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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

How long before Chrome changes their license to disallow ad blocking?

Why should users think they own their whole screen, after all? "We estimate we can sell up to 80% of the visual field before inducing seizures!"

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As long as we use Chrome, we're basically only giving away our privacy, control and data more and more with not much that we can do about.

Don't use Chrome

What are the privacy implications if you switch the search to use duck duck go or something else in Chrome? I kind of naively thought that would give you privacy but I need more information.

Im no Google shill, but the results DDG returns are terrible. I suspect for search to work well, the engine needs to know a bit about the user - especially if localising the results is important to you.

I've been fine with duck duck go, I occasionally go to google if i can't find something.

Using a search engine efficiently is a lost skill these days and has been replaced by search engines knowing more bout you and making assumptions about your search intentions.

Given that half of users report search modifiers have ceased working entirely with Google, and many other engines don't handle them well if at all, the skill isn't lost so much as impossible to apply.

DuckDuckGo may not be tracking you on their website, but Chrome is tracking you all the time. A majority of companies partnered with Google to get data on what sites you visit, and what data Google can share about you.

Not just that, Chrome also doesn't respect your privacy settings across some websites especially owned by Google:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-face-5b-lawsui...

They also are going to block your AdBlockers from blocking ads with Manifest V3

The details about that lawsuit in the link do not seem like google is subverting anon mode to me. They just use usual cookie tracking, so they can track you if you are logged in to some site that uses google analytics (ie analytics isn't turned off, but when you start anon mode you have a clean slate and all is deleted at the end).

I was more worried about was google adding a hidden tracking cookie when I delete all my cookies somehow identifying me. Or was the browser sending all my traffic to google directly somehow.

Use Brave browser, they have their own search engine called Brave Search.

And avoid Electron based apps as much as possible.

It is Chrome anyway.

Use Tauri as an Electron alternative.

OS API for Web views and systems configured browsers are the only alternatives.

I sort of want a client that does the exact opposite. Click on all ads in the background and provide bogus randomized client data, in essence costing companies money for no gain and rendering advertising useless.

It exists as a plug-in, google it. I fixed a bug in it once actually but forget the project name, there are two plugins like it

AdNauseam

I didn't know there was another, hopefully someone will mention it?

As much as I like adnauseam's mission, it seems to hide ads less reliably than ublock origin. I'd imagine some need to be visible for the click spoofing to work?

> Google has removed ad blocking and privacy extension AdNauseam from its Chrome Web Store, and has taken the unusual step of flagging the extension as malware, thereby preventing AdNauseam from being used by those who have installed the software via Chrome's developer mode.

Available for firefox and chromium-based browsers though.

Don't google it, look it up with an alternative search engine,

Tools like this exist, but by using them you run the risk of having your IP flagged by anti-fraud tools and potentially blacklisted. Not because those tools have an issue with the specific tools involved, but because that kind of behavior makes it look like you're running a click farm.

It could also have negative repercussions for the sites whose ads you're "clicking" on, but whether that's a pro or a con depends on your opinion of each site :P

Isn't this actually good? If advertisers and other malicious actors preemptively block me for "fraud" it would be very much welcome.

The problem is those blocklists sometimes get shared with other companies doing more broad bot management stuff, which could end up getting you blocked (or soft blocked) from other forms of content.

Trying to log in to your streaming platform of choice? Have fun solving three extra CAPTCHAs because your IP has a history of "bot" activity. etc etc etc

>"We estimate we can sell up to 80% of the visual field before inducing seizures!"

It's Blipverts all over again

It would mostly piss off the more techy folks. And maybe speed up development of the various open source browser projects out there. And help get them to sufficient level to be real viable alternatives.

What, you mean like Firefox?

imo, firefox is considered by G to be "controlled opposition".

Alternatives?

Brave! It’s privacy first chrome. Arc is also advertised as such, but isn’t open source so you have you take their word for it or reverse engineer it.

Brave isn't an alternative in my eyes. That's supporting the chromium monopoly. I mean real alternatives.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L5YeR9kDQIg/TezDWiay72I/AAAAAAAAAX...

The moment this happens a big fraction of internet users will switch to an alternative browser

If they want to dig an early grave for chrome, sure, there's always firefox

Chrome on Android does not support extensions at all. It's still the biggest mobile browser. Sure, it will make a lot of technical people mad, but a lot more won't care.

Brave and Firefox on Android blocks ads just fine.

Sadly I suspect that may change. Manifest v3 was added to FF in 109 which is why I am on ESR and will probably stay on it as long as I can. Mozilla get funding from Google and that could potentially come with the price of blocking ad-blockers using manifest v3 at some point.

AFAIK FF manifest v3 will maintain the webRequest interface.

they've explicitly said it won't. If somehow that ever changes you'll see huge news about it.

We've always said the same thing about the Firefox for Android extension ecosystem.

Despite Mozilla's explicit denial of the intention to kill extensions on Android, there is an allow list that effectively bans almost all extensions on Android.

There is no justification for this; extensions work just fine on Firefox for Android, which can be tested using the nightly and jumping through a few artificial hoops.

tl;dr: There's little evidence that there will be any big news once adblockers get finally axed on Firefox.

Great but they barely have market share. People apparently don't care enough about blocking ads.

internet explorer used to be the biggest browser at some point

Firefox’s main source of revenue is Google paying them to be the default search provider. They essentially exist at Google’s whim.

They can probably do just fine with another provider and less money if google gives up, so power dynamic isn't all what you say.

Regardless of who the patron is, that's still a patronage operation, rather than a freestanding commercial enterprise.

(I'm not defending market-based approaches, nor do I think they're well-suited to all domains, and most especially not information services. But I am pointing out the relationship of Mozilla to its Daddy Moneybags. I sincerely hope better alternatives will be found.)

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