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

Post by bambax » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

ukoki wrote: post #39

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…

> 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. This has already happened: Just look at how many websites pester you to download their mobile app or even block content unless you access from the app. From a user functionality perspective the vast majority of apps do nothing a browser can't do. But the killer fe…

Post by ameshkov » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

bubblethink wrote: post #47

So a survey article about adblocking without mentioning the main ad blocker in the world (and their competitor), ublock origin. Well played! As for the history lesson, the main meta lesson is that adblockers need to be completely detached from any monetory incentives. No company, however noble, should be trusted at all. Only open source + community ad blockers have survived and flourished. Time and again, people have…

Post by JohnFen » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #48

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…

Don't paint webassembly as something terrible. Webassembly does not add anything substantial to what's already in web. You could compile C code to JavaScript before. Webassembly does not provide new API unavailable from JavaScript. Webassembly is just an optimization. Some code will work faster and consume less memory, that's all. You could write website which paints itself on canvas with JavaScript years ago. The fa…

Post by three_seagrass » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Post by TranceMan » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #51

ukoki wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This has already happened: Just look at how many websites pester you to download their mobile app or even block content unless you access from the app. From a user functionality perspective the vast majority of apps do nothing a browser can't do. But the killer fe…

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?