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Comment by SnowingXIV | Hacker News Reader

There has to be google engineers here. Does this just fall on deaf ears? I realize it’s a massive corp but imagine high ranking staff have a say and input. Maybe they don’t and Sundar isn’t worried about that. Or they do a simple cost analysis and short-term they see the benefit and are willing to to risk long term erosion that maybe be minimal.

Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.

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FAANG engineers in general are remarkably well informed as to who is buttering their bread. You may assume that Google engineers are excruciatingly aware (particularly after several rounds of layoffs) that their continued paychecks and stock grant value depend on continuing to firehose advertising into the face of the general public from every possible angle.

The entire internet runs on ads unfortunately.

I ditched YouTube entirely since this year because I got fed up with the commercial breaks but I am 41 I no longer need to know about the memes and trends.

You don't have to ditch YouTube to avoid annoying commercial breaks. Any decent ad-blocker will skip the ads in YouTube videos, or you can even use an alternative viewer like SmartTube.

Or pay for it and support the people who's content you're watching and the company who's infrastructure is providing it.

Or don't pay for it and you get even a better treatment with hiding ads (SponsorBlock). the free solution is way better than the paid one if we are talking about Youtube.

Unfortunately paying for these services to avoid ads will never work. It was first promised by cable TV when they first scaled out coaxial around the country. You paid for TV in part to not have ads. That worked great until the advertisers increased their bid. It was tried when VHS kicked off but eventually even tapes rented from Blockbuster had ads once the advertisers increased their bid. And now it is happening to streaming services. For over a decade I paid Netflix specifically to avoid the ads but as more people do that it decreases the supply of passive attention, which prompts advertisers to increase their bid again, and now it's almost impossible to continue paying to avoid ads. Now I have to pay a fee and watch ads. I would gladly pay YouTube to avoid watching ads but it just won't work. They will start taking my money each month and then they will also push ads at me after I pay them consistently for a long time. We're well beyond "fool me twice" territory.

You're on to something.

I'm signed into my TV and whenever friends cast a video Google mysteriously forgets that it's not allowed to show me ads.

>and whenever friends cast a video Google mysteriously forgets that it's not allowed to show me ads.

That's because it's using their credentials when they cast, not yours.

Then why do I have it the other way where when I cast from a yt premium phone it still shows ads.

Agreed, but the subscription is generally month to month, so I take advantage until that happens and then cancel, like I did with the other crummy streaming services that have done this (Netflix, Prime, etc).

That said, while I find those services pretty scummy for what they've done, I've fled back to spending a lot more time with books. There's plenty of them to read before I die and it's unlikely they'll be similarly molested.

One of the nice things about TV/movies that you don't get with books is a "shared experience": you can't read a book with your girlfriend or your family, but sitting on the couch with your girlfriend and watching a movie is totally normal and enjoyable.

This is not true about cable TV at all.

Cable TV was first a means to get over the air stations to places where they couldn’t receive it. These stations always had ads

Next, cable started delivering the “Superstations” like the local Atlanta station TBS and Chicago’s WGN which had ads from day one.

The only channels that didn’t have ads from day one were the premium channels like HBO that still don’t have ads.

I've been using Google premium to not see ads for years now. It's great and apparently the video makers earn more too. I don't love Google's domination and some of their practices but this is pretty reasonable.

Or refuse to give in to extortion and don't.

What’s the extortion?

I hate bait and switch done on me when they were giving free stuff out. I was there when creators were purely about having fun, trying stuff out and sharing it with the world.

But for kids these days it mostly is fair game - you want to watch funny cat videos, pay up or watch ads.

You can always have fun with friends from over the world and send each other videos no one is forcing you to post it on YT.

Because the videos in YouTube premium still have ads. But because the ads are built-in to the videos by the "content creators" themselves, they call them "sponsor segments". YouTube Premium doesn't include SponsorBlock.

It does in a limited capacity now [1]. No, it doesn't auto-skip for you and it's not nearly as quickly updated as SponsorBlock itself is, but it works fine enough on the iOS app.

[1] - https://9to5google.com/2024/05/05/youtube-premium-jump-ahead...

>Or pay for it and support the people who's content you're watching and the company who's infrastructure is providing it.

This, it's well worth the price for 'free' youtube and music. I'm not a fan of ads or paying for much either, but it's really surprising how many people here are so against paying for the things they use.

There are still plenty of advertisements placed by the channels themselves. Almost all the big ones I follow do so unfortunately. It's a bit of a shame.

Sincerely,

An otherwise happy youtube premium family customer

Paying for their annoying algorithm and deaf ears features.

It is, unfortunately, not really a workable value proposition if you watch a single-digit number of youtube videos per month.

Most other media streaming services have reasonable non-subscription options - e.g. you can buy individual albums/movies/TV seasons from Apple, etc.

"The entire internet runs on ads unfortunately."

I believe this is a hyperbolic statement, not a serious one. If so, pay no mind. If not, I can attest, with supporting evidence, that "the entire internet" does not "run on ads".

I know people am who are still paying fees for internet service. They have not been provided a choice to select a free internet subscription supported by ads.

You know you can pay to have the ads go away?

Everyone who has an addiction to food and shelter and who needs to exchange labor for money needs to be aware of who is “buttering the bread”.

I'd say that a >=300k/y USD compensation is higher priority for most than arguing with your bosses boss that manifest V3 is a mistake.

Google is an advertising agency. It's a miracle blockers lasted this long.

> Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.

I fear that Firefox’s days are probably numbered at this point, as it’s (imo) too late to turn the ship.

Firefox/Mozilla gets something in the region of 80% of its revenue from a single source, Google, for the default search engine placement. But with the court finding Google being a Monopoly those payments will probably come to an end.

Apple will be able to tank the loss, sure it will sting, but it’s not like those payments from Google where its main revenue stream.

Firefox/Mozilla on the other hand… It’s one of the reasons they have been other paid for offerings. But once the Google money goes away, who is going to step in to replace it? Bing probably, but without having to compete with Google, you can be sure Bings offer won’t be anywhere near that of Googles.

And that’s even before going into any of the other “happenings” going on.

(I say this as a long term Firefox user, I just fear that its days are numbered at this point, so while I’ll welcome you aboard, and we are not sinking yet, I have worries about that large looking iceberg we seem to be heading for.)

I recently made Safari my default browser for this reason. If Firefox’s days are numbered, I figured I’d get ahead of it than be forced. Ublock origin isn’t available for safari, but I was able to use the same content blocker that I use on iOS and it seems to be doing the job.

Why not just use firefox and ublock origin while it works instead of a sub par experience just because you decided to impose it on yourself?

IMO We have at least a year of runway with FF. The decision from the judge on what Google will have to do is not expected until mid-2025, and surely Google will appeal the judgement. So I don't want to give the impression that FF is right on the brink of death, just that as a user of FF, I am pretty worried about the road ahead for FF/Moz.

Which is why personally I'll probably stick with FF until the bitter end.

I just hope that Moz/FF can pull a rabbit out of the hat, because (imo) atm things ain't looking good for the long term future.

I find I am enjoying the syncing features of Safari (and iOS), and it's much less resource intensive on my 2019 MacBook Pro. Also, Safari seems to be the most fiddly when it comes to websites (either because it's stricter in some cases or has strange bugs in others), so I find I am catching more issues for web dev by using it.

Right on with safari not being used by webdevs. Safari is still my browser of choice when I want to hand someone my laptop for some purpose (like ordering food) and not have them complain about my tree style tabs. Some websites they clearly don’t test at all with safari. Big client websites too like tacobell.com, no safari testing at all. Menu images rendered with extra inch wide margins for some reason along with the usual broken fonts.

Weird, next week will complete 21 years of my exclusively using Safari on the desktop, and I’ve yet to notice anything like this. Admittedly I’m not ordering from Taco Bell, but sites being unusably broken is simply a non-issue for me.

I think losing the Google money will be the only thing that could save Firefox... although it'll be a tough year or two while all the execs flee and side projects get axed.

It's a giant corporation. Everyone who had a managerial role in one of these mega corporations should know how such decisions are made. Sundar sees finance numbers, numbers go up if we do strategy x (block adblockers) , someone gets a promotion for turning these numbers up. It's simple as that. Those people have no clue and don't care about how you hackers here use chrome.

Why do you think in the anti-trust lawsuit they're desperate to avoid Chrome divestment? A project that on the surface surely must be a massive cost center for them that doesn't benefit their advertising arm one bit. No sir, made out of the goodness of their hearts and given away for free for nothing other than promoting the open web.

> A project that on the surface surely must be a massive cost center for them that doesn't benefit their advertising arm one bit. No sir, made out of the goodness of their hearts and given away for free for nothing other than promoting the open web.

I don't think they ever claimed it was out of the goodness of their hearts. From the horse's mouth:

"Our business does well if people are using the Web a lot and are able to use it easily and quickly," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/why-google-c...

So there are multiple factors here - I used to work on browsers so have some experience here :D

First off, there are legitimate security concerns with the kind of functionality required for effective ad blocking given the immense work the ad industry (i.e google) have put into preventing purely static filters is also very powerful for exploitation. Those powers can (and have been) abused: the recent news about "Honey" replacing affiliate links so that they are getting paid for ads on peoples page, but also there have been numerous examples over the last year of extensions being sold and then having the extensions getting malware, crypto miners, etc.

Second, there are real performance problems - the non-JS filter rules are vastly more efficient, for memory usage, cpu usage, and load time (I recall people doing benchmarks a while ago, showing ad blocker extensions that actually slowed down page loads).

So those are the engineering arguments for not supporting this model of extension.

However, the engineers on the chrome team are not stupid, or malicious, and understand that the trade offs are something users want. But those engineers work for Google, and google is an advertising company.

So it does not matter what those engineers want, or think is better, if the company management says "you cannot block our revenue model" they do not have a choice. Well, they could quit, but that's basically it.

Does MV3 do anything to stop the behaviour of Honey?

Please show me a real-world page that performs worse on Chrome with no extensions than on Chrome with Unlock Origin.

That would be really easy (though it probably wouldn't be perceptible by humans, but you'd certainly see it if you look at actual CPU and memory usage): just look at some simple webpage that's only static HTML. uBO uses resources, so of course it's going to perform worse not having it there at all. And going through tens of thousands of filter rules isn't exactly a trivial task.

However, at some point, the resources saved (by blocking ads running JS) will outweigh the resources used by the ad-blocker. In typical modern web pages, that bar is probably pretty low, because there's SO much BS advertising and tracking.

What about for any non-trivial example? Ultimately the user has a choice, if ublock's performance is a concern the user can disable it for a page or simply not use the extension. Alternatively chrome could work on implementing a good resource monitor for extensions etc. Maybe it's already possible to benchmark with dev tools. In any case, completely breaking it never makes sense.

Hard disagree. I've been using ublock across the board with Chrome and with absolutely no problems with malicious nonsense or even performance. These are real risks in a general sense, to be sure, but many extensions are run well enough to be relatively safe.

In any case, if such were Google's logic, they'd do more, or other things to mitigate said threats, which can also be extrapolated to any number of other widely used and permitted extensions, not conveniently remove a specific, well-run and widely trusted extension that conspicuously works at removing the firehose of utter garbage that they push at you through various parts of their platforms and on YouTube.

There are some ways to abuse solely the ability to stop an inflight web request, and being able to see what url it was for.

But, that did require a specific permission.

And the permission/ability to inject arbitrary JavaScript into any page is still there. As are other abilities that can be abused.

Meaning, the security argument for removing blocking onBeforeRequest was always a diversion. It is not nearly the highest risk thing in the api.

> First off, there are legitimate security concerns with the kind of functionality required for effective ad blocking given the immense work the ad industry (i.e google) have put into preventing purely static filters is also very powerful for exploitation. Those powers can (and have been) abused: the recent news about "Honey" replacing affiliate links so that they are getting paid for ads on peoples page, but also there have been numerous examples over the last year of extensions being sold and then having the extensions getting malware, crypto miners, etc.

Who controls the accounts and the distribution for all chrome plugins? Who allows automatic updates with no security screening to all chrome plugins? Who charges developers a fee to participate in the chrome extensions store?

> There has to be google engineers here. Does this just fall on deaf ears?

Yes. Extension that blocks Google from making money from ads? It's a no-brainer to upgrade the browser infrastructure to make it obsolete.

The change was mostly procedural, removing apis that were old and replacing them with more modern variants. Gorhill decided to take the opportunity to make a political stand against chrome. Good for him I guess. Given the popular sentiment against google, there was no serious pushback against his stand, including from the independent media and so on. But a google engineer would presumably know the "both sides" take on the subject, and hence not see it as reflecting especially poorly on google.

Whereas a normal extension maintainer would transparently update their extension to a new API, removing any features that could no longer be supported, gorhill elected to let the old extension go out of support, and replace it with a similarly named extension under the same organization. The features in the old extension removed in the new one were minor to non-existent. The main worry was originally that they wouldn't be able to cram all the network filtering rules they needed into the limited number that were permitted. However I believe this issue was mostly worked around.

The rest of the issues raised were a masterstroke of politiking on gorhill's part. Basically, google's justification for this removing of apis business was in part to increase privacy/security. Such improvement of course could only arrive if extensions didn't demand broad permission to see all the data on every page a user visits. So gorhill designed the new "ublock origin lite" around not needing to demand this permission. Of course, such an extension necessarily must have much more limited features than the original "ublock origin". Gorhill then presented this loss in functionality as somehow a necessary casualty of the "Mv3" upgrade.

Of course, the original uB0 extension demanded the same broad permission, so this loss in functionality wasn't really a casualty of the new manifest version. Rather, it was an accusation by gorhill against google that their justification for bumping the version was false. The new uB0l extension incidentally supports a mode that demands this broad permission, so in fact the total amount of lost functionality is practically non-existent. The result is that everyone has the opportunity to flame google for their seeming anti-user behaviour. However, to a google engineer this would presumably come across as unfair, and they would presumably feel as if they were being targeted.

by now they have made tons of user-hostile changes, just to see the line keep going up, they know that there is a loud vocal minority, but most users are totally fine with MV3 if they even notice a change at all.

Maybe people could start actually using internet like it supposed to be used instead?

Like we all should move to IPv6 and if someone wants to share videos with friends and family they could do without big corporations. If they want to serve their content for profit that should also be easy.

But we got what we have it sucks but seems either pay up or don’t use what big corps provide.

In case of IPv6, ISPs'd go out of their way to block p2p by whitelisting allowed sender and receivers through DPI and routing limits.

Only thing i miss from chrome, is ... compatibility. a lot of sites made in the past 15 years are focused on chrome-support. especially the government-websites i use (not US) but i just use another chrome-based browser for that. Firefox is my main-boy!

I hear that often, but I have maybe found two websites that have a bad experience on Firefox. Out of thousands.

Google is deliberately doing this to break ad blocking for Google ads while still allowing ad blockers to work for non Google ads. Most users probably won’t care enough to change browsers or many won’t really notice

> Google is deliberately doing this to break ad blocking for Google ads

If so, they are doing a crap job of it because uBlock Origin Lite successfully blocks all of the search ads on google.com

They were pretty much forced to do this slowly and gradually. There was a large amount of external pushback and some internal too (though money controls here).

> Google is deliberately doing this to break ad blocking for Google ads while still allowing ad blockers to work for non Google ads.

That's the best way to get antitrust breathing down your neck.

So, with talks of Google monopoly ramping up, either this is extremely shortsighted and reckless, or they will choose to not throw oil on the fire and will not go down that road.

Believe it or not, the DOJ (and EU) have almost entirely ignored AdSense and it's integration as a monopoly force. They consider Chrome and Google Search to be the primary source of harms - the war against adblock is perfectly legal even if client-side modding should always be morally correct.

There are two different trials in the USA, one focused on search as a product (which Google lost, and plans to appeal after remedies are determined), and another antitrust trial about advertising (of which the trial happened, but no ruling yet).

I don't know much at all about the ads ecosystem so I have no idea how may adsense should be playing in either trial though.

Google engineers have nothing to do with this decision. They are just employees.

It’s just big-corp tone deafness, eg Google engineers have pointed out that you can use

defaults write com.google.Chrome URLBlocklist -array-add https://example.com

to block sites without understanding that this is fundamentally different from adding this to browser UX.

A lot of Google engineers struggle with the conflict of interest where the world’s #1 advertising network — by far — is making it more difficult to block ads in the world’s #1 browser, which they just happen to own. Good job guys. /s

If only Stalin knew!

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