Also, if you haven't tried Firefox since the quantum days come back and give it another try.
While I suppose Brave with its integrated ad blocking is going to keep it working, I believe it will be wildly unsustainable for Chromium based browsers to keep the V2 APIs for extensions amidst the torrent of upstream changes coming from Chromium. So the only functioning blockers these browsers are probably going to have are built in ones - and only if they care enough.
Ghostery is not selling user data.
Let me point out a few facts:
All browser-side code is open source https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension and https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-dnr-extension.
Yes, Ghostery has a subscription based business model and that another reason to great care in protecting users privacy. Take a look on how we use blind tokens to authenticate subscribed users while searching on glowstery.com https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-search-extension (notice that even when you are a subscribed user there is no session cookie so queries cannot be linked).
Hope this sheds some light on the accusation. If that’s not enough, I do sincerely recommend uBlock Origin or AdGuard on Apple’s platform.
Ohhhh, let me too!
"Ghostery makes money by tracking the trackers while blocking them and selling data about third party trackers, which it calls Ghostrank."
"Ghostery calls it Consumer Messaging Platform, which allows the company to message users directly in the web browser. According to Ghostery, it will be used for product announcements and promotions. What makes this problematic is that it is enabled by default."
You aren't fooling anyone.
Indirectly relevant - It is not the client source code that is ever the issue. It is the server side code and the business model that matters.
Client can be even closed source, if it is zero-telemetry. There is no danger for user privacy there.
But if the client is not zero-telemetry, and is phoning home, at the very least private information like IP address will be transferred and we have no way of knowing what is done with it.
The original post talks exactly about the problem with dependency on the server side which for a browser (and an ad blocker for that matter ) should ideally be zero with the option to opt-in for things like updates.
Firefox is the top choice for me. I recommend it properly and not just for the sake of supporting Firefox. That said, please support Firefox. We should not be allowing Big Tech behemoths from taking away the window into the internet.
If I were to complain to Firefox team - please stop adding shit, I don’t want Pocket, I don’t want anything but just the way it currently is. Just allow us to browse. Fast.
Perhaps Chrome shows more intermittent reflows so you observe more of the page rendering as it's taking place? Can you describe it in more detail? I presume Firefox is doing something right but what might it be?
I am on a pretty powerful Mac and it's exactly the opposite, sadly. Firefox just... stutters. When downloading pages, when interacting with pages, it's there and it's super annoying.
Chrome in the meantime is just absolutely instant no matter what I do.
Doesn't help me wanting to stick with Firefox. :(
The type of ads I strongly dislike for reasons beyond like, breaking pages and tracking, are ones that repeatedly show for something which I already know exists in order to promote a brand.
If someone wants to put up an ad for “we make any bronze parts”, well, I looked to see if any of them were cheap enough to get as a gag (none of them were, but still).
If a company wants to remind me over and over of their company name that everyone is already familiar with, that is irritating.
You see a potential for dissatisfaction, I see a potential for opportunity.
Also, allocating time for “searching for products that I don’t know of but which seems like they might exist, which would improve things” seems, slow an inefficient?
Like, I previously had thought “it is bad that printers basically all have drm-ish ink cartridges.” When I saw an ad for a printer which instead had refillable ink tanks, I regarded that as an improvement. (As it happened the printer had some unfortunate bugs where it semi-frequently needs to be forcibly rebooted by unplugging it, but it is otherwise seems to work nice.)
I don’t see how this is not a benefit? It isn’t like I otherwise wouldn’t be using a printer, or like it increased average rate of printer purchasing non-negligibly . It mostly just changed which printer got purchased.
Like, I suppose if every time I thought “I wish there was a product such the [x]”, I put a description of that into a web form (in terms of keywords I guess?) and then when a product was released, the company releasing the product could send info to the company running the website demonstrating the novel properties, and then the website could notify all the people whose descriptions appeared to match, and that could be an alternative to ads?
I really do not buy many things, if your concern is that ads would compel me to buy too many things, in like, a consumerist way.
(Actually, the example with the printer was when I was living with my parents, so it was actually my dad who bought the printer after I pointed out it existed, and after he evaluated the price taking the ink into account.)
It is a bit confusing to be honest. There seems to be something very upsetting happening but exactly what is causing that response I can't pick out.
And it isn't billions, you need to normalise by audience size. Any company spending billions to influence my behaviour is bankrupt, I don't have enough money for them to make that back.
But one of those things would get a broadly supported "aw, how wholesome!" from the crowd. The other appears to get actual, honest, anger. It is unclear to me why the difference in responses is so large.
Everything a person encounters influences them, and generally people are comfortable with good and bad influences in their lives. The fact that corporations are motivated to sell things doesn't even mean their influence is bad. The fact that I bought a rice cooker because it was being advertised to me doesn't change the fact that I am better off owning the rice cooker. I bought it because it improves my life. So why the hate on ads?
In many ways this is what trade magazines are/were, but the absence of a general market for such generalised interest is so absent its the kind of witness evidence that is deafening in its silence.
The problems are the power Facebook and Google have over the ad market, that increases ad costs for businesses by a lot (I've read, one third, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's more). But online ads are a lifeline for small businesses. Regulate the big players, and keep the ads flowing. Some people here want ads to be abolished, but you'd just strengthen existing brands, i.e. huge multinationals. That's all it would achieve.
That's why real issue with Brave, frankly. I still use Brave as my default browser because it's the only one that allows me to allow all ads by default, and only turn on Brave Shields for specific websites. Even uBlock Origin deprecated their default-allow, and it now breaks many websites completely if you try it. But I don't like "anti-ad" sentiment.
Sad state of affairs. But people who oppose Big Tech domination, and also want ads abolished, don't realize that doing so would prevent millions of small businesses from getting off the ground. Chrome's killing the open web, but might be saving the "open economy" by trying to disincentivize adblocking (by blocking "annoying ads" by default, and implementing ManifestV3). It's a mess.
Let's take Brave for example. Open home page of brave.com and you get:
"The best privacy online
Browse privately. Search privately. And ditch Big Tech."
And a nice screenshot.
The problem is this is not what Brave works/looks like when you open it the first time.
By their own research [1], on your first run Brave will immediately "phone home" 80(!) times. The original post discussed here talks about mundane features like installing an extension not working without contacting their servers about it.
Then, the user is immediately welcomed by ads for several crypto services right there in the browser on the right hand side (curiously hidden on their home page screenshot). I guess that:
"Browser that shares your private information with us and shows you ads you do not really want" would not fly well as a tagline.
Having this behavior turned on by default is where user frustration begins and is later then just amplified by even worse behavior, again incentivized by the fact that the business model is simply dependent on ads, like the other big tech.
once you understand not desiring one, you can understand not wanting the rest, since they're all fundamentally the same thing.
I am entirely with you on not wishing any ads at all, anywhere. I just think that it's not realistic to remove ads entirely on the open web today.
This should not be an excuse for the way ads are being run today. It is fundamentally broken. Incentives and attributions should be changed.
Firstly, I'd urge everyone to deny the initial premise. The right or desire to be free of or avoid advertising has nothing inherently to do with the act of paying money or being able to amass or claim property rights over things. That's not why i hate junk mail. That's not why I don't want to be proselytised to. That's not why i shouldn't have to view propoganda. Of course, the addition of private property rights issues is one more barrier that advertising would have to overcome in order to be deemed acceptable, but on the contrary, i think a better premise is to start with WHY or WHEN advertising should be allowed, given that it is almost universally loathed or objected to. I wouldn't want to live in a world where people are subjected to advertising because they haven't payed for things or own things or content. That's dystopian.
At the very least, I think people should have the ability to say no, and for that desire to be respected and not interferred with. I think there's good grounds for advertising, or at least many types of advertising, to not be allowed in many public areas or via many public resources. I have no problems with companies or organisations not delivering material or allowing access to general consumer goods as a consequence of saying no to advertising, but that's different to users saying "no i don't want ads and I don't want to be tracked" and having the companies go "but I'm gonna do it anyway and you shouldn't be ad blocking".
Finally, I always come back to what the web is, or at least what it was, in that I deny the underlying unspoken premise that the web is there to run business models or pay money for content to be put on it. If businesses can make it on the web, good for them. But if they can't, the web is more important than business.
To be clear, the internet and web and content came first, then the businesses arrived and co-opted it for their purposes. Now the narrative is trying to be rewritten so that you can't possibly let people consume material on the web for free without people paying for it via advertising.
So let me be clear: I pay for my computer. I pay for the bandwidth of my ISP. This allows me access to a public network of computers where I can make requests to other computers on the network to send me information. People can also pay to put content up on that network to be requested by others, but no one forces them to do so, AND, no one forces them to answer my computer's request for content. When i use an ad-blocker, the main activity is for me to determine client-side that there are certain computers I don't want to talk to, and certain content I don't want to see. In an ideal world I wouldn't be tracked also, but that's just an additional abuse or manipulation of the system.
Several years after this whole system had been operating just fine, companies arrived and started trying to make money, and today we have a feigned victim-complex retcon narrative about how people not paying for content should view ads.
On the contrary, if companies do not want me viewing their content: don't put it up on a public open network that's publicly searchable, publicly addressable, and that responds to my requests for that content. Put it behind a paywall, put it behind authorisation, put it on your own intranet or network.
Keep the open web as the web. Keep it open. Keep it in good faith and respect user's explicit preferences. The hosting computer decides what content it wants to make available and who it wants to talk to. And my computer decides who it wants to talk to and what content it wants to see.
And in an ideal world, advertising should be delegated to the bare minimum of places because the starting assumption should be that most users, rationally, justifiably, and understandably, don't want it.
You have just normalized this absurdity because it’s been around for so long. Ads are terrible for people’s mental health, because the best way to sell a product is to create a need for it. In other words, by making you feel incomplete and insufficient.
Ad-funded business models make it impossible for the people to "vote with their wallets", so all of the good things about any kind of market dynamics are removed, and we are left only with its disadvantages.
- It treats everyone as "eyeballs", removing any need for a content producer to care about quality. As long as it generates clicks it goes. It has turned even the most reputable of media channels into tabloids.
- By having no regard for quality, it's a tragedy of the commons.
- By removing any chance of nuance, it makes all of the audience to be bucketed into "pass/filter" algorithms, and the only concern is to make sure that the content is so bland and innocuous that no one within their bubble reach can complain about it.
- It has taken mass-consumerism and general public conformity to 11.
- Big Tech turn all of that crap into profit no matter what.
- It is feeding and coddling the coming and current generation of techies into lame drones with no imagination and will to affect actual change. It's creating an army of people who think that the status quo is good.
I don't think it is too much of a stretch to think of how the "ad supported" content economy is correlated with the increased polarization of people, the growing tribal divide and the isolation of individuals. I honestly think that we should be treating the majority of "ad supported" websites as heavy polluters of our minds and our societies.
If you want to do ads online, here are the initial rules of engagement: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
It might have something to do with the LE intermediate root rotation - Chrome variants and Firefox are happy with the chain, but Safari's CA trust store may not have the new intermediate CA in place.
I'll upgrade the system over the holidays in any case, and the new lighttpd finally has native support for CA chain inclusions. That should make all the clients happy again.
AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads.
> AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads.
Surely you admit that the "acceptable" criteria are at least directionally correct? So even if you find the model icky, it's also "improving" the overall quality of ads (i.e. making them less intrusive/obnoxious/annoying)?
Given the shortcomings of AB+, what do you think is a better way of (1) defining acceptable ad standards; (2) generating enough revenue as an organization to build/maintain ad whitelists? Genuine questions to provoke discussion :)
Irrelevant. I (and 99% of other users) spend the majority of my time on the internet on websites large enough to meet the threshold.
> technically an independent entity gets to determine what's "acceptable"
Skimming the first page of that "independent" committee's bylaws: they self describe as being "hosted by eeyeo" (the developer of AB+).
> So even if you find the model icky, it's also "improving" the overall quality of ads (i.e. making them less intrusive/obnoxious/annoying)?
I don't care about via what mechanism advertisers improve their ads - that is their job to worry about not mine.
> what do you think is a better way of defining acceptable ad standards
I, the user, choose what is acceptable in my browser, not a for-profit company that benefits from bribes to whitelist ads. Believe it or not I do whitelist some websites with what I consider acceptable ads, but I do not and will never use an ad whitelist.
> generating enough revenue as an organization to build/maintain ad whitelists
Ad whitelists that generate revenue essentially always have a conflict of interest.
Web advertising's abysmal reputation isn't some freak accident. Websites and advertisers should work together to create actually acceptable ads rather than trying to bribe adblockers and hope users don't notice.
Is advertising a valid business model? For some apps and services perhaps, but it's not the only option and in many cases serves the business and users poorly. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the best products I've used recently have actually put some thought into how to monetize.
I'm not sure the author has checked the same for the alternatives he mentions. The closed source nature of Vivaldi (their tarballs only contain their copy of Chromium) makes it a weird recommendation, in any case.
in fact, I'll go so far as to say that's exactly what most proper ad-blockers are: user implemented acceptable ads. if the user wants to view ads, they have it in their power to whitelist a site or domain.
perhaps a business could be made where you provide a list of acceptable ads and people can pay money to view them. on the one hand, I think that's a more reasonable business model than the one you've suggested, as at least it aligns the user's interest with their own explicit actions.
of course, there is the little problem that such a business model would probably never work, because fundamentally, most people don't want ads. they tolerate them because they don't know they could have a choice otherwise...
Sure it's nothing new that companies try to show you ads. But in the same spirit I always turned down volume or switched channel on TV when ads were on. This was in the past. These days I don't even bother watching channels with ads.
I personally would not be sad if the whole ad industry became less significant and we had more paid services. They also tend to be longer-lasting than many ad-sponsored services. Also I am the customer and can demand certain things, whereas with a free service I can demand nothing and I am not the customer.
As a student I made a few small Android games with ads. They brought in a few hundred bucks. Then I was blocked by Admob for whatever reason. At this point I learned what a crooked business this is and I swore that I will never make an ad-sponsored app again. If I have an idea for a product/service that will only work in that setting it will not even go on my list.
Also, this very site has no ads. Neither does wikipedia. Nor librivox, or Project Gutemberg...
For example when I share this link to my favorite ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49fDwqwK5E
and you decide to check it out, it satisfies the above criteria.
And by "ads that I accept" I mean "ads that I can turn off".
You are not being attacked by parent. Parent is merely pointing out the difference so other users are aware of it. You could just thank them for the clarification and move on.
And was approved and even pinned.
1. I haven't followed Ghostery, AdBlock+ devs since I started using Brave. Sad to learn of their status. I will look at uBlock Origin. 2. Firefox was a memory and CPU hog and I always usef it as a test browser or a secondary browser, until Brave. Then I started using Chrome as secondary and dropped Firefox. I will give Firefox another try. Thanks again.
I have two problems with that. Firstly on Windows Firefox uses the Control key, so now I have to remember a different shortcut for my work PC vs my gaming PC. Secondly I run i3wm and alt is my mod key.
Out of curiosity, why do you use alt instead of super?
I have a PiHole with a fairly huge block list (~1.2M entries) and uBlock Origin and I keep wondering if I stay only with them, will it be enough?
> To benefit from uBlock Origin's higher efficiency, it's advised that you don't use other content blockers at the same time (such as Adblock Plus, AdBlock). uBlock Origin will do as well or better than most popular ad blockers. Other blockers can also prevent uBlock Origin's privacy or anti-blocker-defusing features from working properly.