I guess this would defeat DNS-based blocking approaches, but more sophisticated tools like uBlock can still cope with it, albeit requiring larger blocklists.
So--one part we're an ad company and one part MS-style "embrace and extend" the web.
MS really dropped the ball after IE6. Notably in Europe Firefox actually temporarily surpassed IE in market share, before Google came and stomped everyone.
I recall a blog from that time titled Chrome is the new IE6.
On the corporate side, we paid attention when an SAAS site had a "Built For Internet Explorer" badge. Elements can+did falter in other browsers (because devs only dev'd for IE).
Pity about Mozilla having recently switched to the dark side themselves, becoming an advertising company as well.
A decision reached because both
informed & consent
Basically, these adverts are blasted at you 5-8 times a day depending on how many YouTube videos/shorts you watch, also I recall seeing same advert even on someone's FB timeline being shared by their friends to switch to chrome.
I use an ad blocker but would have no issue with static image ads. I just don’t want to allow ads that are shown via RTB.
And if it got to that point Google would just randomise the payload. It's pretty easy to do with obfuscation tools.
Could ad blockers run WebAssembly? I suppose it will be up to the task, because it means minimum work for a GC, and no overhead coming from dynamic types of js. With the jit compilation it will be comparable by performance to a native code and native code has no issues dealing with every payload byte-per-byte.
> And if it got to that point Google would just randomise the payload.
And then ad blockers start to measure entropy.
> It's pretty easy to do with obfuscation tools.
It is easy to do, but obfuscation really works only when no one is targeting you specifically, when you are defending yourself from bots that try random targets in hopes to find vulnerable ones. Against targeted attacks it becomes an arms race, so you'd need to change constantly, and eventually you will need to spent a lot of time discovering the ways how your obfuscation is defeated, so it comes to an equal amount of difficulties for both sides.
On the side note, I wonder is there possible an attack of poisoning google stats by sending the fake data from the website. Probably the Google's trick to overcome this threat is to control CDN, so it gets the data from the trusted server.