Is this a chrome API or chromium API? For the later case we have Chromium Edge(https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com), which is just as good!
If it's chromium API then Microsoft may actually end up taking a fork off chromium codebase right away and decide to keep that alive.
Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
491–500 of 909 posts
Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept. Can't we, developers, do the opposite? Like introduce a small annoyance, like showing a pop-up, when visitors use Chrome? It could say something like "today is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"
I'm still working out the details, but when I get to the point where I'm selling software on my site, I plan to offer small discounts (maybe a dollar) to anyone I detect on a Firefox browser. I'm considering doing the same thing for Ad Blockers. I know I can't convince normal people to care about the web ecosystem, and yelling at users about behavior is just another way to annoy them. I like the idea of having a smal…
> I like the idea of having a small (likely secret) list of browser behaviors that reward users, rather than punishing them. It makes it feel more like a game or a cheat code or easter egg to me than a heavy handed lecture.
While that is nice, you run the risk of nobody noticing.
For some strange reason, I wanted to comment to your post and you didn't have a reply button initially. I had to refresh and then is showed up. Huh, never seen that behavior on HN.
Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It also seems to get stuck resolving DNS sometimes, which is probably an artifact of the corporate network, but Chrome doesn't have that problem. OMG I thought I was the only one running into this exact same problem! This has been a deal killer for me.
Switch your DNS servers (I suggest 1.1.1.1). Chrome uses Google's DNS servers by default, they're probably just faster than whatever you're using.
That isn't an effective solution on a corporate network that depends on internal name resolution.
And FWIW I run into the same DNS-like issues with Firefox on my home network, which uses Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS. Perhaps it is something to do with the way my company provisions my machine, I don't know. All I know is that Chrome has no issues. I've made efforts to track down the issue but it's ultimately not worth my time.
Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Mozilla can (and does) offer putting the privacy concerns and an open web first.
Google has worked very hard over the years to make itself into an organization with deeply baked-in incentives to do the opposite. It'd take a decade of sustained effort working counter to powerful incentives to fix that.
This is distinct from making a capable well-performing browser, which Google has done. So has Mozilla.
Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
gorhill makes a moral argument on the other side of yours [1]: That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft. Don't fall for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy. Your analogy is flawed because it assumes the customer walking into the store retains their privacy and is not charged any hidden costs. A mor…
I'm much more sympathetic to the privacy point of view than the "pages loading twice as fast and hours of extra battery life" is my right so I'm going to remove your ability to make money so I can have your content faster.
The people most impacted aren't the entitled well-off first world citizens you allude to, but second and third world citizens and youth.
The rational choices of market participants do not remove the ability of sellers to sell, but they certainly do create more economic pressure for sellers to find and support better systems.
Also consider that the problem is not audiences vs publishers. It's corrupt middlemen harming audiences (privacy / malware / hidden costs) and defrauding publishers (fake traffic, bots, perverse incentives).
At this stage Brave's system of on-device ML in-browser for relevance and privacy, and opt-in ads seems a much better model, and I'm sure others will pop-up too.
We seem to be on the cusp of much better approaches to funding content, so it's really up to us to start advocating and supporting these new approaches.
Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
#496Earlier 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…
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…
Time to build a Pi Hole since iOS Firefox doesn’t allow extensions.
Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yet still, we have Rust (a phenomenally innovative programming language) that was conceived, as far as I understand it, to build a new rendering engine. I've not checked in on Servo for some time but they were going for full on ACID2 compliance with CSS, meeting the specs for HTML...A lot of that work became Electrolysis and then Quantum. Mozilla has been a serious lab for innovation without the conflict of interest…
Servo is very promising, but not ready for commercial embedded applications yet (as of approx 3-4 months ago last time I checked it).
It will likely be a better engine than embedded Chromium when it's done (if for no other reason than that it seems to have fewer dependencies[0]), but I wouldn't start building an application on top of it today.
I am highly interested in finding a more performant alternative to Electron. I'm currently building a web-first game that will also be available as a fully offline native app. I'll probably use Electron unless the ecosystem changes drastically before I'm done. Some really interesting projects out there -- not just Servo, but also thin wrappers around OS web views, even a few re-implementations of CSS/HTML that just force you to cross-compile or port your Javascript to another language.
But I haven't found any that were mature enough that I felt comfortable using them. Servo was the most promising project I personally have seen so far, but it needs more time.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/flibitijibibo/b67910842ab95bb3decdf8...
Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
#498I don't get it. I've used Firefox and Chrome for years. Firefox is easily as good and capable as Chrome. The barrier to switch from Chrome to Firefox is almost non-existent. Is Google counting on the majority of people not being knowledgeable enough or motivated enough to switch browsers?
Google Chrome (desktop) does not contain ads/"suggested content" on the New Tab page. For that reason alone I'll continue using Chromium on desktop until they actually pull the trigger and remove/neuter uBO.
Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
#499Slightly off topic, I'm finding it very disingenuous that people in this thread(and any other threads that come up about Firefox) have actually had significant performance issues with Firefox. No bugs that are noteworthy, sans that fiasco with the expired certificate that disabled addons briefly. I've been using Firefox since "quantum" on both my MacBooks(one of which is old AF) and on Linux. I've yet to have problem…
I use Firefox as my primary browser. I still have performance problems. Today this happened. After a long session using 5-30 tabs at a time, and devtools variously open, Firefox sometimes completely locks up for tens of seconds. This is on Windows 10. It happened maybe 3 times today. I've never seen it happen on chrome ever. This is a recent high-powered machine with fast (for a laptop) everything.
Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
#500From the author of uBlock on this: What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do. This i…
Welcome to the point when even free market people will no longer defend your monopoly, Google.
The number of egregious examples of their centralization backfiring against the freedoms within the day-to-day life of internet users keeps growing bigger at a seemingly exponential rate.
The barrier for competition may be high but history is littered with examples of giants withering under their own decision making. Nor will they forever be immune from antitrust laws.