internet sites, which have all adopted things like newer TLS implementations and HTTP/3 or whatever the latest one is...