Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#861

Post by neuralRiot » Thu, May 30, 2019, 8:23 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #581

ljm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do people act like this is all some great big accident, the result of eternal human fallibility? It's not. This was planned. It was the objective all along. Why else do you think Google Maps is free? Gmail? Why did they drive around 1,000s of cities with cameras on a car taking photos for Street View? Was it really just to become the world's most comprehensive search engine? Hell no, it was to get people into the…

It's the never ending cycle, they will start to tighten the grip and other options will pop up with time, people need to learn that losing a bit of convenience is not the end of the world.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#862

Post by ori_b » Thu, May 30, 2019, 8:24 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #860

ori_b wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes HTML5 harder to implement, not simpler.

HTML5 != XHTML. (If that's what you're saying.) HTML5 breaks soft. It's easier to write , which is what drives content. A parser for which there is no content becomes moot. (I'd prefer far more rigorous document specification. That's not the Universe I inhabit.)

You're responding to a thread pointing out that browsers are too complicated to implement, which has forced everyone but Google and Mozilla to give up on providing browsers and web standards.

And Google is currently the funding source for Mozilla, giving them a more or less complete monopoly on the future of the web.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#863

Post by hannasanarion » Thu, May 30, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

deadbunny wrote: post #697

guuhv wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the default on Linux, "use system colours" is on by default, and the default background colour for widgets on Linux is usually not white.

You mean the default in whatever flavour of linux you're using. It's not enabled by default on all distros.

It's the default in Firefox for Linux. It's a browser setting, not an OS setting. And in order to turn it off you have to do really obscure stuff in the Firefox launch options, it's funky and makes no sense.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#864

Post by hannasanarion » Thu, May 30, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #817

hannasanarion wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has several experience-breaking bugs for me. One where on websites that don't explicitly set their form background to white, which is the default on most browsers, Firefox paints them the color of the user's desktop theme, even when the theme is dark. Black text on black background. This bug had been known about for almost 20 years and is marked "won't fix" because the devs still assert that universal user th…

I am unable to reproduce either of your bugs on mac. I've never had firefox ignore a "force" reload in over 10 years of using the browser, and despite having the "dark" theme running, going to mozilla.com shows a white background just fine. I am running nightly

Yeah, because it only looks for GTK themes, not whatever theming engine windows and mac desktops have, which is further evidence of the absurdity of their wontfix explanation.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#865

Post by danShumway » Thu, May 30, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #852

danShumway wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in common browsing scenarios. Part of the point of an adblocker is to protect you in uncommon browsing scenarios. This is almost like saying that a malware list is bloated because some of the hashes its storing are uncommonly downloaded. Having as close to full coverage as possible is important. It also opens up an attack vector for advertisers that they absolutely will exploit. With unlimited rules, there's no rea…

Comparing it to a malware list is a bit extreme, isn't it? In one case, you actually get infected, in the other, you see one ad. Your next point about advertisers abusing it is a good one though. I believe in the response, they said they are running benchmarks to see the performance hit, so they are definitely still looking at tweaking the limit.

I don't think the consequences are the same, but I do think the underlying idea is applicable.

Two things to keep in mind:

A) uBlock Origin doesn't just protect me from ads, it also protects me from many trackers. I'm in the (maybe minority, I don't know) camp that says that excessive tracking and de-anonymization attempts cause people tangible harm. They're not as drastic or as harmful as installing malware on my computer, but I put these practices in the same category as a malicious attack.

B) Under the most recent stats I've checked, Malvertising has almost surpassed general unsafe sites like porn/torrents as a source of consumer malware. Even Google Ads aren't immune from some of these attacks[0]. So for less computer-literate friends that I have, I consider a gimped adblocker to be a malware risk source.

But to your point, maybe a less emotionally charged comparison could be Chrome's automatic whitelist for autoplaying videos. Nobody is going to die if a video autoplays on their tablet, but at a fundamental level the point of blocking autoplay is to actually block it, everywhere. Not to block some of it. People didn't want Google trying to guess which video sites were the most annoying, they just wanted Google to turn off autoplay.

In the same sense, if someone installs an extension that says it's going to block ads and trackers, I don't think it's unreasonable for a consumer to want it to block all of the ads (or at least as many as is possible to detect), not just some of them on the X most popular websites.

[0]: https://wp.josh.com/2019/05/06/breaking-news-google-adwords-...

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#866

Post by russdpale » Thu, May 30, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #352

russdpale wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this analogy works, because internet explorer was pure garbage. It was worse than garbage, it was like the nasty water left over at the top of the industrial drain, and by just looking at it you risk losing your eye sight. IE was more ripe for disruption like few products ever are, it was so ripe we got not one, but two competitors (chrome)! Pound for pound, chrome is ridiculously far ahead of internet e…

It's not what someone had to do to upend IE or that they will have to do to upend Chrome, it's what Microsoft didn't do to keep IE in power: they didn't do anything.

I agree with that completely, but personally, I seriously doubt Alphabet is going to let its flagship product's flag ship delivery vehicle falter like ie did.

I mean, who knows. Never say never, but they are going to be tough competition. Not to mention that browsers are becoming so advanced it will be tough for a small team to match the engineering prowess of a company like google.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#867

Post by chris_wot » Thu, May 30, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #804

chris_wot wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to have to use it at work. The reason I haven't shifted at work is a ridiculous one really - it's the way you can tear off tabs and move them to another screen - it doesn't tear the same way as Chrome. Like I say, ridiculous.

I've used this exact feature on firefox for years

How do you get it to tear off and show the whole window while you are moving it? I would love that, then I'd literally switch in no time flat.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#868

Post by tatersolid » Thu, May 30, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

geodel wrote: post #832

amelius wrote: post #289

Earlier 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"

Huh, developers using electron and/or whole NodeJS/ Javascript ecosystem for their products are already causing big annoyance for users. If there were whole bunch of conscientious developers we would not be in place where browser engines embedded or otherwise would be the most dominant way to deliver services or products to users.

The market clearly wants a cross platform GUI runtime.

Java didn’t cut it. Neither did Tcl/GTK/Wxwidgets.

Web apps won because of universality and zero touch deployment. Nothing to install, it just works (mostly).

Platform-native apps simply doesn’t achieve the major “it just works” goal, and always havw their own compromises.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#869

Post by amaccuish » Thu, May 30, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

discreditable wrote: post #683

Jaruzel wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Key point (for Windows) on that page is: ADM/ADMX templates with 300+ user and device policies ADM/ADMXs are a list of settable policies (rules) that Chrome will read from the Windows Registry on startup[1]. I'm going to make a huge assumption that the Chrome.exe for Enterprise users is no different to the Chrome.exe that everyone else uses, and it switches into 'Enterprise' mode if it sees certain key policy entries…

Chrome MSI and chrome EXE installers work a little differently. The MSI installer by default installs to the program files directory. I've seen the EXE installer often installed to the local user profile. to convert a regular install to Enterprise you would probably have to uninstall the local version and then install the MSI. ADM templates are something Firefox is sorely lacking at the moment. I remember reading tha…

So two things. The MSI installer will convert a local (EXE) installation to a global install (updating shortcuts and removing the local profile install whilst preserving the chrome profile).

Second, Firefox does have ADMX policies (ADMX being used primarily after Vista): https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates. I believe it took them so long because they were initially reluctant, user freedom etc. But I guess Chrome's success in enterprise made them reconsider. Honestly I never considered Firefox for our Windows Domain because of the lack of Group Policy support. Now I deploy both and users have options :)

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#870

Post by nullandvoid » Thu, May 30, 2019, 10:15 PM UTC

phiresky wrote: post #39

From 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…

AKA the old bait and switch! Well I've been needing a reason to finally make the full switch to firefox ( the containers were already compelling )