Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise
theregister.com
theregister.com
Seems Mozilla may have an opening in browser market share, if they allow add blocking extensions.
But how long before sites start blocking Firefox ? Already on some sites have issues when people are using a VPN.
Yes, I did try browsing with out add blockers, and the experience was terrible. Some "mainstream" sites you would think would know better had multiple popups. So blocker on.
I would not mind ads as long as they were not intrusive, but seems it is getting worse and worse.
Ad blockers suffer more or less by accident. v2 was too easy to use for evil extensions.
And then proceeds to sweep it under some nostalgy. Nice try ;)
To learn what something is about, learn what it does to money. Subj does good to money, so it is for that. Extension security is a lateral positive effect used for marketing. If it was important, MV2 would get upgraded soon after or even before its release.
They didn’t care for all these years, only now it crossed their mind. Sure, sure. And they won’t include the most important project on the web into the standard suite. “No, it’s for everyone, we can’t make exceptions and we’ll remove the page access functionality for other browsers cause that’s uhm… un… unsustainable! Such an accident, ad blocking was so good.”.
That’s a quantum law of bigcorps, there’s nothing under the money layer. Everything beyond money is just an interpretation and a side effect.
In reality, extensions are user-installed software. There is ALWAYS a risk with user-installed software on a PC. It's one thing if this is code webpages can automatically serve to you - then, the security is larger concern.
But I, for example, don't see anyone trying to clean up Win32 for security's sake. The closest thing I can think of is Wayland, which is also for security. But - that's desktop wide, for absolutely all software.
The underlying problem is the abusive and untrustworthy way modern ads are being implemented into everything by big business & media companies. They're removing the ability to block ads, because they want to sell a new monthly subscription just to get less ads, and the price will go up until most people can't afford to be on the Internet at all... They're also secretly lobbying to prevent independents from running websites and apps in many ways too. This model was tested on Twitter, where it's gentrified the community now, and driven most past (free) users completely off the platform... Twitter is still highly unprofitable, so it's completely baffling to me as to why companies think this new ad-spam business model will actually work in the long run for their profit. We will also have no options for interaction or entertainment if the Internet goes out, save for a few people with physical media saved from a long time prior to the outage... It's Titanic-Level hubris to buy into this business model.
These ads create such an absolutely jarring experience in navigating sites now, I actually completely avoid implementing them on my sites and apps for that same reason, and to be honest, I never click on them no matter what. With the ways that social apps, and ad content is converging, the Internet, once highly useful for valid information, is now a hellscape of distraction, undesired content, and disinformation meant to drive political overload and consumerism. We need to start asking where the happy medium is in all of this. Not everything should be for-profit, and laced with ads, and the things that have ads can perhaps be less essential to serious need and function.
Microsoft embedding ads into it's OS and office apps is a perfect example of how the frenzy to capture pennies per click has turned on it's head. people are writing secure and private documentation on apps that are willing to place tracking and adware so easily into mission critical applications that it's eroding trust in products altogether. We should expect more from these very large and well profitable companies that are entrusted with mission critical services. Elon scuttling Twitter for his own personal gain was not a crime, but in many ways it was a failure of trust for the service, and I'm honestly still surprised how people are still paying for verification on the platform and buying Teslas to fund his nonsensical ego-maniacal escapades in elitism.
As a consumer economy, we need to shape up and start sending messages to these corporations to shape up and put customer service and respect back at the forefront of their operations at the risk of failure. This model of abusing customers until they pay is NOT in line with a democratic country, and apparently Congress is never going to get it's act together on tech regulation, so we need to vote in more savvy reps that will pay deep attention to tech fleecing and manipulation. Otherwise, by next year, we'll need to watch a video ad between reading each paragraph, and in 5 years we may damn well be required to watch a 3 minute ad before being able to exit our cars.
I genuinely think one of the biggest problems in digital society is people being addicted to reading headlines without doing the boring work of reading the article.
That view is entirely consistent with reading the article, as in-fact the article points this out.
And the uBO Lite flagging caused more developers to confirm the difficulty of the review process and the minimal value of publishing to the Firefox store. Phrases like "useless time sink expensive", "a real nightmare to work with" and "we just decided to give up" (from three different devs) stand out to me.
App ads, all the trackers from Netflix, Plex, Sonos, etc.
Because, e.g., Apple has official support for allowing apps to easily use DoH/DoT for their connections: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10047/
I would be mighty surprised if this was the only such mechanism
I can view the logs in AdGuard Plus, the only time I see an ad in Words With Friends or Flipboard on my iPad is when I'm off my Tailscale VPN (which goes through AGP). Apps that serve their ads directly, like YouTube, are not blocked sadly. But there are multiple workaround apps for that on Android atleast.
Also some apps don't work with the tracking blocked, like Fox Sports, but I just whitelist the minimum amount needed on a per device basis.
Test this page on your phone without an ad block and see how it goes:
Because when adding telemetry to the app, do you really think they go out of their way to make it easy to block?
You don't get everything from a Google or Facebook app, just use a cracked version of their apps in those cases. But most of the blocking is better than none.
You can also just continue to use Chrome and be tracked across the internet. Helps pay for those of us that block it.
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi
And/or start using Gemini:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi
I have moved my site to gopher/gemini. It is far easier to maintain and there are a lot of interesting sites sitting there. Just a few:
* gemini://sdf.org
* gemini://gem.sdf.org/
* gopher://sdf.org
* gopher://magical.fish
* gopher://gopher.floodgap.com
Wouldn't that be an interesting development, for web browsing shifting to a "have-to" paradigm (for work, for other utilitatarian purposes) from a "want-to" paradigm. Would spam dry up if the web were no longer populated by the masses merely whiling away idle time?
(I'm not going full Richard Stallman about it, sometimes I'll suffer the ads for content, I throw many articles into archive.is, which only shows one ad at the bottom, and I think it's worthwhile to support them, etc.)
Huh? Unless they are serving you a vastly different page than they serve me that's not the case.
UBlock Origin blocks 4 things right away, 3 of which seem to be ads and the logging or analytics. Then sitting on the page over the next few minutes that rises to 7, with the new ones all seeming to be logging or analytics.
Refreshing the page several times to see different ads, they were always either short banners that spanned the page or a square in the middle of the column about 2/3 of the column width.
Most of the time they were not animated. The only animated ones I saw just had an animated fade in which lasted maybe half a second and then it was static.
Or, you know, just install an adblocker.
I have no idea why people would voluntarily not install an adblocker today, you’re just making your life more difficult for no valid reason. No matter how you justify it, your experience without an adblocker is strictly worse than my experience with an adblocker.
You’re rejecting less by allowing some ads to get through than rejecting all ads in bulk.
But even they are going to support MV2 only as long its code remains in Chromium repo, I think.
What this changes is that (adblocking) extensions are losing some permissions (like manually picking out elements to block, web requests to update the block lists, etc).
"Begin disabling installed extensions still using Manifest V2 in Chrome stable"
Chrome Canary just killed uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2 extensions
Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store