this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024

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661

Google is Killing uBlock Origin. No Chromium Browser is Safe. (www.quippd.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

269 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We’ve been anticipating it for years, and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.

Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.

I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and it seems to me that we aren’t getting good information about this topic.

This post is me trying to give you that information, to help increase the mind share of an actual alternative. Enjoy!

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Can we ban bot-posted articles with incomplete body text?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Who's a bot?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Seriously. We don't need bot bullshit on Lemmy.

This is the start of the slide for Reddit is just going to be worse here because there are fewer controls to actually detect and do something about bots.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (6 children)

It blows my mind that there are major companies that are actively, and very publicly- working their asses off to undermine the interests of their own customer base. And not only are they still are enabled to exist- they’re profits are constantly growing. Which means, despite their nefarious and intrusive updates to their services…. People are eating it up!

Nothing will change until people do the work to make that change.

Take YouTube for example:

They have screwed people over time and again. From their content creators, to those that enjoy watching them. Yet- those that hate it so much would seemingly never organize themselves to boycott their services on a level that will ever hurt them.

So they continue to do it unstopped.

Nothing changes until something changes. It isn’t ever easy, but if you want it to happen badly enough, it is always worth it.

All it takes is for someone to stand up and take the reins!

(I cannot be that person as I have ADHD and will probably forget that I wrote this come later this afternoon)

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (8 children)

Can I just add a different perspective on this?

My dad is really old (like early baby-boomers), and I am basically the in-family tech support when the home computer starts acting strange.

Well, right after google rolled out this update, my dad clicked on what he thought was an online shopping link. It was actually an ad for a toolbar add-on. ~~Queue~~ Cue like 6+ hours trying to uninstall that add-on and the bundled software.

I never had to worry about that in the past with him because I had u-block origin installed. Now I need to find something else that can run quietly in the background. And probably a better antivirus.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Buy a Raspberry PI, install PiHole or AdGuard, change router DNS, and you are good to go. Yes, not perfect, but doesn't rely on a browser extension that can go extinct next time the browser decides it is time for a change.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (7 children)

.... or use Firefox and migrate their bookmarks.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

That's what I ended up doing. It was a weird conversation though, telling him that if it seemed like some website wasn't working, try it on chrome and it just might work

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

You're awesome!

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Is there any organization out there that could actually promote an "Acceptable ad standard"? Like, maybe even something within web specs?

A long time ago, ads were slightly irritating, rarely useful, and considered a necessary evil for gently monetizing the web. We've had this slow evolution to draconian tracking nightmares that are genuinely dangerous and often written by malicious untraceable actors. I almost feel like we could pressure back towards decent ads if there was some standard by which they only received basic info about the user, showed basic info about a product, didn't pollute the experience or ruin accessibility, and were registered to businesses by physical address with legal accountability for things like false advertising.

That is...perhaps a vain hope though. It's just hard to picture futures where all websites run off of donations or subscriptions, because advertising is fucking hell now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You mean like https://acceptableads.com/ which is only supported so far by Adblock Plus (and its parent company)?

The problem is until there is some kind of penalty for being too annoying or too resource consuming, it will always be a race to the bottom with more, worse ads. As people add ad blockers to their browsers, the user pool that isn't running them begins to dry up and more ads are needed to keep the same revenue. This results in even more people blocking them.

Two of the things I had hope for on the privacy side was Mozilla's Privacy-Preserving Attribution for ad attribution and Google's Privacy Sandbox collection of features for targeting like the Topics API. Both would have been better for privacy than the current system of granular, individual user tracking across sites.

If those two get wide enough adoption, regulation could be put in place to limit the old methods as there would be a better replacement available without killing the whole current ad supported economy of most sites. I get that strictly speaking from a privacy perspective 'more anonymous/private tracking' < 'no tracking' but I really don't want perfect to be the enemy of better.