Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

Lol, such bombastic statements as "Betrayal", "Firefox rebound", master plans and whatnot.

The userbase, is not the same thing as the handful of technical individuals, such as ones found here.

The bread and butter of the userbase cares only about the optics. So long as the stupid banners are taken out of their sight, hardly anybody would care of more.

If they did, Snowden news breaking would have bankrupted every company named participating in the Orwellian schemes.

Privacy is an elusive abstract, not really understood or appreciated by the public. Partly because we never had it - and have always been accustomed to various levels of intrusions.

Even the EFF doesn't understand the abstract well enough to market it properly, even though their main operations are dedicated to it.

Like it or not, those of us who care about privacy are in the position of that kid browsing the internet and demanding someone makes a browser plugin for some obscure bullshit that only came up in some fossil of a 500 users niche forum.

Take a moment and be appreciative you even have "pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO," to fall back on.

Its not google's fault that firefox decided to shoot itself in the head, with a 2 week update cycle that outdated everybody's plugins constantly. Or that their performance shit the bed.

The way I transitioned to Chrome was when the 14 plugins I used for work - were driven off development because people couldn't keep up with firefoxes bullshit. At that point you might as well use the faster browser thats not memory leaking like crazy, if plugins are off the table anyway.

Theoretically, you can make a company that offers a premium browser but who the fuck is going to pay for that? It's possible to market it to enterprise and say that buying this will prevent people from collecting data on their employee internet activities. But then you'd need a whole lot of business mojo to not only fund that, but then staff it with top talent. Because as garbage as google may be, selling out to help China censor itself. They still have top level enginers you have to compete with. Some sacrifice in performance may be an acceptable tradeoff in favor of privacy, but it can't be too big.

And its not just a browser that you have to repalce, email is mandatory, then you are still left facing the temptation of google docs. What is google docs to the small business? A one stop save for infinite amounts of money on bullshit micorsoft licenses, windows is enough of a drain to start with.

Be glad that google is not offering an OS on PC. We'd be lamenting the days MS was ripping us off.

google slowly showing it's grip with it's android 'open' model falling over and it's chrome now going corporate... :')... soon you will need to pay-per-search not to get only advertisements and nonsense results. enjoy your internet ppl..

Empirical data shows that you are incorrect. People use tabs as a "brittle form of bookmarking", whether you like it or not.

> I think you're giving them too much credit, bordering on a conspiracy theory. There's no way they knew all of this would happen and that they would now be in the position to dictate the plug-ins we use.

Think about it. The time when Chrome came around, Firefox was poised to become the dominant player in the market, barring Safari, which was big on mobile but small on traditional desktops. To some extent, Mozilla depended on Google's money, but was still an independent body, and I suspect, Google came to the conclusion that Mozilla could thrive without their money.

I would not rule out the possibility that their top management decided that it'd be better to have another, Google controlled browser in the market, just in case.

So the Idea would have to be there, to have another browser in the market, just so to make life tough for Mozilla. And being nerds, their engineers put focus on speed, performance, etc.

And Google put a lot of money into the Chrome branding. I remember seeing ad's for Chrome, on huge banners, on prime real-estate in Indian tier-2 cities. Nobody does that sort of advertising, just to get people to use their browser.

Google's thought process absolutely involved the concept of getting people into their eco-system and keeping them there.

May not be a 'conspiracy', but definitely wasn't simply "Hey lets build a great browser, just because we love technology and we can do it"

The ad-Blocker market blew up in response to privacy concerns. And it directly threatens Google's revenue bread and butter, Ads and data collection. Google will fight till death to maintain the status quo, disable any meaningful ad-blocking software. Even if it means risking being a monopoly and paying fines. Even if it means it gets branded as evil.

Regarding speed: Firefox will soon switch to a new rendering engine, WebRender. It's at least as fast as Chrome's. Then Chrome's speed advantage should disappear.