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Comment by stackbutterflow | Hacker News Reader

Nowadays I close a tab at the slightest inconvenience. Want me to subscribe to a newsletter? Close. Allow notification? Close. Privacy popup because you need to spy on me? Close. Close. Close.

There's a very small club of players that I can't afford to reject and you're website is probably not in it.

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Same, though I try Reader Mode first. If that fails, close tab.

On desktop and mobile Android with Firefox, NoScript eliminates a lot of this bullshit. I switched to iPhone last year and I desperately miss Firefox for Android :(

> I switched to iPhone last year and I desperately miss Firefox for Android :(

Self-promotion: I wrote a JavaScript blocking extension for Mobile Safari https://underpassapp.com/StopTheScript/

Oh awesome! Are you aiming for NoScript-like experience? Being able to easily whitelist domains, permanently and temporarily, is crucial. It's not clear from the page you linked if it has a whitelist feature.

Not easily, unfortunately. The extension relies on Safari's built-in permissions model, for technical reasons. It's possible to whitelist domains permanently, but not temporarily. https://underpassapp.com/StopTheScript/advanced.html

Looks like that whitelist is also only per top-level domain. E.g. it will allow all on Youtube.com or allow none, instead of allowing to block per script origin domain.

That sucks :( I'm really looking forward to switching back to Android.

Safari content blockers can do fine-grained blocking of external .js file loads, so you might want to look into one of those.

My extension differs from Safari content blockers in that it can block inline JS.

This is my number one reason for not wanting to switch when people ask me why I don't have an iPhone.

Honestly, you're right to feel that way. I am planning to switch back to Android when this phone dies. Firefox is a major component of that, but iOS feels miles behind Android in many other aspects as well. I switched because of Apple's privacy stance (if you're making Facebook throw a temper tantrum, you're doing something right) and the fact that they are the only manufacturer to make a phone that fits in the human hand. But iOS is really not a great experience overall.

I use Trail of Bit's Algo to run a VPN with adblock; it works quite well to block ads and tracking on iPhone, though it's pretty crude so will miss a bunch of stuff.

thats one hell of a cathedral to perform the same as tiny browser plugin that can even manage to remove all youtube ads... but anything is better than non-filtered web of 2022 thats for sure

Firefox Focus has been a true revelation for me. I use it primarily as a content blocker in Firefox and Safari, but it's also a nifty way to have a quick private session with only one tab.

It doesn't do all the things, but still helps immensely.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/mobile/focus/

Hm, thanks, I'll give it a look. I have "regular" Firefox, but it didn't seem to play nicely with the ad blocker Safari extension I have installed, so I stopped using it.

Likewise! It has fewer features and is less convenient to use than a regular browser due to constantly having to log in to sites, which is 100% also a feature to me. The extra steps to access Facebook have allowed me to kick my Facebook habit for good. I waste less time refreshing the same websites waiting for new clickbait, while productive use of the internet for reference is mostly unaffected.

The problem is that, while using NoScript, you're still giving the website traffic. The longer term solution is to stop visiting these sites.

Reader Mode is nice, but has two problems. Addons don't work with it and it is not possible to automatically enable Reader Mode without loading the website first.

That's you, me and tech people. When it happens to most of my friends, the click yes. The desktop notification is the new IE BHO. Any non tech person's desktop showers them in crap, often scammy in nature even with a closed browser. I'm amazed major browser vendors still allow it.

Same. I even close when YouTube tries to make me watch 2 15-second videos back to back, without the option to skip.

My naive belief is that if enough people leave, they’ll back off.

> My naive belief is that if enough people leave, they’ll back off.

Just like the TV channels did/are doing!

Oh wait ...

But with all the tracking, you'd expect Youtube to know that people are actually going away, while TV channels didn't have that luxury.

Then again, maybe they've seen that people mostly don't go away...

YouTube has enough users that they don't care if you go away. Because if it bothers you enough, you'll pay to stop it.

I subscribe to YouTube Premium and the only time I see an ad on YT is when I'm accidentally logged in as another user.

It’s kinda my point though. I’m sure TV didn’t have 5 minutes of ads every 5 minutes or whatever the ratio is. It slowly built up to that because that’s what people were willing to put up with.

Over time it’s going to be the same with YouTube. People will accept multi-minute ads eventually, so eventually YouTube will run them. It’s only a matter of time.

The only thing that could stop it is if people immediately leave the site when you feel the ads are too long. If that happens enough, it will force YouTube to back off. Naive to think that would happen, but I’m doing my part.

Television's chased off the discerning / discriminating viewers.

I'm well beyond the "I haven't owned one" territory to "I haven't watched in years".

Because of cross-contamination of practices and techniques between commercial and public broadcasting, that includes public broadcasting.

I'll watch an occasional segment on YouTube (with adblocking), but even then, I prefer simply listening to audio (mpv / command-line).

The abuse isn't cost-free, and more attractive demographics will leave. This also means, of course, that the poor or mentally susceptible are left with a far-worse product and more predatory advertising as well.

I’ll go one further. In addition to not watching, My kids have never in their life watched regular tv except visiting someone’s house who does. Those few times they just want to turn it off because it’s “broken and spamy.” “Why does the spam get louder.” “Do they think we care about [thing in ad]” etc.

I was worried they would be more susceptible to ads. Ut it’s the opposite.

Good to hear.

Agree. It's not like their opinion matters so much to me that i m dying to read it. If it's bad news, i will learn about it sooner than later anyway, if it's good news, the same. Maybe after years of pavlovian conditioning i ve desensitized to it.

Yup me too ! That includes medium.com articles or anyone of these big news/content sites that try to squeeze in an accept cookies thing with 2 static ads, one autoplay ad with a push notification request.

same

you best offer me something very concrete before you give me the slightest inconvenience

this is partly why the Euro cookie laws have made the web even more hostile for smaller players, if you had any good reason to track me with cookies by default, I'm sorry but I no longer have the time to be choosing options or reading motives for your cookies - which I delete every session in my sandboxed browser anyway

the annoyance that makes me click "close" with the most prejudice is when they're pushing some app on me (try for instance browsing Reddit without the old interface, it's unbearable)

keep closing those tabs

There's also a target market for this content, and you're probably not in it.

switching to reader mode doubles your contribution to their "article viewed" metric - reinforcing their belief that what they're doing is working well.

Yup, I even almost did it on instinct with this site.

That's exactly me! +1

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