What's really going on with Chrome's June crackdown on extensions – and why your ad blocker may or may not work Web advert blockers and other Chrome extensions will stop working by June 2024 unless they've been revamped to keep up with Google's changes to its ubiquitous browser. And even then, if those content-filtering extensions have been updated to meet Google's latest specifications and requirements, the add-ons may not work as well …
If the ad blocking ability of manifest V3 extensions is a poor version of what you could achieve before the change, it might make people look at alternatives such as Brave or Firefox where Ublock Origin will carry on working to its full potential. So it might be a good thing to end the Chrome monopoly on browsers.
I think Googles recent ad block detection on Youtube which stories about have now reached mainstream news site not just tech site like the register, has made more people aware that you could block ads online, As I have had a few people who are not technically minded come and ask me how they can block ads after seeing articles about it on news sites.
So it could end up being a Streisand effect at work now that Google tried to stop people going on YT with ad blocker extensions its made people who weren't using adblockers actually want to try them.
Ad blocking options have started appearing on everything from enterprise UTMs, educational proxies (e.g. e2bn plug-ins for Squid) and everything inbetween. It won’t be long until deploying adblocking becomes commonplace in managed environments. When that happens, it’ll become an IT recommendation people adopt whether they want it or not, similar to how non-technical folks think they can’t survive without antivirus software, even though they really don’t want all its downsides.
However, as Musk is finding out with Twitter"X", (and Microsoft with IE and Edge) people have a limit where they'll just say, "I've had enough of this, I'll find something else." Once enough people make that decision, word spreads, and a "phase change" happens. Once that phase change has happened, it's very hard to get people to come back.
Google are not just pushing people away with Chrome, but also really annoying people with the excessive and pervasive ads on YouTube. They may think that they can continue to push the envelope of what users will tolerate, but sooner or later, it'll cross a line, and due to inertia, that line may not be obvious until it was crossed a while back.
We can't predict what the alternative is that people will flock to (we couldn't have predicted Chrome), but Firefox keeps trundling along with its 3% market share...
What the anecdotes above suggest is that most people didn't know about or concern themselves with adblocking until it *became* a thing. That is squarely the Advertisers fault. People who are advert apologists bang on about a source of funding being stifled by adblockers which is nonsense. Savvy folk who block adverts are constantly targetted in a way to circumvent their protection. This should be viewed as an attack on their privacy and classed as stalker behaviour. But its a minority and clearly these folk do not want adverts and will not respond favourably toward them. So why attack?
Now, "normies" are starting to wake up and that will do far more damage to advertising revenue than the few who choose privacy over convenience ever did.
Google and their ilk are killing their golden goose.
Then Google will unleash its very own AI on your AI and all we'll end up with is a BSOD.
When that fails, YouTube will go behind a paywall. While that might stop the freeloaders, the casual user will just get pissed off.
Google does seem to be acting more like [See ICON] every day.
When that fails, YouTube will go behind a paywall.
Well if they offered a subscription to both YouTube and YouTube Music for only $2.50 a month with absolutely no adverts at all they'd almost certainly get millions of subscribers happy to pay them that for literally years. Unfortunately though, the entire entertainment industry seems to have decided that a minimum of $10+ a month is the entry price for their subscription services, but when you consider how much you'd have to pay monthly for each service - YT, Netflix, Disney+, Discovery, Apple TV etc. - it's just unsustainable and those prices become a barrier to entry so people just won't pay and that is a lost sale potentially for years.
Either the industry starts being less greedy and start pricing things realistically (perhaps similarly to how FRAND works with patents), or the majority of users will just not pay to use their services but will use a VPN along with ad blockers and other software to access those services - or at least content ripped from them - for free.
My first laptop had a physical volume control. Muting audio was easy.
I came a cropper one time when, waiting in an airport for a delayed flight, I plugged in my headphones and inserted a DVD (that's how long ago). The film started, but I could barely hear the sound, Using the knob, I attempted to increase the volume. This had no effect. I jacked up the sound output in the media player. Nothing.
Giving up, I removed the headphones. That's when I noticed that the sound was blaring out of the built-in speakers, really quite loudly. I had plugged the headphone jack into the mic socket.
-A.
How about forgetting that your headphones auto connect to devices when turned on... and instead of connecting to your TV in your bedroom when you are laid up in bed recovering from surgery... it connected to your partners device... who was watching some weird Korean soap they've become addicted to... and you're trying to figure out why an episode of The Expanse is in Korean and the settings say it's already in English.
Yeah... took me a good 5-10 mins to figure that one out in my drug induced haze of post operative bliss.... I don't miss the discomfort... but I do miss the bliss. :)
on using an AdBlocker make me wonder if Google is starting to suffer from diminishing ad impressions.
If you can, stop using Chrome ASAP.
By 2025, I predict that YouTube be made not to work at all where an AdBlocker is found instead of just telling you that it is almost illegal to block their ads or that I should subscribe to YouTube Premium. Sorry, I'm not gonna do that.
What we need is an adblocker that tells Google 'yep, ad displayed' but the ad has been sent to /dev/null.
FSCK to Google and everything that they stand for.
Except you can put almost all of it back like it belongs. You can put the search box back, disable searching in the address box, put the reload button back between address and search, turn the menu bar back on for platforms that allow it to be turned off (it never left on Mac), everything but the status bar at the bottom (AND DAMN THEM FOR THAT, I WANT MY STATUS BAR BACK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WINDOW WHERE IT BELONGS).
But for almost all of those things, Chrome is worse. Much worse. I can't imagine using Chrome on a regular basis, it's the worst browser.
I've never used Chrome.[1] And I agree with the stupid UI change, especially the status bar.
But I can get the menu bar back as you say, so not a total disaster.
[1] I did buy a Chromebook once, but it would only work if I logged in with a Google account, to tell them everything I was doing. I didn't want to do that, and I couldn't work out how to blow it away and put Linux on (= I want to do things my way, so fuck off), so I sent it back and got a refund.
Because some websites (including one banking site I used) dropped Firefox support several versions ago. That, and other websites written in Angular/React/whatever works wonky on my beloved SeaMonkey suite- data wasn't loading up, links were not working, etc.
I want to stay with Seamonkey but my hand was forced.
I worked for Halifax about 25yrs ago... and they tried that shit with me... you've got to have a Halifax account for your Halifax wages.
OK... so I then set up a standing order to transfer the entire amount less a few quid in rounding errors each month the day after payday... cut up the debit card and never once used it for anything else... those rounding errors, I'd leave in there for a little extra towards xmas. :)
I forgot about the account after I left for years, and then moved... when I remembered, I asked them to close it. They refused and said I had to go into a branch in person to do it. So I did... they refused because I didn't have ID that matched the address on file and I'd never bothered to remember things like pin numbers or passwords from an account I'd not used in 6-7yrs.
It's probably still sitting there 16yrs later.
Do you remember the approximate balance on the account? You could always consider a county court claim (used to be known as the small claims court). Fees start at £35.
That should stir things up on their end a little. You never know, what with X-mas pressie time coming up, and all...
It's probably still sitting there 16yrs later
Many years ago I had a (standard) Amex card (it was free for a year as a corporate perk - then, at the end of the year I ditched it) and, at time of closing, there was 29p in credit on it (can't remember why). Ever since then, they have religously sent me a monthly statement showing that 29p.
I did phone them to try and get it closed but their arcane ID procedures relied on something that I'd thrown away many years ago so I couldn't authenticate myself. I bet they've spent far more on postage over the years than I ever used the card for!
well, then you've been lucky, in corporate world it's much more common now. Even sites like imgur sometimes break on FF.
We're back to the "best viewed on IE 6 at 1024x768" days, the resolution didn't even triple, but the browser at least doesn't support Flash
Back in the days of Netscape Navigator and IE the company I worked for at the time, hired some consultants. One of them told us he had been at a focus group in the USA which MS had either organised or were present at - old age fogs the memory. One of the questions the group were asked was what do you do if you’re using IE and the site doesn’t work well with IE? Some of the responses were that they didn’t visit those sites much to the horror of the MS people there.
I've been using Firefox since before Chrome existed, and I can't think of a single instance of a page that didn't load properly, with the exception of those that demanded I use a specific version of IE, and I think that would probably have been over a decade ago.
So, I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit.
Edit - there are plenty of sites that won;t load with scripts blocked, though. If NoScript tells me that they are requesting that I allow numerous other domains that appear to have fuck all to do with that site to load scripts, I just go elsewhere.
> Why do people use Chrome?
A combination of brand recognition and advertising.
What I don't get is why people would use Chrome and then try to mitigate it's rapacious habits with extensions. Just use an ethical browser. Most of them share the same codebase anyway.
-A.
Presumably you meant Firefox, since Brave does support profiles.
Profiles are incredibly convenient if you work AWS et al, so you can have multiple accounts open at the same time, although I have gotten quite used to FF's much clunkier containers.
Firefox supports profiles, but they're admittedly not as easy to access as Chrome's are.
The way I've always done it is to add -P (or -ProfileManager) to the launch options to get access to the selection interface, and you can add --no-remote to allow multiple instances of Firefox to run simultaneously (at least on the Linux build).
I have just learned that there is also the about:profiles page, which allows access to the same functionality from within the running browser. Cool!
I've recently tried Brave as I was going to do a fresh install of W11 23H2 so had nothing too lose if it borked anything. Hated it, it just felt slow and clunky, it's option settings is a mess, worse than early W10 UI, all over the place, no UI standard. So I just stick to Edge with my plugins until the day I need to make a new choice :(
Because companies like google, deliberately broke google apps/sites from working within firefox and other browsers... to try and force (con) people into using it.
I had to use chrome about 10yrs ago just to be able to use hangouts... Because they broke it with firefox. Joke was on them though... I used chrome only to log into the old Google+ account so I could access hangouts with my friends. and kept using firefox for everything else.
Then there was sky, who only allowed to use the sky go site with IE/Edge because they only allowed silverlight to watch anything.
Utter fuckery from both companies... and my response was simple... find alternate ways to access the content I want... be it legit or not.
If youTube's recent changes are anything to go by "prepare for chaos". A couple of weeks ago I started getting "you have to turn your adblocker off to view videos" notices. On a Chromebook that was not running any Chrome extensions at all. Initially I could fool this by pretending to turn the (non-existent) adblocker off but a week later it had turned into a countdown, "you can watch three -- no two -- more videos", that sort of thing.
Its become more muted in the last few days but, seriously, it looks as if Google has lost it. They are churning out code that is obviously not tested using tenuous algorithms to detect stuff that's not there (while failing to detect stuff that is). Essentially wasting cycles and space on my system to show me advertisements that I'm not interested in because their Adsense code is quite obviously Nonsense. I'm skeptical of the entire Internet advertising ecosystem anyway -- its like a huge Ponzi scheme of belief where nobody questions it because one tremor or breeze is likely to bring the entire house of cards down -- but this has convinced me that the players really haven't a clue what they're doing, they just think they do.
That's right, if that's what it comes to, that's what will happen. If the downloading of the content can't be prevented, it can be downloaded, tokens passed and silently ignored by the client. Everybody wastes bandwidth, but it's more significant and costly on their end, with no returns.
So they can have it our way, or they can have it our way anyway with extra bandwidth.
"By 2025, I predict that YouTube be made not to work at all where an AdBlocker is found instead of just telling you that it is almost illegal to block their ads or that I should subscribe to YouTube Premium"
...at some point, content creators will get the message and move all their videos to a rival site.
Really YouTube should aim to have an advert every 15 mins. I doubt they have enough advertisers to fill the slots they have... so show less, and charge a lot more.
Also, switch to higher quality adverts - advertising used to be an art form. Create an algorithm that judges quality of advert, and increase how often those are shown. Good adverts are much less annoying than bad adverts.
Ads are really telling you "Our product is shit but you'll keep buying it if we show you pretty pictures and attempt to amuse you", or "We're a big company afraid you'll buy someone else's product so we'll keep waving ours in your faces, suckers". Very, very rarely they'll be selling something useful.
I'm not sure whether I agree with you.
During the YT recent adblocker blitz, I was repeatedly exposed to an ad for a revolutionary electric heater that using the Joule-Thomson effect, reduces energy usage by OVER 95% !!!!!
The inventer (Martin), who was a student at either the University of Ediburgh or a US University (can't remember which - it varies from ad to ad), decided to take matters into his own hands when the university heating system broke down, and the students' pleas to get it fixed fell on deaf ears.
So, somehow redefining the laws of physics, Martin invented his own heater (Martin is a genius by the way).
Then, to make matters worse, Martin was offered MILLIONS from a large heating company for his design, which he refused, and as a result, was EXPELLED from the university (the scoundrels).
Not wanting to miss out on this revolutionary product, I googled the name and found lots of other identical designs on eBay, most of which were much cheaper.
But I'm no fool. Those cheaper versions on eBay are obviously fake copies, and probably wouldn't reduce energy usage by the same amount (probably just 80% or something), so I bought one of the genuine ones by following the link in the advert. The website was in Chinese, but the picture was the same, so it must be OK.
I'll follow up this post with the results when I get the heater. It's currently stuck in shipping, but once I've paid the unexpected import fees I should have it in time for Christmas. Or maybe New Year. They didn't specify.
There seems to be a lot of things in this vein, there's a similar thing with a "Lucky Black Obsidian bracelet" where 3-5 people have the exact same story about going from complete poverty to riches, and then losing the bracelet and then their loved ones die in a car accident or similar. It just seems to be the "in" style of marketing from China right now. I am surprised it works, but it must be working as otherwise they wouldn't do it.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k9O34GautU
Like modern parents that have decided not use of negative language like "no" or "don't" with their children to improve their emotional development, Google has decided to remove such negative words from their corporate language so they can better grow as a corporation, including from their original motto: "Don't be evil".
Go ogle dropped "Do No Evil" as a motto in 2015, when Alphabet decided "Do the right thing" was more appropriate. Following that, the old motto was vestigial, at best, a footnote in the CoC, before eventually being quietly removed entirely.
But "do the right thing" for whom? They don't say ... My guess is the shareholders. In alphagoo's warped, fuzzy little brain it's OK that they are evil now, as long as they are making a profit.
Some of us have been shunning go ogle since the year dot ... not paranoid, pragmatic.
I’ve used nothing but Firefox for donkeys. I know it’s had its issues in the past but no other browser comes even vaguely close to the flexibility of Firefox when it comes to plugins (including, of course ad blockers, script suppressors, cookie handling etc).
Continuing to use Firefox is a no-brainer for me and I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would choose to use Googlies’ spyware - it defies comprehension; it’s not like Googlies’ spying has gone unnoticed, even in the mainstream press
Unfortunately, we've seemingly returned to the days of the browser wars when sites didn't always play nicely with one browser or the other. This time, instead of IE, it's Chrome, and Firefox is still on the outs. A lot of sites are using broken JavaScript code that doesn't work properly with Firefox. It's easy to say, "well, maybe you really don't need to go to that site" when it's not biting you in the ass.
There is, of course, also the option of Vivaldi which sits somewhere between Firefox and Chrome. It's based on Chromium, yes, but the Vivaldi devs built their own ad blocker into the browser. It doesn't work as well as AdBlock Origin or something if you want to nuke a pesky bright box or something, but they built it in such a way that it should be immune from the MV3 changes. Where Mozilla has taken to chasing Google's taillights for the past several years, with its extreme minimalism emphasis, Vivaldi brings back a lot of power user functionality.
quote: an essentially lost decade, where nothing much happened
Always good when companies like Google take a holiday from ruining stuff for a period of time.
Do people really care that much about blocking ads? I don't even see them anymore when they are directly in front of me. More folk will be concerned about any loss of video downloaders.
I tend to automatically "bleep out" ads like yourself, but still run ad blockers.
Privacy/tracking is an issue.
But the BIG one is performance. I run a lot of windows & tabs, and the difference is: fine vs excruciating/lockup.
Each ad is actually a program. And typically huge. And typically badly written. And typically arrogantly written, with the assumption that you're doing nothing but staring raptly at their ad, so they can use whatever (level of) resources they feel is "clever".
Try pulling the code out for a couple of ads and deobfuscating it. They are very often tens of thousands of lines long.
What, you don't see the loud, intrusive video adverts that pop up in the middle of a sentence in YouTube videos?
Perhaps it's because Alphabet have now gained complete control of your subconscious mind, and you are now on your way to buy the latest (Pixel phone / Chromebook / whatever $Google product / delete as applicable) without even knowing it.
I think I'll stick with loudly shouting "fuck off" at them when I've not managed to block them, and vowing to never buy whatever shit they are touting at me, but you do you.
If I was asked to accept - and pay for - the delivery of an un-franked letter which contained marketing, I would unhesitatingly refuse it.
Similarly, were I contacted by my phone company and asked to accept a collect call that was some kind of marketing, I would refuse it. I might actually get somewhat forthright.
So why does Google and other online advert pushers, expect me to spaff my data allowance and paid-for data just to download marketing?
People (if web marketers qualify for that term) used to bleat that ad-blocking equated to theft. I suggest the opposite: web advertising is theft.
Web advertising, as currently construed, is theft, or worse.
If I were driving along the motorway and saw an eye-catching billboard which took my attention away for a moment, resulting in me running into another vehicle, litigation would probably ensue.
Web advertising, as currently construed, is worse. It's not content with grabbing my attention, it wants to drive the car.
When I occasionally use a naive web browser to surf I am astonished at how totally unusable it all is. Why would anybody habitually put up with that?
-A.
(this is total kite flying)
While a little bit Heath Robinsonish, how about a UHD camera that points at a browser screen, with a hi-fi microphone rig connected to the speakers, and an AI program that simply cuts out areas of the screen based on it's own AI.
If I never post again it will be because this is exactly how GCHQ avoid the Chrome tracking and cruft without alerting Google.
For OSI fans, this is moving the war above the application layer.
This has all been a long time coming so I'll believe it when I see it.
That said, if it does happen, I'll review my options at the time. No way I'm using the internet in 2023 without shields up though.
I own two Chromebooks and I predominantly use the Chrome browser elsewhere. Should my internet browser experience become intolerable, I'll ditch the Chromebooks and Chrome and find a browser that's more in line with the current experience. Failing that, I'll go to any reasonable length to circumnavigate the problem, then if I'm forced, unreasonable lengths.
A Google life sure is convenient, but I'd change that in a heartbeat if I'm no longer in control of what I do and don't see on the internet.
Brave is based on Chromium, so you've essentially been using Chrome all this time. These days, basically everything is either Firefox or some kind of Chromium variant. There are a few other oddballs here and there, but their usage levels are generally a rounding error. I don't count Safari since Apple forcing everyone to use the Safari engine on its mobile platforms skews the numbers.
As a Pi-Hole & Ublock Origin user, I've settled on these because I can just turn them off if they break something.
I can see people turning to DNS blockers, VPNs, antivirus with built-in adblockers... and some really dodgy alternatives in desperation.
At best, it will break connections. At worst, customers will fall for privacy-reducing products and outright scam products.
If the hardware is slow (such as running on a Zero, or a first generation Pi), then it might introduce a delay to DNS lookups.
I'm running it on a 400 (as well as using it as a file server), and it doesn't go anywhere near using all the memory or processor cycles, so there is no noticeable delay.
Having said that, some pages might have scripts that wait for the ads to load, and which then time out and load the rest of the page. That would be a deliberate (and underhand) choice from the authors of that page.
As a Pi-Hole & Ublock Origin user, I've settled on these because I can just turn them off if they break something.
I can see people turning to DNS blockers, VPNs, antivirus with built-in adblockers... and some really dodgy alternatives in desperation.
At best, it will break connections. At worst, customers will fall for privacy-reducing products and outright scam products.
"At best, it will break connections. At worst, customers will fall for privacy-reducing products and outright scam products."
Believe it or not, this is entirely acceptable.
Let's go back to Microsoft Internet Media Player. It had built-in routines that run scammed media, and offered it as a feature (it could automagically download and install any codecs).
just a quick search for browsers available in EU :o)
and, at #2
Google Chrome: Google Chrome is a popular browser that is widely used in Europe. It is known for its speed, simplicity, and security. It also has a built-in ad-blocker and provides automatic updates to ensure that you are always using the latest version 2.
did Google write their own review at al ?
on work laptop, so using EDGE and BING :o)
when using MY kit, it's been Duck Duck Go for a long while now
There are still those within EvilCorp that remember and perhaps foolishly try to follow their old ethos, killed by Alphabet in 2018. "Don't be Evil" changed to "Do the right thing (For google)".
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393
Anonymous, because they're always watching, and ya know, they're evil.
It's been over 2 decades since I did any web work, so it seems like I am missing some details here...
It seems to me that what is happening is that web servers no longer serve pages to the browser but make extensive use of 3rd-party content that the browser has to load from somewhere else. Nothing particularly new, for example images could always be loaded from a different web server even in basic HTML. But if a server is generating content on-the-fly customised to every user anyway, what is stopping the server from assembling all the components itself, and sending the resulting page to the user's browser (in this way everything is first-party)? Is it because most websites don't want to take on the excessive load it would take up, since a LOT of compute power is going into generating those ads, so they would rather offload that onto the ad server and end user?? Could an ad blocker identify components of a page that are ads even when it is served as a complete first-party page?
Either way, Google Chrome is a gigantic conflict of interest, their interest is for Chrome to serve as many ads to users as possible, and users interests (and ad blockers) go directly against this. It's disingenious to say that an untrusted ad blockers has too much power to mess with your system.... Google themselves already have too much power to mess with your system. Rather an open-source ad blocker than allow Google free rein. Proper antitrust action would have forced Google to divest Chrome (and it's entire software suite of gmail, search, maps etc) completely from it's ad-slinging business (Android also but that's another story...)
What google ACTUALLY said was "this puts too much power in the hands of USERS and developers".
Which is why a large number of companies are abandoning Chrome en-masse. Google's market share is dropping like crazy, but they're manipulating figures so browser refresh/updates count as "new installs".
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
