I wonder how much of this is actually about Adblockers... vs Googlers just wanting to make some performance numbers go up in aggregate to make their own internal company stats better.
It makes sense to me that a company that is heavily invested in an ad-driven internet economy would limit the use of ad-blockers in their very popular browser. They surely weighed the risks of losing some users to better browsers, and probably found that they were by now acceptable.
Most of the web browsing happens on mobile devices where Chrome has a staggering 5B+ installs (though possibly not all active) vs Firefox's 100M+. Chrome on mobile never did support extensions let alone content blockers.
The manifest v3 offensive is meek compared to their hegemony already on display in the Android world which has 2B+ active users that almost exclusively use Chrome.
I see an anti-trust case in here somewhere or for Mozilla to simply buckle up and sign deals with OEMs that makes them the default browser and webview on Android.
As someone who's used digital advertising in the past I wouldn't really care about forcing my content upon all customers. It's a self selected opt-out for someone who won't ever click anyway.
The real problem is news websites don't show restraint and shovel (so, many) ads to customers, making impressions go up and clicks go down. IMO ads won't go away and adblockers won't kill them completely as too many market forces (privacy, performance, revenue) is making the industry adapt.
Disclaimer: Personal opinion, Googler, not in ads or Chrome.
This is absolutely the real thing hurting online advertising right now. Nobody wants their eyes molested by that many ads, and it makes the user's eyes glaze over. Fewer, better quality, better placed, and less obnoxious ads have consistently worked out better for my clients in terms of clicks.
Apple/Safari adopted pretty much the same architecture on Ad Blockers. Maybe just maybe the conspiracy theories are all wrong, and there was actually a legitimate, technical reason for choosing a restricted API.
And the limit is easily circumvented by having multiple extensions. I've seen Safari extensions that split themselves up to one extension per block list.
You can bundle many rule lists inside one extension. It's how 1Blocker works, and I did it myself for my own adblocking extension.
I'm not sure if this is possible in Chrome's proposal though.
Maybe this change will finally get people to prune Easylist which had 30% outdated cosmetic-filter cruft when I last sampled it along with hobby horse websites <0.00001% people would ever visit. Right now it's basically like an append-only legacy CSS file.
If there was, they could've communicated it clearly already a year ago. There is no reason to give Google the benefit of the doubt, since it's clear they're not trying to get it.
If this rolls out, I'm going to very loudly tell my friends to use Fox, and not stop.
They have, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3Nzz..., and reading it I have always thought it makes sense, as much sense as why Safari decided to do it. However, I don't think I have ever thoughtful discussion why their intended goal (security and privacy) is wrong or could be done in other ways.
I feel sad that each time this comes up even on HN it's always "Google, ad company, bad". There's a mention elsewhere about 30k limit being limiting. Why aren't we discussing alternative enforcement metrics, and request for inclusion?
> maybe [...] there was actually a legitimate, technical reason for choosing a restricted API
Without any further explanation that sounds rather unlikely.
The change is very publicly criticized and keeping legitimate reasons that could've increased support secret is a really counter intuitive strategy.
Apart from that I think it's not far-fetched or particularly conspiratorial to assume that an ad-company might have an interest in restricting ad-blocking.
"When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras."
Google is an advertisement company there is nothing conspiratorial about them using their market share to force ads on people. After all whats the point of supporting chrome if it sells no adds.
With Google's new API, all ads can still be blocked. There will be a limit for network request blocking rules, but it's very high so that normal users don't reach it. And for those that reach it, only network requests are affected, so adblockers can still use other APIs to hide the ads.
You can use other APIs to hide ads (i.e. prevent them from being displayed), but they would still be downloaded so you lose the privacy, performance and security benefits of the ad blocker.
1) avoid being locked out of platforms by not controlling the default search. Apple and Microsoft could either extract a high toll, or crush search engines by controlling what search engines people see by default. On iOS, Apple does extract a toll to be the default, but MS was denied this, by Chrome beating out Windows Mobile and Edge/IE. If your company is wholly a web company, and someone else controls the key onramps to the web, you're potentially in trouble.
2) If the Web becomes a toxic wasteland (which was happening prior to Chrome when IE6 ruled), users flee more towards silo'ed platforms and apps. A healthy web is as beneficial to Google as a healthy forest is to a timber company.
It's like saying "The New York times is an advertising company, not a news company, so why would they invest in journalism schools if the point is to sell classified ads?"
And then there's just plain old interest in technology. Lots of projects at Google start from 20% engineers time, and grow to large successful projects, without any business model, they're just costs. You've got more than a thousand open source projects I bet being run by Google engineers, the majority of which exist because someone wanted to scratch an itch. Go, Angular, Tensorflow, Guava, et al, don't make money and aren't intended to.
(You need a standard disclaimer for your employer in this particular thread.)
I disagree that Google is a web company proper. It might have been years ago, but nowadays Google is capable of bending the very rules of the web and internet at their liking. As a result it can now essentially define what the web (okay, the modernish web) is, and that makes your points moot. Also Google's open-source projects are irrelevant to this discussion, much like that using React doesn't void your rights to criticize Facebook.
I use Safari because it gives me freedom. I paid Apple for their product, now I own the product. It works well except for some Chrome demo apps(which gives me the chills "For the best experience use Internet Explorer" == "Your browser is not supported, use Chrome 46 or newer")
Given that they added an arbitrary limit to the number of rules that is high but not quite high enough for modern adblockers I'm gonna assume this was intentional.
I don't know if this actually helps Google show more ads. With a 30k rule limit, I'm imagining most adblockers will prioritize the most common ad domains, and I'm pretty sure Google would be at the top of that list. This may really be a win for the long tail of smaller ad networks rather than the bigger players.
I moved earlier this year, it's been a good experience overall. The dev tools, which were what was holding me back, are _excellent_ and improving all the time.
Only thing I'd really love to see are container-specific windows, so 'Work' tabs would open by default in my 'Work' window.
In current form, yes. The article pretty clearly states:
>Instead Google wants developers to use the declarativeNetRequest API, which has the browser, not the extension, strip content or resources from a visited web sites. This API, though, has a limit of 30,000 rules that can be created.
>Unfortunately, this change will break popular ad blockers such as uBlock Origin, which rely on the original functionality of the webRequest API and need more rules than are available in the declarativeNetRequest API.
Looking at an old picture of ublock origin block lists: https://www.bleepstatic.com/images/news/u/1100723/uBlockOrig... we can see 150,000 rules. The whole point of a rules list (easylist/easyprivacy) is that they're easy to maintain, since it should be a surprise to no one that adding new ad domains is trivially trivial. EasyList alone is 30,000 rules and it alone is woefully insufficient for a modern-day browser. The declarativeNetRequest only allows for ONE type of filter to work. The static kind, i.e. the old, deprecated, bad, insufficient kind.
The way ad-blockers work at the moment is that the authors of ad-blockers work hard to not break the websites they block adverts on. This is good for users. This change means ad-blockers will need a different, simpler approach that probably will break far more websites. For example, you could write a very simple ad-blocking script that just denied requests to load JS from any third-party domain. That would break a lot of websites, but you wouldn't see many adverts.
I'd rather have lots of broken websites than websites with adverts. I suspect a lot of web users feel the same way.
It does not; actually, I’d argue that the adblocker I’m using right now works just fine. I cannot see how it will do in the future, but it’s just incorrect to say that this change kills all adblocking.
It does kill the really effective ones like uBlock Origin by removing any ability to do heuristics, "right click to block", "IAB sized divs" and similar dynamic detection. The 30k limit is also too low. So, a bit of hyperbole, but it DOES kill the best blockers.
This is the point in the dominance cycle where the dominant player decides they no longer need to be the fastest or the most secure and that their dominance will allow them to coast along doing their thing.
There’s nothing particularly inevitable about what happens next, but let’s hope they get an IE6-sized kick in the teeth.
Why does an alternative have to be widely adopted to be seen as good? Tech has an obsession with "popular or bust" and that's the ultimate cause of the lack of choices IMO.
While I tend to agree with you about them keeping Firefox alive, my guess is that they’re becoming less concerned with a legitimate antitrust complaint and that this “alive” will end up being “just barely.”
Betting protection from antitrust issues on getting cozy with a political party is a risky strategy; political landscape shifts on quite regular basis. It's safer to keep a competitor alive so that if and when the power goes to people who don't like you, it won't be easy for them to go after you.
It’s been ongoing since Trump’s win. I can’t find the link right now, but they’ve also been bankrolling and having speakers at those weird, right wing DC conferences. And they’ve been supporting ALEC for years.
And other projects will apear, all the people that visit sites like this one here, will switch, and slowly transition their families. Majority will conitniue "suffering" since they already don't have adblocks installed.
It is true and I wonder if the tech people aren't becoming the privileged class who knows ways of not feeding the big corporations.
For example, it takes a lot of effort and energy for me to explain to non-technical people that comparing Apple and Google in terms of their mobile devices is non-sense. Just look at their regular financial reports, I usually say, and understand that one is an online advertisement business, while the other is a purely software + device business. One wants you to use their devices at all costs, while the other wants you to buy them. Those are very different core business models, different mentality and approaches. Etc etc. And so the choice between them comes down not even to taste or quality or price; it comes down to which business model you sell your soul to.
And then there's ad blockers and understanding how modern internet works etc. It worries me that the disconnect between those who understand the inner workings of tech and those who don't becomes bigger and bigger by the day. As the tech business itself becomes more and more sophisticated (and monopolist/authoritarian).
I operate a website visited primarily by both unsophisticated users and non-expert but savvy users (the former group being the demographic that exchange emoji-laden meme images on Facebook, and the latter group as the type of people comfortable getting around a phpBB board in the mid-2000s). I've seen a steady decline in AdSense/AdWords ad-revenue from visitors based on ad-impressions despite increasing visitor counts from those two main demographics - the evidence suggests they're using some form of ad-blocker.
But there will still be adblockers. Safari still has them, manifest v3 Chrome will too. They work great and the user doesn't need to hand over all of their browsing information to the adblocker for it to work.
has anyone else noticed a marked decline in the quality of Google search results over the last 12 months? I swear, around about 2011 I thought Google was going to become self aware but it's declined from that high-point to a point where duckduckgo has become a viable alternative for more than just reasons of privacy. Which is a great thing!
Turns out "Don't be Evil" was more than just a feel-good marketing slogan. It may have actually been good for business as well.
I do remember remarking to somebody around this time that google search had become something of a glorified grep.
You could still get things though. What I meant in this comment is that it has gotten even worse to the point that its almost unusable. It really does remind me of Microsoft of the 00’s.
I think 2014 was the big change into "AI first" for Google. I remember Translate working fine in 2014 in China with the offline pack, and the offline pack was ~220MB. In 2016, the offline pack was ~30MB and nobody understood the translations over there.
I've noticed that for far longer than 12 months. Google search results are frequently crap. DuckDuckGo is often better.
But sometimes I dream about building my own search engine. It would avoid the big ad-driven sites as much as possible, and give preferential treatment to obscure blog posts about topics nobody else has written about. I want a search result to show the many different ways it could be interpreted, rather than assume one of them based on whatever heuristic, and show me tons of identical results that aren't what I want.
I think this is a combination of SEO exploiting the methods Google used to use to provide good results and personal data based result optimization only being good at certain types of queries...
I don't know about overall quality of search, but did stack overflow do something to fall out of Google's good graces? I swear unless I specifically include stack overflow in my search query it's either near the bottom or not include at all. Instead it's a whole bunch of articles from independent websites. This is for questions I know fit the bill for stack overflow too. It's almost like Google is artificial lowering their ranking to decentralize the source of knowledge. That or stack overflow lost 70% of readership in 4 months
Google knows I land on StackOverflow results so often that SO results appear near the top, if not the #1 result, for terms that often have nothing to do with programming or computers. I was recently looking for an online thesaurus service and Google showed me an SO post about building linguistic/semantic search algorithms. Hmmm.
This is my experience too, and also in other areas. I have to include "stack overflow" or "forum" keywords to actually find something useful on the first or second page. Example: drone racing discussions.
Yes. When I started using DuckDuckGo it was despite Google's search results often being better and every few weeks I used Google for some queries because I simply couldn't find what I was looking for.
Now my last visit to Google is more than a year ago because DDG got better while Google got worse.
> has anyone else noticed a marked decline in the quality of Google search results over the last 12 months?
I noticed this since around 3-4 years ago.
It seems to be based on region.
Quotes get ignored. Even very specific queries about X prioritize clickbait junk like "TOP 10 X!!"
I THINK they might be anti-competitive too; searching for particular Apple APIs is sometimes more miss than hit, though that might be because of Apple's own poor documentation.
However, most Apple-related searches used to show me Samsung crap, and that's definitely not benign. Like searching for "iPhone" literally presented an ad for the Samsung Galaxy at the top, for a while.
The one that I've noticed getting much worse over the last couple of years is Google (and to a smaller extent DuckDuckGo) removing the least common search term if there aren't thousands of hits. Precise search terms are very valuable for hitting the right results in a pile of unrelated slop and Google is even doing things like returning all Windows results when I search for linux and some CLI app that isn't available for Windows and never was. I can put in full paths out of /sys and Google will happily remove linux and the entry name because I'm only getting 5000 hits. The only thing I can think of is that they're trying to increase the number of ad impressions by having you need to do more searches to find what you're looking for.
They still are the fastest and the most secure, and Manifest v3 is faster than uBlock Origin since no javascript code needs to run.
I won't be using Chrome anymore once they implement this since I like my element-hiding rules which I wrote myself, but for the common rabble, Manifest v3 will be an improvement.
They could support declarative rulesets without disabling request blocking. And the request inspection API is still live, it seems; I wonder if this means SimilarWeb and other spyware peddlers can stay in business for now.
The speed difference is only noticeable in benchmarks. It's completely meaningless for humans. Manifest v3 will not be an improvement for anyone previously using uBlock Origin.
No the company which has solved some incredible technical/algorithmic problems is not capable of offering any technical solutions which might impact its own bottom line
You seem to be assuming that the people maintaining the rules have been somewhat lazy so far. uBlock origin has the reputation of being pretty performant though, so I'd assume the engine and rules are already well optimized.
That aside, I wouldn't want to bend backwards just to comply with how Google wants the world to work. I'd rather use Firefox.
It would be hard but I think it might be possible, provided some time is put into coalescing rules in an efficient way. (I have done something similar and couldn’t quite manage to get it to fit, but I didn’t look at it for too long.) One issue that still remains relevant is that adblocking lists usually grow with time and require more features as ads evolve, so it’s not clear that the new API will continue to support this.
Classic cat and mouse moves.
Adblockers will move to OS level so google cant do anything about it.
Pi-hole and Network level blockers should also see a rise.
I generally don't mind ads that are embedded into the page (at the moment). It would solve a lot of the big problems people have with ads right now. Anyway, this change only prevents extensions from blanket blocking web requests, and will make no difference to adblockers which manipulate DOM content.
I think the same thing that happened with popup blockers will happen again. Advertisers will be forced to listen to the consumers and the internet will be better for it.
Have you turned off your popup blocker recently? You can surf around even to fairly sketchy sites, and I bet you won't see a pop up. The consumer won. With tracking, we'll win again.
And cert pinning in the browsers blows this out of the water, which is why I'm of two minds about it as a security feature. It seems that a lot of security these days is really about removing people's control over their own devices.
You can import an own root cert which will be honored. I work in a company where all internal servers have a certificate a non-public root has signed. Works both on Chrome and FF.
Then you need to manage custom certificates and embedded browsers and updaters may not handle proxied connections well. (And what about your tv where you can't provide custom CA certs?) This way of handling things never ends well. Both in enterprise solutions and consumer ones.
I've given up on Chrome a long time ago (using Firefox now), but I think the best way to block ads for good is to use Pi Hole as DNS. I've set it up a couple months ago at my home, plus a Wireguard tunnel so that all connections from my laptop and phones go through that DNS (with the added benefit of encrypting all my traffic over unsecured networks).
Why should it? Most ads are toxic. Even if the site is well-intended and doesn't put too many of them, the few ads are still going to track you and disregard your privacy.
If site has ads served from main domain you can't block them
You can block ads with some static files on subdomains/domains, and this drastically change content (like how is image sites looks like without images?)
So, using DNS filtering for big ads providers is OK
For small and smart ads providers will not work
And I mean ads and tracking the same thing. While you can block all kind of "analytics", at the same time you can't block web-server logs with your IP (cookies, etc)
Off-topic: because of this, I was thinking of moving to Vivaldi and it's really sad how unpolished and slow their UI is... it's almost as if it was a beta, still. I wonder if they use it themselves...
It seems to me that they want to reinvent the entire Chrome UI but they don't have the necessary manpower to do it properly.
It is not about Chrome vs Firefox. It is about how much information they can get about you.
The idea behind the "I am not a robot" captcha is that if you act like a human, then you don't need to be shown pictures for further confirmation. The more you allow tracking, the more info they have to figure it out.
A big one is being logged in to your Google account. Having access to all your history really helps. And because Chrome heavily encourage you to setup a Google account, Chrome users are more likely to be logged in than Firefox (or other) users.
Spoofing your user-agent is likely to be worse. If you have a Chrome user-agent but your browser don't act like Chrome, that's a big red flag. Bots often spoof their user agents.
They're getting garbage in with the service too - about the last dozen (at least) or more times I've had to do it you can clearly see that one of the options is what the AI thinks should be the answer, but isn't. But if you don't select it before clicking 'verify' it gives you a little 'please select all taxis' or whatever.
No AI, that's just a car, not a taxi.
But who cares, I just click anyway and feed bullshit in and in a few years it'll think everything is a taxi.
Note how they say: "We have no immediate plans to remove blocking webRequest and are working with add-on developers to gain a better understanding of how they use the APIs in question to help determine how to best support them."
"No immediate plans" is weasel-speak, as is "[we] are working with add-on developers".
If Mozilla was dead sure that they weren't going ahead with it, they would say so, unequivocally. And I remind you that Mozilla "worked with add-on developers" when they unilaterally decided to drop XUL and go ahead with web extensions, while failing to include support for APIs that developers said they needed to support functionality that their add-ons provided.
IMHO, adoption of manifest v3 is not a matter of "if" but rather "when".
Mozilla will certainly support manifest v3 to maintain Chrome compatibility. That was never in question.
The question is whether Mozilla _removes_ support for webRequest like Google did. And you're right, they weaseled their way out of answering that question.
Mozilla is free to implement Manifest v3, while preserving the webRequest API in its current state. Maintaining the blocking abilities of the webRequest API would not introduce any incompatibilities with Chrome extensions, because they simply would not use that part of the API.
I think the concern is they might also be "free" to find alternative sources of funding if that were the case not whether or not it's technically feasible to support an API that exists today.
Of course, I'm mainly pointing out that if Mozilla retorts to use compatibility as a reason for deprecating parts of the webRequest API, they'll most likely be dishonest.
While I would agree that this might be just a overt way of saying "when", that statement came from Mozilla, and so far I don't think I could accuse them of misleading newspeak. If that was any other big corpo, then you are absolutely right.
As far as organization Mozilla have my trust and I don't look for false bottoms in their statements.
I would point out the previous statement they made there:
> Firefox is not, however, obligated to implement every part of v3, and our WebExtensions API already departs in several areas under v2 where we think it makes sense.
I trust Mozilla to be on my side as customer than ad industry. Well, we will see what future brings.
"Google wants to drop support for blocking WebRequests, which will cripple certain extensions, others might not even work at all. Mozilla is not going to follow this destructive path. Instead, they will keep allowing the use of blocking WebRequests and investigate how to address the issue differently."
That isn't an official communication from Mozilla. That is "someone's" recollection of something "someone" said (or not) at some workshop:
"Fair warning: I don't speak for Mozilla. Everything I say here is a recording of my memories from that event. Nothing more. Nothing less."
(and yes, I noticed that the second "someone" is Mozilla's "Add-ons Policy Policer, Thunderbird Council Chair", but my point still stands: this is something "someone" said, not Mozilla's official position)
I use brave but some brave allowed ads seep through. I have no issue with ads; I just don't like tracking and insane JavaScript pop ups taking over the browser without the user invoking a deliberate action.
On mobile i use brave, and when things break I switch to chrome. I tried Firefox multiple times, but I can't help but miss the swipe the address bar to go from tab to tab. I always revert back to chrome. So it's more of a convenience for me.
But if I had to choose between adblock or swipe to switch tab, then they made the decision for me. There is no way I can ever browse the web without an adblocker
Brave blocks ads natively, even on mobile. It's a pretty nifty browser for when you want chromium. Firefox mobile is slower in comparison, but their extension support is killer tbh.
I find it interesting that Google thinks they are going to get away with this. I'm afraid they might be right.
I've been on Firefox since they launched their quantum version a few years ago after a few years of using Chrome. I like Firefox but I notice a lot of people around me seem to default to Chrome. Things work well enough on Firefox that I don't consider compatibility a problem. But I do get a lot of raised eyebrows from people who consider this an extreme thing to do. Just like back in the day where I was doing most of my browsing with alpha builds of Mozilla Phoenix instead of just using IE like world + dog.
But what matters is that the market has changed. 15 years ago when MS made their anti competitive moves with IE and in the process helped Mozilla survive their Netscape implosion through reinventing themselves through their Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox reinvention (I used all of those). However since then, the market has consolidated around just 3 browser engines: Chromium, Webkit/Safari, and Firefox. Of those Chromium essentially powers all of the Chrome alternatives that aren't Firefox or Safari (Edge, Brave, Opera, etc.). Another change is that the web has imploded to just a handful of websites gobbling up most of the traffic. Yes there are a lot of websites but mostly the way to them leads via Google, Facebook, Apple, or MS owned properties.
Finally the ad market has changed. GDPR and related efforts in other markets (including the US) are pushing the market towards more responsible behavior with respect to getting users to opt in and to ad experiences that are increasing harder to block because they don't necessarily come via separate websites and domains.
There's also the giant shift to mobile. Google and apple would like you to use phones and tablets to the expense of desktops because they can control those platforms better. So they are building their platforms with those in mind, unintentionally-or-not crippling desktops
Did you link to the right thing? That isn't a deflection, they're asking permission to sideline the issue on uBlock's issue tracker into a discussion about Chrome/Chromium's extension policies, which incidentally they didn't get a clear answer to.
> I also don't want to hijack this without the project's permission. @gorhill & contributors, do you mind having this discussion here or would you prefer if we moved it elsewhere?
I haven't really been following this issue, but I did read the linked reply, so I may be missing some bigger context.
That's the correct link, and it is deflection. When developers tell you that the extension review process is so unfair that it feels like bullying [1], and ask you what changes do you plan to introduce to prevent this, the least you can do as a developer advocate is to briefly answer the question, then open a thread on Google Groups and invite people there to continue the discussion.
What they did was to introduce a break in the discussion. Most people subscribing to that GitHub issue, which was trending on HN [2], will not start monitoring Google Groups for any new discussion that may take place, which reduces the likelihood that there will be enough people pressuring them to give clear answers.
Google has been perfecting this language over the past few years, with press releases/blog posts of fame such as: "We're evolving Google Fiber" (read: We're killing it) or "We're releasing the End-to-End email encryption extension to the community" (read: We're abandoning developing and supporting it for Gmail), etc
I remember clearly an interview of a very famous IT billionaire going this way:
- What's the most annoying myth about you?
- A myth migh be that I'm the most generous philantropist of all time. [...But] I havent' sacrified my time or economic well being the same way lots of unamed, amazing people do. So they're the worlds best philantropists.
This is the least subtle humble-brag of all time. "People says I'm so incredibly amazing. But they are wrong. There are out there more amazing people." is gotta be next to the job interview answer "my biggest weakness is that I work too much" in the BS book.
But the reactions to the interview are still, to this day, "this person is so humble", "he is such a good man", etc.
Except that people do, in fact, say things not so far from "Bill Gates is the most generous philanthropist of all time". If you put "most generous philanthropist of all time" into your favourite search engine, I bet you will get a lot of top-N lists and I bet Bill Gates will be in all of them. (Unless they're things like "most generous philanthropists you've never heard of", "most generous female philanthropists", etc.) If I put that exact phrase, in quotation marks, into Google, the result I get up at the top is an article from 2007 (so, well before that interview) making that exact claim. [EDITED to add:] More precisely, it calls him "perhaps the most generous philanthropist of all time".
I don't think it really counts as a humblebrag to say "it's a myth that I'm X" when there are in fact a lot of people saying you're X.
He could, for sure, have gone further out of his way to avoid humblebragging: he could have said something like "I think a lot of people overstate how generous a philanthropist I am". But he was asked, specifically, what the most annoying myth about him was, and all the anti-humblebrag tactics I can think of right now avoid humblebragging by not stating a specific proposition at all -- so they fail to answer the question he was actually asked.
And he could, for sure, have picked something else, maybe something about his time at Microsoft. But these days he's much better known as a philanthropist than as a Microsoft founder or executive, and I bet the things people (truly or falsely) believe about his Microsoft career aren't the things he considers the most annoying myths.
Even if you don't share their opinion, you have to accept that some people honestly believe that advertising is necessary for funding the open Web and keep it open for people who either can't afford tons of subscriptions or hate them for privacy reasons.
Realistically, Mr Vincent is not in charge of being an advocate for anything other than Google's corporate interests. But he is not in charge of destroying extensions either. He may well be in charge of destroying ad blockers though.
> ...advertising is necessary for funding the open Web and keep it open for people who either can't afford tons of subscriptions or hate them for privacy reasons
That's a minor issue. The bigger issue is the fact that, if adblockers become truly popular, websites will go back to serving opaque binary blobs instead of HTML+CSS+JS.
Remember Flash and 'Flash pages' back in the day? That, except worse.
I'm not sure that is worse. A vast majority of the primary source web has no in page ads as it is things like orgs talking about their own products. If I could reliably filter the entire ad funded web from my search results on the basis of their using a blobs/DRM feature, I'm not sure how often I would do a search on the derivative web.
I don't think sites will bake ads into the blob. It's too much server-side hassle. The equivalent today is just serving the ads from your own domain, and precious few people do that. The other option is a binary blob making a network request to an ad server, which can be blocked.
I know people who are building this as a service. It renders this new adblocking API completely helpless. Since it's just a proxy with relatively low CPU load, it's feasible e.g. Cloudflare could also build something like this.
I don’t accept that these people think they are helping create an open web. I think they’re trying to make their stock options worth more and appease their bosses.
I don't know Mr Vincent or anyone else at Google, but it seems unrealistic to assume that no one at Google could possibly believe that advertising is helping not hurting the open Web.
Stock options and bosses with different incentives are available at other employers as well.
>I don’t think anyone could be naive enough to believe ads help the open web
I don't think assuming bad faith with absolute certainty is a productive form of debate.
[Edit]: As a matter of fact, I don't believe that advertising is entirely replaceable as a funding mechanism for the open web at this point in time. That doesn't mean we have to accept all its excesses without resistance.
>Most other employers don’t have a near monopoly on the web browser market.
A near monopoly is not a prerequisite for an employee to make a lot of money somewhere else, especially not for someone in a PR role like "advocate".
> I don't think assuming bad faith with absolute certainty is a productive form of debate.
It’s not a debate though, Google is removing these user friendly features and sprinkling some marketing speak over their actions. It’s right to call them out on that. Also, if your job is to be the face of that marketing speak, you should expect people to question what you say.
[edit] Funding and openness are tangential. A system need not be profitable to be open. Look at open source.
I don't think open source is a viable solution for all currently ad funded services. Some services cost a lot of money to run and many indirect funding sources come with their own downsides. Open source projects are often leveraged by some of the largest corporations for their own strategic purposes that don't necessarily help openness.
But my original point was simply that this is a non-trivial debate in which all sorts of opinions can be honestly held.
I have found that picking at people for a decision that you don’t agree with is rarely useful; we already have people going through GitHub to find instances of other “disingenuous” behavior. Like the decision or not, the change is the product of an entire team at Google, and it’s not productive to harass the one person mentioned here because they’re an easy target.
This is classic modern Google. "Advocate" probably means he is advocating for the Chrome Extensions Team and not the Chrome extensions. That would allow him to have an internally consistent world model and is probably how greater corporate Google interprets the title.
So communicating what the team is doing to the outside world, not defending the utility of the extensions.
I guess the argument is "is it worth it to save some people the privacy issue of extensions phoning home the pages you visit by requiring the ad-blocking to be a rule list and not rely on synchronous webRequest blocking". Safari's webRequest change also blocked even monitoring webRequest URLs, so the current adblocking solution is to only provide a list of blocked patterns, and it seems to work for me.
Yep, the hysteria has no substance. I'm using Safari both on mobile and on desktop and use adblocker even though the evil Apple should have had them killed.
If Anything, I am nervious of installing any ad-on that can access the web pages I visit and send god knows what who knows were. It's almost as an accident waiting to happen. The web is only secure when your browser is secure.
I like the natively handled content blocking approach much better.
I'm not deep in the ecosystem and certainly no expert but I got one of those small iPads for free and tried using it as a device for browsing the web.
AFAIK there is no way to make Safari execute any cosmetic filters at all. (My uBlock Origin setup lists ~50k network filters and 150k cosmetic filters)
There are cookie notices, social media buttons, premium newspaper article headlines, comment sections, fixed elements and content "suggestions" everywhere. Unusable.
I use css filters in ublock origin to increase the font size of the HN comment titles because I often miss the collapse or vote links. ...or to block the food suggestions in Googles shoppinglist that, by appearing as an overlay, always hide the first list entry to suggest me to buy "hamburger". (I'm not joking.)
I still do have the device somewhere and I am open for suggestions on how to get control over the content (or at least remove ads) on an ipad, but I don't think there is currently any full content-blocking solution for iOS.
Which is a shame because (in my case unbearable software aside) the device does not appear bad from a hardware perspective.
Words are just another means to an end for these people. Americans were very good at believing that Orwell’s work about language and politics was specific to the circumstances of the Soviet Union, when in fact it’s broadly applicable to every form of authoritarianism, including corporations and their functionaries. I’ve never had the misfortune of living in a Stalinist state, but I certainly have worked for companies and managers that seemed to aspire to.
Not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek, but the key consideration here is that of authoritarianism (which is capable of being used in conjunction with plenty of other -isms, including socialism and capitalism). Corporations tend to be largely authoritarian as well (i.e., you are expected to respect your boss because they are your boss (and if they deign to respect you, this is regarded as magnanimity); possession of authority in authoritarian contexts is circularly self-justfiying).
Internally, businesses run whatever system they want, but it is almost always an authoritarian hierarchy. (Do what you're told or leave. Various amounts of arguing or grumbling before you do may or may not be tolerated.)
The language used in bad times is telling. You'll hear managers talking about how it sucks, but is needed to save the company ("individuals must suffer for the greater good").
Externally, businesses reflect the political preferences of those who control them, but they tend to prefer weak states they can influence or control. Democracies are harder to control this way because the stakeholders are diffuse. Centralization, strongmen and corruption make things easier.
They are being very stupid. Switching primary browser isn't trivial, but it's easier than wading through an ad-laden web. Goodbye Chrome, hello Firefox.
The big question is, how many of those less technical people switched to Chrome because of technical friends or family and how many switched because of Google abusing its monopoly by displaying deceptive ads for their browser on all web real estate they own?
Except we are the ones that usually decide what to put on end users computers.
And we are the ones that makes suggestions. And end users then make same suggestions to other people.
Word of mouth I believe is a VERY important marketing tool.
Basically if Chrome looses people that brought them market share in the first place... I think market can shift. Not that it happens fast enough. But having some market share for Firefox is important.
If you're not technical, switching browser means losing your entire navigation map of bookmarks and default start page, along with learning a different program's ways of doing the same things.
If you are technical, it's still a pain to get everything imported and set back up, and the extensions you're used to may be absent or done in different ways, and the subtleties of eg: incognito mode and reader mode may be different. You may have to re-construct your personal adblock rules. And so on.
Back in the IE 6 days I was in charge of fixing my families computers, and my family's friends computers. I was dealing with a few things a week, some requiring a full re-install. This was back in the early 2000's. Eventually I snapped and started charging hourly unless people switched to Gmail and Firefox. I started getting a lot less calls since Gmail was pretty good about filtering out malicious attachments and IE was, IE. I probably got around 40 households to switch to Firefox. The people that refused to switch financed a lot of my undergrad, I charged 100 a hour. I don't like fixing computers and the goal was to make things as painful as possible for them so they would stop using IE.
Using a ad-blocker in Firefox was the #1 thing I suggested for safe computing. And don't open unexpected email attachments. This killed 95% of peoples computer woes.
So good job Google, you did it, from here on out whenever I see Chrome on families computers I will strong-arm them into switching to Firefox. I did it in 2005 and was wildly successful. I can do it again. And I think my Christmas gifts this year will be domain names and three year subscriptions to Fastmail for my immediate family.
Oh no, he doesn't think they are stupid, just that they don't know the difference between browsers. If my mechanic mounted a new transmission or something that wasn't the same brand as the one mounted before, and told me "it's the new version", I couldn't care less as long as it worked as intended. I don't know anything about transmissions, so from my point of view I have no way of knowing if what he's telling me is the truth or not, I just trust him to make my car work again.
This reminds me that such people also think that the visual experience of browsing the internet is somehow "fixed". My impression of social media is that one of its draws (pitfalls actually) is that it gives the impression of different people experiencing the same thing, e.g.: a 100 people like this or 500 people retweeted that.
However, as programmers, we should see the internet not as a browser at all. We should see it as a list of protocols and implementations thereof.
I think a big part of the oh-so-common emotional social media battles is anticipation of the other person's experience. Hopefully for you, as a programmer reading this, your view of the internet is protected by automated command line scripts that fight your internet battles for you...
If my mechanic mounted a new transmission from another brand without telling me beforehand that he intended to do so, and I found out later, then I would immediately lose all trust in such a mechanic.
Why did he mount a different brand? Was it because he thinks it's better? Maybe it's cheaper, but otherwise equivalent? I have no way of knowing, and I trust his judgement entirely. On the other hand, if I went to my mechanic and said "Look Bob, I want an ACME Turboencabulator v2 mounted" I believe he would be happy to do so. The point is, most users don't even know what a browser is and just want to get back to facebook ASAP, and don't care if you tell them you installed an ACME Turboencabulator or a Stark Industries Turboelectroencabulator.
Of course, we all know the original Turboencabulator is GE and all the others are knockoffs, but I've tried other brands and they work just as well, if not even better.
Yes, the most ignorant among us will never find out, unless they have a problem and go to a different mechanic that tells them. But it is very very obvious when you actually receive parts whether or not it's an OEM part, or an aftermarket part. Both may be identical and made in the same factory, but if I request a repair with OEM parts, am charged for OEM parts, and am provided with non-OEM parts that is repair fraud and a crime.
Same here, and I understand cars. This is repair fraud, actually, and a criminal offense in the US. If I paid for and was told I would receive an OEM part and instead I got some aftermarket part off RockAuto, I'd be beyond pissed off and I'd get my recompense somehow.
I understand the grandparent point, but their analogy is terrible. When you are paying for a specific brand of item and you get an alternative brand without being informed and giving consent, that is fraud. It is a crime, and it is effectively stealing from you the difference in price/value/cost of the two items, since you're paying for the other brand.
Never did I mention I had specified a model/brand. I just went to the mechanic and asked him "fix my transmission". Whatever the way he does it, if it works it's good to me.
No they are not, they just frequently devoted their intelligence to being a lawyer, doctor or whatever rather than caring about tech. Any more than they cared about the finer points of their microwave or VHS recorder.
The first Google scam - yes scam - was Adsense and adwords. The search "sponsored" box was a yellow designed to be near indistinguishable from white, and was invisible on many LCD monitors. Adsense and adword links were the same blue IE used for links - because people had been conditioned to believe blue links simply traversed the web.
With hindsight, that's the moment everyone should have lost all trust in Google.
yeah back then there was a theme for firefox 3 that mimiked explorer icon and ux, all my relatives had that, very few questioned the different download menu.
thanks satan In all seriousness, "And ofc do not forget to say that is new IE version", that is the key, let them think they are still using their old software.
I always found that it was best not to lie to users for their own good, at least if you want them to continue considering you a trusted source of computing information.
You don't have to explain what firefox is, or what IE is, just that "this isn't IE but it does the same thing and will keep you safe".
Maybe they'll have follow up questions, and you can answer those, but lying is just a good way for them to go back to IE and not tell you because they don't to be treated condescendingly.
I use a pihole at home too. It is funny since I have gotten a few texts from my roommates about their phones being infected when they aren't connected to the wifi here. They think it is a virus and I have to tell them that is what the internet normally looks like.
I wouldn't rule out an infection in that case. I have a friend who has phone malware that shows ads about every minute or so. I offered to help factory reset it (last I checked everything she wants to keep is automatically backed up to the cloud) but we just haven't gotten around to it. And yes she really does use her phone regularly.
What lists are you using, which avoiding? My use of pihole constantly disrupted basic services such as Sonos. I can certainly find the URL culprits and resolve it, but I got tired of constantly doing so...
In case of Sonos - the speakers disconnected all the time. Taking off pihole completely solved the issue. I did not check for possible problematic URLs on the blacklists though.
What were you using for DHCP? I'm no Sonos engineer but that sounds like it might been network level rather than DNS. I have pi-hole doing DHCP as well and created DHCP reservations for my Sonos speakers just to be safe (although it isn't necessary and I never had issues when they were regular DHCP clients of my ISPs router).
DNS adblockers like Pihole are markedly _less_ effective than the declarative content blocking proposed for Chrome and currently in-use by Safari.
They do have the advantage of covering your entire LAN and working inside apps, so they are definitely useful. But they don't replace real adblockers, or even the castrated ones Google is pushing on its users.
It won't work for long. With eSNI and DoH you won't be able to use DNS for blocking, and IP is very easy to switch around, especially in IPv6 but even in IPv4 (ad networks have money, shortage is not a problem for them).
Back then, that was pretty good advice. IE was so insecure your entire system was at risk if you were exposed to the wrong content. Google made their browser quite secure and fast, which negates some of the reasons why people used ad blockers. There are other reasons people might use them, but these days you're much, much safer on Chrome than you ever were on IE.
Maybe the attacks were less sophisticated back then. I've seen so many windows computers completely owned by people using chrome to stream tv shows or perhaps visiting the wrong site while looking for discounts on shopping.
Like so many others on this thread, this is my push to go entirely back onto Firefox. I'll keep Chrome for the diminishing number of sites that don't like Firefox.
You can use Brave as your Chromium-based browser. It blocks ads natively, and I've not yet run into a site that required Chrome that didn't work on Brave.
How sure are we that Brave will not break also with these new changes? And also, how sure are we that Chromium isn't secretly tracking users already? I don't have time to read the source, and don't trust that many people that say it's all a-okay.
For the entire history of the internet, there have been sites that only work properly with the dominate browser, starting with Netscape and then, famously, IE6.
I'm always confused when people imply this isn't the case or start demanding evidence. I'm bemused when they are surprised.
Suggesting a browser because it has adblock preinstalled is like recommending a specific Linux distribution because it comes with LibreOffice out of the box: it doesn't matter for anyone who can click 2-3 buttons.
What matters to me is the part I can't influence that easily, and I simply prefer Firefox because it's not based on Chrome. Not something many browser developers can say nowadays.
But if you need Chrome for certain sites that only support Chrome, then giving Chrome the middle finger by using a non-Chrome Chrome seems like the best of two evils. I realize that sites only supporting Chrome is terrible and shouldn't be a thing, but sometimes it really can't be avoided.
I say this as someone who uses 99% Firefox, 1% Chrome... I had never thought about this point I'm making before.
Wow, the amount of negativity here is awful. I looks like most commenters have not even read the article...
First of all, the HN title is not the title of the article. HN mods, please change it to reflect the actual title of the article.
Second, to me this does not seem as some attempt by Google to actively block Adblocker extensions. They are proposing a change to the API (Manifest) to no longer allow manipulation of content, which I think is a good thing from a security standpoint. They also propose reducing the number of content stripping rules to 30k. Now, I'm not familiar with add-on development, but this sounds like a constraint that was implemented for performance reasons. This constraint will break add-blockers in their current form, but there is no reason for me to believe that this will make content filtering impossible.
It is also clearly stated that the V3 manifest is in early testing phase. Nothing here is set in stone.
Mods, can we have this title changed to match the article? It’s not accurate, as Manifest v3 does not “kill” adblockers. (Whether it cripples them or not is still subjective and does not belong in the title.)
They announced this back in May/June - the whole 30k rules things.
Current rules list easily exceed that number. They said back in May/June that they would consider looking increasing the number of rules - they clearly haven't chosen to increase the number in the intervening time. Maybe they are waiting for more actual testing, but they're not setting themselves up for an easy time.
It's also honestly a little rich to worry about the performance impact of ad blocking given the performance impact of ads themselves.
As 'yipbub says, the amount of negativity here is appropriate. The topic of Manifest V3 has been discussed to death over the past months, and the conclusion is, it does cripple ad and tracking blockers. The security benefits of this change are at best dubious[0], the performance argument is nonsense, and it really does look like the primary goal of this proposal is to make it impossible for browser extensions to effectively prevent users from being tracked. In the months since the initial proposal, Google has done nothing to suggest this is not their goal.
A couple years ago my mac started to not go to sleep... I checked and it was Chrome saying “webrtc has active peer connections”. No, you can’t disable webrtc in chrome.
So I’ve been a bit ahead of the crowd and gave up on Chrome long ago.
This ad block scandal made me give up on Safari too though. Firefox seems to be the only reasonable option left.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadCos sure as hell no user is waiting for this.
Most of the web browsing happens on mobile devices where Chrome has a staggering 5B+ installs (though possibly not all active) vs Firefox's 100M+. Chrome on mobile never did support extensions let alone content blockers.
The manifest v3 offensive is meek compared to their hegemony already on display in the Android world which has 2B+ active users that almost exclusively use Chrome.
I see an anti-trust case in here somewhere or for Mozilla to simply buckle up and sign deals with OEMs that makes them the default browser and webview on Android.
Why do you assume Google implements features that users want? They implement features that their clients want: the ones paying for ads.
The real problem is news websites don't show restraint and shovel (so, many) ads to customers, making impressions go up and clicks go down. IMO ads won't go away and adblockers won't kill them completely as too many market forces (privacy, performance, revenue) is making the industry adapt.
Disclaimer: Personal opinion, Googler, not in ads or Chrome.
I'm not sure if this is possible in Chrome's proposal though.
Maybe this change will finally get people to prune Easylist which had 30% outdated cosmetic-filter cruft when I last sampled it along with hobby horse websites <0.00001% people would ever visit. Right now it's basically like an append-only legacy CSS file.
If this rolls out, I'm going to very loudly tell my friends to use Fox, and not stop.
I feel sad that each time this comes up even on HN it's always "Google, ad company, bad". There's a mention elsewhere about 30k limit being limiting. Why aren't we discussing alternative enforcement metrics, and request for inclusion?
Without any further explanation that sounds rather unlikely.
The change is very publicly criticized and keeping legitimate reasons that could've increased support secret is a really counter intuitive strategy.
Apart from that I think it's not far-fetched or particularly conspiratorial to assume that an ad-company might have an interest in restricting ad-blocking.
"When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras."
1) avoid being locked out of platforms by not controlling the default search. Apple and Microsoft could either extract a high toll, or crush search engines by controlling what search engines people see by default. On iOS, Apple does extract a toll to be the default, but MS was denied this, by Chrome beating out Windows Mobile and Edge/IE. If your company is wholly a web company, and someone else controls the key onramps to the web, you're potentially in trouble.
2) If the Web becomes a toxic wasteland (which was happening prior to Chrome when IE6 ruled), users flee more towards silo'ed platforms and apps. A healthy web is as beneficial to Google as a healthy forest is to a timber company.
It's like saying "The New York times is an advertising company, not a news company, so why would they invest in journalism schools if the point is to sell classified ads?"
And then there's just plain old interest in technology. Lots of projects at Google start from 20% engineers time, and grow to large successful projects, without any business model, they're just costs. You've got more than a thousand open source projects I bet being run by Google engineers, the majority of which exist because someone wanted to scratch an itch. Go, Angular, Tensorflow, Guava, et al, don't make money and aren't intended to.
I disagree that Google is a web company proper. It might have been years ago, but nowadays Google is capable of bending the very rules of the web and internet at their liking. As a result it can now essentially define what the web (okay, the modernish web) is, and that makes your points moot. Also Google's open-source projects are irrelevant to this discussion, much like that using React doesn't void your rights to criticize Facebook.
What kind of freedom do Chrome users get?
Only thing I'd really love to see are container-specific windows, so 'Work' tabs would open by default in my 'Work' window.
Full disclosure: I love this extension.
[0]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338
>Instead Google wants developers to use the declarativeNetRequest API, which has the browser, not the extension, strip content or resources from a visited web sites. This API, though, has a limit of 30,000 rules that can be created.
>Unfortunately, this change will break popular ad blockers such as uBlock Origin, which rely on the original functionality of the webRequest API and need more rules than are available in the declarativeNetRequest API.
Looking at an old picture of ublock origin block lists: https://www.bleepstatic.com/images/news/u/1100723/uBlockOrig... we can see 150,000 rules. The whole point of a rules list (easylist/easyprivacy) is that they're easy to maintain, since it should be a surprise to no one that adding new ad domains is trivially trivial. EasyList alone is 30,000 rules and it alone is woefully insufficient for a modern-day browser. The declarativeNetRequest only allows for ONE type of filter to work. The static kind, i.e. the old, deprecated, bad, insufficient kind.
Recommended reading: uBlock Origin developer's comments on this change (unanswered by google ofc) https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897...
I'd rather have lots of broken websites than websites with adverts. I suspect a lot of web users feel the same way.
I seriously doubt I'd be left with any "broken sites" I care much about by the time I've whitelisted 30k 3rd party javascript domain/paths?
(https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/web-request-and-declarativ...)
It does not; actually, I’d argue that the adblocker I’m using right now works just fine. I cannot see how it will do in the future, but it’s just incorrect to say that this change kills all adblocking.
There’s nothing particularly inevitable about what happens next, but let’s hope they get an IE6-sized kick in the teeth.
as in: people will continue to suffer for about a decade while good alternatives readily spring up but suffer slow adoption?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/google-miles-ta...
While I tend to agree with you about them keeping Firefox alive, my guess is that they’re becoming less concerned with a legitimate antitrust complaint and that this “alive” will end up being “just barely.”
I think it's likely to be a while before any political party other than the Democrats and the Republicans holds a lot of power in the US.
https://fortune.com/2016/12/14/google-conservative-outreach-...
For example, it takes a lot of effort and energy for me to explain to non-technical people that comparing Apple and Google in terms of their mobile devices is non-sense. Just look at their regular financial reports, I usually say, and understand that one is an online advertisement business, while the other is a purely software + device business. One wants you to use their devices at all costs, while the other wants you to buy them. Those are very different core business models, different mentality and approaches. Etc etc. And so the choice between them comes down not even to taste or quality or price; it comes down to which business model you sell your soul to.
And then there's ad blockers and understanding how modern internet works etc. It worries me that the disconnect between those who understand the inner workings of tech and those who don't becomes bigger and bigger by the day. As the tech business itself becomes more and more sophisticated (and monopolist/authoritarian).
It’s not just tech savvy people. I imagine plenty of people here have set one up for their family members.
Turns out "Don't be Evil" was more than just a feel-good marketing slogan. It may have actually been good for business as well.
Bye bye Google. It really has been great!
More like since 2014.
I use google search for one thing only these days: product search, when I'm trying to find a local dealer for a product.
For everything else, duckduckgo, which, to be completely honest, is a lot more like the old google from the early 2000s, than the current google.
I do remember remarking to somebody around this time that google search had become something of a glorified grep.
You could still get things though. What I meant in this comment is that it has gotten even worse to the point that its almost unusable. It really does remind me of Microsoft of the 00’s.
But sometimes I dream about building my own search engine. It would avoid the big ad-driven sites as much as possible, and give preferential treatment to obscure blog posts about topics nobody else has written about. I want a search result to show the many different ways it could be interpreted, rather than assume one of them based on whatever heuristic, and show me tons of identical results that aren't what I want.
Google knows I land on StackOverflow results so often that SO results appear near the top, if not the #1 result, for terms that often have nothing to do with programming or computers. I was recently looking for an online thesaurus service and Google showed me an SO post about building linguistic/semantic search algorithms. Hmmm.
Now my last visit to Google is more than a year ago because DDG got better while Google got worse.
I noticed this since around 3-4 years ago.
It seems to be based on region.
Quotes get ignored. Even very specific queries about X prioritize clickbait junk like "TOP 10 X!!"
I THINK they might be anti-competitive too; searching for particular Apple APIs is sometimes more miss than hit, though that might be because of Apple's own poor documentation.
However, most Apple-related searches used to show me Samsung crap, and that's definitely not benign. Like searching for "iPhone" literally presented an ad for the Samsung Galaxy at the top, for a while.
That's how ads work. If Samsung pays more money than Apple to show ads to people searching for "iPhone", then people will see Samsung ads.
i.e. if Samsung was shoving itself into the searches for all non-Apple phones?
I won't be using Chrome anymore once they implement this since I like my element-hiding rules which I wrote myself, but for the common rabble, Manifest v3 will be an improvement.
I have no idea about the domain but 30k rules seems more than sufficient to map from a 150k set of uncompressed wildcard patterns.
> we are currently planning to change the rule limit from maximum of 30k rules per extension to a global maximum of 150k rules.
(https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/web-request-and-declarativ...)
That aside, I wouldn't want to bend backwards just to comply with how Google wants the world to work. I'd rather use Firefox.
I think the same thing that happened with popup blockers will happen again. Advertisers will be forced to listen to the consumers and the internet will be better for it.
Have you turned off your popup blocker recently? You can surf around even to fairly sketchy sites, and I bet you won't see a pop up. The consumer won. With tracking, we'll win again.
A proxy that wants to do this before the browser will need to do a lot more work I think?
BTW I can see that you are French ^^
ms thought that ie will be at the top forever too
Sometimes they are useful but in most cases you need more flexible solution
If site has ads served from main domain you can't block them
You can block ads with some static files on subdomains/domains, and this drastically change content (like how is image sites looks like without images?)
So, using DNS filtering for big ads providers is OK
For small and smart ads providers will not work
And I mean ads and tracking the same thing. While you can block all kind of "analytics", at the same time you can't block web-server logs with your IP (cookies, etc)
It seems to me that they want to reinvent the entire Chrome UI but they don't have the necessary manpower to do it properly.
I hope no one here is surprised by this G was more and more anti ad-blocking for years now.
This is only natural conclusion after u are a de-facto browser monopoly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20147015
The idea behind the "I am not a robot" captcha is that if you act like a human, then you don't need to be shown pictures for further confirmation. The more you allow tracking, the more info they have to figure it out.
A big one is being logged in to your Google account. Having access to all your history really helps. And because Chrome heavily encourage you to setup a Google account, Chrome users are more likely to be logged in than Firefox (or other) users.
Spoofing your user-agent is likely to be worse. If you have a Chrome user-agent but your browser don't act like Chrome, that's a big red flag. Bots often spoof their user agents.
No AI, that's just a car, not a taxi.
But who cares, I just click anyway and feed bullshit in and in a few years it'll think everything is a taxi.
... and (probably?) the world's largest ad broker.
See this FAQ:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/09/03/mozillas-manifest...
Note how they say: "We have no immediate plans to remove blocking webRequest and are working with add-on developers to gain a better understanding of how they use the APIs in question to help determine how to best support them."
"No immediate plans" is weasel-speak, as is "[we] are working with add-on developers".
If Mozilla was dead sure that they weren't going ahead with it, they would say so, unequivocally. And I remind you that Mozilla "worked with add-on developers" when they unilaterally decided to drop XUL and go ahead with web extensions, while failing to include support for APIs that developers said they needed to support functionality that their add-ons provided.
IMHO, adoption of manifest v3 is not a matter of "if" but rather "when".
The question is whether Mozilla _removes_ support for webRequest like Google did. And you're right, they weaseled their way out of answering that question.
As far as organization Mozilla have my trust and I don't look for false bottoms in their statements.
I would point out the previous statement they made there:
> Firefox is not, however, obligated to implement every part of v3, and our WebExtensions API already departs in several areas under v2 where we think it makes sense.
I trust Mozilla to be on my side as customer than ad industry. Well, we will see what future brings.
https://gist.github.com/Lusito/dd6b76b93f83267903619103745cc...
"Fair warning: I don't speak for Mozilla. Everything I say here is a recording of my memories from that event. Nothing more. Nothing less."
(and yes, I noticed that the second "someone" is Mozilla's "Add-ons Policy Policer, Thunderbird Council Chair", but my point still stands: this is something "someone" said, not Mozilla's official position)
>“Firefox Software Update.app” can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.
Unfortunately for Google, Chrome is open source, and Google will no longer be the dominant Chromium branch if they keep making mistakes like this.
But if I had to choose between adblock or swipe to switch tab, then they made the decision for me. There is no way I can ever browse the web without an adblocker
I use Blokada for adblocking on Android btw, and this change wouldn't affect that. Works fine.
I never knew you could do that! How did you discover this feature?
I've been on Firefox since they launched their quantum version a few years ago after a few years of using Chrome. I like Firefox but I notice a lot of people around me seem to default to Chrome. Things work well enough on Firefox that I don't consider compatibility a problem. But I do get a lot of raised eyebrows from people who consider this an extreme thing to do. Just like back in the day where I was doing most of my browsing with alpha builds of Mozilla Phoenix instead of just using IE like world + dog.
But what matters is that the market has changed. 15 years ago when MS made their anti competitive moves with IE and in the process helped Mozilla survive their Netscape implosion through reinventing themselves through their Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox reinvention (I used all of those). However since then, the market has consolidated around just 3 browser engines: Chromium, Webkit/Safari, and Firefox. Of those Chromium essentially powers all of the Chrome alternatives that aren't Firefox or Safari (Edge, Brave, Opera, etc.). Another change is that the web has imploded to just a handful of websites gobbling up most of the traffic. Yes there are a lot of websites but mostly the way to them leads via Google, Facebook, Apple, or MS owned properties.
Finally the ad market has changed. GDPR and related efforts in other markets (including the US) are pushing the market towards more responsible behavior with respect to getting users to opt in and to ad experiences that are increasing harder to block because they don't necessarily come via separate websites and domains.
One has to love and admire the use of Newspeak by big companies... How is this Mr Vincent an "advocate"? He's in charge of destroying extensions!
On his Twitter bio [1] he also says he likes "helping people" and "the open web". The cognitive dissonance must be hard to bear.
[1] https://twitter.com/dotproto
> I also don't want to hijack this without the project's permission. @gorhill & contributors, do you mind having this discussion here or would you prefer if we moved it elsewhere?
I haven't really been following this issue, but I did read the linked reply, so I may be missing some bigger context.
In Google's corporate opinion, Google's ads must not be blocked. In everyone else's opinion, all ads must be blockable at a user's option.
That's not a difference that can be mediated.
What they did was to introduce a break in the discussion. Most people subscribing to that GitHub issue, which was trending on HN [2], will not start monitoring Google Groups for any new discussion that may take place, which reduces the likelihood that there will be enough people pressuring them to give clear answers.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#iss...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233041
It’s so transparent, I boggle at how anyone falls for it, or that companies still think it is a viable strategy.
I remember clearly an interview of a very famous IT billionaire going this way:
- What's the most annoying myth about you? - A myth migh be that I'm the most generous philantropist of all time. [...But] I havent' sacrified my time or economic well being the same way lots of unamed, amazing people do. So they're the worlds best philantropists.
This is the least subtle humble-brag of all time. "People says I'm so incredibly amazing. But they are wrong. There are out there more amazing people." is gotta be next to the job interview answer "my biggest weakness is that I work too much" in the BS book.
But the reactions to the interview are still, to this day, "this person is so humble", "he is such a good man", etc.
I don't think it really counts as a humblebrag to say "it's a myth that I'm X" when there are in fact a lot of people saying you're X.
He could, for sure, have gone further out of his way to avoid humblebragging: he could have said something like "I think a lot of people overstate how generous a philanthropist I am". But he was asked, specifically, what the most annoying myth about him was, and all the anti-humblebrag tactics I can think of right now avoid humblebragging by not stating a specific proposition at all -- so they fail to answer the question he was actually asked.
And he could, for sure, have picked something else, maybe something about his time at Microsoft. But these days he's much better known as a philanthropist than as a Microsoft founder or executive, and I bet the things people (truly or falsely) believe about his Microsoft career aren't the things he considers the most annoying myths.
Realistically, Mr Vincent is not in charge of being an advocate for anything other than Google's corporate interests. But he is not in charge of destroying extensions either. He may well be in charge of destroying ad blockers though.
That's a minor issue. The bigger issue is the fact that, if adblockers become truly popular, websites will go back to serving opaque binary blobs instead of HTML+CSS+JS.
Remember Flash and 'Flash pages' back in the day? That, except worse.
they will just serve web assembly
Stock options and bosses with different incentives are available at other employers as well.
> Stock options and bosses with different incentives are available at other employers as well.
Most other employers don’t have a near monopoly on the web browser market.
I don't think assuming bad faith with absolute certainty is a productive form of debate.
[Edit]: As a matter of fact, I don't believe that advertising is entirely replaceable as a funding mechanism for the open web at this point in time. That doesn't mean we have to accept all its excesses without resistance.
>Most other employers don’t have a near monopoly on the web browser market.
A near monopoly is not a prerequisite for an employee to make a lot of money somewhere else, especially not for someone in a PR role like "advocate".
It’s not a debate though, Google is removing these user friendly features and sprinkling some marketing speak over their actions. It’s right to call them out on that. Also, if your job is to be the face of that marketing speak, you should expect people to question what you say.
[edit] Funding and openness are tangential. A system need not be profitable to be open. Look at open source.
I don't think open source is a viable solution for all currently ad funded services. Some services cost a lot of money to run and many indirect funding sources come with their own downsides. Open source projects are often leveraged by some of the largest corporations for their own strategic purposes that don't necessarily help openness.
But my original point was simply that this is a non-trivial debate in which all sorts of opinions can be honestly held.
Get a new job.
True. They won't change their mind. The only signal they will listen to is to stop using Chrome.
While not wishing to speculate on specifics, there is medication in common circulation that can help with such inconvenient emotions.
So communicating what the team is doing to the outside world, not defending the utility of the extensions.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/arti...
curiously i haven't noticed any changes on my day to day browsing habits.
Firefox fans want it to become a great browser. No shits given to Chrome either way.
If Anything, I am nervious of installing any ad-on that can access the web pages I visit and send god knows what who knows were. It's almost as an accident waiting to happen. The web is only secure when your browser is secure.
I like the natively handled content blocking approach much better.
AFAIK there is no way to make Safari execute any cosmetic filters at all. (My uBlock Origin setup lists ~50k network filters and 150k cosmetic filters)
There are cookie notices, social media buttons, premium newspaper article headlines, comment sections, fixed elements and content "suggestions" everywhere. Unusable.
I use css filters in ublock origin to increase the font size of the HN comment titles because I often miss the collapse or vote links. ...or to block the food suggestions in Googles shoppinglist that, by appearing as an overlay, always hide the first list entry to suggest me to buy "hamburger". (I'm not joking.)
I still do have the device somewhere and I am open for suggestions on how to get control over the content (or at least remove ads) on an ipad, but I don't think there is currently any full content-blocking solution for iOS.
Which is a shame because (in my case unbearable software aside) the device does not appear bad from a hardware perspective.
You've also included an /amp/ link, which is another part of the problem of becoming too dependent on Google.
Words are just another means to an end for these people. Americans were very good at believing that Orwell’s work about language and politics was specific to the circumstances of the Soviet Union, when in fact it’s broadly applicable to every form of authoritarianism, including corporations and their functionaries. I’ve never had the misfortune of living in a Stalinist state, but I certainly have worked for companies and managers that seemed to aspire to.
The language used in bad times is telling. You'll hear managers talking about how it sucks, but is needed to save the company ("individuals must suffer for the greater good").
Externally, businesses reflect the political preferences of those who control them, but they tend to prefer weak states they can influence or control. Democracies are harder to control this way because the stakeholders are diffuse. Centralization, strongmen and corruption make things easier.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503824 and marked it off-topic.
Chrome used to be the underdog.
And we are the ones that makes suggestions. And end users then make same suggestions to other people.
Word of mouth I believe is a VERY important marketing tool.
Basically if Chrome looses people that brought them market share in the first place... I think market can shift. Not that it happens fast enough. But having some market share for Firefox is important.
It isn't? It seems trivial to me -- what are the friction points?
If you are technical, it's still a pain to get everything imported and set back up, and the extensions you're used to may be absent or done in different ways, and the subtleties of eg: incognito mode and reader mode may be different. You may have to re-construct your personal adblock rules. And so on.
Using a ad-blocker in Firefox was the #1 thing I suggested for safe computing. And don't open unexpected email attachments. This killed 95% of peoples computer woes.
So good job Google, you did it, from here on out whenever I see Chrome on families computers I will strong-arm them into switching to Firefox. I did it in 2005 and was wildly successful. I can do it again. And I think my Christmas gifts this year will be domain names and three year subscriptions to Fastmail for my immediate family.
Install FF
Set it as default
Change path on desktop shortcut for "Internet" to FF
And ofc do not forget to say that is new IE version
That's just plain dumb. Explain to your users what you are doing. You seem to think they are stupid, well they are not.
And by the way, smart ones already had FF and Opera installed
However, as programmers, we should see the internet not as a browser at all. We should see it as a list of protocols and implementations thereof.
I think a big part of the oh-so-common emotional social media battles is anticipation of the other person's experience. Hopefully for you, as a programmer reading this, your view of the internet is protected by automated command line scripts that fight your internet battles for you...
Brilliant!
Of course, we all know the original Turboencabulator is GE and all the others are knockoffs, but I've tried other brands and they work just as well, if not even better.
Even the original vehicle manufacturer might purchase the parts from several of them.
You, as an typical end-user, have practically no chance to find out, whether the replacement part is "original" or not.
I understand the grandparent point, but their analogy is terrible. When you are paying for a specific brand of item and you get an alternative brand without being informed and giving consent, that is fraud. It is a crime, and it is effectively stealing from you the difference in price/value/cost of the two items, since you're paying for the other brand.
The first Google scam - yes scam - was Adsense and adwords. The search "sponsored" box was a yellow designed to be near indistinguishable from white, and was invisible on many LCD monitors. Adsense and adword links were the same blue IE used for links - because people had been conditioned to believe blue links simply traversed the web.
With hindsight, that's the moment everyone should have lost all trust in Google.
You don't have to explain what firefox is, or what IE is, just that "this isn't IE but it does the same thing and will keep you safe".
Maybe they'll have follow up questions, and you can answer those, but lying is just a good way for them to go back to IE and not tell you because they don't to be treated condescendingly.
I have no issues with my Sonos equipment - I use a local MP3 library, a Spotify subscription and TuneIn Radio all without any issues.
What problems did you have?
They do have the advantage of covering your entire LAN and working inside apps, so they are definitely useful. But they don't replace real adblockers, or even the castrated ones Google is pushing on its users.
I'm always confused when people imply this isn't the case or start demanding evidence. I'm bemused when they are surprised.
I've never been a Chrome user, and I honestly don't remember ever hitting a website in the last 10 years or so that didn't work for me.
In Netscape/ie times WWW was other than nowadays, so your analogy is not correct
What matters to me is the part I can't influence that easily, and I simply prefer Firefox because it's not based on Chrome. Not something many browser developers can say nowadays.
I say this as someone who uses 99% Firefox, 1% Chrome... I had never thought about this point I'm making before.
[0] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
First of all, the HN title is not the title of the article. HN mods, please change it to reflect the actual title of the article.
Second, to me this does not seem as some attempt by Google to actively block Adblocker extensions. They are proposing a change to the API (Manifest) to no longer allow manipulation of content, which I think is a good thing from a security standpoint. They also propose reducing the number of content stripping rules to 30k. Now, I'm not familiar with add-on development, but this sounds like a constraint that was implemented for performance reasons. This constraint will break add-blockers in their current form, but there is no reason for me to believe that this will make content filtering impossible.
It is also clearly stated that the V3 manifest is in early testing phase. Nothing here is set in stone.
Current rules list easily exceed that number. They said back in May/June that they would consider looking increasing the number of rules - they clearly haven't chosen to increase the number in the intervening time. Maybe they are waiting for more actual testing, but they're not setting themselves up for an easy time.
It's also honestly a little rich to worry about the performance impact of ad blocking given the performance impact of ads themselves.
--
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/googles-plans-chrome-e...
So I’ve been a bit ahead of the crowd and gave up on Chrome long ago.
This ad block scandal made me give up on Safari too though. Firefox seems to be the only reasonable option left.
Is this true? That's a complete showstopper for me.
In any case, how do they dare disable my power management for something I didn't start myself?