Chrome extension manifest v3 proposal: comment from uBlock Origin author
github.com
github.com
I predict Firefox will see a large uptake in market share if ad and content blockers become ineffective on desktop Chrome. I've finally switched to Firefox on the desktop now that U2F support is here, and it looks like it was just in time.
Which means in the medium run they are looking to deal with ad-blockers altogether because if you can instrument what rules are applies to pages by the most popular blockers you know exactly how to get around those rules. Basically this is a way to dump all that data into Google's pockets so it can slowly but surely get around all of that.
Overall I still prefer it (iOS), but definitely a pet peeve of mine.
Edit: nevermind, I'm an idiot!
I tried to block those for a while now on Android and wasn't able to find any other solution than using Firefox with ubo.
I don't need to block in-app ads; I just bought my way out of those.
Blocking ads in apps is certainly trickier though.
there's also the Background video playback fix add-on for FF, works really well.
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/android/addon/video-background...
I download all my music from YouTube now and don't have to deal with their poorly thought out ux.
so now, they need to recoup the money, or even better, earn a living through content they create. that's done either by ads, youtube premium or stuff like patreon.
would prefer that your favorite content creators stopped doing stuff you like because they can't earn a single cent on stuff they do?
That hasn't been my experience (using GMusic) — Only on Music Videos do I not get advertisements. But I get them on everything else on Youtube.
> Currently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, the majority of the revenue will go to creators.
From: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en
EDIT: found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/9mj13u/sh...
According to them, a view from a Youtube Premium user nets them 36x more money than a view from an Ad viewing user.
So we are overpriced 36 times for the privilege of not viewing ads ?
Maybe there would be two tiers; $20 a month for just "Google" ads, and $40+ a month for all ads to be removed (Via AdChoices).
Sadly this was turned down and the new version of Google Contributor only works on some websites.
$10 per month is nearly the cost of a Netflix subscription. There is no way Youtube generates anywhere close to that much in ad revenue per user per month.
What is your basis for believing that?
If this is all terribly off-base, let me know.
I want to note, though, that this also goes for much more than Youtube. I read a lot of Vox Media websites, and I'd gladly pay for an ad-free subscription—but not for more than $10 per year (and less if it was just the individual sites, rather than a package). Unless I'm quite mistaken, that should more than make up for their lost ad revenue.
I don't want to be stingy, but I also read a wide variety of different sources, and all these subscription costs ad up. I also just don't think freedom from ads should cost so much more than the ads are apparently worth.
I agree that they all add up, and I've dropped a few this past year. I'm just pointing out that I find more value in the YouTube content I do watch than I do from other sources in terms of the time I spend watching.
It's not just the ad revenue itself that has to be replaced.
In addition to that, you have substantial costs baked into supporting a subscriber program. Customer service costs, payment processing fees, development effort to manage your subscriber system itself, incremental development and creative costs to ensure your wireframes and functionality account for the ad-free and ad-filled versions (which may include multiple form factors and platforms for content delivery), marketing related costs (be it marketing labor, development labor, conversion rate optimization labor, etc) for user acquisition and retention work, and additional complexity in ensuring harmony between what you promise in your subscriber contract and what promises you're making in your advertising/data brokerage contracts.
In addition to all that overhead, the people that pay for subscriptions are those with disposable income to pay for subscriptions. Which substantially overlaps with who advertisers want to reach. So the more valuable part of your audience pool is self-selecting out of your advertising pool, which exposes you to substantial risk of devaluing your advertising pool and the CPMs you can command overall far in excess of the value of any single individuals ad- and data- related revenue (which only gets worse as your paid subscriber base gets larger and more noticeably absent from your advertising pool).
So you take on risk at the beginning in the form of overhead, and as your subscriber base scales the overhead becomes less of an issue as it's amortized across a larger base. But your risk itself still exists, it just shifts over to the advertising side of the house where your addressable audience is becoming less and less valuable (or maybe even just less in volume, if not in value).
And after all that, if they just broke even it wouldn't be worth the risk. So in addition to just paying for your equivalent value to an advertiser that month, you're paying for that + a portion of the overhead and incremental costs it takes to support the ad-free version + a portion of the long term devaluation of the advertising pool that results from having an ad-free version + a bit of profit to ensure it was all worth the hassle to begin with.
Off course, Apple doesn't even allow other browsers on iOS, so firefox iOS can't support extensions even if it wanted to. If you look at a single policy and decide that you know all you need to know, then maybe you should first ask for apple to change.
I think there are more. But I don't remember which ones.
But if they added extensions (which mobile Chromium doesn't support at all), they're not shy about divergence.
Not meant as a comment on the proposal or FF vs Chromium.
This (v3) proposal, and the slick rewrite of Mozilla's stuff probably means I will be off of Chromium for mobile and desktop some time in the hazy future.
See detailed comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20050936
Firefox Focus will at least destroy everything the moment you leave a site
Firefox allows ad-blockers
These are what I use for all sites that aren't owned by Google... Google sites I open in Chrome, but only Google sites do I open in Chrome
I have no default browser on my Android, I pick a browser when I click a link, with Brave being my default in most cases, Firefox Focus for "must have JavaScript but please scorch the Earth afterwards" and Firefox for somewhere inbetween
Not that I use it the most — I have standard Firefox for hitting my everyday fave sites — but when I follow a link from another app (email, etc.) I know I'll get a fast experience w/o cookie persistence and the other upsides of a stealth browser.
For me, it's been a successful pattern.
Edit: still has an ad blocker add-on based on the Adblock Plus rules, and the browser has been updated within the past month. I believe it was the first tabbed browser on Android, and supports some useful features like definable gestures.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...
Safari has definitely come a long way, and the app extensions tend to get underrated.
Are they 100% up to par with Chrome's? Probably not, but when shopping around for reasonable competitors, you need to account for the trajectory, rather than just the current state.
I predict you're right but not enough for it to make a difference.
The one thing that I've come to realize is that we're losing. The web is now closed. Owned by Facebook and Twitter for the most part.
Facebook screws you over on privacy but most people don't care.
Sure... you and I do, however, the masses don't care about defecting as long as they save $0.99.
Add Apple and their walled garden to that list. When Intel first attempted to introduce "Trusted Computing" in the early 2000s, there was a huge outcry. Few years later Apple comes along with something that is much more restrictive, and now people are happy to accept that you can only do with your device whatever the manufacturer allows you to do.
The PC only escaped that model due to Compaq's reverse engineering trick and IBM's failure to take it back.
Something that most OEMs are quite found of having back as per current Android and laptop models.
I care about my privacy, but the steps I can take to protect it are inadequate.
I am in the vast majority (97%) according to this survey:
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/security-world/2019/03/labs-su...
Here are some numbers from the article:
An overwhelming majority of respondents (96 percent) feel that online privacy is crucial. And their actions speak for themselves: 97 percent say they take steps to protect their online data, whether they are on a computer or mobile device.
There is a near equal percentage of people who trust (39 percent) and distrust (34 percent) search engines across all generations.
Across the board, there is a universal distrust of social media (95 percent). We can then safely assume that respondents are more likely to trust search engines to protect their data than social media.
When asked to agree or disagree with the statement, “I feel confident about sharing my personal data online,” 87 percent of respondents disagree or strongly disagree.
It's easy to dig up a survey someone did that supports the conclusions you wish were true. It's much harder to find the actual state of reality.
If you click through to their report, you'll realize that there's not much information about their sample, other than this:
From January 14 to February 15, 2019, Malwarebytes Labs conducted a survey on nearly 4,000 participants to measure respondents’ confidence in their own privacy and security practices, as well as their confidence in privacy being maintained by businesses.
There's absolutely no information about the demographic breakdown of the participants and no way to access the dataset itself. In other words, we have no way of establishing that this survey is worth anything more than a blog post on a site that tries to promote its software.
And gated by Google, for the most part.
Change doesn't happen quickly. If you expect and require it to, then you're going to be guaranteed disappointment.
> The one thing that I've come to realize is that we're losing. The web is now closed. Owned by Facebook and Twitter for the most part.
A big reason why "we're losing" is that kind of defeatist attitude.
A big reason why losses can be so bad is that approach of refusing to accept reality. It robs you of time & resources that would be better spent on a solution for what happens after.
>>> ...[it's] not enough ... to make a difference....we're losing. The web is now closed...
...is more surrender than anything.
Many, many important social changes in the past century happened because some group of people refused to "accept reality" and surrender to the status quo, and instead embarked on a seemly quixotic effort against all odds to change it. They don't all succeed, but many do. Don't smother that success in the crib.
Considering most younger people don't actively use facebook anymore, their (facebooks) only chance is to buy the NewHowApp company every couple of years (khm.. instagram.. khm,... whatsapp..)
How many people here have installed Chrome on the computers of their friends and family? Is there anybody here that never did that?
I remember recommending Chrome, even though I was a Firefox user, because Firefox on Windows tended to get infested with crappy toolbars and other extensions. Well not anymore.
And that whole recommendation process can always happen for another browser.
All it takes is for the developers to come back to Firefox. And I've seen a noticeable shift happening among my peers ever since Quantum.
Nah.. They're both losing users.
The problem with "modern" internet is, that there's more and more people using it, and that makes the numbers 'weird'. The number of IRC users is probably higher than it was in the late 1990s/early 2000s. But back then only geeks used internet, and only they were on irc.. and now.. a lot of them are still there, just that now there is a bunch of of other people on facebook.
As we've seen with myspace, digg, etc., and as we're seeing with tumblr and also facebook now, younger, more tech-savy users have no issues with changing platforms.. from facebook to tumblr to snapchat to instagram to SomethingNew(TM).
One "bad" turn of events, one company that doesn't want to sell to facebook, and the "owned by" sentance will be completely different in a couple of years.
Rumors of IRC's death have been disproven fairly frequently, but at least when I was active on IRC everyone I've talked to had the impression that IRC as a whole was losing users throughout the early 00s.
I suspect services such as slack and discord killed off a lot of IRC users as of late as well.
Wouldn't mind being disproven, but at least personally IRC has fallen out of favor except for very specific use cases (like Linux distro support) rather than just chat in general.
This is directly in response to "As we've seen with myspace, digg, etc., and as we're seeing with tumblr and also facebook now, younger, more tech-savy users have no issues with changing platforms.. from facebook to tumblr to snapchat to instagram to SomethingNew(TM)."
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...
fixed link
also, this is a really interesting project; would you mind allowing me to interview you over IM at some point? I'm trying to improve my breadth of knowledge by doing deep dives into unfamiliar areas.
I'm hoping that Brave, Edge and Opera maintain the API compatibility in their downstream forks.
In January, Google announced that Chrome was going to be blocking all ads on domains that had too many ads ( https://blog.chromium.org/2019/01/building-better-world-wide... ) ; website owners were told to use the new "Ad Experience Report" in Webmaster Tools/Search Console to find out if they passed our not. Months later, my sites never were reviewed. Everyone I asked also did not have their sites reviewed.
Now Google has updated the Search Console and this "Ad Experience Report" is no where to be seen.
Maybe whoever came up with this idea and announced it never had the authorization to do so. After all, Google's Adsense was happily encouraging web site owners to add ad placements to their websites that were blatant violations of these new rules, including the most egregious, full page interstitials. The UI of Adsense would easily convince a more novice operator to just turn on "auto ads" and have Google blanket their website with ads automatically. Certainly this couldn't have been the plan, follow Google's advice so that your site could never earn advertising revenue from Chrome users again?
I suspect Google does have a plan to deal with ad blocking. They might have a few plans. Right now, it resembles someone bashing their own head against a wall. These changes to Chrome precipitate the end of Chrome having a dominate desktop market-share. If it really happens. But no matter what happens, Google is once again a little less trustworthy after.
I think there was a guy whose 20% project was calling the shots but he eventually replaced himself with a GAN or something.
"The sole motivation here is correcting major privacy and security deficiencies in the current system. I know, because I set that focus, and the team reports up through me."
https://twitter.com/justinschuh/status/1134092257190064128?s...
https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1134127701583904770
All I see is handwavy posturing and tweets like this: "I should know better than to check Twitter after a painfully long day, but I am not dumb enough to actually reply to any of this crap."
This is the person who (by his own claim) is making the call on something that will fundamentally change the entire Internet?
Thank God for Firefox Mobile.
"New and existing technologies could affect our ability to customize ads and/or could block ads online, which would harm our business.
Technologies have been developed to make customizable ads more difficult or to block the display of ads altogether and some providers of online services have integrated technologies that could potentially impair the core functionality of third-party digital advertising. Most of our Google revenues are derived from fees paid to us in connection with the display of ads online. As a result, such technologies and tools could adversely affect our operating results."
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204419...
And creates Facebook-style shadow profiles: https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160882873380870
HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
They have also fixed the issues. The page makes it clear when someone has not opted in, and in that case it won't use profile images or names and the tip won't go through.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/wp-content/uploads/2019...
I hope they never backslide.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19208004
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012687
I'm sharing the Firefox link on Facebook right now. Not a huge deal but I guess I haven't advocated for it yet.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/a2y9iv/is_br...
I think the mindset that crypto = stay away when looking at Brave is silly. The idea is novel, they have a working product, and IMO they really aren't "locked in" to crypto. I imagine they could pretty easily transition the ad payouts, tipping, and auto-contribution features from BAT to traditional currency. Building the platform around BAT to start just allowed them to cash in on an ICO at the peak of the craze.
See also: https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160753793683456?s=19
To my point - you're not tipping the content creator at all until they claim (edit: although as you say, tipping to verified does tip them). Also, these tips that are done with BAT that came with the promotion of Brave is sent back to Brave if they remained unclaimed for a set amount of time. Seeing as Brave has complete control of the tips they can change the rules and take the BAT back at any time.
>the whole point is to increase the value of the network.
This is kind of a pain point, isn't it? Many content creators have established ways to donate (Patreon, Twitch built in methods, Paypal, etc). Why should they opt-in to an altcoin created by Brave? There's no incentive for content creators to "increase the value of the network."
That's true for unclaimed tips. I don't believe they have any control if someone is verified, but I could be wrong.
>This is kind of a pain point, isn't it? Many content creators have established ways to donate (Patreon, Twitch built in methods, Paypal, etc). Why should they opt-in to an altcoin created by Brave? There's no incentive for content creators to "increase the value of the network."
I'd imagine the incentive to grow the network would be more tips through Brave. I don't donate through patreon or paypal since I find that to be a personal pain point. But I will be using Brave. I'd imagine there are others like me.
1. Better dev tools 2. Better WebGL performance
But today, Firefox has upped their game on both, and really, I don't play much with WebGL anymore so it doesn't matter that much to me.
I am kinda sick of this whole back-and-forth thing, though. I'm also getting tired of seeing the way the web is going; monetized and walled off. More and more, I'm starting to look into and toward distributed solutions.
Give me back the internet I remember from the early 90s. If I can't have that, then I might just return to BBS-ing over ssh...
We need a more effective strategy than this...
What if we had a middle ground where we build a browser to fight ads by putting forth responsible ads with responsible tracking and used the revenue to fight for a responsible web.
Make people truly responsible for their words and actions online, and maybe politeness and civility might return. Let anonymous actors still communicate, but they would be known as such, and the browser or whatnot could identify that and mark them as such, so that others can know whether or not to put their trust in them.
But then - that also goes against my real belief that the internet should be free and anonymous; it also goes against reality, as we've seen real-life examples of people who are toxic, divisive, insincere, hateful, etc - being perfectly forthright with their identity online and people flocking toward them by the thousands. Conversely, there are also plenty of completely anonymous personas and characters out there that people also believe and hold their words to be true; in some cases more true than objective reality.
I don't know what the real solution to all of this is, at least in the short term. In the long term, better education for everyone would be the ideal solution, but with that also being vilified and worked against by individuals and groups who have an agenda to prevent such betterment, pushing that solution and having it work long term is increasingly becoming seemingly non-viable. Even in a perfect world, though, where such a thing weren't being molested, it might still take a generation or two before any results were potentially seen.
I think long before this is solved, the solution may present itself in the utmost form: A worldwide civil war, that'll make both WW1 and 2 look like skirmishes.
Did everyone just got rid of email and phone numbers?
If?
They’re acting in keeping with their business model. There’s no “if,” just “when.”
I’ve already started reaching out to all the people that I’m family-and-friends tech support for and begun pitching a transition to FF.
Google is taking advantage of it's monopoly position in browsers to help another business area: advertising.
On Android I use Opera, which has a built-in adblocker. I would love to use Firefox as well, but on Android it just seems very sluggish. Especially the scrolling is kind of cruel.
Really inspiring stuff!
Update: Couldn't find it on the Play Store
You have to opt into some beta groups first to use it: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/16/mozilla-firefox-preview-ne...
It's located here on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...
If Edge can preserve the old behavior then this might be a chance for Microsoft to really hurt Google if they wanted to.
So long as ads are served by third party servers I can not stand the lack of security and privacy.
If example.com serves ads from it's own server and there is malware in them, then example.com has issues. Currently places like yahoo have served malware and simply blame the third party and portray themselves as duped victims that have no liability.
If this thing happens with chrome - and someone is using an adblocker that has been crippled, if then a malvertisement is served, wouldn't google become liable for blocking the security plugin from working properly and therefor causing the infection?
I do get results for: firefox, opera, microsoft.
coincidence?
The suggested searches were for adding every major browser apart from Chrome to the search.
If you add Chrome to the query then uBlock for Chrome appears as the top result.
Seems kind of a strange failing that Google search needs such a specific query to get a result for a chrome addon that their own store page claims has over 10 million installs.
On a related note, if OSes were shipping uBlock powered browsers by default, removing ad blockers would be considered a security risk and a no-go. Hopefully we'll be there one day.
At first i was worried my workflow would be disrupted, but literally nothing has changed. I was able to find all my chrome extensions in firefox's marketplace
When Apple made a nearly identical change in Safari, some people even praised it for protecting user privacy by preventing malicious ad blockers from intercepting every URL you visited. Most people didn't seem to care, and those who did generally seemed happy about it. But when Google does it, people assume the worst intentions.
2) Safari’s API is less restrictive than Chrome’s proposal. Rules can be updated dynamically instead of requiring resubmitting the extension for approval, for instance.
3) Market share is materially relevant to level of concern. What the mouse does is less concerning than what the 800 lb Gorilla does.
Also Safari does a lot of tracking and cookie prevention out of the box: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16308138/apple-safari-11-...
I can imagine Microsoft carving a greater slice of the browser space if they continued to support Chromium extensions whilst Chrome did not.
A friend tried this with a DO Droplet, but the Google Pixel does not allow changing of the DNS servers.
Thoughts?
*
Editing to say I found this. Some nice gentleman is allowing this for anyone who would like to use it. I cannot vouch for the safety of said link, but here it is:
The greatest issue seems to be whether your hosting service will allow you set a server up (droplet or raspi host) to be a DNS server; his changes in the paste seem to be to mitigate the issues that could come from allowing it. While I've done my fair share of apache config editing and other sysadmin tasks (for my own hobbyist purposes mainly), I'd still do a ton of research on the changes listed to figure out whether they will do what they're supposed to, and whether there are any other things to apply as well.
Lastly - I wonder if you could set this up (on a raspi of course) and let it be public facing on your home network? That is - would say comcast or cox allow it (technically, they don't allow any servers, but I've heard that at least cox tends to "look the other way" for low-bandwidth home-based stuff; I would think a home-based DNS pi-hole server that only you and maybe trusted family/friends use would fall in that category - ymmv)?
Should be interesting to watch how this shift will change the web development community who, for awhile, could safely focus on targeting Chromium for the most part.
Nearly every time I use their computer again they are running chrome as default.
For the overwhelming majority of internet users it just isn't a priority.
"In 2018, roughly 25 percent of internet users were blocking advertising on their connected devices. This figure is expected to keep growing" https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...
"How many people in the UK are using ad blockers?
Rates of ad blocking in the UK remain relatively low compared with other Western countries tracked by eMarketer. We estimate that 12.2 million people in the UK will use an ad blocker at least monthly in 2018, representing 22.0% of internet users, compared with 28.7% in France, 32.0% in Germany and 25.2% in the US. ... We expect 43.0% of UK internet users ages 18 to 24 will use an ad blocker this year." https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-in-the-uk-2018
40% seems very high to me, but then again usage of ad blockers isn't exactly exciting conversation that I try to bring up when I'm around my friends.
I wonder if we will start seeing "you wouldn't download a car" style ads targeting users of ad blockers soon.
Edit: There seem to be few good alternatives at this point, now that almost every browser developer is using Chromium. Waterfox, Icecat and Iceweasel all have different things I like about them, but no one has 'the full package' any more. Google made sure of that.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/?redirect_source=f...
If your favorite feature works slightly worse in Firefox, consider that its interests align with yours, unlike Google's.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...
On mobile I made the switch to avoid AMP pages.
The list of reasons keeps growing...
I'm talking my entire system gets taken out for minutes by one pages' shitty javascript. Even then, I'm not even sure if it's the pages fault or a plugin, or firefox itself.
Surely I'm not the exception to an application that everyone else seems to have no issue with?
Try doing a full reset, delete all your configs and extensions. Then run plain Firefox with no extensions for a while, and see if that behaves well. If not, something serious is up and you should try reporting it to the Firefox bugzilla if you can repeat it.
If that works fine, something was up in your config, or extensions. Once I found someone had gone into the internal Firefox config settings and changes something years ago, forgotten it, and it was now causing serious performance problems.
Chrome is slightly better at utilizing every computing resource available, but that also means that it is more resource-intensive.
Now, every once in a while, I do experience Firefox being unresponsive. Restarting the browser always fixes that, even with the same browsing session. I haven't experienced Firefox locking up the entire system, except with really low resource computers (like Netbooks, or < 4GB of Ram).
I'm on OSX. My primary browser is Safari, but I typically had Chrome running, too.
Something pushed me over the edge last year, and I switched to Firefox for exactly this reason. There was a time when FF was lagging badly, but that all seems to be over now.
However, I do not see that "many well-running" means "roughly equal market share". Browsers are software and thus easy to replicate. And due to the huge market (> 1B users), even 1% market penetration is meaningful -- that is provides enough users to stay alive and develop.
Linux, text editors, many email clients, etc. were originally hackers toys, not grandma's tools and as such had a small (but vocal and dedicated) user base that cared about functionality and not market penetration. But once certain functionality threshold has been reached a lot of people were willing to wrap the core in a grandma-style interface. It could work for new browsers, too -- the main threat is not low user base, but being eaten by a large corp once it is capable enough to be a potential threat. My 2c.
Speaking of add-ons, I do miss FireBug. It was easy to find/define XPATHs by it (which is critical for web scraping). The new inspect element in FF just lacks that feature.
Just how GNU/Linux and macOS are traditionally more appealing to professionals and developers, FF should come to grips with targeting their own niche market. It's interesting how so many great ideas from these "niche" markets (e.g. Unix and Linux in the case of OSs) have surfaced in the more dominant, closed, commercial ones (i.e. Windows). If Mozilla want to really make the web a better place, they should know that by keeping their users happy (who are mostly developers), the ideas they put forth will sooner or later get spread in other browsers as well.
As another analogy, you might think about LISP and how the main ideas were later implemented in even the most imperative languages: although Lisp as we knew it is not dominant anymore, the ideas that made it different are still alive in Ruby, JS, etc.
My 2 reasons to keep coming back to Chrome for Mac are the battery life and DevTools. Firefox is very power hungry in macOS, there are a few bugs reported about that (see [1] and related tickets). The best in terms of energy consumption is Safari, but the dev tools are terrible.
So each time that I switch my default browser to Firefox or Safari, I end switching back to Chrome a week after for one of those two reasons :(
- Console. Both Safari and Firefox put the input at the bottom so it's like a command line. Chrome puts it at the top, so it feels more like a code editor. It's a small difference, but that combined with auto-complete and the preview of results makes Chrome console better for me.
- Editing of CSS properties. Chrome and Firefox are similar in this area, but Safari is terrible (it improved in Safari 12, but it has some interaction annoyances when you edit rules). Since I work doing UX, I do dev mostly for prototyping. Tweaking CSS in the dev tools is something that I do often.
- Display of computed CSS properties, Chrome displays the "trail" of a property in the computed view. (Note: I just discovered that Safari added that as an experimental feature in the latest versions).
- Source Maps: My experience with source maps was much better in Chrome DevTools. For example, Chrome shows the files mapped by a bundle in the source tree, while Safari shows the bundle and only displays the source map when you hit a breakpoint (if there is a setting for that I couldn't find it).
- Accessibility tree is also a great feature of Chrome DevTools.
- For small (simple) projects, the ability to link a file system workspace is also great (although useless for projects that use a lot of JS tooling).
Some nostalgia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Mozilla_...
Maybe it's the kind of websites I visit? I don't know...
Have they cast anyone in the Kris Kobach role yet?
That would admittedly be an easier argument if online adverts weren't hideous, intrusive, slow, distracting, bandwidth-chewing, performance-destroying, malware-delivering, privacy-violating abominations.
It is naive to think that companies wouldn't want to show ads to paid members. It may not be necessary for survival, but companies do love money.
It used to be, back in the olden days of pay-TV, that you'd get HBO, etc in order to not have commercials shown to you. I haven't seen HBO in like forever, but last I recall, they ended up showing tons of "commercials" for stuff they were playing, were going to show, up-and-coming things, "sister station" things, etc.
Basically, yeah - you didn't get to hear about the latest and greatest form of Tide or Folgers - but instead you would get anything and everything about HBO and other channels.
Great.
Today - I don't know what you see. I know for Hulu and other streaming services, it was peddled the same way (pay to get no ads). Now you pay - and you still get ads. Thanks.
So I've personally done what they don't want you to do, but they can't stop me: I've stopped watching everything. I don't even go to the movies if I can't help it. The magazines I purchase are super-niche so I don't see any mainstream adverts that way (Nuts and Volts, Servo, 2600). I don't listen to the radio. UB-Origin on my browsers (and with all this being discussed, I'm going to look into switching back to FF as well, and setting up a pi-hole).
They still manage to sneak some crap in - and I can't help to see those billboard ads and other things as I drive down the road or whatnot. Amazon also has some ads, and some things I subscribe to require you to see the ads to see the content, but that stuff is usually off to the side and just "filters out" into background noise at best (and most of the time it's for products I either don't want or can't afford; for some reason, I get a bunch of ads for Rolex watches and BMW cars - you'd think they'd run one commercial for a Unimog, but nooooo).
Ultimately, I've more or less opted out of consumer popular culture. This crap being discussed, and numerous other issues I see and experience, is just pushing me further off the road.
For instance, I intend my next "smart phone" will be one that I build and code myself. It won't look very pretty, and I'll still be tied to a service provider and all that entails, but even if all I have are SMS and voice calling, that'll be enough for me.
I'm also in the "slow process" of rebuilding/refurbishing an old Toughbook for general usage, but that is also competing with a couple of other projects, a refurbished TRS-80 Model 100, and a custom built "cyberdeck" I've been contemplating and buying the parts for.
Maybe go back to using BBS's too, or some other "dark web" niche of the internet - I dream of a place of freedom, the network I knew back when I started in the 1980s. Not this walled-off mess we're walking...no running...towards.
Websites will never stop tracking just because you pay for the service.
What stuff? Clickbait news and freemium games? I don't think anybody has to, or even should support their existence. I think the viability of their business models only undermines premium content.