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.
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)."
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.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...
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'm hoping that Brave, Edge and Opera maintain the API compatibility in their downstream forks.
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.
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.