Honestly I hope Google go through with this as it will direct people to Firefox so they can continue using ad-blockers like uBlock Origin.
I don't know how many will come but if Google wants to implode their plugin ecosystem in favour of more advertising, and if that action increases Firefox adoption (and thus a healthy browser ecosystem via competition) then I am for it.
It might be 1%, best case. Most people are just clueless and think loads of ads are normal. Talking to them about ad-blockers usually goes nowhere in my experience. They don't even know what browser they're using; they just click on the Chrome icon and think it's the "internet icon".
I think you are underestimating how annoying ads are. I was in a german forum today on my mobile phone and the ads jumped into view for a second and then jumped back out again while I was scrolling. I can't imagine that anyone puts up with this for long. I thought that most people would stay with inferior adblockers but it only takes a couple of such extremely annoying ads to make it through for you to start googling for an improvement.
>I think you are underestimating how annoying ads are.
I think you're underestimating just how much annoyance the general public will put up with. Look at how popular streaming services are, even though they're constantly removing content. I see people complain about it all the time, but they keep signing up for more services.
There's no need to convince them. Just install Firefox with uBlock Orign on their machine and set it as default. I guarantee they'll enjoy the new and improved web.
Can confirm. I helped my dad switch from a Chromebook to an M1 MacBook Air. He made the comment that it was like going from a moped to a Cadillac. I thought he was talking about how good the Mac is. But he was in fact talking about the fact that I had installed a default browser with ad-blockers.
Yeah. I install uBlock Origin on every browser I come across. Everybody tells me how much better the web is afterwards. Most of the time they can't even articulate why. I know why.
That's the problem: you have to do it for them, without even being asked. They aren't going to ask for it themselves, because they don't even understand that ads can be blocked. So the whole thing depends on these non-technical people having technical family members to do this stuff for them.
If ad blocking really became a significant problem, the next big change I suspect is server-side ad network integration for ad serving.
Architecturally, it is definitely possible to interleave ads from an ad network into your server's http3 response stream by doing server-side ad network integration. Only the measurement needs to be client-side and directly integrated with ad network, if at all.
The same underlying mechanism used for content security policy can be used for ensuring integrity of ad content even when not served directly by the ad network. So, any domain/url/path/extension/dom-id etc based ad blocking mechanism isn't going to work.
Very likely this will result in superior technical performance (latency and measurement), and superior ad performance (due to richer backend data integration and better ad selection). It is just a matter of time.
Quite possibly. Google and the other major players are reluctant to do that because it's much, much harder to do a server side integration solution without compromising user privacy by handing the third party owning that server a lot of intimate knowledge about the ads being served to a customer. Under the current system, your privacy is protected because the only place that integrates your browsing habits and the ads you're seeing is actually your browser.
I'm sure that such intimate server side integration will eventually result in legislative pushback for privacy protection, and the measure-countermeasure game will continue.
I do believe that Google doesn't want ads served through the site that's actually being visited, because it reduces Google's visibility into what's going on, which affects both Google's semi-legitimate interests, like being able to detect click fraud, and Google's total control over information that might be used for targeting.
I also believe that many of the sites don't want that, especially the smaller ones. It'd be more complicated for them to set up, and would mean they needed more bandwidth.
I do NOT believe that Google actually cares enough about user's privacy per se to do much about it. If that were the case, Google itself wouldn't collect about 95 percent of what it actually does collect.
> Google and the other major players are reluctant to do that because it's much, much harder to do a server side integration solution without compromising user privacy by handing the third party owning that server a lot of intimate knowledge about the ads being served to a customer.
They might be able to address this by flipping things around. Instead of the ad service providing ads to the content provider for the content provider to them embed in the content and server, have the content provider provide content to the ad service which then puts in the ads and serves the content.
Let's say content provider foo.com wants ads from Google. One way this could be done is for foo.com to organize their site so that any pages they want ads on come from content.foo.com. They would set content.foo.com to point to a server run by Google. That server would provide a way for foo.com to put their content there, with some mechanism for Google to do the ad integration and then serve the pages.
In the current status quo, there is a data détente that keeps either solution from happening: advertisers don't want to give third-party websites intimate knowledge of ads vended because they don't want to compromise user privacy (or more cynically: they don't want to give third-party sites so much info about what ads are run to what users that those sites cut out the middle-man and just broker adds to run for users directly). But third-party sites don't want to give intimate details of users of their site to ad companies for symmetrical reasons (Google has dipped its toe into social media before).
If the industry moves to a place where only server-injected ads are profitable, something will surely give here. The end result will be more large conglomerates knowing more about us than ever before, unfortunately.
> If ad blocking really became a significant problem, the next big change I suspect is server-side ad network integration for ad serving.
I'm surprised that's not already the case. Well, not that surprised, it's a business where at least one of sides is scum and server-side makes it a hell lot easier to cheat
The problem with server side ad insertion as you call it is the lack of accountability.
It gives way too much power to the publisher: they want the ad money and therefore have all the incentives to commit fraud.
At the moment, having the ad distributed by a third party and a ton of other third party JS in the browser allow all parties involved to cross check each other.
The bot problem would be way worse with server side.
We've been really lucky so far that most marketing departments don't seem to interact with the core codebase when it comes to injecting ads, they just get a Tag Manager and can inject as many ads as they like.
Yes, platforms like cloudflare worker can be used to inject personalized ads into html before it served to visitors. It's likely to be much cheaper than forgoing cache and process ads on your web server for every visitor.
I can see that happening and that could be a good way to remove all that JS nightmare and provide better visibility on perf impact, eventually improving overall user-experience.
In the meantime, someone will build adblocker undoing what has been done server-side. And if this is hard to detect, that will be based on training/model. Data integration will be subject to GDPR.
Sure, but if their was anything I was to believe was a tiny minority of users it would be opting out of telemetry. If they are under 10-20% they wont sway the end result enough to matter, and I really expect they are.
According to many ad networks today just using Firefox is "ad-blocking" because it is not Chrome and is missing Chrome features.
I know I'm satisfied with Firefox built-in Enhanced Tracking Protection, so I don't have an extension installed for "ad blocking", but my problem is not ads but ad trackers. I don't mind "non-personalized, non-targeted" ads and I welcome them in many cases, but I do mind ad trackers and I loathe any attempt at "personalized" ads.
(Though I don't have 0 extensions installed even then, I like Tree Tab Plus and Multi-Account Container. Multi-Account Container is of course another reason the ad networks believe I "block ads" even though I technically do not. It seems better for me that Google, Twitter, and Facebook accounts are never logged in at the same time in the same tab.)
> Mozilla has renewed its lucrative nine-figure deal with Google to ensure its search engine is the default in Firefox in the US and other parts of the world.
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> Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement
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> More than 90 per cent of Mozilla's funding comes from web search providers that pay for the right to be the default search engine in Firefox in their regions. According to the organization's latest financial figures, $430m of its 2018 total revenue of $451m came from those internet giants – primarily Google
Google may try to enforce MV3 on Firefox. 90% of Mozilla's income comes from Google and while Google needs this controlled opposition, they may lower their input to almost-suffocate Mozilla whenever they desire.
Firefox has already announced support for v3, even though it's not implementing the changes to WebRequest that is causing the most heartache, and they will continue to support v2.
They want to have puppet that makes it look like they're not a monopoly on the market. That doesn't really work if the puppet is so niche companies stop even supporting it
That doesn't make sense. If you can control the other person's moves directly like that, then you're clearly a monopoly already. Nobody actually has a choice.
Yeah no, modifying logic of a binary application as large and complex as modern web browsers is slightly more involved than the Discord frontend mods that essentially just tweak some CSS and or HTML and JavaScript.
This. I didn't mean to imply that Discord modding is as easy as Chrome modding. All I meant to say is that people are willing to mod Discord with random .exes so they'd do the same with Chrome.
What about all the people with Chromebooks? If they want to use Firefox, their choices are either doing all of their browsing inside of a container that's itself inside of a VM, taking apart the Chromebooks and removing the developer screw to be able to replace the OS, or buying new computers. I expect approximately 0% of them to do any of those things.
Something else, I meant most people use defaults and are not educated enough to rely on them finding firefox and using it, you have to market it to them.
I imagine you didn't take the time to understand Manifest v3 criticism.
Nobody claims they won't work at all, they'll just be crappier than they are now, which boils down to two reasons: Manifest v3 introduces limits to filter list size + pattern matching isn't as flexible.
And Firefox has stated multiple times so far that they're going to keep current content blocking APIs, meaning that once Manifest v3 rolls out, adblockers will work better than they will on Chromium-based browsers.
> Nobody claims they won't work at all, they'll just be crappier than they are now, which boils down to two reasons: Manifest v3 introduces limits to filter list size + pattern matching isn't as flexible.
Can you show this objectively through experiments or are you just assuming it won't be as good?
> they call it uBlock Origin Lite for a reason
Nowhere on that extension does it say it's any worse. It's a work in progress, it makes sense to call it something else. You're reaching and pressing your own assumptions as truths that have no backing.
> Many users of uBO will dislike the limitations of uBOL when compared to uBO.
If gorhill says it's inferior, I'm strongly inclined to say it's inferior. Obviously some form of blocking is possible, but degradation is degradation. (And assuming that anyone who disagrees with you must be ignorant is ... impolite.)
I think you're really overestimating Firefox's influence. Firefox has less than 4% browser share. Even less than Edge! This is also a change to Chromium itself and not just Chrome so even those Edge users will be affected
At the time, it was a common talking point that Firefox never got beyond 25% market share. I’m not sure why statcounter has questionable data for that period.
Here’s a Mozilla blog post from 2009 celebrating hitting 25%:
It rose because Internet Explorer sucked and us technical folks made our relatives switch along with ourselves.
Same story with Chrome: pre-Quantum, Firefox was getting pretty slow and Chrome was the new, fast kid on the block, so we changed browsers and dragged the tech-illiterate along.
It's time for this to happen again. The Chromium monopoly is bad for the open web, and now that Google has consolidated power, they're using it to push ads.
It's time we switch back to the only viable, truly open source alternative and drag all our acquaintances along.
>It's time we switch back to the only viable, truly open source alternative and drag all our acquaintances along.
I can tell you with absolute certainty it won't happen, at least so long as we're talking about Firefox as the alternative in this kind of manner, and here's why:
Both the Firefox and Chrome usurpations happened organically without too much ideological dogma getting tossed around. It just happened: IE6 sucked ass, Firefox was great, usurped. Firefox (read: Mozilla) became putrid after usurping the throne, Chrome was great(ish), usurper usurped. It was all ultimately just happenstance, the commons did commons things.
Contrast now, where Firefox is being thrown around by a select handful as the supposed returning saviour with dogmatic fervor. As a witness of the original usurpations, I will say this isn't what happened ~15 years ago and it is impossible to force something to become a thing.
Chrome will eventually be usurped, but it's probably not going to be Firefox and it's going to happen regardless whether anyone forces the issue or not.
Ad blockers need to make no attempt to function at all with MV3. They should maybe even go out of their way to not work. Any ad blocker installed on chrome should just bring up a message that said (not 100% truthfully) that ad blocking can't be made to work on Chrome, please go to Firefox to continue ad free browsing.
This will shift a lot of users. Especially the more technical ones who then tell their less tech savvy friends and when they go home for Thanksgiving they can just install Firefox on dad's computer so he stops falling for stupid scam ads.
This can work, and I think work pretty well. This does not mean that Firefox is the end all, be all. That hypothetical usurper browser you mention can still swoop in and scoop up the new Firefox users as well as the poor saps who stayed on Chrome.
Ideology, much less deception, is not how you convince the commons on something as mundane as a web browser. Firefox didn't usurp IE6 because it was FOSS, Firefox won because it was straight up better.
Likewise, any contender to Chrome today must demonstrate objective, practical superiority (and be honest about it). The commons don't know nor care what FOSS is, arguing FOSS to the commons is a fool's errand.
I appreciate gorhill, a trusted name, took the initiative to release a MV3 adblocker, because that simple act stopped fools like you who would readily deceive users to force an issue.
Also, pro tip: Deception doesn't last for long, and once it comes to light you are never regaining that lost trust and respect.
As long as the few people with the skills to make a (very watered down, thanks to Google) adblocker for mv3 don't. Then for the average user the statement "you can't block ads on Chrome" approximates to true.
If the hobbled ad blockers get made anyway then the effect pushing to Firefox will be lesser but still there. Especially since ad networks will not be able to restrain themselves from abusing the initial crack in the door and users find themselves staring at more and more ads.
15 years ago people were using PCs to surf the internet.
Now a huge portion of net traffic is mobile devices. Those are far more locked down. It is not as easy to install and use a new browser on IOS or Android devices.
People around here seem to forget that for a large number of internet users a phone or tablet is their primary interface.
I'm using Firefox on Android right now, including ublock. I just got it from the Play Store.
It might be trickier on iOS, but that's not a technical limitation and imo an antitrust case waiting to happen. We'll see if the Digital Markets Act forces their hand.
To be fair, the problem was predictable already in 2010, so switching to Chrome was a bad idea in the first place. I understood it for webdevs, Googles tools were a bit better very quickly, even if that was a domain for FF previously.
This is very true and I think it is often understated, the influence that we developers have over the spread of a certain trend or technology through the mechanism you described.
Now imagine if you're a company that have 50k or 100k developers on payroll. Even that alone will actually spread your influence if you indoctrinate them right, might be worth hiring them just to double down on that influence, even if you may not necessarily need them.
It is a little surprising it was only 30%. For a while their a significant portion of websites only worked on FF, and most said something like "designed for FF" at the bottom.
I don't know how many will come but if Google wants to implode their plugin ecosystem in favour of more advertising, and if that action increases Firefox adoption (and thus a healthy browser ecosystem via competition) then I am for it.