Google Chrome's crackdown on ad blockers and browser extensions, Manifest v3, is now available in beta Google, which makes most of its money from online ads, insists it wants ad blockers to continue working under the latest, more locked-down iteration of its Chrome browser extension platform, known as Manifest v3. "We have been working closely with the developers of many extensions – including ad blockers, shopping extensions, …
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Even on my Ryzen 3000, I notice how much faster pages load with and without NoScript enabled. Some websites try to fetch javascript from 20+ sources. That ain't cool. It is my opinion that no website should require javascript to read the content of a webpage. It is also my opinion that no advertisement should be allowed to use javascript either.
Something else you might notice is that your Internet provider has 'tuned' their network in a web unfriendly manner. Spectrum, for example has made changes to improve streaming speed in ways that slow down web pages. They prioritize large transfers at the expense of connection setup. So a web page that has 20 scripts and 50 images will load slowly, but your speed tests and streaming will all look great. That means if web developers would put all their javascript in one file they would see a big increase in page load speed. At the expense of a little more RAM. I doubt it would be significant, memory wise though. Currently my browser has 54 processes and is using 3.3gb of RAM.
Javascript is good, it's lead to Node.js and other advancements. The problem as ever is "too much of a good thing". The second something good works well people overuse it and with no checks in place it just gets abused. The other issue is that more and more fancy flash webpages meant people trying to outdo each other to create a ever more complex responsive pages that punters demand or they will simply walk by your site, until you open up a page today and it's easily loading 20+ libraries in from caching servers, content caching servers must spend half their time just serving JS libs to millions of page calls.
m.o. on chrome is it's horrible. it's got nasty config screens (what happened to white checkboxes on grey backgrounds (aka xp style) - works for anything else), one of it's main functions appears to make it harder for you to delete specific parts of your history. (tbh, even if a browser/application did allow you to delete individual history (firefox - also very rubbish cookie control in chrome compared to firefox), there's no guarantee that the only person who was losing access to the data you were deleting is you) - your "deleted info" might still go back to the large mirrored buildings, or buildings shaped a bit like circular radiation signs.
My XG Firewall blocks adverts. Even though they slip through when I search with DDG, clicking them gives an error;
I use the usual script, tracker and ad blockers
I run a Pihole.
Still get some garbage through but generally I find pages load a lot quicker and are a lot less intrusive with this combination.
But I prefer not to use Chrome as my browser anyway.
Except Edge and Opera are now Chrome with a new wrapper. I've been reasonably happy with Opera, since I got tired of Firefox's bloat and bullshit. And if Google makes this the new core Chromium, then it's going to be hard to get away from. It would take a lot of work for open source developers to stand up a new browser engine. Sure, you could fork the code. But Google could just bury it deeper with cross dependencies. Think SystemD.
The mention of DDG was what I was wondering about - I will be seriously upset if I have to give up on DuckDuckGo! I haven't noticed anything slips by it, unless I configure it that way. It gives me granular control to allow web sites I support to keep doing business. Taking that away will impact Google's, AND those web site's business, I hope they know!!!
Hopefully this won't affect Edge, because that is what I will switch too if the Chocolate Factory pulls this stunt!. If it does effect it I will switch to FireFox whether I like it or not, or whatever browser I can to get away from the creepy crawly privacy violation that is Google.
Internet is "growing up", that means it is being taken over by commercial interests, and the former nerdvana is slowly turning into a huge mall, built to take your money (want it or not).
It happens continuously, right before our eyes, but we don't (want to) see it. Remember when common people used to create small websites about their personal interests? Back then people owned the Internet, today "the Internet" (Google, Facebook) owns them.
The Manifest v3 issue is just another stone in the wall, some oddballs will grumble about it for a while, but eventually it will become the new normal. The masses will go "whatcha gonna do?", and life will go on. (And please don't mention Piholes and other nonsense: That's not a society-wide solution, it's just the privileged bragging about their privileges. A little like dropping in a discussion about traffic congestion that your private helicopter is so comfortable and fast.)
If the people really want to get out from the commercial meat grinder, they need to fight it at the political and legal level. And be aware it will be an uphill battle, given the millions spent in lobbying, and the governments' own desire to keep tabs on the Great Unwashed: Everybody who is somebody or has something to say wants to fleece you in some way.
"...(And please don't mention Piholes and other nonsense: That's not a society-wide solution, it's just the privileged bragging about their privileges..."
Jesus, calm down. No one here said this was a ubiquitous solution.
Also this is the reg - have you not noticed the "I've never...", or "I do it this way", or even the "Choice is good. Your choice is bad" brigades all live here?
Have a biscuit or something.
> No one here said this was a ubiquitous solution.
Every time some problem is discussed (not only IT-related), there is somebody who will drop in and in a condescending tone explain that his solution, one usually only available to him, solves this issue (understood that everyone else shouldn't complain because it's his own fault if he's affected).
I'm not protesting about the fact some have the means and some not, I'm protesting about (apparently intelligent) people not realizing that. I can understand Schadenfreude, but not arrogance.
The Internet isn't changing, you've just finally become aware of what is has been for over 2 decades. Probably since it moved from an academic only platform to the general public, it has been a commercial enterprise. Amazon launched in '94. eBay moved from 'sell stuff you don't need' to stores a long, long time ago. I rarely buy anything used there anymore.
If you want to create your own web space, you can still use a web host or dynamic DNS. Most people prefer the ease of Facebook or Instagram. The only business model for public web sites that seems to succeed is free content with advertising. As such, there is going to be a battle over what the appropriate amount of advertising is going to be.
I liked Google and Facebook when they first started, I even tried to sign up for Facebook but was told that I was using a fake name (my real one) so that was the end of social media for me (Thank God!).
But watching Google, Facebook and the rest of the Internet world, it's like having a baby lion cub for a pet, they are so cute until they are six months old, and then about a year later you are dinner.
I created a facebook account many years ago but even then I was concerned over privacy so I used a fake name and data.
It took them a long time to figure out that there was no 93 year old Lesbian living in the Outer Hebrides named Charnel Liquor. Perhaps the skull I used for a personal picture gave me away?
Only use Chrome as ordered to at work, at home wouldn't touch it with 50 foot shit rotted bargepole!
FF with UBlock is a huge step in the right direction, and if your site stops loading and warns me to disable my ad-blocker 'cos you know I've got an ad-blocker in use then you know where you can take your site and store it!
Reading that several people are forced to use it at work is interesting. Due to proxying all meta data (including keystrokes) to harvest data (for marketing) we can't use goog chrome at work, as we would be passing members financial data to an un approved 3rd party - goog. We have internal web apps that we use a browser to access. I guess some businesses don't have to meet data protection laws that financial places do.
Maybe it's that when you click Agree, that makes it okay for personal use, but under GDPR can you legally process other peoples data though an advertising company?
Goog blocking ad blockers is understandable as the entire purpose of google is Marketing (and data harvesting to do so).
Blocking ads takes the entire reason they develop a browser mute.
Interesting times in data laws. I wonder what this landscape will look like in another 10 years.
At my work, we have a choice of Chrome, or (pre-Chromium) Edge. Both of which are quite heavily locked down by GPO: cookies are wiped on exit, nothing is (officially) slurped to the cloud, even passwords can't be saved (because apparently that's better for security, said no actual security expert ever).
Actually pretty much every security expert that's not clueless will tell you that cloud based password management (which chrome's is, since it syncs them with google) is a horrible idea. Ideally you want to use unique passwords for everything and just remember them all. However since that's not really doable in this day and age, the next best thing is to use non-cloud based password managers that have local encrypted storage like password safe or keepass, etc. Sure it's not as convenient, but actual security never is.
Plus there has been no shortage of exploits and vulnerabilities that have cropped up over the years that have allowed browser stored passwords to be read by malicious parties. So there are plenty of good reasons your organization has banned that practice.
Maybe they are doing something I haven't heard of yet, but from my research Goog chrome can only be managed in googs cloud services, not on prem. But things are always changing.
It would be interesting if you opened chrome, not going to a site, then in a command prompt run "netstat -an" without quotes. Then do a who is on the IPs that show up, to see if it is really kept from googs prying eyes.
As far as I'm concerned Google can make plenty enough money positioning search results for companies that want to buy into that, but getting in my nickers is verboten, and I don't care if they lose that or not.
I support the sites I wan't to, because I know they need to stay in business, so I don't block tracking or ads from them - Google should be happy they can glean from that too - if not, then I think it is time to whip out the anti-trust laws, because we need a choice of browser that doesn't steal our lives away.
Time for a new open source no ad allowed browser ? I mean FF and chrome are now Google creatures and both will eventully totally surrender to advertisement and monetiation. it's unavoidable because commercial interests have taken over by fnancing Firefox heavily. They owe Google .. in fact accepting money from Google meant in the long run having to obey to their masters and do as they are told. Simple. Both browsers are to be avoided and a new project needs to come to life. FF was nice .. but time to move on and start coding something ground up that will be small light efficient and built to suit our needs , not the needs of the advertisers. We need data and access to information , not to be flooded with ads. There's a need to reclaim what's rightfully ours and our work to begin with.
We need to get out of the circle for it to end.
The problem with that is that Google essentially controls the game at this point. If someone creates a browser that starts impacting their revenue stream, they'll just simply leverage their market share and basically change the rules to favor themselves and there's little that can be done to stop them.
About the only thing that would prevent it is if google ended up getting carved up so the ad business was a completely unrelated and separate entity from the browser business. But I don't ever see that happening even if they do actually get brought up on monopoly charges.
They've got anti-trust laws for that, and in the US they just love whipping it out to blow apart any huge corporation that thinks it can completely corner a market. They could even fine Google enough that the money could go to a company to develope a truely private browser. However, that might impact mom and pop web sites that make money on tracking and advertising too But there has be be a limit somewhere.
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