Google's Chrome Ad Blocking Arrives Tomorrow (theverge.com) 211
Google is enabling its built-in ad blocker for Chrome tomorrow (February 15th). From a report: Chrome's ad filtering is designed to weed out some of the web's most annoying ads, and push website owners to stop using them. Google is not planning to wipe out all ads from Chrome, just ones that are considered bad using standards from the Coalition for Better Ads. Full page ads, ads with autoplaying sound and video, and flashing ads will be targeted by Chrome's ad filtering, which will hopefully result in less of these annoying ads on the web. Google is revealing today exactly what ads will be blocked, and how the company notifies site owners before a block is put in place. On desktop, Google is planning to block pop-up ads, large sticky ads, auto-play video ads with sound, and ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads. Google is being more aggressive about its mobile ad blocking, filtering out pop-up ads, ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown), auto-play video ads with sound, large sticky ads, flashing animated ads, fullscreen scroll over ads, and ads that are particularly dense.
Anti competitive (Score:5, Insightful)
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For annoying ads, yes
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And it defines which are annoying.
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Gotta start somewhere
Re:Anti competitive (Score:4)
Or force them to ditch annoying auto-playing audio/video ads and pop-ups/pop-unders, etc.
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Are those still a thing?
The most annoying things I get are the position:absolute divs that has the ad cover my content, having to find where they placed the x button.
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Find those more on my smartphone than on my computer browsers anymore
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Or force them to ditch annoying auto-playing audio/video ads and pop-ups/pop-unders, etc.
Not really. According to TFA, ads will have a grace period of 30 days before they are blocked, so plenty of annoyware will get through. Also, the standards are weak: autoplaying videos will be allowed as long as the are silent. Flashing ads are blocked on mobile devices, but not on desktops. Etc.
I'll stick with my 3rd party blocker.
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Yep, don't trust only the source of many ads :)
Third party apps work wonders too
Re:Anti competitive (Score:5, Interesting)
Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.
If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws. They have a near monopoly situation and the European Union, as one example of places where laws are still enforced, has already made judgements against them.
The reason that Google is doing this is simple. The advertising industry has become so dangerous and dirty, serving malware and other garbage, that a computer without an ad-blocker installed is a clear security risk and most major companies are coming to realise that. In recent years malvertising has become one of the leading methods to attack companies. As other ad-blockers go mainstream Google's main business, selling advertising space, is being threatened. This is more or less the last throw of the dice for the advertising industry
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Not really.
Although this ad blocker has good intentions, it's likely to be undermined by the very same algorithm bullshit that plagues youtube's demonitization and copyright strikes. Basically it doesn't know shit and expects you to do all the work.
On most sites, all it takes to block ads is to find what script invokes it, and block the address of it. That's what we have all been doing for over 15 years to block ads using the host files. ublock/adblock only started making ad shit worse because the people bl
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Why should it be the responsibility of Amazon Web Services to police other people's content, outside of legal DMCA Safe Harbor type exceptions? And what does that look like, anyway? Constantly scanning all of every S3 region for anything you don't like? Or that they don't like? Or that someone arbitrarily decides they don't like? And what does your "vetting" entail? Credit checks? Background checks? What the fuck does that look like?
If they were scanning and selectively blocking stuff being served f
Re:Anti competitive (Score:5, Insightful)
Its kind of critical at the moment.
A friend of mine is a journalist who makes his living off the website he writes for now that the newspaper it sprung out of has died. That means he's 100% dependent on ads to pay the rent (The sites fairly opposed to paywalls). So understandably he's got a bee in his bonnet about ad blockers.
My self on the other hand actively advocate people using full strength no exception ad blocking, simply because I've had on more than one occasion been pwned by zero days sprung out of advertisements dropping malware on my machines without my consent. In the current deeply unethical state of internet advertising, its just too dangerous to permit ads in my browsers.
And so we have a problem. Because without good writers and content makers being able to make a living off their trade, we're going to lose a lot of the good content on the net to paywalls, and a lot of content makers are simply going to quit. And thats BAD for the internet.
So maybe companies like Google and Apple laying smackdowns on badvertising , despite the conflict of interests involved might be what it takes to save the internets content infrastructure from the slow death that losing advertising might bring
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Tell your friend to stop being a leech and relying on ads for revenue. Get a real job that doesnt rely on polluting the web. and annoying users. Hes a parasite if he cant live without ads, we dont need his work if they are the only way to do it.
Harsher than I would have put it, but true nonetheless.
If all advertising revenue were to disappear tomorrow, any industry or product which couldn't migrate to another form of acquiring revenue in a few days probably doesn't need to exist in the first place. People would be able to choose if they want to directly pay for access to sites they like, or to move on and spend their time on something else they value more. Sites that are a hobby or a true labor or love (the way 80% of them were in the early days
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If all ad supported services went away tomorrow there would be riots by Friday. Bread and circuses, remember.
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Tell your friend to stop being a leech and relying on ads for revenue. Get a real job that doesnt rely on polluting the web. and annoying users. Hes a parasite if he cant live without ads, we dont need his work if they are the only way to do it.
The irony of you posting this on a service that is highly dependent on ads to survive is delicious.
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Re: Anti competitive (Score:2)
He could do what Salon.com is doing and allow visitors to opt in to cryptocurrency mining instead of seeing ads. I really think that's the best way to pay for online content.
Re:Anti competitive (Score:4, Informative)
A friend of mine is a journalist who makes his living off the website he writes for now that the newspaper it sprung out of has died. That means he's 100% dependent on ads to pay the rent (The sites fairly opposed to paywalls). So understandably he's got a bee in his bonnet about ad blockers.
As far as I know, ad blockers aren't doing any kind of advanced image analysis, they're just going by the domain the ad comes from. So if he wants to sell ads on his site, he can host the ads himself and they won't be blocked.
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I know I can't be the first to suggest that if the content producers were willing to source their own ads, and make them part of the articles being published (i.e. conform to a more "print media" approach), then current ad blocking approaches would become obsolete overnight, and the security risks would almost completely disappear.
So if you want content funded with ads, the underlying issue hasn't changed: FIX THE DAMN INTERNET AD MODEL ALREADY. Your friend shouldn't be getting a bee in his bonnet about a
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Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.
If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws.
But what if Google blocks ads based on putatively altruistic standards and the result is that none of Google's ads are blocked but a significant portion of competitor ads are blocked? Can Google be punished for intent or the resulting impact on the market? Or is punishment reserved solely for explicit declarations of anti-competitive behavior, i.e., I know what the law is and I'm going to flaunt that law in your face?
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Re:Anti competitive (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the idea here is to undermine more aggressive adblocking software. The adblocking genie is out of the bottle and the only way to combat it is to subvert the whole ecosystem by having a built-in option that's "good enough" for most people, yet leaves Google's ads untouched -- unlike 3d party ad blockers.
So if you don't run an ad blocker (70%, last I checked), it will be seen as an improvement. If you do run an ad blocker, you'll see it as a weak offering.
Re:Anti competitive (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is using Easylist, the same blocking list that uBlock and most others use. The only difference is that Google only enables blocking on sites that they have determined contain abusive ads. The determination seems to be a distributed thing, based on user's actions and reports. That's usually how Google works for stuff like malware warnings, they don't want to be doing manual checks.
I don't really buy the idea that they will start blocking everything but their own ads. Apart from getting them severely punished by regulators (the EU isn't afraid to hit them for billions of Euros) the same argument could have been made 10 years ago when Chrome launched with malware protection. Google could have marked Firefox as malware, same as Microsoft could mark Linux ISOs as malware in Windows Defender. It just doesn't seem to be an issue, probably because of the previously mentioned consequences.
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They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...
Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?
Re:Anti competitive (Score:4, Interesting)
They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...
That is completely right. Long gone is the era of the browser monopoly. I can choose to use Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Konqueror, etc. as I see fit. As it stands, Firefox has regained my preferred-browser status with the Quantum release. I had only preferred Chrome for Netflix viewing, since Firefox pre-Quantum was too sluggish. With its recent performance improvements, it is at least as good as (if not better than) Chrome for that purpose.
So it matters not one whit how Google plans to have Chrome handle ads. If its ad-blocking abilities are intended as a poor replacement for proper ad blocking, then users are free to use a different browser if they so choose.
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They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...
Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?
That's... not what a monopoly is. There is rarely a law prohibiting competition, but the circumstances, barrier of entry, difficulty to get adoption, for challengers to that monopoly make it unrealistic to happen, and that's bad for everyone. Well, everyone except the monopolies, and free market extremists who don't understand that markets where someone has undue control are not functioning markets.
Should Chrome get into the same position IE did in the 90s, and its arguable that they are there now, then yes
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I thought IE was a problem because it was a bundled and default browser, and Windows isn't free.
Chrome is obviously a completely free, and completely optional third party web browser.
I guess unless we are talking about Android. I was thinking about Windows and Mac PCs only before.
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I thought IE was a problem because it was a bundled and default browser, and Windows isn't free.
Chrome is obviously a completely free, and completely optional third party web browser.
I guess unless we are talking about Android. I was thinking about Windows and Mac PCs only before.
Even if you give something away free you can still get into trouble-- if you use your market power to give something away until all the competition goes bankrupt, then you are able to charge anything for it because there's no competition. It's not only about what you can do as a user, because the exact same thing that happened with IE when it got to 99% or whatever can happen again, websites stop developing for anything else and start to require you to run Chrome to use them. If you want to use your bank or
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I guess unless we are talking about Android. I was thinking about Windows and Mac PCs only before.
Now you got it, and now you can see why it's become an anti-trust issue the same as IE.
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Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?
I don't know. Are you in a dominant position in the online advertising market? Are you using income from online advertising to subsidise the development of the web browser and sell it below cost? If the answer to both of these is 'yes', then there are laws in a lot of jurisdictions, yes.
Re:Anti competitive (Score:4, Insightful)
They way I see it, you don't have to use Chrome...
Is there really a law that prevents me from writing my own web browser that blocks all ads except my own?
I'm torn on this topic because auto-play video ads, floating ads, ads with undesired audio, and ads on overlays have made using websites an absolute chore without ad blocking software. uBlock and friends, however, seem to go too far in the other direction and prevent any ads from being displayed, which is not what I want, either. In theory, Google has the balance right, and I think that having such capabilities built into the dominant web browser is going to instill corrective behavior in the same way that integrated pop-up blockers have brought that ad format to extinction.
However, Google is not the company that should be doing this. They are an ad company. This is the definition of 'conflict of interest'. Google also has an overwhelming market share of online advertising. Facebook admittedly rules the roost on their own platform, but it's not entirely apples to apples since they keep their ads in-house, and even though they're the most popular website on the internet, their decline has begun.
Beyond Google, you end up with small percentages in other areas where AdSense doesn't do the trick - the MSN, Yahoo, and AOL homepages (still seen by millions), the sketchy ad networks like Trafficstars and Taboola that serve up ads to torrent sites and porn sites, and places like DDG who run their own ads on principle for whatever they can get.
Ad networks should never have let things get this far in the first place, and shame on whoever thought it was preferential to do this rather than keep ads a 'necessary evil', as if the pop-up blocker battle of the 90's is forgotten history. I'd throw 'government oversight' into the ring as a solution, but if you're left-of-center, Trump and Ajit aren't going to make any decisions you like, and if you're right-of-center, it's more government oversight in general, which isn't desirable, either. Even if somehow there was a sudden outbreak of common sense from Washington, we start dealing with the same "physical jurisdictions don't apply to the internet" problem. Even a perfectly written and enforced federal law is thwarted by an office move and shifting the VMs to Ireland or Sweden.
To directly answer your question, no, there's no law preventing what you state. However, you're not a multibillion dollar company whose primary income is based on ad revenue with a browser commanding over half the browser market share...in which case, the rules are just a bit different. There's nothing stopping you from writing an operating system and shipping a web browser on it, but you're not Microsoft, you're not telling OEMs they can't ship computers with Chrome on it, and this isn't 1997...so context is involved here.
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DMCA most certainly does prohibit writing code of certain functionality. That's one of the reasons nearly 100% of computer programmers hate it. "No person shall manufacture..." I don't think people could make a good case for how it would prevent writing a web browser that blocks ads on pages as we currently know them. But it's definitely illegal to write, say, a DVD player that blocks ads (since your DVD player would need to be able to play the DVDs too). All they have to do is somehow have the ads combined
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DMCA prohibits circumventing copy protection, which is an end-around the fair use law. Since a browser plugin runs in the browser, the endpoint that must decrypt and display any encrypted content such as ads, how is the DMCA relevant even if web sites start delivering encrypted content?
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Re: Anti competitive (Score:2)
I'm just excited that YouTube ads will be blocked.
Yes, I know they won't, but it's amusing to me that they list count down as a bad thing.
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Sounds suspicious (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds very much like they want to control what you see and who gets paid. I haven't met a single ad I like, so I'm skeptical that any "pro ad" committee is going to come up with a fair list.
If I am wrong, great. Somebody have the scoop on this?
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This is exactly what I was going to post. They just want to replace ad blockers with an ad blocker that doesn't block their own ads and whatever other large companies they partner with.
While I agree that many of the ads they want to block are annoying, nefarious, or both; they have a clear conflict of interest in their attempt to police such action. They may be open and transparent about this whole thing now, which allows them to boast about how nice they are while applying lube, but it stands to make them
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I haven't met a single ad I like
I have met plenty that are easy to ignore and I'm happy they subsidise and keep the content on the internet free as a result.
In other words (Score:3)
The Coalition for Better Ads: [betterads.org]
"While the Coalition’s consumer research was designed to identify the least preferred ad types, it also provides insight into consumers’ evaluation of a far broader range of ad experiences, including those more preferred by consumers.
Google: "We're only tracking your every move and recording your preferences to bring you a better online experience, you ungrateful dolt!"
Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
"While the Coalition’s consumer research was designed to identify the least preferred ad types, it also provides insight into consumers’ evaluation of a far broader range of ad experiences, including those more preferred by consumers.
"More preferred" actually translates as "less hated". Nobody actually prefers ads, they just hate some types more than others.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
I prefer static images ads or text-only ads. If that's the end result of Google's filtering, I'm all for it.
Ads with scripts, plug-ins, videos and animated GIFs should be banned.
No ads (Score:3)
I prefer static images ads or text-only ads. If that's the end result of Google's filtering, I'm all for it.
I prefer no ads of any sort and no tracking. Google's preferred style of ads may be less obnoxious but it's more creepy.
CSS can animate a JPEG (Score:3)
Blocking animation in ads isn't a very easy problem for two reasons. First, how would you distinguish desirable animations, such as the main video on the video's description page, from ads? Second, CSS can animate a JPEG [pineight.com].
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No scripts, no CSS. The ads could only be static images.
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no CSS.
Now you appear to want to take us back to the days of <table> layout and <font> tags. I don't see anybody being impressed by that.
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desirable animations, such as the main video on the video's description page, from ads?
There is no desirable animation. Pages should not be playing videos unless I explicitly activate it. There are very few cases I want a video on my webpage and none of them call for auto-play
I have abandoned several news sites (such as Salon.com) because each article insisted on a video, which would jump down to bottom when you scrolled and would try to auto-play and to re-open itself.
It wasn't even an ad, I think it was part of the news or some other news or something. I guess I'll never know for sure.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
People prefer ads to the other two possibilities: having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article, or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt. (I'm interested to read your fourth option.)
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or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.
It's amazing how much time this would give me back in my life.
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or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.
It's amazing how much time this would give me back in my life.
What do you do for a living, and to what sources do you refer if you have a question about something? Would you prefer that, say, Server Fault and Photography Stack Exchange and Ask Ubuntu go out of business?
And I worry about what effect a worldwide shutdown of ad-supported sites would have on subscribers to home Internet access. Without ad-supported sites, there might not be enough demand for home Internet access to allow home ISPs to continue to offer Internet access at affordable rates.
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What do you do for a living, and to what sources do you refer if you have a question about something?
I get paid because I am able to read documentation. There are programmers who would be lost without Stack Overflow, but the world would be far better off if they learned how to read documentation.
Also I want to point out there were forums and such, without ads, before Stack Overflow.
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I get paid because I am able to read documentation.
Would you still be able to do your job if you had to pay for access to said documentation? Or for help interpreting documentation, particularly to resolve discrepancies between the documentation and the behavior of the software or workarounds for functionality that the documentation acknowledges is missing?
Also I want to point out there were forums and such, without ads, before Stack Overflow.
With what source of money did the operators of said forums pay for hosting and moderation?
Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, I do have the advantage of knowing what I'm doing with script- and ad-blockers so a whitelisting is a viable option. The average Joe's PC, on the otherhand, is probably going to be spending a lot of its time sending spam, mining crypto currency, or acting a a proxy for random script kiddies to do whatever they want. If Google really wants to make a difference with Chrome's ad-blocker (and AMP, for that matter), they could start right there and insist that all pages and content, including any ads, will still render a usable page without any scripting support. I'll still be blocking the ads though.
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My fourth option is the same as the one I use when I come across a site with an anti-adblock script where the effort to work around it outweighs my desire to read their specific take on the content. See if that content is available elsewhere, with a side-option of probably not returning to that site again if it's a high-enough profile to enter my conciousness or particularly obnoxious about the detection.
There's an implicit assumption underlying this option which should be made explicit: You're assuming that the content you would like to see/read is available for free somewhere. In a world where everyone used the same strategy you do, that would almost certainly not be the case. It takes time and effort to produce content, and it takes space, labor, hardware, power and bandwidth to serve it. Outside of whatever hobbyists are willing to do for free, all of that costs money. Without ads, it either wouldn't ha
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Low-power CPU; hacked sites; NoScript for security (Score:2)
I see at least three practical problems with Coinhive. First, if the viewer is viewing the article using a low-power ARM or Atom CPU, the viewer is unlikely to finish mining enough blocks to pay for one article view by the time the viewer finishes reading the article. Second, the Coinhive brand has been tainted by widespread installation of Coinhive on publishers' websites by intruders without the publisher's permission. Third, Coinhive relies on JavaScript, which some users (especially those who regularly
Plenty of options (Score:3)
People prefer ads to the other two possibilities:
There are FAR more than just two possibilities.
having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article
So buy one subscription that aggregates articles. That's basically what the Associated Press is anyway. Or buy the article piece-rate. Maybe the value of that article is only $0.01 or less per read. Advertisers have to guess how much it will cost to get someone's attention so I see no reason why content providers should be unable to figure it out. Or give the article away and make money on something else like merchandise sales.
If no readers are willing to
Adult Check was sued out of business (Score:2)
So buy one subscription that aggregates articles.
A service called Adult Check tried that business model in the late 1990s. But its "grown-ups can pay $10 per month for nice things" business model ran into two problems. The first was that the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine successfully sued Adult Check out of business when it was discovered that several publishers (website operators) accepting Adult Check had displayed infringing copies of photographs from Perfect 10. The second is that if different publishers are on different subscription aggregators, v
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The barrier to pulling out your card (Score:2)
It's not the amount* as much as needing to whip out the payment card in the first place. If you read three or fewer articles on a particular site per year, arriving at them from Google Search or Slashdot or whatever social network you use, how likely are you to pay $5.99 for a year's subscription and create yet another line in your password manager?
* Except that the payment method charges a transaction fee on the order of 30 cents.
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Fourth option is I block ads and enough* of the rest of you don't--either because you don't know how or you don't care.
Yes, "Everybody else can block them, too", but that's irrelevant; as of today, you don't.
Before you cry "no fair", know this: It's too late for "fair" in advertising, and has been since *long* before there was an internet.
To the degree that it's profitable to abuse the public- producers, sellers, and advertisers have done exactly that. For millenia. Absent confiscatory fines or jail term
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Fourth option is I block ads and enough* of the rest of you don't
Ah, the "I got mine, Jack!" strategy.
Before you cry "no fair", know this: It's too late for "fair" in advertising, and has been since *long* before there was an internet.
To the degree that it's profitable to abuse the public- producers, sellers, and advertisers have done exactly that. For millenia.
And the time-honored "but Billy started it!" defense.
I happen to like the free (except for ads) nature of the web. Now I tend to buy subscriptions for sites I like, but when I was a poor student "free" was all I could afford, and I don't believe in an internet "by the wealthy for the wealthy". So I feel that it is my duty to block or avoid the truly awful ads but otherwise allow ads. Google's plan seem to do just that, for which I am rather happy.
Switching from abusive ads to static images (Score:2)
Nor is my comment history the topic. So ad hominems aside:
Your comment appears to promote "regular ads that consist of text or an image" as an alternative to the script-driven ads responsible for the abuses that Google Chrome will block. For example, Daring Fireball runs "regular ads that consist of text or an image" and are hosted on Daring Fireball's server (source [daringfireball.net]). But that model requires each publisher to staff an ad sales department in order to advertise the site's ad space to advertisers, and adverti
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Sorry, no sale (Score:3)
So, in other words, it still lets ads slip past, waste my bandwidth and time?
NEXT!
Re:Sorry, no sale (Score:4)
We noticed you're using an ad blocker. To continue to be able to bring you quality journalism, we kindly ask you to buy a subscription for full access to this website.
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Close window.
Click next search result.
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Next search result states something similar:
My point is that after the web advertising market collapses, more of the top 10 search results will be paywalled than not. I have already begun to see this
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And you will notice that those paywalled results don't stay in the top 10 google results for long.
For the most part, they become part of my "minus list". You know, the long, and growing, line of "-this -that -whatever -site:paywalled.crp" pasted onto every query.
Does your minus list hit the term limit? (Score:2)
And you will notice that those paywalled results don't stay in the top 10 google results for long.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Subscription websites, such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and closed-access academic journals, tend to rank consistently high in many of my Google Search queries. This goes double since October 2017 now that Google Search no longer imposes a cloaking penalty [google.com] if a paywall is marked as such with JSON-LD [google.com].
For the most part, they become part of my "minus list". You know, the long, and growing, line of "-this -that -whatever -site:paywalled.crp" pasted onto every query.
How often do the terms in your minus list cause you to hit Google Search's limit of 32 terms per query? (Before 2005, it was 10 terms [slashdot.org].)
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And you will notice that those paywalled results don't stay in the top 10 google results for long.
They will when everything relevant is paywalled.
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Yeah, and if we ALL don't buy at Walmart they will have to...
C'mon, not gonna happen.
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Yeah, and if we ALL don't buy at Walmart they will have to...
C'mon, not gonna happen.
Stuff costs. It's gotta get paid for somehow. You're assuming that everything you care about will always be free.
C'mon, not gonna happen.
Fox guarding the hen house? (Score:2)
Naturally Google won't block any of their own ads...
I'll keep blocking all ads insofar as I can find the tools to do so. If google wants to actually pay me cash money to watch ads then we can revisit this discussion. I pay subscriptions for services I like. Ads just waste my bandwidth and time so companies that rely on them for their business model can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.
All ads = bad ads (Score:2)
Are you saying that Google actually runs ads like those being discussed?
I'm saying I don't care what kind of ads they run. Just being less overtly obnoxious doesn't make them any less creepy to me. In fact it's the ones who quietly try to track my every movement on the internet and who try to profile me that offend me the most.
Re:Fox guarding the hen house? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying that Google actually runs ads like those being discussed?
Youtube has "ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown)".
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Youtube has "ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown)".
Not really. The web page that they're showing you does NOT do that. Inside of that page is some video content that YouTube is providing to you free of charge, and attached to that content is (sometimes) an ad. That ad does NOT prevent the page from loading, the page's navigation from functioning, etc.
Not the same thing at all. And of course you can choose to be an actual customer of YouTube and have that content appear without those ads that pay for the service and the people who create the content. But
Not good enough. (Score:3)
And lose access to Partner or claimed videos (Score:2)
All self-playing video ads need to be blocked.
I fully agree on text articles and on the videos that some news sites have started to use to decorate their text articles. But preroll ads on sites like Dailymotion and YouTube are also "self-playing video ads". Would you prefer not to have access to Partner videos and claimed videos at all, especially outside those few countries where YouTube offers YouTube Red service?
So many sites, including New York Times (which I pay for!) are practically unreadable without a blocker, due to animated ads.
At this point, I endorse ad blocking on subscription websites. The dynamic there differs greatly from websites offered to the public withou
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> But preroll ads on sites like Dailymotion and YouTube are also "self-playing video ads".
I run Pale Moon with 2 changes in about:config. I've set
media.autoplay.allowscripted;false
media.autoplay.enabled;false
That blocks autoplaying... period... end of story. If I want a video to play on Youtube, I click on it, and it plays, sometimes with a pre-roll ad. But the pre-roll add only plays if I click to play a video.
The only downside is that I sometimes have to click 2 or 3 times on a video "Play button " to
Google can CMA (Score:3)
Since even 'approved' ads can contain malware, it is foolish to not block all the ads. Block them all (and if you must use a hosts file, why not?)
Re: (Score:2)
What if approved ads cannot contain any scripts whatsoever? In an ideal world, Google would only approve static images (JPEG and PNG only, no GIF) and text-only ads.
Re: (Score:2)
I really think advertising has been a net negative thing for the internet. It causes so much trash content to be created, content whose entire purpose is grabbing your attention, even if it has to deceive and abuse you in order to do so. Advertising just pushes the quality of everything down, I say that both as a user and having worked for an advertising company. They don't care about the content, they care a
And with the arrival comes... (Score:2)
Good start but not enough (Score:2)
I would not mind accepting some irritating ads from sites that I want to support. I would like the ability to whitelist the sites.
I would not mind giving Google some keywords to tailor their targeted ads. One mistyped or misclicked site, and forever I'm getting ads pitching stupid things like Beechcraft jet for 2 mi
just use uBlock Origin (Score:2)
ntr
Already using Brave (Score:2)
I've long since switched to the Brave browser. Negatives first: Brave supports the idea that it can serve as a payment conduit, so that you can make micropayments to publishers. While not a bad idea, the implementation is unrealistic. But you can turn it off and ignore it.
On the good side, it already blocks ads, 3rd party cookies, and (some) fingerprinting.
The only thing remaining - and this is missing from every browser I am aware of - is to stop auto-download (and auto-play) of multimedia. Even if a brows
Is that any better than plain old ad blocker? (Score:2)
I mean, I have this "uBlock" thing that's working fine with Chome and Firefox.
They have both basic blocking *and* custom blocking.
And they also block Google ads which chrome won't be blocking.
How is supposed the Chrome builtin blocker to be any better that a more general solution?
Hell not freezing over in 3... 2... 1... (Score:2)
On desktop, Google is planning to block ... ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads.
Like the ones on many YouTube videos?
Youtube is going to hate this (Score:2)
Let's see if the people at Youtube are outraged enough at this change to take action against the makers of Chrome. These companies' struggle might be the next big war. Who will win?
Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome? (Score:5, Interesting)
For me the end result is that I don't visit their site. And nothing of value was lost.
Re: (Score:2)
Internet Explorer died a few years ago, Microsoft replaced it with Edge.
Also, requiring people to use Edge would be a big fuck you to users of other browsers and to Mac and Linux users, which is a sure way of losing users for your website.
Re: (Score:2)
Internet Explorer isn't available for any of the following operating systems:
Fedora
CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
SUSE
Debian GNU/Linux and Raspbian
Ubuntu
Linux Mint
Slackware
Android
FreeBSD
What error message do you plan to display to users of Chrome or Chromium (which comes with an ad blocker) or Firefox (which blocks only those ads that fail to respect users' privacy) on those operating systems?
Re: (Score:2)
Two excuses YouTube would use for preroll ads (Score:2)
I can see two ways that the Chrome team might consider it "technically correct (the best kind of correct)" not to block preroll ads on Dailymotion and YouTube.
Re: (Score:2)