Firefox Preview adds support for recommended extensions, including uBlock Origin
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://mobile.twitter.com/Pythux/status/1154403982342852609
It looks like it is just a repackaged a AdGuard in a way that complies with the GPLv3 license of the original project.
Sure, morally, it is questionable at best. But it looks like it is legal, does exactly what it says, and doesn't harm users in any way. Furthermore, it is highly rated with a lot of downloads.
While I admit I'd rather not be supporting a ripoff, I don't think it is Mozilla's job to check the morals of developers unless there is a direct risk for users.
> If the add-on is a fork of another add-on, the name must clearly distinguish it from the original and provide a significant difference in functionality and/or code.
If anyone considers the addon to be in violation of this policy, they can use the “report for abuse” link halfway down the AMO page. Be sure to cite the policy paragraph and to politely explain why it violates the policy. The AMO review team may or may not agree, but at the very least they’ll consider it.
The rip-off extension only has a lot of downloads (more than the real extension, in fact) because it’s recommended by Mozilla. It’s not illegal, just unethical.
The opposite is also true: just because something is outlawed does not mean it is unethical. Many things deemed good now became lawful after people did them.
Ethics is not defined by laws, contracts and licenses. It is defined by your moral compass and different people under a same law may have different world views.
I have seen Mozilla recommend closed source addons. They have all the rights to do that (thanksfully), however I was not too happy with this, especially from an organization that promotes open source and an open web.
I see no point in promoting an outdated fork when you can recommend the better, fresher, original extension.
Now, back to the point. Nobody has made an ethical argument that Mozilla shouldn’t be pushing an extension that is a fork with a license preferable to them.
Of course, this does not apply to every situation where there is a fork. In many situations, there is real work done in the fork, sometimes this work is even upstreamed.
> a fork with a license preferable to them
Both extensions have the same license (GPLv3), except the fork removed the original copyright notices from the original source code. This is probably not even allowed, let alone ethical.
Personally, I'm entirely OK with Mozilla exercising some editorial judgment here. In many ways, Mozilla only exists because of moral judgment about technology. And thank goodness. Without them, we might all still be stuck on IE: https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/
The resolution of the trailer is 160x120
It's like a movie recommendation engine that preeminently features Howard the Duck or something. It's not malicious or illegal but its recommendations are probably useless.
If you replace all copyright notices with your own, it's illegal.
The GPLv3 license, like most OSS licenses, does not give you the right to assert copyright on a piece of work.
This seems like something that should apply to inclusion in the add-on site, NOT to inclusion as an explicitly "recommended" add-on.
Recommended add-ons should, in my mind, be recommended for some actual reason beyond "is not malicious"
However, this calculus changes quite a bit when adblock penetration reaches high enough levels. Once 80-90% of users use adblock I don't see how these sites will survive. And that adblock penetration rate increases year over year due to efforts like this.
The real question is what will happen next. Will the government move to rule adblocking illegal? Will websites engage in sophisticated technical anti-adblock measures? Will companies like Google and Twitter give up on advertising and shutter their existing businesses? All I can say is that the current situation doesn't seem sustainable.
The Register prompts to allow an alternative form of advertising that's audience appropriate, Ars has a subscription model, and sites like Vox are partnering with Scroll.
I want chat, video calls and thought sharing with social circles to work the same way. We don't need one Facebook to rule all the social concerns of the whole human species (the part that uses internet anyway) as it sees fit. I would not worry too much for such services. It will work. Same for YouTube. I run a PeerTube instance on a cheap VPS for a small association. Granted, we don't have a lot of traffic, but if we had, the peer to peer feature would help, right? :-)
As for newspapers... I don't have a definitive answer that would be privacy-friendly, sadly. Nor for search engines (including for videos in a more decentralized world....).
Gmail and Google search specifically open a powered by chrome tab when you click on links unless you look around deep in the settings to turn off this user hostile feature.
Usually when I or others bring this up someone says: but then you are leaving behind the value of serving customized ads for each user.
To to which I counter:
- ads baked into the page would probably slip by my ad blocker, and more importantly, as long as they are relevant and not annoying I'd probably not even care to try to get rid of them. There exist a subset of ads that are absolutely ok with me and I'd be happy to leave them visible to support smaller sites, and another subset of ads that I just don't care strongly about.
- I strongly believe that the value of customized ads has been overhyped. And with that I mean to the ad buyer, not to Google: I've only seen relevant ads from Google once or twice a year for the last 10 years or so.
- there should be a value in knowing that your ads don't end up next to a "hit the monkey scam" or next to another dubious ad. A good seller or sales organization can make this obvious to ad buyers.
- for a number of sites I would not only be OK with but also happy to pay for individual news items (think smaller newspapers from Nowhere that gets linked in social media etc), as long as they don't insist on selling me a subscription instead of access to this single page.
Say I run a blog, by myself or maybe with one other person. Even putting aside questions of my own limited time, are big companies going to deal with me? Is it practical for them to deal with me and a thousand other, individual small blogs?
I have a site that gets about 30k pageviews per month; I threw ads on it just to see what would happen. It makes something like $12/month. Even at minimum wage here, after hosting costs I could afford to spend approximately zero time on it.
So I think for small sites, the answer is effectively the same with algorithmic ads or directly sold ads: you won't make enough to matter either way.
This seemed surprisingly low to me, so I did a little Googling.
https://blog.adstage.io/google-display-ads-cpm-cpc-ctr-bench...
> In Q1 2018, [AdWords] advertisers paid $2.8 dollars per thousand impressions
So for a site with 30K monthly page-views, I'd expect something closer to $84 per month with one ad per page. Place an ad on both the top and bottom of each page, and now it's $168 per month. Still not a ton by any stretch, but an extra 2K in income each year is nothing to sneeze at.
Ad clearinghouses are a flattening and democratizing force on the Internet that I don't think people recognize as such. They let people who otherwise couldn't really afford to pay for server space put up their content.
And even if you're right, an extra $2k in income would only be nothing to sneeze at if the ROI is decent. But competition for eyeballs is fierce. There's a reason that even professional writers are having a hard time making ends meet.
If you wrote a blog about leatherworking and wanted some ad money, you could go to a leatherworking tool company and say "I have this much traffic and its 100% people interested in your product because why else would they be on my website reading about this niche leatherworking technique that only you and I and my audience care about, lets make a deal." I bet that pitch would land a handshake.
With streamers/influencers being an entire industry these days, there are probably a lot of boutique agencies who do all this legwork of connecting company with highly specific products to your interested niche audience for you. And if the model changed where this would be how advertising is now done, you would see a lot more of these advertising agents at every economic spectra making these deals on behalf of any sized company or website.
If you wrote a blog about leatherworking and wanted some
ad money, you could go to a leatherworking tool company
and say "I have this much traffic and its 100% people
interested in your product becaus
It does not work.
For this approach to work, you need somebody who...
1. Is good with the actual subject matter (leatherworking or whatever)
2. Is a strong writer/communicator
3. Has the "salesperson" personality to go and promote their blog to potential companies
4. Has the TIME to promote their blog to potential companies, deliver metrics so they know what kind of exposure they're buying, etc
5. Has the appropriate technical chops to run/publish a blog, handle ads, set up analytics, etc.
Those are disparate skillsets. You are going to exclude an AWFUL lot of good leatherworkers who'd otherwise be good at this. Sure, the occasional unicorns who combine these skillsets exist.
Just like there are a certain number of people in the world who are competitive skateboarders and... are also taekwondo masters or world-class violinists or something.
And if you're lucky maybe 0.1% of that remaining 0.1% will actually have the time to pursue something like the venture you describe, which tends to rule out folks who are already working 40+ hour weeks and have kids and such.
In reality, we're talking about an operation involving several full-time people with a breadth of skillsets to make this kind of operation a sustainable business.
A lot of podcasts and streamers do kinda make this work, but are generally part of networks and in the end are still beholden to advertisers whose businesses are an odd fit with the subject matter at hand anyway -- like all the tech and true-crime podcasts who sell ads to Stamps.com. It's not really the smoothly-integrated seamless bespoke ad paradise you want.
Also now they've effectively censored you about the dangers of paying to have a spy camera in your house that collects all footage and sends it to law enforcement (and anyone else with access).
When I wrote "small sites" I wasn't thinking about single person blogs but rather about smaller newspapers and similar.
As far as I know there was a golden age for technical blogging but today I personally wouldn't even try to earn money that way.
Even for slightly larger organizations, I'd wager the extra work required to procure you're own agreements is a significant expense. Local newspapers (for example) often run on razor thin margins.
While it's true that print newspapers also had to obtain their own ad agreements, they had a lot of other revenue sources back then too. Classifieds were a huge one; another was that issues weren't free for users. Hence how they're struggling.
Podcasts are another medium that require bespoke advertising agreements. And smaller creators have found a solution—combine to form larger "podcast networks" that collectively handle advertising agreements.
This seems to be working, but it also runs counter to your goal of a more decentralized internet. As I see it, the logical end-game in the podcast space is for networks to keep combining with each other in order to take advantage of economies of scale. Eventually, the entire Podcasting space will be dominated by a handful of major networks—or, Spotify will just take over everything, and any semblance of podcasting as an open platform will disappear.
Good points, and interesting.
Hopefully an equally interesting counterpoint:
Publishing and distribution today is a fraction of the cost of paper based media.
Its not customized ads to YOU, but its customized ads to a particular audience, which may or may not include you. That audience might include a bunch of people who are extremely likely to buy things, and it definitely moves the scales for those companies.
Google and Facebook work diligently and at great expense to make sure that not too many people are "turned off" by ads - an example is even recently how Google rolled back its search results ad UX change after the outcry started to pick up stream. It would be an existential threat for them if everyone started moving towards ad blocking. So they simply keep people from getting to that threshold.
Maybe if they would look at the feedback they got on the ads (yep, people taking the effort to click on that tiny tiny x in the top right corner of the ad) where people said that the ad were irrelevant or even offensive. Maybe if they started with the assumption that these people knew what they were doing and hadn't managed to hit that specific combination by random chance and especially not three times or more in a row. And maybe if they had removed these users from the group that got said ads then that could be a good starting point for further work.
I'm no machine learning expert by any means but taking into account the current situation there should be some room for improvement.
If anyone missed it: I'm sarcastic. I believe ads targeting are either out of control, or Google as a company aren't as smart as they think they are or they have a really deep disregard for users.
Besides, Google etc. turned me off ads years ago, so they didn't work diligently enough.
It's like how Windows still have an unsurmountable lead in personal OS.
If I had the perfect answer then I’d go make my millions consulting for them, but I imagine there’ll be some form of premium versions of sites
Chrome dominates 2/3 of the mobile browsers market, and it's still growing. Just because HN celebrates a new Fenix update, it doesn't mean it's realistic to expect that this is indicative of any wider trend.
So, the effects might be less dramatic than we'd expect. The industry will adapt one way or another, not the first time a technological shift like this happens. Who knows, maybe we'll even get functional micropayments out of this. One thing that will definitely happen that you didn't mention is disguising advertisements as organic content. It's already happening with instagram influencers and even newspapers publishing sponsored content.
The big boys like google have been hedging their bets in multiple ways already though, they can (and do) track people in chrome, they can track people with CDN's and they can (and do) track people in android. Others can deploy sites as webASM that make tools like uBlock much harder/less effective. They might even go with an in house "box model" to serve ads from sites indistinguishable from the content. There's a lot of options to fight back against ad-blockers but the haven't been deemed worthwhile yet.
I know plenty of non technical people here who like and use Firefox as their main/only browser by choice. The Firefox UI is fine.
Your concerns about compatibility are valid though. I've not run into such issues myself and people around me neither (except for Jitsi Meet, which works on Firefox but not optimally. They are going to fix this though.) but I know they exist.
Firefox market share may well be higher on mobile but we just don't know about it.
This is just your social circle bias. My social circle almost universally uses Firefox and it doesn't include techies only.
Running entirely on donation is not a viable route.
> Will the government move to rule adblocking illegal?
Absolutely not, serving ads is not a protected activity, you can't force someone to consume something they don't want to.
> Will websites engage in sophisticated technical anti-adblock measures?
Already been tried, see anti-adblock and its counterpart, anti-anti-adblock. The solution to adblock is product placement and sponsorship, which has already extremely prevalent.
Which doesn't mean no ads, unfortunately. (NYTimes is the example that springs to mind. At least in the crossword, which is how I mainly use my subscription, they still show ads—err, try to, except UBlock Origin has other things to say.)
See this threat for examples of pure enjoyment of others' failure, justified by the darwinistic logic that anything that dies must deserve it for being insufficiently smart or flexible.
While that logic is rooted somewhere in capitalism, they do seem to miss the fundamental idea that this business, like any other, was two-sided: any transaction generated profit not only for the content creator, but also the consumer. If your favourite shop had to close because some local gang found an unstoppable method to steal from it, you and your neighbours would have to switch to what was previously your second choice, which by definition is worse according to your preferences on price/distance/quality/etc.
It seems like the big institutions such as Times will survive. But local politics will function about as well as any regulatory system missing one leg of the feedback cycle; imagine air conditioning with a missing temperature sensor.
I'm holding out hope for some people to recognise this. It is just as true that the advertising industry went too far in some ways. Maybe an ad blocker takes pride in a sense of taste and moderation could find an opening, blocking the worst ads but considering the ad/ad network/advertiser/site with a willingness to allow some. Or it goes the other way, with ad targeting getting anywhere near what it has been promising, and people getting fewer ads of such quality they consider them interesting more than annoying.
I probably feel nothing because i was only reading it because it was free, and if the price is no longer worth it that's that.
People always bemoan how x is going to die on the internet because of changing trends in advertising. Fact is many of these sites provide ok at best content, and are dying because the value they provide doesnt equal the cost they want to charge.
The journalism industry can't seem to accept that most of them were in the distribution business of moving around physical bits of paper and that without that they have no revenue stream. And without the limits of their old distribution model the world needs far less journalists than it once did.
There's also more to professional journalism than online newspapers. There's still local news on TV. In most countries there's still state funded organizations providing way better quality than their commercial counterparts ever did. So journalism will survive, they just need to accept that we need less journalists than decades ago and their old business model probably won't survive.
While I clamor for privacy and advocate against ads whenever I can, most users would not not appreciate having to pay for dozens of different services every month.
Just imagine: 5 bucks a month for Facebook, 3 for Reddit, 10 for Google Search, 4 for Gmail, 15 for Youtube, 5-20 each for 5 different newspapers, ...
But there are practical realities that make a significant increase in ad block usage unlikely:
* A lot of browsing has shifted to mobile. Mobile browsers don't have extensions, except for FF and a few Chromium derivatives, which almost no-one uses. That's a big chunk of impressions right there.
* Google is probably not happy about losing a double digit percentage of impressions on desktop. They are trying to hamstring ad blocking in Chrome by removing request interception APIs.
* A lot of websites have mobile web versions, but aggressively push you towards using the app instead, where ads can't be blocked and profiling is much easier. (FB, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, ...)
* Plenty of sites are using adblock detectors. Probably only those that really need the revenue to survive.
I use FF on mobile and love it.
I find mobile web pages with ads unbearable. I intentionally disable Chrome on my Android phone as some apps disregard my default browser preference (Google news).
I generally prefer web pages (on mobile) rather than apps so I can turn off ads. I don't really see the attraction of apps, especially when they have ads as well.
Yeah.. maybe I'm an outlier. :/
And how about all the apps that use a built-in webview every time you click a link (Gmail, Hangouts, rif, etc. etc.) rather than even calling a full browser. At least they typically have an "open in browser" option but that gets tedious, and they sometimes have a setting (buried deep) to always do so.
If that's on, you get the mini-browser in the app, otherwise links go immediately to the full browser. (Just tested with Gmail, YMMV)
However, for the smaller sites, something like Scroll would work fine. You pay them a fixed amount, which they distribute based on your usage: https://scroll.com/
This one is bullshit. I don't run an adblocker today because I think it is insane to grant extensions the ability to observe and modify all of the content your browser ever renders.
Chrome changing to a rule based system is both the only sane option (I might finally decide to use an adblocker that uses the new system), and it also is in line with how Safari enables extensions.
But an extension requiring explicit permission to observe and modify all of the content your browser ever renders is unacceptable.
If they start charging money for fb access it will make it very easy to drop this bad habit and quit Facebook.
I don't have the willpower to stop browsing facebook and instagram from time to time. But next second they announce paid access, I'll stop using it.
Although even without this, I find myself browsing Facebook and Instagram less frequently with every passing month. At this rate it would be rather painless to quit it altogether by the end of the year.
It's not just adblock that's the threat: overzealous bans against tracking cookies have the potential to do much the same thing. Either way, ad revenue collapses, sites either die or switch to paywalls, and the internet becomes a much smaller, higher-friction, and lower-utility place. It'll be sad.
In a decade or two, the same people who today decry ads and tracking today will be the ones who pine for the open internet of their youth.
I know I would certainly develop some defense mechanisms to justify working for a scourge like Google or Facebook, and they would probably assume a similar form to your argumentation here.
To anyone that grew up on the Internet in the 90s (I believe you are old enough to be in that group, correct me if wrong), the striking degradation of what was then a high SnR knowledge repository and a medium for rapid information exchange, should be more than obvious. The rise of surveillance capitalism can not be defended with appeals to highly-polarised what-ifs. The Internet is a platform for decentralized expression and emergence of new ideas. Your alternative futures don't seem to take that into account. I suggest a shift and widening of your thinking into what is possible rather than regurgitating the same old narrowing perspectives that your corporate masters try to enforce on us all.
Even if that's true, consider that perhaps the proliferation of adblockers like uBlock Origin might also help many many other people and businesses who currently have trouble competing for attention against the gigantic internet companies and their business model of "get clicks by any means necessary because clicks = ads = money."
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams! Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ballgames, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
It's hard to see how we'll ever get that genie back in the bottle.
Don't hyper-correct though: the zero-sum nature of most ad spending is important.
Yet, they can't compete with cars.
- for billboards, there’s the visor
- for TV ads, there’s the mute button, or time shifting/ad skipping
- newspaper ads don’t move around, so it’s easy to spot and tune them out.
In other words, make obligatory "force-feeding" of content? As in, people won't be allowed to close their eyes or cover their ears? Good luck with that...
On a less serious note: "If you outlaw those who block ads, only outlaws will block ads."
I mean there are already rules in place that disallow modifying software, circumventing DRM, etc.
It wouldn't be a stretch to see them disallow modifying a website's contents.
It's entirely possible to insert first party ads based on what might be interesting to someone reading that content without user tracking.
It's just less profitable.
All of these sites already have native advertising in the form of paid content. Ad-blockers don't block them. Ad-blockers don't block first party advertising, either.
This isn't necessarily true. Some ad-blockers can be trained with CSS selectors that remove any visual element on the page.
Of course, like all ad-blocking, it's an arms race. Facebook already randomizes and obfuscates the names and IDs (and I think even the structure!) of their pages to prevent ad-blocking.
:::Year 2032:::
Web browsers are now a relic of the past used by a small cult of nerds and promoted by fanatics at EFF. Now world runs on SuperApps by Google, Facebook and Amazon. These are "Open" platforms which provide content authoring and hosting platform, ad networks, micropayment and discovery services for a small fees of 30%. The content is easily sharable across except for a recent glitch in Amazon and Google platforms causing them to be unable to interlink. Content of these is only searchable on Bing and Google.
Some Evil countries like Russia, China and Iran block access to these and run on copied platforms developed by Yandex, Baidu and Alibaba.
With a notable reduction in junk sites, better performance and security the Internet was never a better place.
Centralised platforms like Google also contribute to this because they can (and in case of Google they do it indeed) lift up negative articles and bury positive.
However, the main reason these apps gained all this traction is that the Web is simply not made for small devices with touchscreens. It's the discomfort of using web browsers on mobile that created the tipping incentive to adopt these streamlined apps. As long as people keep using more comfortable devices (eg. laptops) that can easily browse the Web, this segment will not have that "discomfort" incentive to move away from the Web and onto more restricted platforms.
Yes, there could be other incentives - you mention junk sites and security issues - but these aren't strong enough to outweigh the main advantage of browsers, which is the breadth and momentum of the Web, something that users still value. I hope I'm right.
The idea is not to disable ability to run browser and millions of website will continue to exist, but Top 1000 web properties and 99.9% of traffic and money will move out.
In current scenario, you can still run a BBS and share some really interesting content, but it will be a niche of nerds and fanatics.
However, if the iPhone came out in 1997 when websites were mostly static html pages, provided the browser could wrap text, it would be an excellent experience. An iPhone's screen is about the size of a few paragraphs from a newspaper column; it's not tiny, in fact its perfectly sized for ergonomic reading. The most praised reading apps on mobile these days are just a plain background and a block of text consuming the whole screen, with the rest of the ui getting out of your way.
I'm in favor of retiring the web. Not that it will happen any time soon. How many reasons do we need? Private information leakage alone should not be tolerated. Accessibility? Attack surface? Resource efficiency?
Obviously I'm missing the point, because none of this explains why internet is what it is. I sure wish it were simpler.
I think that you are 100% incorrect: the Web (i.e., HTML) is perfect for small devices with touchscreens. As asdff notes, late-90s websites would work perfectly on a mobile device. It's all the cruft we have spent the past twenty years polluting the Web and our browsers with that doesn't work so well in a mobile context.
A mobile phone is perfectly capable of displaying images and text. HTML is perfectly capable of displaying images and text in a device-independent fashion: that was its raison d'etre, as I recall.
I think where we went wrong was assuming that browser windows would be maximised on a desktop screen. That, and JavaScript.
I think that in such vision we'd be also slowly marching towards controlled, approved by vaguely described but tolerated by everyone "standards" (political and cultural), DRM-ed safe content from those SuperApps providers. It wouldn't happen fast but that'd be the direction. The remaining classic pages would be forced to transfer themselves into new reality or completely cease to exist. The "alternative private Internet projects" would be outlawed by hands of politicians who'd be open lobbyists of big corporations.
Realistically speaking, we're already one foot, or hell, leg inside the world and times where the Internet belongs to few corporations who are giving us software, services and content and it's nothing surprising that some countries are trying to fight these namely american monopolies with own solutions at the same time blocking by legal means access to what majority of world is using.
I don’t think the gov’t can make adblocking illegal, nor do I think they will even try, but yes websites will (and already are starting to) use anti-block measures. It’s not even hard technically, if ads are served as content from the visited site’s domain, rather than iframes from other domains.
Will companies give up on advertising? I predict: Never.
I agree with the first part of this sentence, but the second part seems wildly optimistic, at least in the US, where lack of technical knowledge or ability is no hindrance to passing ridiculous tech laws.
1. Publishers would shift to apps. Apps won't support ad blockers, and are in a much stronger position to detect them and refuse to operate until the block is removed. I'm not sure how much of this would be the "one big app" model where you use Facebook/Amazon/Reddit/Google for everything vs a "lots of little apps" model, but I'm guessing more likely the former?
2. The ad blocking arms race would accelerate dramatically. Sites would CNAME to their ad network, which would then be responsible for proxying the site and inserting ads directly into the pages. The ad network would try to change its serving approach faster than the blockers could keep up. This would look a lot like how Facebook runs ads on their site, with obfuscation to confuse blockers.
Fundamentally, publishers are offering a trade: we're willing to show you our pages if you'll view our ads. Users with ad blockers are rejecting half of the offer and taking the other half. Publishers can't force users to see the ads, but they probably will be able to use technical means to keep users from getting the content without the ads.
(Disclosure: I work for Google on ads, speaking only for myself.)
No thanks. Not ever.
There are application level firewalls (such as Little Snitch on macOS) that can cater to applications trying to do adware: allow the content, reject the ads. On Android you can install AFWall+ or NetGuard. On iOS you have Lockdown. There's also pi-hole which will get more traction outside IT as this ad war continues.
The problem is a circular, chicken and egg issue. Ad companies think of news ways to track, fingerprint, monitor and inject ads, and the market will respond with new blocking techniques.
The only unique position the goog has in all of this is the 'value add' that its non-revenue products bring to the table. However, more people are looking at alternatives to those as well.
Personally, I look forward to the day that I can pi-hole google.com... and I know that your company will fight to abuse this right every day (typically with recaptcha).
Just like it's not personal to your company to try and vacuum up every single bit of data about me, it's not personal to me that I look forward to the day the goog/Big Brother dies. What was a beautiful thing: the original google search, has long passed, imho.
If a publisher wants to have ads... No worries, but if it reports back to ANY entity other than themselves AND I can trust them to not on-sell that data, then yes, sure: I'll ignore the ads that I'd never click on anyway. So for me, the only sure fire way I'd find ads acceptable these days, if those ads were text-based, used no javascript or other css/url sniffing tricks.
Until ad companies drop the idea that each person MUST be shown an ad, then there's some hope of progress. Truth be told, of all the ads I notice these days, it's the old paper billboards on the road side.
Interesting take. Why do you think that, vs publishers trying to sell their content?
A world without ads may be impossible but if it were, it would probably be more fair, as we would get to see and estimate the value of content/services.
I would not pay to use Twitter, I would simply stop using it. But I would pay to use Google Search because I find it's still the best.
If history is any indication, the ad companies will show up on the doorsteps of the uBlock Origin developers with a big old sack of money. And then the uBlock Origin developers will start talking about how what users really want are built-in, uneditable whitelists to make sure that "ethical ads" (e.g. ads from the people who showed up with the sack of money) get through unmolested.
And then some user will get frustrated and fork uBlock Origin off into uBlock Origin+++, with the first commit to the fork taking out the ad whitelisting. And the whole cycle will start over from the beginning again.
I will say in as far as I know, gorhill has actively turned down attempts like this already
Even if this happens (and gorhill has shown no signs of being susceptible to pressure so far), the beauty of the open source system is that as long as there's one technically competent person who's more interested in developing an ad blocker than the potential industry payout, we're going to have ad blockers. There are a whole lot of people with the ability to continue the development of uBlock. It's simply not feasible for the industry to have everyone on their payroll.
Unfortunately, I think that either way, it will benefit big actors like Google and Facebook.
Google as a first party can seamlessly integrate ads, making them indistinguishable from content, they don't need specialized trackers to track you on their websites. Smaller websites have to rely on third parties, and these are easier to block.
Same thing for subscriptions. Big players can provide attractive paid subscriptions. For example there is enough content on YouTube for $10/month, but independent actors can't do that and they need another model.
But i somewhat imagine for at least pay per click ads the audience is separate from people with ad blockers, because when was the last time you ever intentionally clicked on a banner ad?
For quite a while I've been very conscious about paying for things I like, things I think are good in the world. Subscriptions for sure. Patreon to support individuals. And I just signed up for Scroll, which sends money every month to the sites I browse: https://scroll.com/
If ads die (which I'm 100% in favor of), then people will figure out how to support the things they really like and care about. And the rest will die off.
Is there a list of sites they support available somewhere, so that I can see if it's useful to me?
Don't personally read any of these, but still seems like a promising idea.
if you think the future is asking people from Rwanda to pay 5 bucks a month to read a single online newspaper, or get access to Reddit then I guess you're in for a rude awakening.
"In a world without ads, people will just pay their own way" is elitist thinking. Most people online have nothing of value to exchange except their attention.
2) If said people can't afford 5$/month how will they afford the stuff ads are targeting them to buy?
Then again, neither wikipedia nor <s>youtubr</s>hacker news have ads and that's like half of what i read on the internet right there.
Edit: this is what happens when i try to post while falling asleep. Meant to say hn not youtube. Youtube definitely has ads
Don't know which YouTube you use, but the one I do does have ads.
It's also important to remember that the vast majority of journalists and would-be journalists currently can't afford to do journalism. We need to solve both the consumer and producer problems.
Further, the attention of a perfectly broke version has a value of zero. Since advertisers are still paying for it, you could argue those hypothetical people are harming a website by viewing it: they bring the yield of ads down, encouraging advertisers to only support things for rich people.
Tragedy of the commons. The marginal cost to render another page is zero, but if 100% of pages pay nothing, the server is run at a loss. As a result, only pages that can get "stuck in" alongside revenue-positive content (or pages on a whole server operating at a loss with revenue generated via some other source) can survive (i.e. a patronage model).
> Further, the attention of a perfectly broke [person] has a value of zero
In addition to direct encouragement for consumers to buy something (what is called "conversion"), advertising is also used to shape public perception and garner general interest. Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value, because their product becomes the thing that person will ask for if someone offers them a free beverage of their choice, and it becomes the thing they'll generally recognize as "a soda" over alternatives when the topic comes up at all. The Ad Council's products are generally not about getting a broke person to spend money, but to shape their behavior ("this is your brain on drugs," "#DanceLikeaDad," etc.).
Possibly, but not necessarily. The tragedy of the commons applies when there's a non-zero marginal cost. But with zero marginal cost, you have have to find some way to cover your expenses, and then you can give away the rest as a public good. E.g., the NYT can happily give away a ton of pageviews to non-subscribers as long as they keep their subscriber base up. Public radio, another medium with zero marginal cost, has been giving away their content for decades.
> Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value
[citation needed]
I highly doubt Coke thinks that way. There is approximately nobody who sees their ads that is so permanently destitute that they will never have the opportunity to buy a soda. Indeed, at least in the US, the poor are better customers than the well off. About 2/3rds of people below $30k in income drink soda, while only about half of people over $75k do. https://news.gallup.com/poll/163997/regular-soda-popular-you...
> The tragedy of the commons applies when there's a non-zero marginal cost. But with zero marginal cost, you have have to find some way to cover your expenses, and then you can give away the rest as a public good
So a web page isn't zero marginal cost, it's nearly-zero. Servers require occasional maintenance and continuously consume electricity (to say nothing of the rent / peering arrangement that is usually part of gaining access to someone else's network). Even though a server can host a million individual pages at near-zero marginal cost for each, the original point still stands that if nobody is paying for that server and nobody finds "some way to cover your expenses," the electricity will stop flowing or it will break down and nobody will repair it. So everyone hosting on that server is doing so at the mercy and pleasure of the org or individual paying for the server's continued existence (i.e. a patronage arrangement). Your specific examples (NYT giving some content away and public broadcasting giving all of it away) are examples of patronage models in action (NYT non-subscribers are patrons of NYT, and public broadcasting itself is a patron of its sponsor base).
> [citation needed]
I believe you gave a fair explanation of why Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value immediately after that request for citation, so I will cite your logic. In addition to your observations, the points about brand stickiness (that "when someone offers you a soda, they want you to ask for Coke" bit) and behavior shaping still apply (source: I worked in advertising, this is common knowledge in the industry, but if you want concrete sources I can hit the Google and try to dig up a primer on the industry philosophy; it's so bedrock-knowledge that I can't remember precisely where I learned it). But you're right; even absent those effects, Coke assumes that people who are broke right this moment aren't broke tomorrow and still want you thinking about buying their beverage. "Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value."
As to marginal cost, I don't think you quite understand the term. Web servers are fixed costs. Hardware, setting up pages, electricity: all of that is considered a fixed cost. The marginal cost is the additional cost of producing one more unit of product. In this case, the actual cost difference between serving page 1,000,000 and 1,000,001. So, say 0.0007¢ in bandwidth for a modern, too-heavy page. Too cheap to meter.
It's true that the fixed costs have to get paid for, but there are plenty of ways to do that. And once that's covered, there is no tragedy of the commons. As long as the NYT has enough subscribers to pay their fixed costs and produce a reasonable ROI for their investors, they're golden.
It's a tragedy of the commons if 100% of those pages think someone else is going to foot the bill and one day the system that is actually footing the bill for those pages changes.
Except that it's completely utterly wrong to milk broke people like that.
Oh it happens, but advertising trying to influence you to have thoughts that you would otherwise not have, is actually something that most people disapprove of.
It's not really a good argument to say "just because you don't have money to buy our stuff, doesn't mean we can't control your brain in other ways".
THINK for one moment: If you have nothing to give, or nothing you WANT to give, what on EARTH gives them the right to take something else from you anyway?!!?!
... where you'll only be advertised at to READ and told about local community events. "Advertising" is really just the structural term for "People communicating things at each other." It's pretty inimical to human interaction in any common human space since we developed the capacity to communicate, and it's pretty unavoidable. We have some laws constraining the sorts of things we can advertise at each other, but advertising itself is extremely core to the experience of living in a human society.
I'm not sure where one draws the line between a Coke ad and a blacksmith's shingle, or between brand-recognition ads and towns putting up hisotrical markers indicating why the town is special. It's all on a common spectrum of information exchange.
Doesn't matter. What matters is everybody else is not given any choice about it.
A general solution for that where people could avoid ads by direct-paying publishers would be nice to have. As it stands, we're left with not-so-great options for the consumer where we either just deal with the annoyance of ads, choose to consume advertising-free content at a premium (that differs from the ad-supported content), or try to cheat the system by getting ad-supported content without ads.
That implies it was even needed. It wasn't the same people either, the online ad industry is a bunch of greedy fucks with dollars in their eyes, they came to the web like a swarm of locusts.
Remember the many ~ home - sites?
Browser support is already in-place, now it's on to adoption.
When you have binaries running in the browser it's going to be a lot harder to block advertisements.
WebGL is the real risk I think. You can't filter a canvas with the same ease(if at all} you can filter DOM model elements.
Citation needed.
Many web properties run first-party ads. Sport blogs and news websites are examples of web properties that show PR-driven ads.
Sponsorship is another viable model as TV has shown. Round the calendar sporting events like the Grand Slams, the NBA, the NFL, the Champions League (to name a few) make ad-money like it's nobody's business.
There's nothing that suggests ad-money would dry up if ever Google and Facebook go down-under tomorrow. And so, I feel, web's demise in the face of more user-control is over exaggerated and a dicotomy that simply doesn't exist except for in the tech circles that have a lot to gain if the status-quo persists, imo.
the whole industry is patently unsustainable without venture capital. venture capital moves on to another industry
With goobal steering maybe flat-rate based.
And while we are at it, can be start funding the many open source hackers who altruistically keep the internet surfing afloat?
That being said, it's not going to ever be prevalent with chrome being like 80% of the browser market, a product of an advertising company.
I can't really see technical solutions working. It is throwing money after people who have chosen not to be customers. Paywalls just mean we go elsewhere. If I have reached the point of installing an ad blocker and I notice the ads on your site, I go elsewhere. And the more people going Elsewhere, the more profitable it is to be that Elsewhere. Or maybe elsewhere is run by enthusiasts or interested parties or some non-profit model.
It is interesting how the vast majority of the Internet is assumed to be ad funded. Do we want or need this part of the Internet? Company web sites, the banks, the universities, non-profits, the politicians, the individuals, online shopping, would all still be there without ads. Lots of existing paid services would still be there, and possibly become huge as the cost of their competition stops being 'free'. Ads stopped funding blogs long ago, replaced by subscriptions and Patreon.
I run my site (personal blog) paying for it from my pocket and not running any ads or analytics. It is much simpler and cheaper then it was 20 years ago.
The web will become only better if more people would do this.
We've been there before.
When Webwasher was popular in the beginnings of the popular internet time, it was a wide spread program in Germany. PC magazines recommended it, everybody was talking about it. German Internetz survived. Nothing of value was lost.
Let's wait first if Firefox itself will be able to become prevalent enough.
And these sites hurt us with their surveillance capitalism and deceitful marketing nobody asked for. They have only themselves to blame for abusing our trust and good will.
If they don't like the fact we haven't paid for their content, all they need to do is return HTTP 402 Payment Required. If they try to make us pay through ads, we'll just delete them. Nobody is obligated to look at or click on this stuff for the sake of some site's revenue. When we buy a magazine, we can rip out the advertising pages and throw them in the trash.
> I don't see how these sites will survive
Maybe they shouldn't survive if they can't come up with a business model that doesn't involve shipping 10 megabytes of ads and tracking people's every move.
> Will the government move to rule adblocking illegal?
Governments barely manage to keep copyright infringement under control despite the lobbying of multi-billion dollar industries. Surely they have better things to do than police what browser extensions people use.
> Will websites engage in sophisticated technical anti-adblock measures?
Most likely. It is an arms race.
(Source: Their Github page)
uBO mainly blocks tracking, not ads. If ads were not that privacy-invading, there would be no problem. If uBO was prevalent, ads would still be there but probably less tracking would be involved.
> uBlock Origin is NOT an "ad blocker": it is a wide-spectrum blocker -- which happens to be able to function as a mere "ad blocker". The default behavior of uBlock Origin when newly installed is to block ads, trackers and malware sites
There is nothing here indicating that uBO "mainly" blocks trackers. It blocks malicious content which includes ads. The quote even suggests that it does primarily block ads as that's what people care about and install uBO for.
Entrenched players, like Amazon, will become more entrenched.
Medium and smaller websites will move to more affiliate marketing, "influencer" monetization, and perhaps subscriptions.
It will force new business models, perhaps ones that doesn't just rely on eye-ball/attention seeking for the sake of ad impressions. And once a few pay-sites/subscriptions etc paves the way, it'll be easier to create services online that you can charge for. And now you can focus on making quality, valuable content.
People gladly pay $10 for a beer, but paying the same for some type of quality information service is a ridiculous proposition. The expectation of "free" created by the ad model plays a big part in that.
All pro users adblock. Which means it's slowly but surely on the way to the mainstream.
I'd expect to see most users here realise this dependence and start to defend their livelihood. However most people here (myself included) hate ads, and use blockers wherever possible.
Twitter, Facebook, et. al. have the engineering resources to get creative and devise solutions (such as inlining advertising in such a way to make it computationally difficult to divorce it from desired content---YouTube, for example, has control of the video source and if necessary could start splicing ads directly into the video vended to users in a way indistinguishable from the content itself). The firms that can't afford to do that are small newspapers, individual developers, etc. They'll either pay their own way to put content up, GoFundMe a support base for their content, or give up and do something else.
The result will probably be a more centralized and perhaps less diverse world wide web. Content-agnostic advertising made a lot of room for "little ideas" to find footing. Without a similar model to that, web content defaults to a patronage model for every piece of content that isn't immediately monetizable. This is how the web worked before content-agnostic advertising (i.e. you only put up content if you were in the government, military, university, or paid someone with access to the backbone) and we could go back to that model, but it'd be a smaller web for it.
If video ad blockers take off enough to impact that technological solution, they'll shift to embedding ads directly by modifying the video content itself, because after the up-front cost it becomes win-win for them; the ad blockers will turn a tech like that into a "moat" that YT et. al. can use to keep competing video services at bay. Then the ad blockers will iterate to do their own crowd-source digital fingerprinting of ad content and time-skip around in the video, so the ad companies will iterate to make ads hard to fingerprint or onerous to successfully time skip, etc.
Each step in this arms race creates another technological moat to make YT more ad-revenue-viable than possible competitors, who will have to operate on some other revenue stream (and what that revenue stream could be is unclear---subscription model, so only those with disposable income can view videos? Creator-supported model, so only those with disposable income can upload?).
The forums and hobby websites I spend most of my time on don't advertise, and easily survive on voluntary donations. We even have built in hosting for user uploaded pictures and videos, so we're not relying on any external services at all. I've met a lot of close friends through these sites, and have done a lot of collaboration. And even more goofing off ;)
For the non-WWW real time stuff, I also use a lot of IRC, which has always managed to be free for the end user and ad-free. And more recently Discord does the same thing without ads (I pay for Nitro, but regular users don't have to).
I also use Reddit and Facebook a lot, not because I think those sites offer anything particularly valuable to me, but because of network effects. I don't think these offer anything particularly compelling that couldn't be offered by non-ad supported services.
The "big one" in my mind is video sites such as Youtube, I don't know how they could survive if a very high percentage of their users were blocking their ads. I pay for their premium ad-free service, but am among a small minority willing or able to do that. Can their business model work purely on premium subscriptions that offer extra perks? It seems like it only barely balances out right now, and I don't think the cost of hosting all these videos will become dirt cheap anytime soon.
Some websites will earn their keep. I'm not shy about throwing money to my favorite streamers, the newspapers I enjoy when they have reasonable subscription prices, and supporting the game servers and hobbyist websites I care about.
Some websites won't earn their keep. The bazillion listacle (Top 10 ways to naturally cure cancer!) websites probably won't survive. I'm ok with this.
- We've seen what a Web with few/no ads or uselessly-low-paying ads looks like and it was totally fine.
We already know the answer to this because we saw it in the days of the early web: advertisements on web pages will be pictures and/or text served from the exact same FQDN as the website itself.
The problem has never been how to serve ads - it's trivially easy to insert an <img src> and perhaps size it randomly, etc. Or you can just put in a text block.
The hard part is the ad networks and the user tracking and the analytics. These are the parts that are difficult to self-host or self-provide. Their absence will cause ads to be relatively less valuable and less user-hostile.
The companies which do the best job of preventing ad blocking while minimizing disruption to users will survive. Those which ignore the problem and allow ad blocking or those which are too aggressive and annoy users with their countermeasures will die. Companies which don't rely on ad revenue will stand to gain. The extent of this gain will depend on how far the war escalates and how much worse of a user experience ad-supported sites become as a result.
The resulting war will slowly escalate, with ad-supported sites becoming a bigger and bigger pain to use until one of several things happens. Either:
A. Enough sites are successful in forcing users to disable their ad blockers that running an ad blocker becomes a bigger pain than it's worth, and as a result adblocking usage declines enough that the old status quo is restored (except that running an adblocker will be a much bigger pain than before for those who choose to continue using one).
B. Governments pass laws restricting the use of ad blockers, and those laws are sufficiently effective to reduce ad blocking usage to a level where the old status quo is restored (except running an ad blocker will be more difficult and/or legally dubious than before).
C. Governments pass laws banning the use of anti-ad-blocking technology. Millions of ad supported companies which are affected by these laws go out of business. (See other comments in this thread for assessments of how that might turn out.) Sites which are unaffected by the laws (or which can get away with breaking them) continue the war. Repeat.
D. Anti-ad-blocking tech reaches a level of sophistication where companies start deploying full-fledged DRM to protect their content from users who use ad blockers. Circumventing DRM is illegal under existing law. See option B for the result.
E. Ad-blocking tech becomes so sophisticated that any and all technically viable countermeasures are either so expensive to develop or so annoying to users (even users who don't use adblockers) that most ad supported businesses are no longer economically viable. See other answers in this thread for the result.
Maybe clickbait will die out. Which is what the ads are paying for, supporting the shittiest side of the internet. I say, good riddance.
If they can stop tracking me that would be great, I am already not blocking image links, which is what an advertisement should be, so the door is in fact wide open and the ball is in their court. Newspapers could have just continued their old ad model, but nooooo they had to buy into the spammy tracking 5MB javascript bullshit, what a shame because that shit gets blocked.
I feel absolutely zero responsibility to the parties that shit all over the web, and those who went into business with them. They just took whatever they wanted and shoved tracking and ads in my face, as if it somehow paid for what was clearly already there, there was no agreement, no consent for exchanging X for my privacy and attention, nothing. Just pure greed and pollution.
So yeah, I really do hope that it's going to be incredibly difficult for anybody who thinks it's okay to make money off of people this way. Which also includes all those people who complain it's too much work to use something slightly more ethical than Google Analytics, they can drown in their own mess.
Nobody asked "what will happen to the web when we shit ads and trackers all over it".
But all the tracking and privacy invasion that comes along with that? No thank you.
When was the last time a browser vulnerability was actively exploited at any significant scale?
So I can't shake the feeling this is really more of a post-hoc rationalisation for people not entirely comfortable to screw over creators in the rather selfish pursuit of personal comfort.
It would then redirect money by modifying the target bank account when the user paid bills or whatnot. The web page looked entirely as it should, it would just modify the request before it got sent.
Now, the user had to have Java installed you might say, so not a big deal. Well, big deal, because the same bank, the most popular one, _required_ Java for signing in to their online bank.
Fortunately the breach was noticed fairly quickly and the harm was limited. But after that I decided no more ads.
http://www.deependresearch.org/2012/08/java-7-0-day-vulnerab...
Trying to find the original article I read, the bookmark I had no longer works :(
Said bank has since moved away from Java to a JavaScript solution for their two-factor login.
But yeah, the main problem with ads is that the ones displaying ads have no idea what they're sending to their users.
i absolutely hate youtube ads, but at the same time, i want people these content creators that i watch to get some money from my view.
so for the ones i think are "worth", i use patreon. for the others, youtube premium.
It makes me wonder how people without an adblocker can even browse the web.
Better yet, make it so that, when I "turn off" my adblocker, it's turning on this restricted-browser-API sandbox instead. Then, if the page still doesn't work, I could turn on a "compatibility mode" that would load the page with full API permissions.
At first thought it might be something like "sandbox javascript to the DOM".
Relatedly, I don't know if there is a common name for the part of a tabbed browser which implements policy and defaults above the level of individual tabs. In some sense it is a kind of shell and sandboxer (?). Do we need a more shell-agnostic approach??
You forgot "messing with clipboard to add `See more at {URL}`" when you ctrl+C stuff.
Listen, if a webpage deserves attention, I'll make attribution manually, but if you try to force it via clipboard, I'll make sure to remove it, again, manually
It can be done using uBlock but it's cumbersome and I always forget which buttons to press.
Is be willing to let ads enabled on most sites but I'd like to block the worst offenders (video autoplay, overlays etc.)
I'm using this method today but it's annoying and I always forget which "squares" to tick in uBlock.
That's a new record. Thank you to the all the developers who have contributed their time to that project.
Enjoy the happy ending :-)
The title of this post could be clearer, lest people (like me) get confused and think of it as uBlock Origin being merged into Firefox Preview.
Edit : I clarified by saying that uBlock Origin can now be installed.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-compatibility-firef...
> We are currently building support for an initial selection of Recommended Extensions for Firefox Preview. These extensions are expected to be officially supported for Firefox Preview during the first half of 2020.
Thanks a lot for the thankless task of moderating HN.
Huge pain, but it's fun.
uBlock I run with near-zero configuration tweaks, only enabling a few additional lists.
uMatrix I run in a much more restrictive mode (block all 3rd party, along with first party scripts and XHRs). Then I selectively unblock to unbreak sites.
In this way, uMatrix is my primary line of defense, and uBlock is a backup, in case I accidentally unblock an ad/malware domain when trying to unbreak a site. It also allows me to temporarily allow all with uMatrix if I just want a site to work, without enabling ads, etc.
That's exactly what I do too. You get better at knowing the likely candidates for what you need to unblock, but payment on a new site (or a modified since you last used it site) can be annoying.
Incidentally it has also led to me being both undercharged (client-side upping of the price wrt quantity) and double charged ('failed' transaction, unblock something, try again, turned out they actually both went through).
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/162#issuecomm...
> Automatic privacy is here.
They "care" about it, but they don't care about it.
Besides, F-Droid is a canary - if you can't get your app into F-Droid, in any capacity, then it's not free software. If you won't do what it takes to get it into F-Droid, you've also staked your colors in the ground - that you don't care about that value system, or about users who have that value system. The message is clear: "Digital serfs only - digital yeomans need not apply".
I'm cautiously optimistic. Do you know if NoScript works?
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/06/27/reinventi...
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix
uBlock Origin is currently available in the nightly channel of Firefox Preview:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...
And that will be pretty soon: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2020/01/17/a-brand-n...
After the last update the "undo" notification at the bottom sometimes doesn't disappear, which is annoyingly placed over the address bar and menu button. There's also no way to manually dismiss the "undo" notification.
Despite all this it has by far the nicest user experience of an Android browser so I stick with it in the hopes one day it won't be super buggy. I'm sure that day will come.
https://firefox-ci-tc.services.mozilla.com/api/queue/v1/task...
Worth pointing out that Firefox Preview is set to replace current Firefox within the next 5 months, add-on support will probably arrive a version or two after that.
"Full add-on support will be available in late 2020." "The Firefox for Android Beta and general release migrations will follow and the final migration will occur in Spring 2020."
Mozilla were cagey about this for a while, but this doesn't come as a surprise to any of the many people who predicted they would do this.
Those of you unaware what FF bookmarks has to offer see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
Otheewise FF preview is since 6 months my android go-to browser. I missed nothing during that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS
But does this mean that extensions will never work on iOS ?