Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

The pattern is this:

- Google publishes a specification.

- They raise request for feedback from the Mozilla and WebKit teams.

- Mozilla and WebKit find security and privacy problems.

- Google deploys their implementation anyway.

- This functionality gets listed on sites like whatpwacando.today

- Web developers complain about Safari being behind and accuse Apple of holding back the web.

- Nobody gives a shit about Firefox.

So we have two key problems, but neither of them are “Google controls the standards bodies”. The problem is that they don’t need to.

Firstly, a lot of web developers have stopped caring about the standards process. Whatever functionality Google adds is their definition of “the web”. This happened at the height of Internet Explorer dominance too. A huge number of web developers would happily write Internet Explorer-only sites and this monoculture damaged the web immensely. Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

The second problem is that nobody cares about Firefox any more. The standards process doesn’t really work when there are only two main players. At the moment, you can honestly say “Look, the standards process is that any standard needs two interoperable implementations. If Google can’t convince anybody outside of Google to implement something, it can’t be a standard.” This makes the unsuitability of those proposals a lot plainer to see.

But now that Firefox market share has vanished, that argument is turning into “Google and Apple disagree about whether to add functionality to the web”. This hides the unsuitability of those proposals. This too has happened before – this is how the web worked when Internet Explorer was battling Netscape Navigator for dominance in the 90s, where browsers were adding all kinds of stupid things unilaterally. Again, Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

The web standards process desperately needs either Firefox to regain standing or for a new independent rendering engine (maybe Ladybird?) to arise. And web developers need to stop treating everything that Google craps out as if it’s a done deal. Google don’t and shouldn’t control the definition of the web. We’ve seen that before, and a monoculture like that paralyses the industry.

Yes, Windows supported Electron-like applications back in the 90s with HTAs. If you want something modern and cross-platform, Tauri does this:

https://v2.tauri.app

I don’t believe the lawsuit claims this, does it?

> which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.

This is untrue.

- Most developers pay 15% for in-app purchases. Only the tiny proportion of developers earning more than a million dollars a year pay 30% and even then, it’s 15% for subscriptions after the first year.

- This is not any purchase made through an app. This only applies to digital goods and services.

Sure, go ahead and install Firefox, LineageOS, etc. (I did so too and am a happy user of both). But I'm just saying that this is not fighting the monopoly in any way, it's just retreating into a bubble where we can ignore it for a while.

I have no answers as to what to do instead, but I think acknowledging that a strategy has failed would be a useful first step.