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Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

I think people are underestimating how big this is. When Brave did it you could excuse it as the action of a startup looking for attention; Opera now legitimizes ad-blocking as being a feature that should be on by default. This is similar to what went down with pop-up blockers, it quickly became a must-have feature.

I wouldn't be surprised if Safari was next and to ship their own content blocker in iOS and have it on by default.

The question is, how much will this trend cost Google?

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Opera versions 12 and lower had built-in native ad-blocking. You could right-click on any element on a page and block it by exact URL or a partial URL. This feature was only just now reimplemented for the new Opera that's based on Chromium.

You mean "have" and "can". Opera 12 is still very viable for normal use.

Right, Opera-12 has been my main browser for... Fuck, like six years now. I open other ones as-needed for "fancy" sites.

Another part of it involves mouse-gestures, which I use heavily.

> feature that should be on by default

"Opera’s ad-blocking feature is deactivated by default."

I know, but it does have a popup the first time asking if you want to turn it on. It's a step in the right direction.

Qihoo(360) will get all your privacy. A notorious and shameless company. Have you ever think about why Qihoo made this dicision?

I believe all the website will fight back soon, if opera is detected, then display a message "opera is not supported"

Spoof the Chrome User-Agent.

Who is Qihoo? What decision?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177438 (14 days ago, 71 comments)

Google (AdSense, chrome, android, etc.) doesn't right? Nor does Microsoft, Adobe or Apple.

firefox has had "anti-tracking protection" (which is effectively an adblocker) enabled by default in private browsing mode for some time now.

Anti tracking and ad blocking are not the same thing. I don't want to see ads period, not just tell the websites to not track my preferences so they can gauge what ads to show.

Firefox's Tracking Protection is not the same as Do Not Track (which "tells websites to not track my preferences so they can gauge what ads to show"). DNT is simply an advisory header and it has no effect because very few websites honor it.

Firefox's built-in Tracking Protection uses Disconnect's blocklist to block content that tracks you, preventing the tracking from happening in the first place. As a side effect, it blocks some, but not all, online ads. The thought was that online advertising is still an integral part of the web's sustainability, and so blocking it entirely would be too much - but advertisements that nonconsensually track users are a privacy and security risk, and should be blocked.

Until we have a reasonable alternative to advertising for funding the web, I personally consider Firefox's Tracking Protection to be a reasonable middle ground that hopefully sends a strong signal to advertisers - online tracking is creepy, unwanted, and puts millions of people's privacy at risk.

The question is how long will it take for sites to switch to fully run on header bidding and full server-side incorporation of ads into native placements in a largely unblockable manner.

If sites did server-side incorporation it would probably be nearly as fast as the site itself and therefore solve the problem Opera says they are trying to solve (web speed).

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