> People seem to think it's the browser's job to block ads, but my perspective is that if a business owner wants to make their business repulsive, the only sensible response is to stop using the business. Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what's happening, people start talking about how it's their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction. Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: "I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway".
What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them?
The "don't just use that business" idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels).
Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It's only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above).
"Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.
The quote also perpetuates the free market myth: every actor is on an equal foot, has infinite amounts of time and energy to consider options, the alternatives exist and/or are essentially free to build, and money is not a problem. That's never been true. Somehow, there is no environment, no society at large, no inequality. I understand how someone living in the richest country working for the richest company could fool themselves into believing it, but it's incredibly shortsighted.
The society we live in demands that you earn money, if you don't want to die. The only thing that you have in a high enough amount is time, so if you use time to do anything, at some point it must earn money or you die. In the digital world there is no scarcity, so the old model of physical stuff you sell for $X a piece doesn't work. There are no systems to guarantee a life to everyone, everyone has to fight for themselves. If you want to produce content, content that is not necessary to live, you necessarily enter non a competition for attention, for money, against everyone else. If people justifiably can't give you money, you must resort to the only way that gives you a survival fee: shove crap in the eyes of the reader. Give them not what they want, but what others want. Influence their decisions.
It's a shitty system. The analogy is interesting because if there's a single vendor that holds what you need to survive, and they price it at an outrageously high price just for their profit, is it acceptable ? Is it OK, as a society, to say no to this practice ?
> A free market is merely one that is not regulated by the state
No, a free market explicitly applies only to well-regulated markets, as per the very creator of the word. It doesn’t matter what regulates the market, but for all practical purposes it will be the government(s). And this is the reason why European markets are often “more free” per several metrics.
A good analogy to this topic would be sport competitions. A free market is a fair, say running, race. But an anticompetitive/too large company exerting its power in different segments would be akin to someone tying the other racer’s shoes together (but I wouldn’t put past the analogy even shooting the others)
But that doesn't exist either, as the state sets the rules for businesses (what tarrifs apply on which goods, what property is protected, what barrier are set for entry, etc.) and is also potentially a major client of the market, deciding which services is chosen based on state's own criteria.
This is true in just the same way that a free society would have no have no government at all. No taxes, no laws, no police or judiciary, just complete freedom to do whatever you want to your neighbors.
It's almost as if the people who think absolute capitalistic libertarianism is a good idea always think that they'll be on the good side of it and get to reap the benefits of being a monarchical overlord and not the bad side of it where their organs are being sold overseas for a week's worth of food credits for the rest of their starving family.
It seems clear to me that was is meant is a perfectly competitive market, because according to basic welfare economics, that is the set of conditions under which a free market will lead to socially optimal outcomes. Aside from very hardcore non-aggression principle absolutists and sheer nihilists who are just rich and don't give a shit if the rest of society suffers, that tends to be the argument for why a society should be more capitalistic and have liberal markets. The further we get from those conditions, the less the argument holds.
And, of course, welfare economics itself is just a mathematical model. Whether it really holds true empirically is hard to tell given the impossibility of society-wide RCTs and enormous confounders when trying to compare across time and space.
I find the entire analogy dubious. When I see a link, I don’t know what sort of ads or JS is on the page it leads to. By blocking ads I am not renegotiating any transactions, because I never entered any transaction. If anything, it seems the author of the post thinks it’s okay for website owners to unilaterally dictate the terms of transaction and force visitors into them.
When I buy a banana, I see the price beforehand. With ads on websites it’s more as if upon me taking the banana, the banana seller gained the right to search my pockets and take anything they fancy.
Also, let's not forget what's really going on as a part of this "transaction," which is that a website is sending data to my computer, which I own. That data includes requests for my computer to perform certain operations, show me some ads, maybe hand over my online banking passwords, etc. etc.
I am absolutely within my rights if I instruct my computer to honor some of these requests and not others. Any other perspective is crazy when you think about it. I own the computer, I choose the programs that I run. I'm not leasing this computer from Google or from the business that owns the website in question.
This is really a matter of property rights. If somebody wants me to use a computer which is unable to block ads, they can offer to lend me a free computer which has that limitation, I suppose. I mean I'd say no, but other people might say yes.
Yep. I adore the philosophy behind the browser as “user agent” - the browser acts on behalf of the user who runs it, as an agent of the user’s will in the world.
This is why it is perfectly fine to use an ad blocker by default, and perfectly fine for a website to refuse access with ad blockers enabled. At least then there’s a negotiation going on.
Because they don't refuse access. They kindly ask you to disable, but don't require it, and the users of an ad blocker know damn well they're not going to voluntarily disable it if it's possible to browse the site at all with it on, so rather than rote click "continue" 90 times every two hours, let the blocker block the nagging popup as well.
If these sites really don't want you there with an ad blocker, they can actually block you. I imagine they realize there is value in getting more eyeballs even without ads, whether that be that users might still recommend and create links to your content that other people without a blocker then follow, or you actually sell something and some of those people might buy it. Whatever it is, by revealed preference, those site owners seem to be indicating it's worth it to allow people to browse with an ad blocker.
By default we try to work around sites which require that the user disable their content blocker, as this is not acceptable since content blockers are used for more than to just block advertisement. In uBO, trackers and malware sites are also blocked, and thus it's not acceptable that sites require to wholly disable uBO.
By default, we do not try to work around sites which make a polite demand that the users disable their blockers without preventing access, this way the final decision is up to the users.
Nope; uBlock Origin will work around that as well. Skimming recent issues, in https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/15338 atozmath.com detects that people are running an ad blocker [1], explains what they're doing, and refuses access. The discussion is how to make the site think ads aren't blocked, though they haven't succeeded yet. In https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/13801 there's a simpler one with https://www.magicgameworld.com where it refuses access but doesn't provide reasoning, and that one was fixed.
With ads on websites, it's more as if upon glancing at the banana, the vendor went through your pockets, photographed your ID, and sent it off to who-knows-where.
> People seem to think it's the browser's job to block ads...
Yes, it absolutely is. Ads not only cost me my time and attention, but also consume resources (network bandwith, CPU time, screen real estate) that I might not want to be consumed. Just open any consumer-oriented webpage these days, and I can guarantee you will get 2-3 videos (!) or animations autoplay immediately, and a large part of your screen eaten by "garbage". Sometimes reader mode helps, sometimes it does not...
One thing that I usually do is when a page shows an explicit ask to turn my adblocker off, I close that page. This is fair enough, you can call this a transaction, and I can opt out of it.
> Ads not only cost me my time and attention, but also consume resources (network bandwith, CPU time, screen real estate) that I might not want to be consumed.
Story time. In the 1970s, my grandfather wrote a letter to our local newspaper, asking them to omit the advertisements when they built his copy of the news. "I never read them" he said.
Then my mother had to explain to him a little bit about mass production.
following your reasoning it's your media player job to skip the uninteresting part of a video you're watching ?
no, the browser job is to display what he receive from the resource YOU requested what the server put in that resource is between you and it (you can "cheat"(not my word but liked/steal it from another comment) by drop the ad or choose to not requesting the resource all together).
The proper analogy would be that the media player would play random extra videos in addition to what you are watching, in overlays or even opening new windows. Can you imagine VLC working like that?
In-video ads are usually OK, the way they do "sponsor" segments on Youtube for example, they are "uninteresting" but usually short and non-obtrusive. Again, I consider these as transactions and don't skip them if otherwise I wanted to watch the video. The best creators (Jay Foreman comes to mind) do these so well that I actually look forward to watching them!
Completely unrelated ads that are forcibly and blindly inserted into the video stream (again, Youtube is an example) are not okay, and I expect the browser/ad blocker to weed them out.
Not directly related, but there is sponsorblock, where the community will mark the parts of a video that has a sponsored part, and so you will just skip those parts.
> The best creators (Jay Foreman comes to mind) do these so well that I actually look forward to watching them!
Nice. I see this pattern around: when X wants Y to (say) watch an ad, X's first instinct is to try to force Y. When X does not get to do that, they tend to discover much less coercive ways to do it
The fundamental "transaction" of the web is that the client requests files from a server one behalf of the user. The server can deny that request on behalf of the business by for example returning an 403 access denied error.
If the server returns a file, the user hasn't implicitly agreed to some limited use of that file or that it must be processed in some specific way, but the business has implicitly agreed to the user's usage of that file. The user (or the client on behalf of that user) can choose to ignore that file, not execute it or not even request it in the first place. This can be done either manually or assisted by tools (e.g. sponsorblock, ublock origin).
Anything else puts arbitrary restrictions on the weaker party (individual vs. large business), and negates their property rights of being allowed to choose what runs on their general computing device. If the business doesn't want a file to be used, don't serve it in the first place.
The same as adblock exist (im not agains ad blocked, im using them already it's just trying to explain that the moment you requested the webpage it's up to the website to put whatever it wan't(his right), the job of your browser is to display it and your right to refuse the ad, hide it, block it or automate it in the browser level by an extension or your OS level (blocking DNS)
> following your reasoning it's your media player job to skip the uninteresting part of a video you're watching ?
Yes. Proper video players and media files have support for chapters for the express purpose of skipping what you don't want to see and getting to the point. YouTube refuses to do it because of its stupid advertising bullshit? People will do it for them with SponsorBlock.
> no, the browser job is
The browser's job is to be the user agent. It acts on our behalf and represents our will. Its job isn't to display some website's little ads. Its job is to do whatever we, the users, want it to do, even if it hurts the interests and bottom line of some corporation. If blocking ads is good for users, that's exactly what browsers should do, literally no questions asked.
no you request a resource (webpage) the ad was sent to you by the owner of the resource (it's his right to put whatever he want the the webpage) as your right to not request it/block it
It's like going into a hotel, restaurant, college lecture theatre, or library and immediately being mobbed by sales people.
The owner/landlord may have given permission. But it's still not a welcome intrusion, and wearing a "No salespeople here" anti-mobbing suit is a completely legitimate personal freedom.
I agree, although it's never "cheating" to block ads on our own devices, unless we accept that it's okay to force people from looking away Clockwork Orange-style. (Even the term "blocking" seems wrong: it's not like the ads are coming down a pipe and my "ad blocker" is bouncing them away.)
No one seems to mind this as much as I do, but I remember well over a decade ago when I first tried the Spotify thick client. It would play ads, and if you turned off your volume, it would PAUSE the ads. Spotify has been banned in my household ever since.
The way i see it (an example) you as a user want to read a story that i wrote in my website but when you request it i'm embedding an ad with the story, it's my right to embed the ad and not showing what i wrote without it and it's your right to not open the website
it's not perfect, im using an ad blocker and i can't understand how people can surf the internet without one but hopefully we can find a solution the change the whole free internet based on ad with something else
You include ads in the hope people will look at them, but there is no obligation to do so. Their eyes can just flick down and ignore the ad or they can configure their browser to do this automatically.
If you want money reliably you need to explicitly ask for it.
But the thing is that you're just sending me code. The thing that is executing the code (rendering the website) is software and hardware that I supposedly own. So I think it's reasonable to expect that those work in my interest and not in the interest of the website.
I'm okay with that. I can't help but think the internet was better when it was mostly unpaid hobbyists and personal blogs without commercial interests.
The problem is that people are using their ad budget to compete with free content, but the free content is still going to be there it will just appear higher up in the search results if various bad actors aren't paying for a bunch of SEO.
For tech content this might be true but for general news, investigative journalism, reporters, etc. that probably won't be the case as the activity itself implies fixed costs.
That's false. Perhaps the author would not have bothered to write the article without securing economic compensation of some form, but advertisement is not the only possibility.
I guarantee you no important information is going to go totally unreported anywhere, even if ads ceased to exist globally tomorrow.
On the other hand, a whole lot of recycled content mills where all the $0.05/paragraph contract writers are about to be replaced by GPT-4 probably would.
It's also my right and in my power to open your web site on my browser, delete your ad and read what you wrote. Once your web page leaves your server and enters my computer, it's no longer yours. You are no longer in control. You cannot dictate to me what can and can't be displayed on my screen.
> The way i see it (an example) you as a user want to read a story that i wrote in my website
This is very rarely the case, though, and also the fundamental error the original article is making. The vast majority of page loads are blind link clicks. The user doesn't know what is behind it before clicking. They're trying to take a quick sample and maybe stay on the page and read something if it proves sufficiently interesting and not obnoxious compared to the thousands of otherwise identical pages with near identical content.
It is not people trying to grab your magazine to take home without paying. It's people at the magazine stand browsing through all of them trying to decide if any are worth buying. While thumbing through the covers, we don't want autoplay videos taking over our speakers and waking up our sleeping spouse, malicious JavaScript querying the OS to figure out what our hardware capabilties and settings are to fingerprint us, thumbnails of a bunch of women with E cups in tight shirts with no relation to a story trying to get us to browse through to something else. We just want to see if whatever the hell we clicked on is actually worth reading. You're automatically assuming we made that decision before loading the page.
You know how e.g. Netflix requires a DRM plugin in your browser, and some standard for that kind of thing got into the WWW standards? Now that AI with camera access is basically competent to tell if you're watching, it'd be natural to require something analogous to confirm you see the ads. "This website requires Telescreen(TM). Please enable it to continue."
Guy can buy out the ads, spending currency to skip them. One day he doesn't have the money and is forced to watch the ad. Literally forced. If he averts his eyes, the ad follows them. If he closes his eyes, they torture him with high pitched noise until he opens them. It drives him to the point of physical violence.
It's one of my favorite episodes. The incredible inhumanity of it all, and I bet these ad tech companies would think nothing of it.
It’s the browsers job to be an agent of the user, full stop.
All other forms of advertisement are a deal between 2 businesses. They work out all the details of when and where an ad will be shown, and what methods will be used to verify the deal is being upheld, none of which rely on the consumer. It would be insane to expect consumers to volunteer their time and effort to fetch the ad and show it to themselves, especially before they even know what they’re getting out it. Add to that expecting the consumer to answer a large list of personal questions, and it’s downright certifiable.
> Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what's happening, people start talking about how it's their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction.
It is our right.
These corporations do the exact same thing, they change their little terms of service all the time, often without notice, and we're forced to swallow it. Why is it suddenly wrong when we do it? Because it costs them money? Fuck their money, we owe them nothing.
> Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: "I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway
Complete bullshit analogy. There is no "transaction". There never was, not even once, a "transaction". Only assumptions.
They are not charging us anything. They're giving us the banana for free after putting some advertising stamps on it. They're hoping we'll look at the ads but the fact is we are under exactly zero obligation to do so. We invented technology that peels the bananas automatically and gives us the fruit while throwing the trash away and the ads along with it.
Our attention is not currency, nor can it be sold to the highest bidder. We are under exactly zero obligation to "pay" with our attention. Zero.
> "Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.
Absolutely agree. Businesses are the ones that come to us with their idiotic "our way or the highway, take it or leave it" deals. Functionality such as ad blocking is absolutely vital for consumers because it empowers them to alter the deal. It doesn't really matter what the corporation thinks, the deal is gonna be altered whether it likes it or not.
Such is the power of adversarial interoperability, the nightmare of every monopolist.
Yeah, that part of the blog post is probably the best example of:
“it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
This obviously goes both ways - some people also utterly refuse to understand just how many businesses exist because of the revenue driven from ads. Which then results in some comments here that are utterly detached from reality.
It's kinda tiring really - seeing people constantly bark past each other with no understanding of nuance. But that's the modern internet I guess.
I understand both sides, but it feels like the ad world has been in a race to the bottom for a long time. I wouldn't really mind a few simple static banner ads here and there. But it seems like every site with ads has stuck dozens of them everywhere with video and animation, and sometimes semi-malicious scripts too.
Not only frome the ads revenue, but also from being able to advertise their product to others. That is the original idea of ads. You have a products that you think is useful to others, and you need a way to let others know that this product exists and can be purchased.
We understand that many businesses and services wouldn’t exist without ads — we just don’t care.
In fact, it’s not apathy, it’s antipathy.
I think the world would be a better place if ad-supported businesses, advertisers, advertiser-driven tracking, and ad-tech companies simply did not exist.
> What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them?
Can anyone really make that argument though?
Maybe making sites repulsive is the default because those that push that default earns money on it?
You recognize these dark pattern modal boxes that absolutely ruin a site and you feel the complexity. The mom and pop site most assuredly did not invent this, and if they believe they even wanted it is because they were tricked into it.
Remember when popup windows were a thing? Originally a feature for pages to show alerts or confirmations, naively implemented when the web was a less hostile place. Then sites started abusing them for their own gain, and browsers started shipping popup blockers as a feature.
Sites that are "well behaved" with ads are fine to me. The problem is too many abuse the css/js capabilities of the browser to make a result similar to the popup problems of yore. The only sane solution from a consumer point of view is block by default and whitelist the good places.
> People seem to think it's the browser's job to block ads
May not be the job of a web browser but it’s the job of MY web browser. I either have a web browser that blocks ads or I have a broken web browser that’s soon to be replaced.
I have no problem with a business that wants to generate revenue through ads. If you want to place an ad on a billboard or on a bus or in a newspaper or a non-tracking ad online, great!
The business that I'm boycotting with uBlock Origin is the one that tracks me as I move around the internet and builds a dossier on me that they sell ads against.
> History will surely uncover a Machiavellian plot about usurping control over the web, but at the time the story was pretty simple, at least as it was explained to naive pawns like me. Google wanted the web to succeed and even had a team of people contributing to Firefox. Google wanted more influence over the product, Mozilla was (reasonably) uncomfortable with that, so we went our own way.
This resonates with me. Often the narrative is that big tech is malicious. I think that evolves way down the line. Initially it's just about getting stuff done.
People are trying to anthropomorphise companies and that isn't a sensible way to understand them. The list of people who have your interests at heart:
* You (some caveats).
* Maybe your family (lots of caveats).
As Stallman has been pointing out since the early 1990s, if you give up your freedom you won't be free any more, and other people can do stuff you don't like to you. People still refuse to use that logic despite its excellent predictive track record.
Google hasn't actually asked anyone to give up any freedom, so little meaningful damage is being done despite the fact that Google is going evil. The Microsoft era was much worse for the internet.
Let me get this straight, you cite Stallman on freedom and then claim that Google hasn't done anything wrong? Google the company that manages the webs most widely used DRM module? You are aware that Stallman and GNU explicitly oppose digital restrictions management in the context of freedom?
I think he's not as internally inconsistent as you claim.
"Doing things i don't like" would be locking me out of purchases I made or bricking my devices if I don't subscribe to some new service.
Google isn't doing this, you can use their products mostly for free and you're unlikely to rub up against the 900lbs gorilla that famously doesn't have support.
Until you do rub up against that gorilla; then you will start to cry about freedom, and retrospectively realise you kept trading it away.
(see also: if they change the rules, usability, cost of entry, etc;etc;etc)
I don't understand what issue you are going to. I haven't installed Widevine.
I'm extremely disagreeable, most people do things I think are foolish/detrimental to the general good/philosophically bad. We all get along regardless. The idea that Google does something I don't like that doesn't affect me is not ideal, but is usual in all my relationships with any entity you care to name.
I think company can care about certain interests of yours, if you are aligned. That’s why you want to work for a good one. Companies are made out of people and at least some people there care.
Every single atom in my leg could want to go left in its personal capacity as an atom, but they will still go right when my brain decides to go right.
These people aren't in control. What they care about isn't a major factor to be using in decision making. One of the core principles of western law, culture and corporate organisation is to centralise control in a tiny group with extreme amounts of skin in the game.
And those people almost always bend to the incentives they are put under. Sometimes it takes a little time.
to be honest, you can already kind of see the writing on the wall in that quote, too. google wanted more control over the browser, I don't really think that's a neutral act, because they had vested interests in controlling a browser from the start. Of course google's reputation was a lot better back then, so people generally didn't question it too much.
Another way of framing this is that Google wanted to do things that browsers couldn't and better, and built a new browser that redefined what the standards could be.
You could call that "control" but in the early days when Chrome was gaining dominance it made the web better.
The change in reputation is directly related to the change in the decision making and reasons behind it, imo.
From this narrow perspective, Internet Explorer was the exact same story. Starting around version 4.0 it really was a better browser than Netscape, implemented the new standards better, and also did essential new things that other browsers couldn’t (XmlHttpRequest anyone?). IE’s dominance really made the web better because developers could write to a single standard and end users had a unified browser UX.
Now, I disagree with this definition of “better” because it doesn’t consider the indirect effects on the open web platform. But my opinion is presumably a minority one because the community has sleepwalked into the same situation with Google and Chrome.
> Now, I disagree with this definition of “better” because it doesn’t consider the indirect effects on the open web platform. But my opinion is presumably a minority one because the community has sleepwalked into the same situation with Google and Chrome.
Yes, and meanwhile prevented the content being locked inside the walled garden platforms like Facebook and apps on Apple AppStore. It's really strange how none of you remember that having most news and other content locked off behind a mobile app was a serious trend that happened before web caught up?
Serious trend? It never stopped. Literally every website on the mobile version will outright demand I download the app. Even sites that are on a desktop will refuse to do anything the site should do and instead tell me to download the app.
It's harder to game app downloads than site visits, so companies chased app downloads. It has very little to do with the user experience or preference.
I don't remember that. When was any news locked in at Facebook? How even? When chrome came around, how many people even had smartphones? The majority of people still used Facebook via Browser then.
But even if; just like in the movies, when the good guy finally turns bad, you have to get rid of him.
I think it's kind of two sides of the same coin. Of course google didn't exclusively use their increased control over the web for strictly evil purposes, but it's more about whether someone who has a vested interest should be the one controlling browsers. It's kind of like a manufacturer being in charge over the safety regulations of their own factories. Sure, you can argue that they might know better than anyone what needs to be regulated, and might regulate things for the better where other manufacturers are worse than them, but there's also a huge conflict of interest built into the scenario.
Of course chrome was an improvement over browsers at the time, it's hard to dispute that, but that doesn't really mean that googles intentions were pure. Or that it wasn't a strategic move to place themselves into a position of having a grip on a central piece of internet infrastructure.
If a wal mart shows up in your town and drives all the smaller stores out of business you can also argue that they might have genuinely lower prices and a wider selection, but that's also just part of a larger strategy to assume dominance.
It feels like we're dancing around the concept of Embrace Extend Extinguish.
The first two phases are prominently positive and benefit the users enough for the newcomer to gain traction up to a dominant position. It's also only if that position is reached that the third phase kicks in.
> Another way of framing this is that Google wanted to do things that browsers couldn't and better, and built a new browser that redefined what the standards could be.
For sure!
But what were the things they wanted to do that browsers couldn't? Was it removing tracking everything, shoving more and more ads down everyone's throat and turning Web into their walled garden?
> Phishing and Malware Protection works by checking the sites that you visit against lists of reported phishing, unwanted software and malware sites. These lists are automatically downloaded and updated every 30 minutes or so when the Phishing and Malware Protection features are enabled.
Although it seems they're still doing that for files:
> In addition to the regular list updates mentioned above, when using Malware Protection to protect downloaded files, Firefox may communicate with Mozilla's partners to verify the safety of certain executable files. In these cases, Firefox will submit some information about the file, including the name, origin, size and a cryptographic hash of the contents, to the Google Safe Browsing service which helps Firefox determine whether or not the file should be blocked.
I work for Mozilla (on Firefox) and I was around when phishing protection was introduced. Pretty sure it never did that. Not leaking the user's visit has always been a top priority for us.
> Although it seems they're still doing that for files:
What exactly do you mean by "that"? What you quoted below for certain executable downloaded files never applied to phishing protection, I don't think.
Maybe it was removed after August, but it was in Firefox only a few months ago.
And for the record, FF android prioritizes Google searches over history leading to accidentally visiting the Google search for a web page I often frequent.
That doesn't seem to say anything about what gets transmitted to or from Google? Certainly it's not your visited URLs.
> And for the record, FF android prioritizes Google searches over history leading to accidentally visiting the Google search for a web page I often frequent.
For search suggestions we send what you've typed, not full URLs. I'm not sure what happens when pasting a URL but I would recommend using Paste & Go in that case. Search suggestions can be disabled too in the app settings.
Really? I thought it was to simply guarantee that the search service in this browser would be Google--and that it would probably be cheaper (the cost of building/maintaining the new browser vs paying existing browsers for the right to be the default search service).
It's the predictable consequence of the things built. I don't think you can absolve yourself of responsibility for how your work is used just because you didn't realize that companies exist to make money.
> Just because you didn't realize that companies exist to make money.
There are many different ways to make money though. I work with green energy tech in what is essentially an investment bank. Like most companies our main purpose is to make rich people richer, but we do this by building solar and wind power plants along with storage. We do this in the most ethically correct way possible, which is often also a much more expensive way, but it gives us the opportunity to sell our products to customers who will not buy things that are build in what they view as terrible countries. From a cynical perspective, I can see how this could get interpreted as being done because of money. But the truth is that it has been one of the organisational goals from the beginning, and it's hammered into every part of the company in such a way, that we don't hire people we don't think are committed to doing things the right way. It comes from the very Scandinavian belief that there is enough money to be made by doing things right. This isn't necessarily a competitive strategy on the 1-10 year plan, but when you look beyond those 10 years, it's slowly turning out to be the only profitable way to turn out a healthy consistant profit in the green energy industry.
I think Google had that when they had their "don't be evil" spirit going for them. In many ways I still think they have that going for them. I also think the company struggles to become more than just an advertising company, and I think it's a shame, because they seem to have some genuinely great products that are completely unusable for businesses (especially here in Europe). Which is also where I think things get sort of interesting with stuff like ad-blockers and Manifest V3. Because ad-blockers are consumer friendly (sort of), but they aren't business friendly.
If you want to run a website that offers content that is paid for by ads, then you can't do that if everyone uses an ad-blocker. Google, Apple and Microsoft can, because they have ways around it by building ads directly into their core products in a non-skippable fashion, but you can't. This is what has been hurting journalism, or at least the journalism that people don't want to pay for, but it's frankly hurting any sort of content creation. If you want to create videos about something, you're going to put it on YouTube. Both because it gives you exposure, but also because it gives you an easier revenue stream with the (sort of) unblockable ads in their app. Once you get enough people following you, you may build your own content-site and rely on subscribers, but you're not going to do that when you're just starting out. This is a stark difference compared to the early web. I remember running a Diablo 2 fan site for the fun of it, that generated enough ad revenue from a single non-intrusive banner add, to pay for a laptop back when I was a teenager. You can't do that on the modern web, and ad-blockers are a big part of the reason.
I don't have a good answer for you, but I don't think you can say that ad-blockers are inherently good, or, that Google is inherently evil for wanting to change the way advertisement works. I'm also not sure you can expect power houses like the EU to uphold the right for browsers to be capable of blocking ads. They may but the EU is also looking for ways to save journalism.
Lastly. I'm as much a fan of the old punk saying "the guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to" as you seem to be, but I'm just not convinced it really applies here.
I am the glen briefly referenced here - I miss working with Evan, and I could write chapters about the magical alignment he talks about that we swam in, and how I yearn to feel that sense of directionality and purpose again - one of the many reasons I left Google last week.
I am so thankful I got to take part in the Chrome adventure with so many people I still call my friends.
Also the close button was only not funny for a stomach churning 5 minutes after I saw the techcrunch article; at all other times: hilarious.
I remember how exciting it was to be in my college dorm and having people be like "Man, this new browser is amazing!"
It's kind of surreal because I'm not sure desktop software really does that anymore; maybe apps, but they seem to fizzle out really weirdly. It's very crazy to consider Chrome's influence on the Internet, and how most browsers are just skinned Chromium now.
While the shift toward mobile means a lot of things are released as apps these days, I'd argue that desktop continues to be exciting. Two things that come to mind from this year are:
- Stable Diffusion
- Unreal Engine 5 (in particular, the Matrix demo).
That's a testament to how bad browsers were/are compared to Chrome.
Chrome was a ground-up project, written by highly-paid Googlers, while other browsers were sitting on old codebases built up by many average employees and unpaid volunteers over a decade+.
Chrome was also, at that time, allowed to be a pure browser for browsing the web while other browsers were trying to get you to sign up for toolbars (essentially more ad real estate for them) or use their homepage (more ad spots) and were pushing out updates constantly (an excuse to show you more ads in the updater progress window!)
I felt that way when Rockmelt came out, and the original Opera. I sometimes wonder if these alternative browser projects were too early, or were only able to exist due to the lack of Chrome's dominance on the space yet.
Chrome gets free marketing, and tons of google money. Opera could not have competed with that. Opera only went free after they did the same deal with Google that firefox had. Otherwise, it's quite an achievement that it was able to exist in a world where it was a paid browser for such a long time.
> Apple cares about making a browser that renders web pages just adequately enough to be acceptable
I think this is biased. It's closer to "Apple cares about rendering currently existing web pages superbly" while "Google also cares about rendering future web pages".
Once upon a time, V8 won benchmarks and ran demos faster but JavaScriptCore rendered the web faster. This was mainly due to JavaScriptCore having an optimized interpreter and V8 lacking one, and actually existing web at the time didn't execute JavaScript long enough on average to compensate for JIT overhead.
The second part of that quote is that the real work happens in apps.
Safari doesn't properly enable PWA features on purpose. So, 10 years later, that's more correct than ever. Anything that can be used to replace an app would see strategically slow or non existent adoption.
Exactly. This bug (broken overflow:hidden for rounded corners) took 11 years to be fixed. But how long from will it take until we can assume that all iOS users will have a Safari version that does not require the dreaded isolate workaround.
Also, I have the feeling that there is exactly ONE person working on Safari. I always run into the same same when reporting or browsing bugs. I hope that this is either an alias used by many developers or the poor guy is making a ton of money.
The fact that lack of Safari features drives people through taxed AppStore is just an accidental Apple side effect right? ;)
Google is utterly evil for driving people towards web Ads for profit, while Apple drives people into their 30% tax AppStore by pure altruistic battery concerns?
It seems more like a difference of vision. Apple has a popular desktop and mobile OS. It's fundamental to what the company is. For Google they have Android on mobile, but ChromeOS didn't take off in a big way on the desktop, so Chrome has become their desktop "OS" in effect.
From Apple's perspective a lot of stuff being added to Chrome is just duplication. They have a competent desktop OS already and it's not cheap to build, so why would they get talked into building what amounts to a second competing OS just because it suits Google? It's maybe like asking why Google doesn't build super slick native Mac app equivalents for everything they offer. Why isn't there a native Google Maps app on macOS for example? Of course from Google's perspective that sounds unreasonable - they've got their own platform and would rather use it, why would they invest so much into Apple's? It's sort of the same thing but in reverse.
I believe we agree: control is a strong ulterior motive with both pros (prioritizing privacy; Flash is dead) and cons (native app required for important functionality).
Indeed, battery life shows Apple's goal is being superb, not adequate. For features, that's what focusing on currently existing web is about, instead of future possible web.
The Safari team has been killing it in interop-2022.[0] They've not only improved the most (and are currently leading) but was also way ahead on certain features like the new color spaces.
> For features, that's what focusing on currently existing web is about, instead of future possible web.
The reality is, of course, much more complex.
For example, once upon a time Apple wanted web components to be declarative: https://twitter.com/rniwa_dev/status/1352322006448947203 And yet Google was "move fast and break things" and here we are 10 years later with Declarative Shadow DOM struggling to become a thing.
However, this aggressive push did surely help Google to sabotage Mozilla when they kept the abysmally slow polyfill for the deprecated v0 of Custom Components spec on Youtube for ages.
This also applies for the many, many, many features of the "future possible web" that both Apple and Mozilla increasingly object to (anything from hardware APIs to web-component-related bullcrap Chrome churns out every day it seems).
He didn't make it that obvious but the author is also the creator of Ninja [0]. One of the, if not the, fastest ways to build C/C++ software on a single machine.
> There was a second subplot about how Microsoft was increasingly turning to nasty practices to get back at Google, and fears about using IE to pull some anti-Google shenanigans.
Quote from that thread: "The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional."
> In retrospect I think of this as a failure of leadership on my part. Many years later when Chrome eventually inevitably switched to using Git only, I think it was a multi-year project to dig out from SVN. Had I spent a little bit of time advocating for something that was pretty obvious to me I would've saved those people a lot of time.
I really appreciate this attitude - definitely something I can learn from. It's easy to look back on something and say, "I knew X was the right idea, if only everyone listened to me". It takes maturity to say, "It was a failure on my part for not advocating more for X". It's not applicable to every team or situation, but in general I think it's a much better attitude to have.
I actually really like Chrome, well Chromium, despite the negative perception about Manifest v3. I truly hope that they work out the kinks quickly enough to resolve some of the concerns. I do get that the new API in some ways is safer for the average user, but there are power users that should be able to do what they want. Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the changes possibly being in good faith, it has only harmed their public perception and they may never recover from that unless they try to address and resolve the concerns publicly.
> Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the changes possibly being in good faith
I don't think you've kept up with the way Google has treated certain extensions if you're still considering the possibility that it's in good faith
Anybody remember AdNauseam (still available on Firefox)? It's an adblock that doesn't just block ads but in the background silently clicks ads to create noise and make you harder to track. Clearly against Google's business model
It wasn't enough for Google to find some rules in their policy to exclude it from their app store. They literally labelled it as malware (completely unfounded)
I agree that they've made questionable decisions, but if an extension is clicking on ads in the background wouldn't that be considered a violation of their ToS for related products that they control.. essentially, a way to game ad revenue? If someone released an extension to silently DDoS ad organizations in the background, even if the user was aware of the purpose, then I'd imagine it would still be against their ToS. Extensions like this can still be installed from a packed extension. I don't think Apple would do anything different if there was an app in their app store that did things in the backgrounds to violate their policies.
If it does as you say then at least in the United States it may actually be considered a form of fraud. By clicking an ad that you've hidden, you're essentially telling the advertiser to pay for something you didn't even see.
> a violation of their ToS for related products that they control.
I don't actually think so, but that's not my point. If it was against their ToS, fine. Take it down
But they didn't just do that. They made baseless accusations of malware against this (open-source) project in order to spread misinformation and make people even more hesitant to use it. That's not just an abuse of their platform but an abuse that goes outside their platform
Sure. It used to be on the Chrome Extensions page. It wouldn't let you download the extension and had a big "malware" flag on it. I don't think that's up still but there's articles written about it:
Yeah, I saw that one but other stories around the same time say something different. Were you able to find an arhive.org page that actually shows the extension listed as malware?
I don't even know what URL I'd have to put in archive.org to find it, but I'm telling you I saw it myself when it first happened. I had it installed and Google uninstalled it for me and told me it was malware
What do "other stories" say about it? I'm seeing multiple articles confirming the same thing. Not sure why you find this so hard to believe...
I think MV3 critics are mostly based on a loss aversion bias, rather than a rational opposition.
If those people truly think it's absolutely essential for the extension system to have the pre-MV3 webrequest API, they should either stop using Safari, or ask Apple to support the same as loudly. But they don't. None of the critics I know does.
I think Google sees this as matching Apple for privacy and security - as there has been so many malicious extensions that caused significant harm. Everyone thinks they won't be affected by malware or bad extension, and they think it's personal responsibility but as is often the case, the best way to improve the security is to eliminate the attack vector whenever possible, instead of trying to control / safeguard it. Given the practical downside is virtually non-existent - I have been using uBlock Light since it came out, and there's been no noticable change in adblocking - I think MV3 made the right trade off, and I would be disappointed if Chrome team cave to the emotional and irrational critics.
The changes in Manifest v3 make a lot of sense. It's absolutely true that we can't trust extensions or their developers and they should be restricted as much as possible. Forcing them to declare to the browser what they want done so that only the browser touches the user's private information is a great idea.
It's just that certain extensions are so important and trusted that it doesn't make sense to restrict them like this. Extensions like uBlock Origin should be a special case in the source code. If it's uBlock Origin, then give it direct access to all APIs so that it can do anything. The rest can deal with Manifest v3.
Truth is uBlock Origin should be literally built into the browser instead of being a mere extension. Only argument against that is conflicts of interest. Google obviously has no interest in properly integrating uBlock Origin and Firefox is funded by Google. Ironically, Brave seems to be the only browser where such a thing could actually happen.
Who decides who gets special extensions! Can I make a unlock origin compete and get special permissions? (Then sell my extension later to a shady person)? Its tough to manage exceptions like that
> In retrospect I enjoyed this a lot, for two reasons. One is that getting code review from experienced engineers is one of the best ways to grow as a programmer, and the Apple engineers came from a totally foreign engineering culture — no unit tests! no comments! — that also was clearly producing a high-quality product.
Anyone know if this still applies to Apple’s SW engineering culture? Or if it’s just some urban myth? Hard to believe.
From my experience observing Apple and Google in WebKit and LLVM project: it's relative. Of course Apple's culture is not literally "no unit tests" and "no comments", as can be easily verified by looking at sources Apple released. On the other hand, I do think Apple's culture was "less unit tests" and "less comments" compared to Google, and it still is.
I don't think that's on Google. I tried it last time using git. Having learned more about git: the defaults are not well suited to large repos. Worse: it's not easy to get the right settings.
Why would they do that? Chrome being hard to compile is a benefit to them. It means it's harder for people to fragment the Chrome ecosystem by making slightly-incompatible forks.
And my recollection is that Google devs use something akin to Chromebooks, coding remotely, meaning the multi-gigabyte repo isn't on "their machine" anyway
It's sort of funny the paragraph about a custom title bar, that is always the first feature I disable whenever I deal with a new install of Chrom(ium|e). Don't really know why it tries to do it, but a right click and "Use system window title bar" and back to normalcy.
I will always support Chrome over Firefox because they are not politicizing their project, they just serve you and leave the politics to politicians. They earned their market dominance for being great and supporting things that Firefox did not at the time. I am OK with monopolies of good products, I don't really care about using an inferior product for the sake of lack of monopolies.
"Inferior" is your opinion. I believe Firefox to be superior.
Chrome is winning for a few reasons, least of which is that it is a good browser. I believe Chrome is winning because:
1. Chrome is advertised on the most popular website in the world for free.
2. Chrome is the bundled in both ChromeOS and Android.
3. Some of the most popular sites in the world are only built to work well in Chrome (Blink), ala YouTube, at least in the past.
4. Chrome is a performant web browser.
Chrome is an inherently political project. Google is using Chrome's market leader position to push what it wants on the Web, whether that is standards, Manifest v3, removal of third part cookies, etc. Mozilla is honest about the politicization which mainly revolves around an open Web and freedom of information. Chrome's politicization happens in the background where a normal user wouldn't see it. You seem to have fallen into this trap.
by default, chrome is scanning your whole computer and uploading that information to google under the guise of chrome now being an antivirus too (hilarious excuse). enjoy!
I think they mostly earned their market dominance by aggressive marketing -i.e. pestering the search engine users to install Chrome, or bundling it with most Android devices. I feel that any browser that was good enough (and Firefox was) could have gained the dominant position on the market if they had the same promotion platform.
How does Firefox politicizing their project affect you? It shouldn't. If you don't like the quality of the browser, just say that, otherwise YOU are the one being political.
I don't think newspapers (here standing for media organizations in general) need saving. Newspapers have great influence, and they will be funded for that. Let's say, ads go to zero and all newspapers are bankrupt, except BBC, NHK, NPR, and Al Jazeera. Is that a problem? I don't see a problem.
If you think all of the news orgs you just listed have a particular slant, then you'll have a problem. If you don't see a slant because you honestly believe they are neutral or you just happen to agree with them, then of course there's no problem to see.
I'm not saying any of those have a slant or not. I'm just seeing how it's pretty obvious there's going to be public perception problem with your list
I mean, obviously all of them have slants. I am saying that generally well respected media organizations exist right now without depending on ads, and I don't see what ads-supported media organizations add over that, except variety. Opposing slants are also represented: Xinhua News and Russia Today will survive without ads. I just didn't list them because they are less respected.
I don't see a problem with this either. If companies want to charge for some opinionated blog drivel about their market predictions or how work-from-home is bad for the economy then so be it, at least it is obvious that those are biased... but to pay for fear porn in regards to current events is nonsense.
Nothing personal against the author, I'm sure hes a great guy and all, but I got a chuckle out of someone working at a company deploying the largest world-wide spying apparatus complaining about Microsoft's practices.
What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that's a winning strategy for them?
The "don't just use that business" idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels).
Ultimately, when boycotting a business, the customer has to bear a harder cost than the business owner: The business owner loses one transaction while the customer loses the entire service. It's only effective if large numbers of customers would quit as the same time, which is almost impossible to pull off (see above).
"Cheating", such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.