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Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Adblock+ for the last 6+ years. Granted the 13.8m users [1] are a drop in the bucket compared to googles non Adblock+ viewers. I was a little shocked to see this post as it is much different than what I see.

For the search "saas help desk" (https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=saas+help+desk)

I see: http://imgur.com/xMB6t

They see: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Vq-qWuUPZE/UER9ChRkKQI/AAAAAAAAAd...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

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Also about 14m users [1] of Ad Blockers for Chrome. Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at, I wonder how it will play out in a few years if more and more people default to no ads.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/popular

I expect eventually all ads will be routed through the domain of the site you are visiting, making domain blacklisting programs like AdBlock irrelevant.

They have much better granularity than simple domain blacklisting. Take a look at a filter list.

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

wow -- just installed Adblock+. the experience was a lot like finally progressing far enough in my career to not have to wear a tie; i feel freed from bondage...

I was wondering what the author was going on about until I remembered Ad-block. It's still a very clean interface and the distinction between ads and search results is pretty clear. Doing a quick informal search, the terms that the author chose seems to be a large outlier in terms of numbers of ads.

They are being good guys about it; they could easily block all "Ad-Blockers" and ask you to disable the adblocker to continue (as some sites already do).

You underestimate the ingenuity of geeks. If Google decided to prevent people from using Ad-blockers, 24 hours later a new Ad-blocker would be released to get around it, or the existing ones would be updated.

Except such an arms race is highly asymmetric in Google's favour.

Google can have a team of 10 working full time racing Ad-Blocker's volunteers.

Google can ask for ever more aggressive permissions from web masters, Ad-Blockers must play nice with browsers' plugin api.

Google can hire away the most productive Ad-Blocker developers.

Google can ban ad-blockers from chrome's plugin repository and halve the ad-blocker userbase overnight.

Google has the warchest for a multi year engagement. Most plugin authors cannot last a single year fighting full time.

If Google went total war then ad-blockers would disappear within a year. It would be a massive PR hit, maybe even a legal issue. The risks make it all a numbers game, but there does exist a point where Google can no longer ignore ad-blockers. Thus ad-block users must be careful and not become too numerous.

All those arguments sounds similar to arguments about why the RIAA would have easily stamped out file sharing.

I would say that the arms race is highly asymmetrical against Google. Building ad-blocking technology isn't that hard, so the labor force force is significantly larger than Google could ever afford to combat.

Google is smart to not take on this battle. Only a small percentage of user's install ad-blocking software, and those users would not likely click on ads anyway. Now, if only Google could teach the RIAA of its ways.

If listening to music necessarily required that you download a new 'app' for every play, then the RIAA could shut down piracy pretty easily.

Bluray security is pretty close to that. Somehow I still keep seeing bluray rips on the internet.

That's because the content doesn't necessarily require you to download a new app every play - the content is the same every play, and any software/license download is just a nuisance.

Google search results are different every time, and the freshness of a result is essential to its utility. If you always needed "today's version of The Movie" then piracy would be much easier to thwart.

I don't buy that for a second. Where is the asymmetry on Google's end? Google has to stop adblockers everywhere, meanwhile, adblockers only need to have a lucky strategy once, and social distribution spreads it everywhere. It's exactly the opposite of what you assert.

And at the end of the day, the web page is rendered on hardware (a display) owned by the user. In the very worst case, the final bitmap being displayed could be modified to remove ads; this crude approach could not be stopped short of a totalitarian state (Google isn't quite that strong) or mangling web pages into unreadability (in which case they wouldn't get traffic so ads would be pointless).

But it would never get that far, for the simple reason of accessibility (i.e. for people with disabilities). Accessible websites are machine comprehensible, to a greater or lesser degree. What the machine can comprehend (in form, if not meaning), it can edit.

Imagine the arms race with a super fast 30 minute release cycle. Every 30 minutes a new updates comes, 30 minutes later a new counter measure.

During those 30 minutes of vulnerability Google is losing only the marginal cost of serving an ad-free search, a rounding error.

During the other 30 minutes ad-blockers will lose users. Users of ad-blockers are not fanatics, they have no moral issues with ads. They are normal people who are using ad-blockers because it improves their browsing experience. So what happens when these ad-blockers temporarily ruin the browsing experience? They'll temporarily turn off said ad-blocker. By the 87th time what percentage will have given up on ad-blockers for good? If that percentage is anything greater than 0% then Google is winning.

The race is not like the DRM arms race, it is more akin to the virus arms race. Users want to run untrusted code and said untrusted code wants to do something the users do not want it to do.

I doubt Google would be willing to do 30 minute release cycles. Like any large piece of code search needs to be tested before it is released, the tests alone probably take 30 minutes to run. Google probably could not update their code more frequently than once a day. Risking breaking the search webpage is too high of a cost. On the other end ad blockers don't have to worry about lossing millions of dollars a second if they introduce a bug so they can respond much quicker.

People wouldn't use a product that changed that quickly. People complain enough as it is.

Actually, there's no way to really block ad-block.

It wouldn't be too hard to make an ad-blocker that used CSS and Javascript to do all of the blocking during page render. It'd be an inefficient use of bandwidth and rendering time, but it'd be able to block 100% of ads and undetectable from the web server.

In fact, before Opera had a built-in ad-blocker, I think there was an ad-block extension built on its "User Javascript" and custom CSS abilities.

Seriously?

  function verifyAds() {
    if (!adContentsVisible()) {
      loadAdContents();
    }
    setTimeout(verifyAds, 1000);    
  }
  verifyAds();

Yes, but it's easy for a browser to just override your verifyAds function.

Huh? Extension can override JavaScript on the page, too, you know:

window.adContentsVisible = function () { return true; }

  (function() {  
    // local scope, can't override
  })();

My point is that I agree with grandparent, that they just allow ads to be shown, and it's not technically impossible to reload ads, or prevent page contents view, if no ads visible.

The plugin can absolutely mock the ad element(s) and make them seem to be visible.

only because sites generally don't do so; if necessary, extensions could get much more aggressive with website scripts, current user script limitations aside.

If it's client-side, it can be defeated. Let's not enter into an arms race of larger and more bandwidth-intensive checkers/blockers to try to get the upper hand. If someone ad blocks, they're not likely in your target demographic anyway.

greasemonkey:

    function adContentsVisible() { return true }

not if it's defined in local context.

I can modify my browser's javascript interpreter if I need to.

Also, it is possible to block 3rd party ads without touching the browser by going straight into the underlying IP routing tables.

I use http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ as my hosts file, and it works great. It doesn't remove the placeholder for the ad, but it does stop it from downloading.

"During page render".

Render the page, identify the regions of the resulting bitmap which are ads, and blank them out. The browser can always just lie at the end, even after running all of the JavaScript and marking all of the DOM elements to visible.

If they find a way to force the visibility of ads, we still could move them to the bottom of the page.

Mobile Safari successfully refrains from adblocking.

There is another factor that people are ignoring for all the talk of technical possibilities...

Those who are minded to go out of their way to install something that blocks ads probably aren't very likely to click ads anyway.

They are also probably technology 'leaders' who help sites to bring in all the regular folk who do click the ads.

Google is probably the least likely company to lose users this way, but they have another factor that they want a good reputation with that community because they want to hire lots of them.

If google becomes too annoying people will leave. There are alternatives.

I think it's more a matter of simple customer segmentation (same principle behind outlet malls: charge price-insensitive customers a premium, without losing the price-sensitive but hassle-insensitive customers who are willing to schlep to the outlet mall for a discount.)

AdBlock allows Google customers to self-segment the same way. Win-win.

Google makes money from people clicking on ads. I'd wager that people who install adblock, don't tend to click on ads, especially if you force them to disable it.

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