Google Backtracks on Chrome Modifications That Would Have Crippled Ad Blockers (zdnet.com) 112
Google has changed its stance on upcoming Chrome Manifest V3 changes as benchmark shows they lied about performance hit. Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: A study analyzing the performance of Chrome ad blocker extensions published on Friday has proven wrong claims made by Google developers last month, when a controversy broke out surrounding their decision to modify the Chrome browser in such a way that would have eventually killed off ad blockers and many other extensions. The study, carried out by the team behind the Ghostery ad blocker, found that ad blockers had sub-millisecond impact on Chrome's network requests that could hardly be called a performance hit. Hours after the Ghostery team published its study and benchmark results, the Chrome team backtracked on their planned modifications. At the root of Ghostery's benchmark into ad blocker performance stands Manifest V3, a new standard for developing Chrome extensions that Google announced last October.
Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd still want an ad blocker. It's optional anyways. Don't like the performance? Don't install the extension.
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if the performance was good, google still does not want you to use an adblocker (at least not one they dont control)...
Re: Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Already been done. Get yourself some Brave Browser and enjoy.
Just because I want a independent browser does not mean I want one with associated shady micro transaction processor and cryptocurrency bolted on thank-you very much. I think I will stick with Firefox for a truly independent browser that at least tries to respect my privacy between ill-conceived attempts by their corporate overlords to shoot themselves in the foot.
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I will stick with Firefox for a truly independent browser
Aaah, yes, the browser from the truly independent Mozilla organization. [wikipedia.org]
In 2006, the Mozilla Foundation received US$66.8 million in revenues, of which US$61.5 million is attributed to "search royalties" from Google.
From 2004 to 2014, the foundation had a deal with Google to make Google Search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site was also made the default home page of Firefox. The original contract expired in November 2006. However, Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and again through 2011. On December 20, 2011, Mozilla announced that the contract was once again renewed for at least three years to November 2014, at three times the amount previously paid, or nearly US$300 million annually. Approximately 90% of Mozilla’s royalties revenue for 2014 was derived from this contract.
In November 2014, Mozilla signed a five-year partnership (effective December 2014) with Yahoo!, making Yahoo! Search the default search engine for Firefox in North America. The default search engine in Russia will be Yandex, and in China, Baidu. Due to Mozilla's financial release timetables, the results of the Yahoo! contract will not be public until November 2016.
In November 2017, however, Mozilla announced that it was switching back to Google as the default search engine. This represented an early termination of its Yahoo partnership.
If you want truly independent, 90% funded by google isn't what you want. I don't know what the answer is, but it's not Firefox.
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
If they banned ad blockers everybody would move to Firefox. They can't afford that. Somehow on Android, people don't move to Firefox so they still don't allow ad blockers in their browser.
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
>"If they banned ad blockers everybody would move to Firefox. They can't afford that."
I was about to post the same thing.
THANK YOU, FIREFOX
Whether you use it or not, the fact that it exists most certainly prevents a complete takeover by Google and the resulting lack of freedom. And my suggestion is, if you value freedom, privacy, open standards, and choice, to use Firefox whenever possible, and encourage others to do so, also. The days of Chrome being "much faster" or "better" on the desktop [MS-Windows, Linux, MacOS] are long since gone.
>"Somehow on Android, people don't move to Firefox so they still don't allow ad blockers in their [Chrome] browser [on Android]."
I also use it on Android, even though on Google's platform it seems to have an unfair performance disadvantage (I wonder why that is).
Re: Even if the performance was bad (Score:1)
At the time the drama was starting for this new standard (which OF COURSE would have removed backwards compatibility with ublock origin), firefox openly considered a similar step, to keep pace with google.
Firefox is a risk too, just a smaller one.
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But Microsoft said that Mozilla is wasting their time, and that they should give up their silly 'own browser' stuff and just reskin Chromium like Microsoft is doing!
I mean, if Microsoft said it, it can't be wrong!
(Wow, I can't believe I managed to type all that with a straight face...)
Re: Even if the performance was bad (Score:1)
I use a browser called Adblock Browser on Android, which is based on Firefox. I'm using it to post this right now.
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I just use normal firefox on Android, with the ublock origin add-on. And also ghostery. Android on Firefox is actually really good.
And another essential add-on for mobile browsers is a tap to reflow column add-on. I have a simple one in firefox that works well enough. Many mobile sites are awful compared to the desktop sites (slashdot I'm looking at you), so being able to zoom in on some text for a normal website and reflow it is wonderful. I never quite figured out why Google removed that feature from
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Huh. This post kind of explains why Microsoft opted for Chrome for their next browser engine instead of Firefox. They're actually probably better off with a Chrome-lead monoculture for this reason.
The more resources they can starve from Mozilla, the more powerful a position they will be in in terms of being able to dictate the terms of the browser-based advertising market.
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Electron is Chromium (Score:4, Informative)
So don't use Chrome. Problem solved.
Good luck with that. Native applications built with Electron, such as Discord, Slack, Skype, Atom, and Visual Studio Code, all bundle a copy of Chromium. This is Google Chrome with a handful of non-free parts cut out, mostly related to video DRM and Adobe Flash Player. The use of Chromium in Electron encourages development of web applications that work only with Chromium. For example, the owner of a Discord server can upload images to that server for use as emoji, but clicking the upload button does absolutely nothing in Firefox. This encourages Firefox users to switch to Google Chrome (on Windows or macOS) or Chromium (on X11/Linux) to make web applications work again.
In addition, on a phone or tablet running Android 4 or later, Google Chrome has a RAM use advantage over Firefox because its HTML engine is always loaded. This is analogous to IE's advantage on Windows 98 through 8.1.
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That's just silly nonsense technicality "gotcha" bullshit, though.
Who cares if skype embeds a sucky browser, or not? How does that affect users who are intentionally using a browser?
This isn't something that is harmful if it is hidden under the hood of another product, it is something that is harmful when it interferes with the choices the user would otherwise be making.
And, Firefox has a RAM advantage if you keep a lot of tabs open.
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Who cares if skype embeds a sucky browser, or not? How does that affect users who are intentionally using a browser?
If the desktop version of Skype and the web version of Skype share code, the supermajority usage share of Chromium discourages Microsoft from making the web version of Skype compatible with anything but Chromium.
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Who cares?
That would reduce their customer base for the product. They wouldn't do that.
They support linux, and other popular operating systems anyways.
There is not anything about web dev that would actually push them to want to lock it to a browser. This isn't the 1990s when they were doing it to push people at their language and integration tools. And even if MS of all companies was going to "go there" on browsers, why would they do it to pimp out Chromium?!
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That would reduce their customer base for the product. They wouldn't do that.
If a company makes a web application Chromium-only, users will do one of two things:
A. Quit
B. Install Opera, Vivaldi, Chrome, or an Electron-based desktop application in order to retain access to their contacts who use the service
If the cost reduction of no longer catering to Firefox exceeds the revenue reduction attributable to those who choose option A over option B, then going Chromium-only and recommending option B to Firefox users makes business sense.
They support linux, and other popular operating systems anyways.
Yet the Linux version of Skype, Slack, or Discord t
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Is an app that doesn't work on your machine at all because it's made for a different OS superior to an Electron app? For example: If you use a Mac, is a Windows-only app superior to an Electron app? Or if you use a Windows PC or X11/Linux PC, is a Mac-only app superior to an Electron app?
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Why do we have a company whose main business is selling ads controlling the software that either allows the ads to be blocked or not be blocked? Seems like an enormous conflict of interest. This only will end one way if Google is in charge... ultimately ad blockers will go away, one way or another.
Maybe someday, if Google starts struggling to grow revenues and profits. The situation now is what it's been for pretty much the whole life of the company, that Google has a money-printing machine so effective that the bottom line rarely figures in decisions made by most engineers building the products (and most of these decisions are made by the engineers, not by management)... and even from the upper management's perspective it's considered far more important to make products that people want to use than
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Informative)
Really, the goal here seems to be to make adblocking safer and more efficient, better for users, not to kill it.
That presupposes that adblockers are inefficient now. But, as linked to in the summary, simple measurements show that isn't true [whotracks.me].
And I use an adblocker, advise everyone I know to use adblockers, and would switch to a different browser if Chrome were to block adblockers.
Adblockers work better in Firefox. You should advise everyone to switch to Firefox now instead of waiting. uBlock Origin uses WebAssembly in Firefox [ghacks.net] for better performance, but Chrome does not allow this yet.
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The rest of us can only go by what Google releases publicly. And what was released publicly was that they were removing an essential API for ad blockers and replacing it with nothing at all useful.
Now that the excuse has been publicly debunked with actual measurements, they are reversing that decision.
The size of the static list was never the point of controversy. Even an infinite static list would be less useful than the current API.
I agree that we can't prove a particular intent form what we see, we can o
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:4, Insightful)
This only will end one way if Google is in charge... ultimately ad blockers will go away, one way or another. They just need to figure out the way to accomplish it that causes the smallest uproar.
Per past experience, I expect we’ll see a series of small, under-the-radar moves over the next 18-24 months which will basically accomplish the same thing. They’ll (rightly) assume inertia will keep the vast majority of users on their platform.
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember Doubleclick.com? The lovely people behind those "Punch the Monkey" animated ads a couple decades ago? Guess who bought them.
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Some of my boxes still have them in the hosts file :)
Oh, doubleclick? I love them so much, I love them like localhost. ;)
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd still want an ad blocker. It's optional anyways. Don't like the performance? Don't install the extension.
Well, given that ads typically increase page load time significantly [bbc.com] (for example ~2.5 seconds for Wordpress WordAds), you are probably still coming out ahead by using a blocker.
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I'd still want an ad blocker. It's optional anyways. Don't like the performance? Don't install the extension.
You're right, but you're missing the point.
Google makes 60+ Billion dollars a year. Nearly all of it from advertising. This is only the beginning. Google is not simply going to give up. They aren't just going to say "Oh, OK, we were wrong, performance isn't that bad after all. Never mind."
No, I guarantee they are hard at work trying to figure out a new excuse to kill off ad blocking.
It was never an issue of performance (Score:3)
It was never an issue of performance. That was just an excuse that Google expected would be hard to prove otherwise. As you say, it is a very shaky excuse too, when add-ons are optional. Google is #1 in the ad space and they make their money from that, not from Chrome directly. Controlling the browser market does help them maximize their ad revenue and disallowing Ad-blockers they don't control it is one way. As they are trying to not alienate people too much, once this excuse was shot down they backtracked
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I'd still want an ad blocker. It's optional anyways. Don't like the performance? Don't install the extension.
It should be pointed out that the new API being proposed will actually make adblocking more efficient. The new API allows extensions to configure Chrome with a set of rules that specify what URLs to block. These rules would be evaluated by Chrome, in native code. In contrast, the method currently used by adblockers is an API that simply calls a snippet of extension-provided Javascript on each network request. While this can be fast if the adblock extension author codes it well, it clearly will never be a
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, huge rule lists will be slower than small rule lists. Cronin says the rule list size limit will be increased, though there will still be a limit.
There's no technical reason why there has to be a limit that users will run into. It's their problem if the browser gets slower, not google's. I call shenanigans.
Re:Even if the performance was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
The other issue was that the Chrome native method was simpler than many ad-blockers allow for. It was a simple rule matching engine, where as something like uBlock is much more complex and has many other anti-ad and anti-tracking features. Even relatively simple stuff like "only block if matching a 3rd party object" is very useful for avoiding breakage.
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It should be pointed out that the new API being proposed will actually make adblocking more efficient.
But adblockers aren't inefficient. If Chrome's interested in efficiency then it should enable WebAssembly for add-ons, like Firefox does [ghacks.net].
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And of course, nobody could ever possibly want to use a general purpose API for a general purpose that may or may not be ad blocking.
The rule list size limit is a bit of a red herring, that's not the worst feature of the new API. The new API is a static list. Point out the error if I'm wrong, but it certainly looks like the rule list is loaded at browser startup and I see no API for updating it. No more "allow this for this site" or "don't allow this anymore" etc. No more OK for this but not with cookies.
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i would abandon chromium in a second
Then you should abandon Chromium now. The fact that you use it (or any Chrome based browser) now is what emboldens Google to do this sort of thing in the first place.
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I'd still want an ad blocker. It's optional anyways. Don't like the performance? Don't install the extension.
Yup.
Frankly, until companies can prevent malicious ads from being broadcast over their networks, I'll use an ad blocker. Which means for that reason alone I'll be running an ad blocker forever.
But it's not just the potential for malicious adware to wreck your PC that I hate. Ads take up a lot of page space, they increase load times, they increase bandwidth usage, and they're a fucking distraction.
An ad company (Score:2)
The ads still get in.
Re:An ad company (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember when Google primarily had text ads? Not even pepperidge farms remembers, their products are pure garbage now. They cheaped them out so much in content without lowering the price, in pursuit of profit, that they're no longer worth buying.
Sadly, many people still make purchases without any consideration for whether they're getting anything for their money. The ad on heavy rotation right now on YouTube is for some shitty horror movie sequel. I see this ad because we use a fire tv stick, obviously I block such things on my PC. Some ads still sneak through occasionally, so if I actually want to watch something without interruption I YouTube-dl it first. But back to the ad. How much have they spent to ensure that I see their unskippable ad 20 times a day? That kind of entrainment might work on toddlers, but it's alienating to everyone else. Even horror movie devotees must get tired of it after the tenth time or so. I, for one, don't want to hear a woman screaming in terror right before I watch a comedy clip, or some daily show. That puts me off right quick.
Did an unskippable ad ever increase revenue?
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Unskippable ads are at the discretion of the person who uploaded the video (or the company that stole it with a bogus copyright claim). Google offers it because some uploaders want it, but no-one is forced to use it.
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As a user I can't choose if I want to see unskippable ads or not though.
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I'm a user, and I choose not to see any of the ads. They're not skipable because I never saw them in the first place.
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Why, in a thread about adblockers, is someone implying there are ads on YouTube?
If you could read, you'd know. Since you can't, why are you here?
What backtracking? (Score:4, Interesting)
The only commitment given by Google is to keep the observational API, but that's not the API adblockers care about! Adblockers need the blocking API, and there's no commitment to keep it by Google. Most likely Google will still remove it later, when the heat is off and people moved on to the next outrage.
We still need to fight against Chrome (Score:3)
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Its in the OS, crypto, browser. Extensions cant keep protecting at that level of support for ads.
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Oops, triggered a Google-hater.
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Ad supporting crypto is crypto that gets an ad past any attempts to block an ad at the browser level.
The ad is full protected by the OS, browser and the user will find it hard work to block, removed, not display.
Windows still gives the user control over a users selected browser to block ads.
Other OS give the users even more control over their own OS to block ads, tracking.
Freedom and control over a real OS is great l
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ads which are a form of DRM.
How so? This is a very interesting claim. I'm not saying it's false, just that I don't see the connection.
Adblockers are performance enhancers (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll take that sub milisecond delay to prevent the ad that takes much longer.
Mistake (Score:5, Funny)
I guess someone at Google made an honest mistake. Now if we lived in some alternate universe, one in which Google made, say, $116.3 billion dollars in 2018 selling ads primarily viewed through web browsers, then the skeptic in me might think shenanigans were afoot. But since we don't live in that universe, we can have peace of mind that this was purely an error by an overzealous software engineer trying to make browsers faster. Because, you know, there is absolutely no performance impact (CPU, rendering time, network bandwidth) caused by loading multiple advertisements on every web page that stream video. Anyone with a modicum of common sense would realize that blocking those ads in the first place would surely require far more resources than loading and rendering them. So I can totally see how this honest mistake was made.
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The world is not black and white. Just because this wasn't some engineering mistake, doesn't automatically make it some huge conspiracy. The reality was probably somewhere in the middle:
Engineer proposes something, likely nothing to do with ads in the first place, something aligns well with Google's business model and how it would block adblockers so it gets fast tracked to production, someone realises the backlash may cost market share and they roll it all back.
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Why does anything less than "google is teh evil" trigger people around here?
It's like they have turned hating google into some kind of religion, far stronger than the Microsoft hate from back in the day.
Google wants Ads (Score:1)
They are the ADVERTISMENT COMPANY. Fuck you slashdot, i'll scream as much as i want, cause they deserve it.
we can't use caps to convey what we mean ?? GO FUCK YOURSELF SLASHDOT.! !!!!!!!
Too late. (Score:3)
I already switched to Firefox.
misleading title - they are NOT backtacking!!! (Score:2)
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I am in awe of how successful Google shills were in pushing this "google backtracks" message by citing article clearly stating V3 proposal is full steam ahead and NOTHING is being changed apart from maybe considering bigger static list ...
About Time For A Monopoly Investigation (Score:3)
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Possibly, but I think you'll need to cite examples other than this.
This being Google trying to sandbox extensions a little more at the cost of ad-blockers, then backtracking.
While there was a report that showed blockers having little negative effect (and mostly overall positive effect) Google's announcement of winding their changes back happened only hours later. I doubt their internal technical strategy can pivot that quickly so I assume the strategy had already changed but this accelerated their announcem
I want my tabs back & less white! (Score:2)
I refuse to leave Chrome 70 and put in a hack to disable Google update until that happens.
Current Chrome is unusable and migraine inducing. They need to fire these kids with their flat phone interfaces. I can't even see which tab is which now on my monitors