How come Apple always pulls off stuff Microsoft would never get away with?
Why doesn't Firefox already do this out of the box? It's not as if adblocking is a particularly new concept. This is ten-year-old technology. It's not as if adblocking isn't known to be something people want: Geeks use it all the time.
Personally I could give a crap. ;)
Everyone’s screaming about this, it’s completely blown out of proportion and crazy conspiracy theories are formulated. That’s different to how the press reacts to Microsoft or Google – exactly, how?
I always thought that Microsoft could have killed Google's non-search business and other free "cloud"-based competitors by shipping an ad blocker in IE. It would have ruined Microsoft's own free online service business, but they could have thrived on software license revenue alone. But, I think the DoJ and the EU would never allow it.
Ads on websites vs. ads in apps, iOS vs. Windows, Safari vs. Internet Explorer, Mobile Safari vs. Desktop Safari. All those kinds of details regulatory bodies tend to care about.
To give you just one example, Safari (the non-mobile variant, the one with the Reader feature) has at the moment a market share of around five percent, Internet Explorer has twelve times that.
Details like that matter in antitrust cases. Just because something looks superficially similar doesn’t mean it’s actually the same.
Reader is not an adblocker anymore than Readability or Instapaper are.
You guys are completely insane and blowing this out of proportion. Reader is a manually triggered page reformatter, essentially Readability built in, you have to already be on the page and you have to have seen the ads before Reader is even available.
The ars article is one of the few that got me to headdesk in years, it's unbelievably stupid.
Still, they seem intent on pushing the limits.