Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future
malwarebytes.com
malwarebytes.com
1. Will the ultimate removal of Manifest V2 support affect other Chromium-based browsers, or only Chrome itself?
If the support for Manifest V2 isn't removed upstream in Chromium, but only disabled in Chrome, then I would expect that we will end up in a world where other browsers (e.g. Edge, Brave, Opera) continue to allow the installation of Manifest V2 extensions, esp. from their own first-party verified-extension hosting platforms. So even if the Chrome Web Store also ceases to host Manifest V2 extensions, users of these other Chromium-based browsers could still get uBlock Origin from "Edge Add-ons" or "Opera Addons" etc.
2. Would it be possible for some random developer to put in a PR to the upstream Chromium project, to introduce one or more Manifest V3 capabilities (new strings for the manifest.json "permissions" key) that, when added, would allow the extension to do all the stuff that Manifest V2 let extensions do by default, that uBO and others depend on: increased request-filter list size, async periodic network data-file updates, etc? Would such a PR have any chance of being accepted?
My own guess is that such a PR wouldn't be accepted, because I get the impression that the nominal goal of Manifest V3 is to allow V3 extensions to run under a streamlined extension "runtime" that has fewer hook-points into the browser runtime, and so fewer places where the browser runtime must call back to the extension runtime; where adding such capabilities would require adding all these additional hook-points and callbacks back in, which would defeat the purpose. Correct me if I'm wrong!
I would also guess that even if such a PR were accepted, Chrome would still disable the use of those capabilities downstream, and also reject any extension that used them from the Chrome Web Store. So at best, such a change would just mean that uBO and friends wouldn't be stuck as "legacy" Manifest V2 extensions, but could instead just be "modern" Manifest V3 extensions with a few capabilities that Chrome and only Chrome forcibly rejects.
Alternatively it could be that all alt browser companies will maintain one chromium fork that preserves manifest v2. Or V3 but with a lot more rules.
Also Gecko is just a factually worse engine, that's why they didn't use it.
I just wonder if they end up dropping Manifest V2, if a patron model would work to maintain a fork properly...
1. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
I've heard this said a few times but no one has ever supplied any reputable source other than fanciful speculation. It's become such a meme at this point that I'm pretty sure it's just harmful disinformation.
Vivaldi and Brave are going to maintain the code so at least uBlock Origin can work. Nobody knows how this will play out as the forks won’t want to stray faraway from the chromium code as that would add a lot of overhead.
I tried a bunch of the forks, didn’t like Vivaldi, don’t like some of Braves crap, and won’t use the Chinese browser Opera.
Ended up moving our family back to Firefox.
I miss chromium’s better profile management and the app as a window. Rest of the family don’t miss any of those. Other than that happy with Firefox.
The effect is "invisible", so there's no warning sign when you've done something wrong. My use-case is managing instagram profiles which periodically log you out, so if you forget and log in with the wrong one it's kind of game over.
In sum, it's too wonky for the general masses. Sure, Mozilla could add it just for the experts but that doesn't seem to be their approach which I can respect. After all it's not hard for an "expert" to get containers running.
I don't see why Google would ever allow it, unless some new regulation from EU or other gov. bodies mandate it.
I had always assumed the relationship between Chromium and Google was akin to the relationship between Webkit and Apple, or between any ASF-donated project and its corporate originator: a community-owned (and several-major-corporate-stakeholders sponsored) open-source project upstream, with a corporate closed-source "living patchset" project sitting downstream of it; where the corporate devs try to push as much as possible upstream, to keep the patchset they must maintain downstream as thin as possible; but where it isn't up to the corporate devs whether the upstream "steering committee" accepts the corporate work upstream.
But I guess this isn't true; per Wikipedia:
> However, in terms of governance, the Chromium projects are not independent entities; Google retains firm control of them.
Which is just bizarre to me, given the following sentence on that page:
> The Chromium browser codebase is widely used, so others have made important contributions, most notably Microsoft, Igalia, Yandex, Intel, Samsung, LG, Opera, Vivaldi Technologies, and Brave. Some employees of these companies also have @chromium.org email addresses.
You'd think these other companies wouldn't stand for Google having unilateral control over a project they're so dependent on! But I guess, as large corporations, they can always express their true concerns through more... corporate politick-y means.
1. Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera have all announced they'd maintain support for Mv2 past Google's deprecation date [1].
2. Your guess is correct - one of Google's stated motivations is to make the extension review process easier and less error-prone; having a way to opt-out would be counterproductive in that regard. I strongly doubt they'd accept the PR upstream; there is a chance other players could maintain patches to modify Mv3 but the effort of designing and implementing a new spec around the Mv3 spec and convincing extensions to maintain yet another platform means this is unlikely to happen in practice. Keeping Mv2 around is a more reasonable approach (and one that is compatible with Firefox, as well).
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-...
The design has already been completed, in that mozilla has already done this in their implementation of manifest v3. The difficulty of convincing extension developers to support it should thus be no more difficult than convincing them to ship a firefox version of their extension.
> Keeping Mv2 around is a more reasonable approach (and one that is compatible with Firefox, as well).
This isn't a long term solution. Brave for example has only committed to maintaining mv2 support as long as chrome continues to support it internally. If chrome removes it, the work of continuing to support it would become untenable.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/extensions-addo...
I do wonder how long it will be before we see browser browsers, software that takes a browser instance and sanitizes it. Maybe chrome will continue as a daemon allowed to run inside a sandbox within a browser's browser that actually displays content to a human.
Maybe I removed them or something. If so, it was relatively easy.
Today I can see that the ads shortcuts can be removed: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
Unfortunately, Firefox is still an ads machine. They keep coming up with “WE PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY” dark patterns to make us gobble up ads.
The worst is getting downvotes every time we point this out. Firefox defenders are extremely bad-faithed, they can’t have a rational discussion about Firefox having mere drawbacks, especially they can’t hear that Firefox misdirects users about privacy and ads.
I didn't down vote you.
No solution is 100% perfect in the tech world. I won't knock them for trying to make some money to keep afloat, even if they aren't (probably) the best at managing money.
I care if I can't turn them off. As you've pointed out, you can do that.
There's no date on your referenced article (pet peeve), so I can't tell when it was done. However it's been a long time (so much I so, I can't even remember) that I've seen ads that I couldn't turn off.
There's nothing mandatory about the initial shortcuts - just remove them. It's trivial to change your search engine to Duck Duck Go too.
Yes, there is in-browser private advertising with user revenue share, but all of it can be disabled too if you prefer.
We'll also be continuing support for Mv2, in case you prefer to use uBO or other pre-Mv3 adblock extensions.
1- non hacker users too starting to realize corporate friendly browsers like Chrome and many derivatives can't be used anymore for painless surfing, then flocking to Firefox.
2- corporations and advertising companies pushing for a new closed HTTP standard that requires their browser, or an old browser using a closed extension that doesn't allow adblockers when using a given service or page.
Open browsers work because they still connect to open web servers, and the industry already ruined the mobile environment by forcing users to run apps instead of navigating web pages (that is, installing a hundred application for a hundred services instead of just one that speaks a standard protocol); I have no doubt they'll attempt the same in the desktop world too. We have to fight to keep protocols open.
Corporations and services are once again forced to standardize on open standards for web access or lose customers because the public (and techies specifically) will not support a proprietary software model for the public internet.
It's a cycle - corporations become big and successful, try to establish proprietary control, then lose massive market share to newly created competitors.
Once successful corporations get large, they tend to forget that eventually the frog getting boiled does jump out of the pot, and is usually angry when that happens.
The article makes it sound like Firefox will have the same ad blocker limitations as Chrome. The article fails to mention that Mozilla is implementing MV3 APIs in Firefox, but not removing the MV2 APIs like Chrome is:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-fi...
Use Firefox. uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Can someone give an example of what a good number would be? How many dynamic rules are currently used?
> Also, extension developers are limited in what regular expressions they can use, along with other technical limitations.
Does this meaningfully impact rules? Just curious.
> According to Firefox’s Add-on Operations Manager, most malicious extension that manage to get through the security review process, are usually interested in simply observing the conversation between your browser and whatever websites you visit. The malicious activity happens elsewhere, after the data has already been read. So in their mind, what would really help security is a more thorough review process, but that’s not something Google says it has plans for.
I don't see how one follows from the other. Attackers are using malicious extensions to eavesdrop on networks... therefore we need better reviews and not restricted APIs? I get why you might want to advocate for the latter over the former, but certainly it seems like restricting APIs also has positive impact.
uBlock's built in list has 47,000
EasyList has 75,000
EasyPrivacy has 31,000
Fanboy's List is 78,000
Basically none of the major lists fit inside this quantity.
I don’t think we need the adtech company to make a statement for us to know what’s going on here.
Checking 150K rules once wouldn't be a problem, but if you have to do that for 50 network requests on every single page load, that adds up. So the hope, as I understand it, is to set a ceiling to encourage developers to keep more up-to-date lists by pruning old and outdated rules. This prevents a situation where browser performance slowly degrades.
I'd like to see a system where users opt-in to allow ad blockers to collect metrics on which rules are actually applying, and have them occasionally trim anything under 0.01% usage. Which sounds like a small number, but should capture the majority of dead or unused rules. Of course, that would require a new browser API in a declarative system.
As I understand it, the APIs that are removed only remove the ability to modify network requests; the remaining APIs will still allow you to inspect requests.
(Disclosure: I work at Mozilla but not on extension APIs or even Firefox. I have written extensions myself though.)
> As of Manifest V3, the "webRequestBlocking" permission is no longer available for most extensions. Consider "declarativeNetRequest", which enables use of the declarativeNetRequest API. Aside from "webRequestBlocking", the webRequest API will be unchanged and available for normal use.
So the other functionality, to inspect web requests, will still be available.
But nearly all web traffic is encrypted. And without being able to inspect the traffic more closely ad block is quite limited. So DNS blocking or router firewalls have trouble. Pihole can’t block YouTube ads. The ads still come from the same domain as the video.
Extensions have access to the live page and can do much more inspection, with finer control over the page. (Manifest V3 limits this somewhat)
On iOS it can kinda happen at the “OS” level as there is only one web browser. But that has its own drawbacks. The only adblocks are those the AppStore allows.
* More (Advertising) revenue for Youtube streamers?
* More people switching to Edge browser to use Ad Blockers?
* People using Pi-hole style Ad blocking?Examining the Manifest V3 changes more closely (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/mv3-o...), and comparing/contrasting to what uBlock Origin themselves say about it (https://support.ublock.org/hc/en-us/articles/11749958544275-...), I can understand the cause of one of uBO's problems with V3... but not the other.
The cause of "Allow List Limits" is clear: uBO Lite will be forced to use declarativeNetRequest; and declarativeNetRequest imposes limits on the size of the ruleset you can "declare".
But I'm confused about uBO's point on "Ad Blocking Quality". It seems that Manifest V3 only restricts 1. the use of eval(), and 2. the loading of remote-origin scripts into the DOM and/or as service-worker modules. It doesn't restrict the use of remote-origin-loaded data files generally; which I would presume means that uBO would still be able to use its service-worker to periodically fetch and update its filter lists.
Is there some part of the way uBO uses these filter lists, that requires arbitrary remote code execution (and for which the only true substitute is burning in the lists locally?) If so: why, exactly? (Not a rhetorical question; I'm not doubting that they do need it. I just can't figure out where the need comes from, and I'd like to know!)
It might seem at first blush that the literal answer is this feature: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#... ... but it actually isn't, as you don't write actual JS to be eval()ed in these rules, but rather just name a function that's already burned into the extension locally as part of its "scriptlet resource library".
Is it instead, just the way that these rules get "baked down" into in-page logic? Does uBO compile the lists into a bunch of Javascript source-code, and then have the page evalScript() that code?
And if that is the blocking issue — and I'm still not clear that it is — then wouldn't there be other workarounds for this?
For example, sticking the generated JS code into a data: URL and then dropping it into the page as a <script> tag. Or even, at worst, swapping out feeding the page "JS source code", for feeding the page a (static!) interpreter, and then having that interpreter receive instructions as regular ol' data from the uBO service-worker? (Maybe that'd violate uBO's performance goals, I suppose? But it wouldn't have to do it on every page; only on pages that it knows from the ruleset can't be blocked entirely declaratively.)
Also note that the site you linked is for UBlock, which is a different extension from UBlock Origin. If you're interested in what the UBO developer thinks the differences are, the UBlock Origin Lite (UBlock Origin for MV3) page has a write-up: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
uBO Lite (uBOL) is a permission-less MV3-based content blocker.
But seriously, this finally forced my back to Firefox and it has been very smooth so far.
The Cloudflare overlords like to force a few more captchas to access sites, and Apple doesn’t support keychain password sharing yet, but they’re worthy compromises to push back on the domination of chrome.
I'm looking ten or more years in the future, though. By that time, the Firefox/Chrome duopoly will be broken by alternatives that don't compromise between the user and business models.
That said, I'm not really holding my breath for FF to grow again.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/nkzrj0/comment/gz...
As a result, Firefox extensions got dumber. Bye bye Vimperator, DownThemAll, etc.
In about 6 months, I won't consider Google either. I'll simply start targeting reasonable, good, healthy Web standards and implement them with progressive enhancement.
If they support the standards, then there won't be a problem.
The Web is fragmenting and it's gonna be ugly.
The structure of our markets ensures players like this will coalesce, but it's no reason to let giants of commerce dictate the terms of engagement for everyone.
Even hosts that correctly implement $CURRENT_YEAR's email security dance end up on spam lists erroneously. The problem is allowing these hosts to have that much influence to begin with. The creation and spreading of those lists is pernicious to the protocol, but in absence of new RFCs and matching client behavior, I see the need to add some light 'hazing' to setting up e-mail.
The problem is when Google tells everyone your site is spam and they listen. Tech can't solve that problem.
Pine64 and Purism are making headways on that front, but again the situation is too thorny and regulations are hamstrung by the relevant companies bidding for spectrum. I've not heard of anyone having a smooth experience with PinePhone, Librem 5s, or the OnePlus line of phones.
Also, how many of these devices just run Android? So Google's got your ass there anyway. The ones that don't are foolishly following XDG and so are GNOME, KDE, or Enlightenment stans. The moment upstream changes, they'll be forced to go along because they don't fully own their UI experience.
We need portable libraries for accessing baseband stuff so that no vendor can lock a life feature (smartphone) behind their ecosystem.
I actually don't much like my phone. It's the most reliable way to find out where I am or what I'm doing, and who honestly deserves that information just because? I guess I wish I didn't use a phone at all. Despite its conveniences, on paper it's really just added a bill and a constant mental "on"ness that stresses me out.
So, not much of a gotcha because I've thought about this and it bugs me, but there's also no actually good alternative ready yet. When I'm able to BYOD with free hardware on a mainstream network and there aren't signal or reliability problems, I will. The whole point of a cell phone is remote availability, so it needs access to a reliable network to be of any use.
Please, if my understanding of free phones is out of date, correct me. It'd be nice to get one step closer to a completely user-controlled cellular device.
I suspect this will be good for Firefox.
Everyone can decry the loss of the "small web" as much as they want, but the cram-ads-into-every-pixel dystopia means why should anyone bother? Even big brands are not immune to this behavior. At least if someone stays on the Instagram/Reddit/Tiktok experience, the ads are a consistent frequency and intrusiveness.
The thing that made me realize how bad it's gotten was ironically an inability to use ad blockers. At one job, we weren't allowed to install any adblockers to the browser (there was a lot of bureaucracy so I never figured out why). Ended up writing my own JS bookmarklets to remove ad elements from sites I commonly visited. Also started browsing the web more in the terminal with Lynx because there are no images, it's just text. No distractions.
Taking your typical "How do you frob a xyzzy in the foo framework?" Medium article, the entire thing would usually fit on my screen in the terminal. The GUI browser had one or two lines followed by an image of ad.
It could have been the IT department fielding too many "this web-based app" isn't working requests due to ad-blockers. A lot of time can be spent trying to troubleshoot an issue before figuring out the cause is the ad-blocker.
Edit: It could also have been a policy to disincentivize people to use their work computer for non-work-related tasks. Ads typically don't pop up on work-related web applications.
So much more text to make it look like they have more content where 1 paragraph would've sufficed.
It's like my English teacher took over the web '3,000 words minimum'... except that doesn't count if you just don't have more to say.
IE did not survive the competition. And Google did well with chrome. But technically it's weird that they continue to convince people that use operating systems that come with a different browser to install Chrome. Firefox has the same challenge.
It seems that Google has gotten a bit too used to that being a thing that users are eager to do. The more ads that slip through the defenses, the more market share they'll loose to other browsers. This is a classic throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Their ad revenue (i.e. most of their revenue) is largely dependent on Chrome being something users want to use. More ads means less users. And as MS has demonstrated with IE, having a leading position is no guarantee whatsoever of keeping that. Even their position as the dominant fork of Chromium is not guaranteed. If people get annoyed enough, they might just fork and cut loose. Happened before when Google forked Apple's webkit. Which in turn was a fork of khtml. Not saying that's likely to happen soon but it's always an option.
Anyway, I'm happy using Firefox. No ads for me. Also not on Youtube.
Brave funnily enough is also the only Chromium-based browser that lets you set policies to turn off their optional features, none of which I want.
Vivaldi has some downsides (no gesture navigation is a dealbreaker) and installs its bookmarks every time you sync a new browser. It also feels crowded no matter what settings you use.
Edge just does absolute asinine stuff. Yesterday it disabled my new tab page without asking (and it also asks every day) and today it asked if it could submit my Kagi search results to Microsoft to help them make Bing better, which I refused. Weirdly enough the refuse button was blue... and sure enough, Edge set my default search engine to Bing in that moment. Apparently you can switch to a non-consumer Windows SKU to turn down these shenanigans. An Antitrust needs to read that source code, badly.
Unfortunately I can't use Firefox because an app I'm forced to use wouldn't support it.
The world is ripe for a Chromium fork that just works. Maybe Ungoogled-Chromium can bring back some creature comforts eventually...
That said, they already announced plans to do this once and then backed down for a year due to pushback around MV3.
Guess we'll see what happens.
The average user is going to open Safari or Edge and go to Google or YouTube. They'll see the "this page runs better in Chrome" popup and install Chrome. The installer asks to make it your default browser, so they do.
The idea that you can install an addon to the browser isn't even in their toolbox. They aren't aware of the anti-competitive nature of Google. To them, a browser is just the thing their OS exists to run for them.
You're right, but you're forgetting, Chrome needs technically inclined users. Yes there's always people without enough awareness to be satisfied with the walled garden, but Firefox used to be popular because it was user, and importantly power user friendly.
Something will usurp that thrown, the power users will switch and then so will everybody else
Even a 5% dip will end it.
And technically inclined users are the ones being asked to configure computers for their families etc.
My grandmother uses the Google app to browse the web on her phone. Not Chrome. Not safari. the Google Search app.
Because every single time she does a search, google tells her to install the app.
And I have a few friends that either uninstalled Adblock. Or stopped watching YouTube on PC in response to this new Adblock crackdown. All of them use chrome.
Bit by bit, maybe Google will get the message.
Well, it's not slow or bloated anymore and Chrome is now officially evil. It's time. Don't just switch your own browser. Switch the browsers of all the non-technical folks that come to you for questions.
We only let the net get jizzed on because we allow it to be.
If Serenity can do it, imagine if all those who push repos to github collaborating together and actually making an open source project for all and everyone.
Both browsers are old and have been abused.
Both Chromium and Firefox are already open source projects.
What is the magic sauce that's going to make this effort suddenly produce a perfect browser?
Another Facebook of course. /s
Remove Javascript and 90% of your challenges go away.
Pouring more resources into existing projects seem more realistic.
Not at all. I'm just done with the drama and shite that keeps occurring over the piss battle of Chrome and Firefox. The internet is just a waste land and all those technologies you posted I have not seen one decent product come from them. Please feel to prove me wrong.
All of those technologies could be implemented in a better application away from the browser instead of throwing them in a "all-in-one" solution which ends up falling behind because some other new tech comes a long. It's your attitude which causes the internet to lack in the first place.
Or are you suggesting making GIMP the browser?
Microsoft, on the other hand, gave up on it.
As such a gigantic international organization with so many people, how has Microsoft managed to keep that a secret for so long?
Microsoft must really know how to do security right, if they haven't leaked such a big story.
That would be bigger than then OpenAI soap opera! Eric S Raymond would rise up from his Racist MAGA Libertarian Climate Change Denying Gun-Nut Cesspit like the Creature From The Black Lagoon and run a victory lap!
It follows from your own conspiracy theory that Microsoft must be one of the most security conscious and proficient companies on Earth, leaving Apple in the dust, to keep such a huge story from getting out for so long!
laughs in Microsoft
Only complaint is text input on some sites is very sluggish and drops letters, notably many of the wikis used by games. But those sites are not exactly optimized either so no idea how much of that is Firefox vs. the site.
Mozilla has shipped ads directly in the browser at least three times: pocket, the automatic installation of a Mr robot extension, and the full screen new tab ad for turning red. They've given absolutely no indication they won't do it again
It's not even about Youtube. I pay for Youtube Premium. But not being able to block third party cookies would be a deal breaker.
very many of us don't.
I'm one of those dozens too, but sadly, "techies" are not that great at promoting the more open alternatives. Or even ad-blocking in general: just look at how hordes of HN users insist here that everyone who blocks ads is evil and how we have a moral obligation to watch advertising.
I would love for HN commenters to share a recording in which they show this “buggyness”
My pet peeves: sync and app mode. I don't want to switch at the moment, tried many times, but it doesn't stick for me. If i ask my my aunt to do that, and she dislikes it, she won't do it again and won't trust me anymore on top of that.
Today it’s all about mobile.
Nearly everybody uses their phone for everything and they aren’t making choices about which software to install on their personal laptop.
But why the scare quotes?
It's a bit more fluid than the OS market. A company can't get away with just anything forever in the browser space. At least not so far. 2-5% loss is significant for one change, and denotes a chink in the armor of dominance that other players can begin to exploit; whatever dissatisfaction caused people to migrate, other players can be very good at it, which can get more people trying the other product, which if it does well in other ways, can spread. So 2-5% loss has a small chance of turning into a long, slow landslide of market share loss.=
Definitely dangerous to start throwing customer experience under the bus for short to mid-term gains without paying attention to the long term picture.
IE lost a lot more than 2-5% during the golden years of FF. At its peak in 2010, FF had about 30% market share.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...
Not even Safari has reached the same level or market share (including mobile).
Chrome has a proper setting for that you don't need an addon for it?
A stronger response would be -- a year or more ago -- techies switching to Firefox as a symbolic movement.
And when we have more techies using Firefox, that means various kinds of network effects that end up improving its adoption.
Other than this ad stuff (which I agree is tremendously hostile) Chrome has acually been getting better. The dev tools, performance, UI, and memory usage have improved considerably this year.
I assume you have good intentions and want to advocate for Firefox and have it have wider adoption. I want the same thing, but it's imo not enough that Chrome gets shittier (it doesn't in my opinion btw in terms of UX), Firefox needs to become better to win.
It doesnt take 1 minute and yes the FF experience was significantly worse when I tried it.
Here's one example. I write almost daily in 4 languages on the web. With Chrome I get multilingual spell checking automatically in those 4 langguages without having to do anything. Even in the same <textarea>.
With FF you have to manually install dictionaries and there was even a 23 year old issue (yes, 23 years) about using multiple dictionnries at the same time. This issue was only closed 2 months ago:
I think I might go back to Safari. I like the way it looks and it feels snappier all the way around.
I had FF slow to a crawl and when I checked it was using 7gb’s of ram. Turns out a site I had turned off uBO in had opened up a sub frame that was blasting ads. So it is interesting to try to see what is going on with about:processes.
Not to mention that it feels like Safari is only fast because it does its own thing and doesn't strictly follow the spec. I've often run into CSS specific issues with it when making slightly more complicated animations.
Needless to say, I'm not applauding any steps in this direction.
Windows 11 requiring a TPM has already locked some people out of their zeitgeist. There is more old circuitry that can get the job done well enough, they'd be competing with prior freedoms.
Daily reminder that economics is a political theory, not a science, that capitalism is the most incidious form of oligarchy, and that the US is no longer a democracy (if it ever was).
LLM: Hi!
Me: Please develop a browser that is full HTML, etc, etc compliant
LLM: No problem... download the source here.
Me: Thank you, but could you please optimize it for speed?
LLM: No problem, done.
Me: I have only 5 more minutes, could you please write a version in Rust, and two more in Go and C++? Ah, and support Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS. Don't forget to use the native WebView in iOS.
LLM: done.
Me: Could you please do me a favor? Remove all ads.
LLM: done.
LLM: Unfortunately, as a subsidiary of MSFT, I cannot allow you to create a competitor to Edge. Would you like to try Edge now instead?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/10/sob-s...
imo the eu needs to stay out of this. its a competition between people trying to block ads and trying to force you to see them, which i see nothing wrong with.
What do you mean "now"? They've been prolific malware vectors for over 20 years!
When did that happen? Link?
but there is a discussion going on about this, a few news articles and one hn post. basically they want to determine whether its ok for youtube to check your computer's memory to see if you're somehow blocking their ads.