Presumably the worry is that the big ad companies would get approximately every website in the world to use this technique, which is already the only reason web advertising is such a big problem.
and stop participating in online society? Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites, viewing youtube, and reading your gmail?
I think it's an inevitable future tbh. The users have lost - they just dont know it yet. Google's WEI [1] is their first foray into this, and i dont doubt there will be future iterations they try to push through. The browser-in-browser is but one alternative idea.
Sure. This site is one of very few sites I can bear to visit. I come here for the comments, I don't even open the links anymore, I just assume people will quote anything important.
When I made my own website, I deliberately set out to avoid as many of these obnoxious dark patterns as humanly possible. The result was basically a marginally improved motherfucking website and I'm actually pretty happy with it. I think that's how websites should be.
If the web is gonna turn into an opaque proprietary mess for the benefit of advertisers, it doesn't even deserve to exist.
> Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites
Absolutely. I already avoid it.
> viewing youtube
Absolutely. I already use yt-dlp, if that stops working I'm just gonna forget about it.
Ha, I'm not the only one. Barely ever visit the links unless that's something I'm actually personally interested in, by coincidence. Mostly come here for the comments.
The parts of it that try to force ads on me, sure.
> Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites, viewing youtube, and reading your gmail?
I would, yeah. I've already stopped using all google services to whatever extent possible and deleted my google account long ago. I do sometimes watch a youtube video (in an external player) if one is linked to me, but I don't think I'd particularly miss youtube if it were gone altogether.
I would hope that there will remain at least one e-commerce site that doesn't try to force ads on me. But if there isn't, I'll drive to the store.
> Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites
E-commerce is the online sector with the highest incentives to deliver an ad-free and user-friendly experience, because they actually want to sell products. If you're selling something you should do everything possible to get out of the user's way and let them make a purchase. This includes having your site load and operate extremely fast, not using cookies and not using advertising. This also includes having the highest quality content on your page, so that users find what they're looking for and to build enough trust that they want to do business with you.
As for YouTube there's premium and for e-mail the ad-free and spy-free options are legion.
If we exclude the online content that is free and without ads, the online content that we can pay for and the online content that we can pirate, that's already a huge chunk of what is valuable on the internet. So I don't think the ad-fueled internet has the upper hand here.
When ecommerce becomes unweildy enough, I'll just go to walmart in person. I can pay my credit card bills by mail.
I'd be ok losing youtube. There's some good content there, but there's so much garbage and I can only hear people begging me to like and subscribe so many times. I've got more dvds and blu-rays than I can watch, and there's so many at good will too.
All I get in gmail is transactional mail for other people. It would be no loss. My personal email is at fastmail, and I'd expect them not to participate in the browser in browser thing, but if they do... That's fine. Email isn't that important anymore. What am I going to miss? If you want to contact me, send me a letter or call me or text me or ... ?
Thankfully, the biggest ad company - Google - would hate it because it would dramatically reduce page performance. And webpage performance apparently has a big impact on ad clickthrough rates.
