I've often thought that ad blockers get it all wrong, we shouldn't be identifying the ads to block them, we should be identifying the desired content and serving it up to the exclusion of everything else.
The run-a-server-elsewhere-and-connect model of Brow.sh seems ideal for building something that did that:
- render the page server side
- check for crowd-sourced filters
- apply them
- pass page to user
I'd happy make cryptocurrency micropayments to whoever contributed the filter that de-bloated that page for me.
It would be slow at first, but with a big enough cache and enough users...
Glad to know about this project. I may try and adapt it to man-in-the-middle my own web browsing one day.
This is almost exactly what I've had in the back of my mind for years now.
I've been trying to prototype a browser with the aim of extracting semantic content from webpages and presenting them in a uniform manner (with the user able to choose/modify the templates). I try to explain it to less technical people as a "permanent safari reader mode for all types of web content - articles, ecommerce pages, recipes etc".
The current model is similar to brow.sh (or opera's vpn etc), the browser makes the request via the server, which extracts the content and serves back the minimal representation. The client then has its own templates saved meaning all layout happens client side and so only the content has to go over the wire.
The user then has control over how they view the content, all images are forced to be lazy loaded (with lqip previews currently) and I'm interested in how to take it further such as extracting the structure of a website navigation and always presenting it in a uniform fashion.
My prototype kinda works for browsing hn/reddit/lobsters and articles and is pretty snappy but content extraction is the hard part that's kept me from starting for a long time.
I've always held off on sharing this because
1) I didn't have a hn account (can't get sucked into an argument about javascript if you can't comment)
2) I was never sure how to present the idea and how exactly to frame it compared to reader mode, adblockers, AMP, Brave, surfing without JS and a ton of different alternatives
If anyones interested I'd love to discuss it and maybe get my prototype live somewhere if there's interest (email address in my about)
The run-a-server-elsewhere-and-connect model of Brow.sh seems ideal for building something that did that:
- render the page server side
- check for crowd-sourced filters
- apply them
- pass page to user
I'd happy make cryptocurrency micropayments to whoever contributed the filter that de-bloated that page for me.
It would be slow at first, but with a big enough cache and enough users...
Glad to know about this project. I may try and adapt it to man-in-the-middle my own web browsing one day.