Hacker News Reader

Comment by KevinMS | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't it bother anybody that Chrome is made by ad company?

The way I see it, if everybody started using ad blockers like I do, google would implode almost instantly. So how would they combat that? Control the platform for viewing the web and be positioned to kill ad blockers if it ever became a problem.

Would you buy a DVR controlled by a television network? That would be insane, as soon as DVRs ate too much into their revenues they would just kill the skipping feature.

But because of the abundance of chrome fanboys, this is just what is happening, and everybody is looking the other way.

A little while ago we had a big company doing everything they could to control the "personal computer" platform, even evil things, and illegal things, and now there's another company trying to control the internet as a platform and a lot of you hackers are eating it up, I'm just baffled.

View on HN

Doesn't it bother anybody

A little, but do be aware that (i) Mozilla is 83% financed [] by search royalties from that same ad company, and (ii) Chromium has a somewhat independent developer community

Making money from ads is also not evil: you are probably served by a local newspaper which is probably both good for your neighbourhood and financed mostly or entirely by ads. This stream of revenue comes with conflicts of interest, but these can be handled better or worse. I think Google has done pretty well in this; at least my criticisms of Google mostly do not lie here.

[] http://www.extremetech.com/internet/92558-how-browsers-make-...

For most people, myself included, it's not about the ads as such, it's more the tracking that goes with it. I'd happily see ads all day if they didn't track me, but they do, so I use adblocking. Should I unblock the sites I like? Yes, I should, but it's just too much work so I leave it on permanently.

If you could be sure the tracking was used only to present more relevant and useful ads to you, would you change your mind?

Yes, absolutely. I actually realize I'm missing a significant amount of opportunity right now by not seeing Google ads for products I could make use of, so yes. However, I don't want my IP or anything identifying me in particular associated with my ads.

Potential opportunity here to make a special adblock which tracks user using an anonymous ID code? Essentially acting as a trustable middleman in the equation?

Well, instead of adblocking everything, you can use something like ghostery http://www.ghostery.com/ to block all tracking.

Doesn't addblock just blocks the adds so you don't see it, but you are still being tracked?

Would you rent a DVR from Comcast? Thousands of people do.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-01/comcast-takeover-of...

I don't care at all.

If google does something like that it wouldn't take long until someone forks Chrome.

I take it you use Chromium then?

Yes. Most Linux distributions include Chromium instead of Chrome.

I use Chrome because it is an absolutely excellent browser. It gets a lot of things right that others do not, and it is (mostly) open source.

Since you brought up television companies controlling DVR's, I will make an attempt to extend upon that. Would you use a DVR controlled by a television network if it was significantly better than a DVR of any other nature? I have no problems admitting that I would, and I feel that a lot of others would as well. That is how I relate Chrome to other browsers. Sure, its controlled by an ad company, but it's also an absolutely fantastic product that includes a lot of features that make my day much less stressful than using "other" browsers, especially as a developer.

If Google wants to start killing off the AdBlock extension, then they can do that. It's their product and they can do whatever they want to, but that also means I have the freedom of jumping ship and using Firefox. Chrome has gotten its popularity among this crowd because they have made consistently good decisions when it comes to features, ui changes, etc.

Going back to DVR's, if a television company wants to release a product and then take away features that user's have had from the start, then fine. It's their decision. But remember, Sony did it with the PS3 and look how that turned out. There is almost always another choice, and that is especially true in the browser market.

the thing is, imagine a world where Chrome has 70% userbase, IE 20% and Firefox 10%. When Chrome decides of a new features, others must follow or die.

Now, it's easy to think of features that sounds "technically useful" but also "going to bring a lot more ad traffic / much less privacy".

Heck, why not make 3rd party cookies mandatory for example? :>

And if Google can't win through the browser war, they will try other fronts, like they do with NativeClient, which is a good lock-in, because others will not want to implement it.

I do share your concerns but I still use Chrome more often than Firefox because Firefox has some annoying issues on the Mac that don't seem to go away (stalling text entry and scrolling after a few hours of uptime being the worst)

I'm keeping a close eye on what Chrome does in terms of privacy related settings. The moment I feel that Google does indeed leverage Chrome to spy on me more than they would otherwise be able to, I'm back on Firefox. After all, Chrome has some very annoying issues of its own (window switching is broken on pages with Flash vids, and Flash keeps crashing more often than in other browsers)

I'm not convinced that blocking all ads helps my privacy interests though. The alternative to ad funding is a paid subscription model which takes away privacy altogether.

No, it doesn't bother me that Chrome is made by a company that makes money by serving ads. In fact, Google is using some of the ad money to fund the development of the webrequest API [1], which allows me to fully block the ads that they (and others) are serving.

The simple fact is that Chrome serves my web browsing needs wonderfully, so I use it as my primary browser. If the day comes that this is no longer true, I will just switch back to Firefox, or whatever awesome browser emerges between now and then.

[1] http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/experimental....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com