Google Chrome's upcoming crackdown on ad-blockers and other extensions still really sucks, EFF laments The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday renewed its campaign to convince Google to listen to criticism of the tech goliath's plan to overhaul its browser extension platform and to make changes while there's still time. In the advocacy organization's latest broadside against Google's three-year-old extension renovation …
There are none, unless I am searching for a product, at any other time, ad slingers whether Google or the advertisers are stealing my time and the energy I use in my system.
I have clicked on one ad recently and that was by mistake, generally I know what I want and when I want it and if I am not too sure of the best product for a particular use, then and only then during a search, will I countenance relevant ads.
If I can't use the internet for entertainment, I will go back to buying dead tree books.
Ads are literally the price you pay for free search and content.
Its the model that drives 95% of the web.
There are a few "must subscribe" sites like the Economist or New York Times, and, a few beg for money sites like Wikipedia but if its not e-commerce the chances are its funded by adverts.
Still its fun to search for items you will never ever purchase like "John Deere Parts" and see yourself uselessly targeted for those products.
Free search and content existed before Google dreamed up Adsense. Indeed there was no need to navigate away from the plethora of all those deceptive clickbait sites that neither intend to inform nor entertain.
Other business models are available if they were given a real chance. Examples are really useful websites like Archive.org and even Wikipedia. But the ad-slingers' lobby will never allow their waste of space to be controlled or taxed for what it is. That business model will be protected and hence will stay pre-dominant.
Sadly.
See, I remember a time when web ads were nothing more than a small static (literally in some cases, with the images hosted on the site itself rather than being pulled in from the adslinger network) banner that sat benignly somewhere on the page - perhaps integrated neatly into the header/footer section, or used as a divider between sections as you scrolled up and down. Once loaded, the only resources they consumed was however much memory was required to hold the bitmap image.
That for me was the acceptable, but unfortunately all too short-lived, way to do online advertising. Unobtrusive, minimally resource-consuming, and based around the not unreasonable premise that if someone has visited a website it's because they want to look at the actual site contents, not the adverts. The ads were just there, it was up to us to decide whether or not to look at them or click on them. As it should be.
Then some sites/advertisers started to get greedy, and started loading up their pages with more and more ads, in less and less discrete locations on the page. Ads started to get more IN YOUR FACE, with static images giving way to animGIFs, embedded videos (with sound, of course, back in the days when browsers were trusting enough of web pages to presume that an embedded video was something the user would want to see and hear as soon as they loaded the page, so would start playing it right there and then) and an ever increasing amount of active scripting running behind it all. There were popups, popunders, pop tarts, pop pickers, poppity popping popsalots all over the page, stuff you actively had to dismiss before you could even get to the page content, stuff that would randomly pop up as you were browsing, leading to the occasional (and *totally* accidental, of course, whyever would an advertiser do something to deliberately coerce you into clicking on their ads...) misclick as you went to select something on the page itself only to have an ad swoop in and steal your mouse action.
This made browsing the web rather less enjoyable than it used to be.
This in turn pissed off rather a lot of people. Some of whom had the technical abilities and the determination to do something about it. And as countless companies have learned over the decades, once you do something that mobilises the global army of annoyed techies, the only eventual outcome is that you'll lose. It's just a question as to how long you mistakenly think you can win before you finally accept reality...
So the amount of sympathy I have these days for adslingers and the websites that have chosen to go all-in with their increasingly dodgy ways is so small it could double up as a national standard measurement for the smallest measurable thing imaginable.
So the amount of sympathy I have these days for adslingers and the websites that have chosen to go all-in with their increasingly dodgy ways is so small it could double up as a national standard measurement for the smallest measurable thing imaginable.
Frankly, a bit depending on nationality, but I would go for an international standard.
Sponsorships are. Notice how the content contributed to the top 5 websites is by and large powered by sponsorships these days? This shows that the personalised advertising business model really doesn’t work because if it did, there would be no need (and thus no demand) for fixed sponsors.
I have seen plenty of sponsored content online but no randomised or personalised adverts… and funny enough, I am a heck of a lot more likely to think about a sponsor which relates to (and supports) content I am interested in.
I think we all know where the future is headed. Google needs to catch up and fast.
It's not just Ads that are obnoxious on the modern web, but the general trend of every webpage loading 100s of JavaScript objects (often obfuscated) from various domains. Some of which run continuously in the background with multiple worker threads, hogging my CPU, tracking my mouse (hopefully not my keyboard too), and exfiltrating as much data as they can get away with.
And the only 'person' we have to trust to tell us that all this javascript is all perfectly safe to run, is er, Google.
I run a Chrome extension called ScriptSafe. It does mean that most websites are broken at first and I have to add some third party site to the whitelist to make it functional. But I don't need an ad blocker because all the ads are invariably pulled in by some dodgy javascript from doubleclick.net or similar - don't load the script and you don't get the ads.
If any site has some nice well-behaved ads that don't slurp my data and don't require cross-domain javascript, then i'll see them and I'm happy with that.
Personally I think that websites that require javascript to perform a function that could easily be provided without it should be banned.
But if google bork ScriptSafe with this update, then I'll just have to stay on the old version of Chrome I suppose, or move to Firefox and use NoScript.. Until they break that with a similar API change because Google told them to.
I used to use NoScript to do the same thing but having so many adverts come from the same place can actually be good if you're willing to buy a small form factor computer and install Pihole on it. Once you blacklist doubleclick and few other big ones then you'll almost never see ads and the browser won't even complain because you're not using an extension.
Pihole ... then you'll almost never see ads and the browser won't even complain because you're not using an extension.
I use Pihole, it is trouble free and highly effective. However, some sites can tell and ask me to remove my ad filter (I have no ad filter running on the browser, just pihole on the LAN). But most just show empty spaces.
And those are (more) reasonable.
If I watch F1 I don't mind the sponsors names on the cars. I don't mind ad images embedded in a magazine article, chosen by the magazine with some idea of their brand having some responsibility
I object to 1000s of pop-ups, random ads for stuff I'm not interested in, dating ads at work, autoplay video etc. that's why I have piHole and Brave
Is it just me or does Mozilla sound scared? They should be. Their purpose is to appear as "competition" and participate in "public forums" and "discussion" in the same way that "interviewing 5 candidates" is often followed by "hiring the boss's nephew." Forgetting this could be very dangerous to various careers.
Just what I do...
/etc/hosts file set up with one of those curated hosts files that block many of the add serving domains
Chromium and Firefox kept for Websites with significant program-based content that I actually want (generative art sites and so forth), 'tube &c, along with private browsing windows for online banking and govt web sites.
Seamonkey for random stuff (bit slow and some 'modern' css does not work too well)
Something like uzbl or surf invoked for news/information sites. Can be invoked with javascript off.
Basically moving to a LoFi Web which is mostly text and pictures.
Seconded for Pi-Hole. It's a game-changer and much more powerful than the /etc/hosts solution.
I lost power at my home earlier this morning and for a while my Pi-Hole DNS box was down along with the rest of my network. Browsiing on my phone over cellular was miserable. So many adverts!
Actually… no. Simple solution: don’t use Chrome or stuff sufficiently closely derived from Chrome as to have also killed ad-blockers. This boils down to Safari and Firefox. Turn on your ad-blockers. Cruise.
I usually use Firefox.
I’m sure that once Chrome kills ad-blockers, there will be additional browsers which can allow ad-blockers, just not based on Chromium. Or maybe a fork of Chromium which kills the blocker-killer. Or something. There will be two populations on the Web:
1. Chrome/Chromium users
2. Ad-free users.
Some websites will be hostile towards ad-free users; some sites already are. I see such a site, I go elsewhere. So far I have been able to do what I want. If I absolutely positively must use Chrome, I do so from inside a VM with everything locked down tightly and certain settings modified so as to not reflect my actual system. Including a VPN. Google can get data, just not correct data.
I've found that most of my frequently-used sites are fine without JS. The awkward exceptions are Allmusic.com and TheTVDB.com (which, since its last redesign, seems to deliberately load its content from the sketchiest-sounding domains possible).
Ironically, even the bay that is piratey seems to work better without JS (and with uBlock Origin, NoScript and Pi-Hole all in force) than those two above.
Not sure if Firefox is any better, as Mozilla is engaging heavily in "acceptable ads" in its browser:
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/privacy-2/2021/10/firefox-reveals-sponsored-ad-suggestions-in-search-and-address-bar/
Mozilla certainly wants its part of the web ads pie.
There are plenty of good Chromium forks to free you from Google's BS. I'm looking to unlock my phone's bootloader to get off the stock Android 11 dumpster fire as soon as 3rd party ROMs exist. Google's address space is rejected on my mail server because it's a solid source of phishing emails.
Google is crapping on the tech industry before people have forgotten the alternatives.
Somehow still trying to engage in a useful form of dialogue with G.
It should be pretty obvious by now that it's pointless. Google will do only what Google wants to do.
Disassociate the phony image Google has paid $millions to manufacture from the reality of what Google actually is.
If I understand correctly, the pretext is security. It's not really possible to build an adblockers extension without giving the extension wide rights to see and transmit your surfing activity. Specifically, the new rules would prevent the transmission of that data, which is crucial for adblockers to check their database of ad services, but can also be used to spy on the user.
There's lots of extensions I trust at least or more so than Chrome itself... (they so love sending data back to the mothership if possible, check settings carefully if you must use chrome)
I don't install extensions I don't trust.
I'm at far more risk with reduced ability to block things via extensions than I am at risk of a "rogue" extension
I am firmly in support of the EFF here, but the example cited in the article is not a great way of arguing for it:
For example, a school district administrator posted last month about trying to rewrite his extension under the new APIs and finding that his extension can no longer use geolocation to track lost or stolen devices or monitor battery percentage to know when a battery needs replacement.
If you're doing device management from a browser extension, you're doing it wrong. Identifying a stolen device by waiting for the thief to, presumably, log in as the user they stole it from and then use the school's preferred browser is a fool's errand. The best bet using normal tools is to have a background task started on boot which reports information if the machine's online. That won't survive an erase either, but it will at least not require a very specific set of actions to have a chance. As for monitoring battery conditions, that strikes me as a good example of something an extension shouldn't do. An extension has no need to look at a battery, and it's likely a good fingerprinting technique. That's also something a background task can check and report about.
A browser extension should be able to interact with the facilities and actions of a browser, and that's what Google has been taking away. I think the point is best argued with the more obvious benefits that provides.
I admit I didn't think of Chromebooks. I would hope that, since Google has been selling these to schools with the claim that they're easy to manage, that you don't need to write custom code to check where one is. After all, all phones logged into Apple or Google's systems can handle autoreporting location for lost or stolen devices. But if that's incorrect, more evidence that Chromebooks are not suitable for lots of locations.
The biggest threat to the internet is Google dominating and breaking web standards and Chrome becoming de facto, non-optional to guarantee smooth access to various websites.
It happened years ago with Internet Explorer in its hay day, and it undermined competition and hindered technology development until that stranglehold eventually broke down. We were all stuck with suboptimal performance in other browsers, and on non-Windows machines and IE itself bloated into what was a mess that had little incentive to improve, as it was the dominant, and highly broken standard bearer.
The big competition regulators need to act. The EU might be the one that takes the lead here as I don’t think the US seems to be competent in competition law in recent years - it’s too focused on culture wars and entirely about pandering to powerful lobbyists. The days of competent federal US agencies seem to be behind us.
You are exactly right.
Just the other day I opened a ticket for a web application. Works in Chrome, works in recent Firefox, doesn't work in Firefox ESR. Can't _paste_ into a textbox, for crying out loud. Support's answer was, upgrade Firefox.
It's *exactly* the same thing that happened with IE, back then my own employer was a prime offender, and believe it or not we *still* rely on old internal web apps that only work on IE. New internal web apps only work on Chrome, so we didn't learn anything in 20 years. Because of market dominance web developers will test against Chrome. Any other browser except recent Chrome will be rapidly "not supported". In order not to have their market share dwindle even further, "competing" browsers will also try to match Chrome -- which is the exact opposite of true competition.
If there were any kind of standards with regards to browser adverts or an online ASA then I wouldn't mind so much. Unfortunately it's up to the site to decide so maybe they'll be decent and ban ads which play noises, flash, move when you scroll, create obnoxious popups, provide misleading/downright false claims or a dozen other things which deserve to be blocked, but an awful lot don't. So blockers have consequently been around for ages because websites refuse to regulate themselves and nobody else will. If Google decide to strongarm their browsers then, in the long term, it'll just mean fewer people using them and an inevitable rise of another more popular one. Remember why Chrome became popular in the first place? Because it was fast and provided an excellent choice for web developers. If that's now going to be compromised by a return to the days of "You're the 10,000 visitor! Click here for your free laptop" then good riddance. You're never too big to fail.
Most SOHO routers (<$130) are a pain to customize. Pihole on LAN is convenient, although if Pihole were ever compromised it would be on your LAN. Proxying through a VPN to a VPS (e.g., Linode) which is running Pihole software (without the Pi hardware) is popular but - more complexity, more potential failure points, $5/mo for the VPS.
I set up Pihole on a Pi on the LAN a few years ago and it has been working perfectly since then. No noticeable difference from uBlock Origin as far as Ads go, and it works for everybody on the LAN, whether they want it or not.
As an alternative to ad blocking extensions in the browser, you can try a curated hosts file such as https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
It worked well for my laptop - not but easy to get to it working on a mobile device.
Eventually, I moved to Pi-hole running on a Raspberry pi zero (which uses the same block list as above). It's been up for over a year now and blocks most ads on any device connected to my network at home. If you want to extend this to working outside of your home network, I believe you can also configure Pi-hole to act as a VPN.
There are monopoly laws in the USA that have been invoked to split up companies that have gotten too powerful for the common good. This led to the "Bell breakup" in the 1980s for similar behavior in trying to completely corner the market, and with other companies in using their position to strong arm their customers. (think Intel) I'm not sure if this can be directly applied, as other companies are apparently going along with these standards 'voluntarily'. But it does raise eyebrows. Amazon is kind of approaching this critical mass as well.
For now, I will keep using Firefox until the day that Mozilla caves to the pressure, or all of the forks can no longer run the web apps I use. Hopefully everyone (including Google, which has the best overall "ecosystem" for devices and automation IMO) comes to their senses and realizes that user experience is at least somewhat important, and should not always take a back seat to revenue. But every time someone makes a better mousetrap, mice get smarter too. So I am somewhat confident that there will always be workarounds.
> user experience is at least somewhat important
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) is the only thing important, and is has to be steadily rising from year to year and quarter to quarter to placate shareholders, that's why all top managers are constantly running around in circles.
Note I don't say that's good, just that in reality user experience isn't anywhere in the company goals: Satisfy your clients and make less money, and the board will have your head on a platter.
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"Moreover, the EFF's repeated harping on this point reflects a sense in the developer community that Google says it listens to community input but fails to translate that input into meaningful changes to its plans."
The famous line from Krylov's fable "The cook and the cat" comes to mind:
А Васька слушает, да ест
This sounds eerily like Microsoft, who claims at each new release of Windows that the security has once again been improved. However, every day we seem thousands of incidents where hundreds of Windows PC's are being encrypted with ransomware. So, despite all these so called "improvements" ransomware gangs seem to have no problem encrypting filesystems of every PC in the network.
This is one of the problems of the majority of mainstream browsers all being based off one engine. Since Google control the code they can steer if to where its beneficial to them.
Sure Brave or Vivaldi can fork Chromium before manifest v3 is implemented and maintain their own flavour with manifest V2 still enabled, but eventually so much code will change between their forks and Google Chrome that the Chrome 'compatibility' will be broken. And then people will switch back to Chrome from them thinking its these alternative browser that are at fault, rather than the lazy developers only checking their code works correctly on Chrome
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