There's a product here that's been waiting to happen for awhile. I've been anticipating somebody cross-compiling another browser engine to WASM but this works, too.
Deliver your site only to the "inner browser" (that the user has no control over because it's heavily obfuscated and tricked-out with anti-debugging code) and you eliminate all ad blockers. Throw some DNS-over-HTTPS w/ certificate pinning in for good measure and you kill DNS-based ad blockers too.
Accessibility will be a challenge but if it sells that'll get "fixed".
(I think this idea is evil, BTW, but somebody is going to do it.)
Hopefully that will be literally illegal due to accessibility concerns.
Doesn't matter either way. Can't wait for AI-powered ad blocking. Just imagine it. AI parses content and filters out ads, brands, even subtle PR text from pages automatically. Not just textual content either. It also kills ads in audio, video, images.
If I can imagine it, it must be possible. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will create this at some point. Perhaps this comment will inspire that person.
In any other context, having an AI interpret websites and decide what you should and shouldn't be allowed to read, even based on "subtle" language (which one assumes the AI would need to rewrite,) would be considered the grossest form of censorship. It's far beyond what Twitter and other social media platforms have been accused of simply by using algorithmic feeds and people want to burn them to the ground.
I'm not against ad-blocking but this seems a bit too Big Brother-ish.
By that logic you could call regular ad blocking censorship, because it does exactly the same thing as parent described, only without AI and less effectively. I see a difference between algorithmic feeds that I have no control over that are designed to boost the companies goals, and an opt-in tool (hopefully an open one) running locally and modifying the content presentation to remove things I don't want in the first place
Censorship that many people, myself included, agree with (I don't believe all censorship is harmful) but it is clearly censorship.
But the real problem is assuming everything an AI blocks will be an "ad." Why is this the only instance where the slippery slope doesn't apply? This is different than a normal ad blocker that uses specific heuristics to block specific elements - an AI will be employed to make "intelligent" editorial decisions based on interpreting the intent of the content. What happens when it decides - or is ordered to decide - that political advocacy or the promotion of certain ideas or contrary narratives amounts to "advertising" them?
It's literally just enforcing wrongthink, most likely using closed source centralized services run by corporations who will be harvesting and selling your data to advertisers anyway. But it's cool because ads. It's not cool when it's Nazis or doxxing transgender people or spreading conspiracy theories or plotting sedition, but it's definitely cool if Justin Whang wants to sell me on Nord VPN.
ML algorithms are already constantly deciding what you should and shouldn't be allowed to read, by surfacing, amplifying, and suppressing content on Google, Youtube, every social media platform, baked-in Windows ads I presume, etc. based on each website's own financial and/or political interests. And soon ML algorithms will be increasingly deciding what you can and can't read, by vomiting out the "content" in the first place according to those interests.
Maybe I'm just fatigued from the constant erosion of user autonomy over information consumption, but as long as a ML ad blocker runs locally by the user's own decision, it doesn't seem that Big Brother-ish (compared to serverside shovel-feeds), and as long as there's a single-click toggle to disable it like in existing ad blockers (or if E.G. the UI exposes a side pane to show the content it's blocked) and it can be configured to be less or more aggressive based on content patterns, it hardly seems like censorship… As far as uses of "AI" go.
Much more powerful entities are going to be in control. The "beauty" of AI is that it's a black box, and you can't directly check its biases. Guess who will win the people control battle? (If we are speaking of the illusion of control, it's a different matter of course)
>I'm sure someone much smarter than me will create this at some point.
Such a person is the very last creature I want parsing every byte of content delivered to me. in order to make this service a reality it must be local.
What we need is data poisoning. Have the AI watch ads, spoof responses, while we watch ad free content. Run it like SETI, during our devices downtime. They'll try to raise fraud concerns. Understandable. Accusations of piracy? Certainly possible. Convictions, though? Probably not.
> Agreed. Anything reduces their profits is valid. Ideally to zero or into the negatives. Their "concerns" are irrelevant.
It would be better to produce a more profitable business model that doesn't incentivize or benefit from being shitty/harmful. "They" can then either adapt and cut it out with their shenanigans, or die out outcompeted by companies that do.
The best way to pressure them to come up with alternative business models is to completely invalidate their current business model.
They're virtuous capitalists who got to where they are via pure genius and will to power, right? Adapt or die. And they better not cry about it or beg the government for intervention.
>Doesn't matter either way. Can't wait for AI-powered ad blocking.
It would seem that it is just as likely that browser producers would add AI "watchers" to the browser to make sure you are not using any ad blocking! AI doesn't see any ads or marketing copy for 30 mins, sorry browser temporarily unusable ... unless you have a business account, then no ads for 8 hours.
If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube, for all of which I much prefer to pay with my attention rather than cold, hard cash.
I have no doubt that current AI is capable of this (in fact I'm sure it would be trivial for GPT-3.5 and well within reach of even locally-run LLMs), the question is what fraction of users can be bothered -- and I don't see any reason why AI would lead to an increase there.
The end of ad-supported services makes room for open protocols, open source, and regular old commercial software. All of which have suffered from lack of interest—from developers and users—in this environment where they have to compete with “free”.
I agree that that there would be an upswing in those things, but I'm not at all certain that the resulting environment would be any better for the average user -- certainly not in the short term, while people's expectation (which has by now become built into our culture) to get almost anything they want online "for free" remains.
> If AI-powered ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, it will mean the end of high-quality free services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube, for all of which I much prefer to pay with my attention rather than cold, hard cash.
That is true, but what is also true is that a few products are currently sucking all of the air out of the system, preventing new entrants from encroaching on the incumbents territory.
Maps, Search and Youtube all serve the Google Search business. Any new ad-supported entrant, by necessity, also has to serve the Google Search business.
If the Google Search Business is crippled, there are only good things that can result from that. I don't see a downside to making Google Search unprofitable due to smart ad-blockers. (I welcome hypothetical scenarios in which the Search Business being limited due to ad-blockers has bad unintended consequences).
Unrelated: I don't understand why this comment is modded so low that I can barely see it? It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.
>I welcome hypothetical scenarios in which the Search Business being limited due to ad-blockers has bad unintended consequences
A big increase in the use of ad blockers (AI-enhanced or not) would not only cripple Google, but also hurt the multitudes of small business and hobbyist sites that scrape by on what Google pays them to host ads. If users could somehow culturally readjust en masse to the idea of actually paying for online stuff, this would not be a problem -- but I think that's unlikely to happen immediately, and even in the long term, unlikely to happen to the same extent. So there would be a net loss of free (i.e., paid-for-by-Google-ad-money) content and services available to people. Also, it's not like a new wave of smaller, more democratised ad-sellers would arise in Google's wake, since ad-blocking works on them too.
>It is not in any way controversial and can be (and is, above) rationally debated.
Thanks, I appreciate that. Every society has things that are true but which you aren't supposed to say, and it's amusing to me that "Google provides some high quality free services" seems to be one of ours.
> So there would be a net loss of free (i.e., paid-for-by-Google-ad-money) content and services available to people. Also, it's not like a new wave of smaller, more democratised ad-sellers would arise in Google's wake, since ad-blocking works on them too.
You're correct, but I don't know how bad a thing that is.
To my mind (i.e. my opinion), there's no such thing as a power vacuum that remains a power vacuum.
Something is going to arise that replaces (for example) youtube. It is inconceivable that those content producers on youtube are simply going to give up the ghost and die.
It has to be a self-sustaining something(s) that isn't driven by ads (I agree with you on the point that a replacement can't be ad-supported), and I am arguing that whatever it(them) is will be better than the current ad-driven youtube.
The whole TLDR of my argument is that, even if the ad-driven sites go away, the content-producers and the content-consumers aren't going away!
Right now, the arbitrage is performed by ad-driven middlemen, so the motivation for abuse, control and censorship is incredibly high. I think that whatever arbitrage process or middlemen arise is going to be a lot better for society as a whole than the obnoxious ads with which I am bombarded with whenever I turn off the ad-blocker.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this is one of those things we'll only see when we see it.
I sometimes throw a YouTube video on the TV for some background noise (or for my cat :-) and if you're not paying attention, the ads can get incredibly long -- not just a few minutes, but 20, 30+ minutes.
Yeah, I got caught in one the other day because my gym uses YouTube for their music system.
Have also woken up to an ad that was hours long.
Not quite sure what the incentive is but maybe it works for some cases, sometimes I wonder if they're scam setups - sitting through a super long ad is a pre filter. Weirder things have been known for Internet scale.
All of the services I mentioned are either directly (Search) or indirectly ad-supported, the latter insofar as Google pays for their development and upkeep somehow, and most of Google's revenue comes from ads. And I think they are all of excellent quality.
Ads are irritating, and Google is not supplying these services out of the goodness of their heart, but I think there's no question that the world is a better place with these ad-supported services in it.
>Doesn't it mean that you are paying for the ads you see?
I don't follow, sorry. By "you", do you mean the end-user, sitting in front of their browser? I'd agree that that person is paying Google with their attention (hopefully in exchange for other valuable content nearby in time or space). But it's the companies trying to advertise stuff that pay Google cash (in exchange for that attention). Google then pays a cut to the site hosting the ad.
>I would rather have all google products be paid, and lessen the incentive for business to spend a large share of their revenue on advertisement.
I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you?
Companies pay Google with the money they got from you. They aren't getting "attention" they are getting future potential sales which will fund the next advertising round.
> I don't think Google would have ever gotten off the ground if you had to pay cash to search for stuff -- do you?
If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
I am not saying that this move would have made Google more successful, they are already successful. But I do not believe that this success is reaching us, consumers.
>Companies pay Google with the money they got from you
You talk as though this has already happened, but that's not the case. Companies pay Google with money they hope to recoup from you via your purchases, but whether or not you choose to buy the thing advertised is completely up to you. Advertising is an investment with uncertain returns, like any other.
>If online advertisement became illegal, Google or somebody else would have gotten off by selling search as a service.
It's possible, but I just don't think there's enough of an appetite to pay small amounts of cash for this. It will be interesting to see what happens with Kagi (though I acknowledge that if it fails, that would not be definitive, since it has to compete with ad-supported services, and massive, entrenched ones at that).
> You talk as though this has already happened, but that's not the case. Companies pay Google with money they hope to recoup from you via your purchases, but whether or not you choose to buy the thing advertised is completely up to you. Advertising is an investment with uncertain returns, like any other.
It has already happened. Things you buy have an online/google advertisement markup whether you use youtube premium or not. You pay for the ads no matter if you watch them or not.
Free services aren't actually free, on a large scale they affect how much everything should cost.
> It's possible, but I just don't think there's enough of an appetite to pay small amounts of cash for this. It will be interesting to see what happens with Kagi (though I acknowledge that if it fails, that would not be definitive, since it has to compete with ad-supported services, and massive, entrenched ones at that).
This is because free services are a trap. People do not want to pay for search BECAUSE there are """free""" alternatives. If every services become paid people wouldn't be as reluctant.
Free services also create wrong expectations and change the way we should use the service. Take youtube, it is free so everybody expect everyone to be able to access the platform, and so people tend to only upload to youtube because "why would you be anywhere else". And now, when youtube obviously change its term you have a wave an angry people seeing youtube as a platform that must remain convenient or their world will collapse.
If video platforms were all paid, people wouldn't have the same expectations. Uploaded videos could only target users who also paid for the platform, and would instinctively understand that this is a temporary platform.
An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries.
If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources.
I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a point I hadn't considered before.
> An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries.
You know who has seeded that argument into the public domain? PR agencies working for the advertising industry. It doesn't have any merit whatsoever. People in developing countries don't like ads any more than anyone else.
>People in developing countries don't like ads any more than anyone else.
Almost no one likes ads. What many people do like is the trade-off of some ads for access to high quality services that would otherwise cost them money.
> An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries.
This argument definitely gets pushed now and then, but seeing you write it out actually made me realize it seems like a red herring.
Ads are priced, bid, bought, and sold based on their expected return on investment.
If lower-income countries would be unable to sustain a public website because of being unable to pay for subscriptions, wouldn't they also be unable to sustain that website because ads sold there should have lower prices?
There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads. Sibling comment mentions Wikipedia, Open Street Map also comes to mind. We need more of these in this world. Not this ad-supported nonsense.
I love the concept of advertising-free cities! It's actually the advertising situation with public transport that I have found particularly frustrating where I am. For instance, some bus seats have transport maps on the ceiling above them, but others have private advertisements. Likewise, some stations have dozens of electronic advertising boards where they could have timetables. Perhaps they could at least have a button on them to switch them momentarily to a map or timetable.
I wonder how many millions of people have missed their train/bus connection because they couldn't find a departure board among the billboards.
Those were really interesting reads, thanks. I'm not aware of any similar step-change. It would be interesting to learn more about the aftermath, especially the effect on business overall.
>There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads
So you claim, but one of the two links you provided contains an ad. Which did not bother me at all, of course -- I'm happy to provide a couple of seconds of my attention in return for the interesting and useful information someone spent time preparing.
If everyone blocks that ad, though, the site will make less money, unless they start charging a fee to view some or all of it. I'm interested enough to read for "free" (paying with a couple of seconds of my attention), but not interested enough to pay cash -- and the world is full of people like me. What do you think will happen to sites like this if everyone blocks ads? Is that what you want?
Yes, there is Wikipedia, which is excellent and free. I think Wikipedia is an outlier, though. It's high-profile enough that people actually donate money to it, which is exceedingly rare. In some countries, the government donates only a small amount to well-known charities like the Blind Foundation or the Red Cross because they are known to be high-profile and trusted enough that large numbers of the public will give to them directly -- but there is a long, long tail of deserving charities that almost no one has ever even heard of, which the government has to subsidise fully. What do you propose to do about the long tail of websites that no one cares enough to donate to, once you shut off their main (and possibly only) source of income?
I feel similarly, though I also think that, provided the intent to track and profile-build is made clear to users up-front before they opt in to using something, the onus shifts to them (the user).
(OTOH if that intention is conveyed in p. 37 of an EULA in dense legalese, it seems clearly designed to swamp the user. I'd like to see a lot more attention paid to this in legal circles.)
We do. I think advertising of all kinds should be illegal. I consider it to be a form of mind rape when they forcibly insert their brands and products into my mind without my consent.
Not at all. I draw the line at consent. Nothing wrong with HN showing me your comments. I came here to see comments. If they started showing up while I'm watching a video somewhere else I would feel violated and swiftly block them. Nothing wrong with showing me products when I open a store app. That's what I opened the app to see. Showing me products while I'm trying to read an article is a violation.
Advertising is by definition noise. Superfluous. Information I did not ask for. Irrelevant stuff that someone paid money to put in front of me. Information I explicitly ask for is not advertising, it's simply information.
My cognitive functions are inalienable, they are not theirs to sell to the highest bidder, nor are they currency to pay for services with. I have attention deficit disorder. It's hard enough for me to focus without these corporations trying to grab my attention. I consider their attempts to do so a violation of my personal integrity. I consider ad blocking to be justified self-defense. I will literally do everything in my power to avoid looking at ads.
Most online advertisements are as intrusive from a mental attention perspective as a door-to-door salesman is intrusive from a personal space perspective. Yet, the former is somehow considered acceptable even in societies where the latter is completely taboo.
I always try to make sure my online contributions are worthy of the valuable attention of their readers they take up.
> Is hearing or seeing any idea that you have not previously consented to likewise mind rape?
I'll bite: yes. If you show me images of goatse or mutilated bodies in a war zone without my consent that’s mind rape. Same with bring politics forcibly into the workplace, showing Fox News (or MSNBC or whatever) at the bbq joint while I’m trying to eat or at the gym while I’m trying to exercise, or screaming at me in protest while I’m trying to access family planning services.
Just like women have the right to walk down the street in whatever clothing they want without getting raped, I have the right to experience the world without constantly being bombarded by commercial and political mind rape.
> If not, where do you personally draw the line?
Consent is implicit via set and setting. If you want to challenge peoples viewpoints go to college or start a poker night with a bunch of philosophically diverse neighbors who like to argue politics. If you want to shove ads down everyone's throat, go join an influencer support group.
Everyone else deserves to live free from constant mental assault.
> And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case?
>Just like women have the right to walk down the street in whatever clothing they want without getting raped
Do men, and lesbian and bisexual women, have the right to walk down the street without seeing a woman dressed in a way they find distracting?
I think you will say that they have no such right. But if so: What makes this form of attention-grabbing behaviour (wearing a skimpy dress) acceptable, and the other form (advertising) unacceptable?
This example highlights that (a) we are, in fact, capable of managing distractions to quite some degree, and (b) in both cases there is another party involved whose interests oppose our own, but whose rights nevertheless also need to be considered.
So, I think there’s a massive difference between ads in de-facto public spaces where consent is impossible, and ads in an environment where there’s full affirmative consent.
Can we call it nonconsensual ideation? Maybe that can be workshopped into something less wordy? Mind rape is too off-putting to generate good discussion, imho.
Therein lies the rub (or more precisely the problem) advertising at its core does _NOT_ have to be evil. Taking into account that the onus of every advertisement is to entice you to do something that you may have otherwise not considered we still do not negate the need for an advertisement to be evil. Now, you may very well be enticed to do something that is not in absolutely everyone’s best interests in mind, which does indeed qualify as evil. And I believe we agree that there are far too many advertisements prevalent that are indeed evil when referring specifically towards advertisements on a digital medium. So I think that the argument is valid that ending all advertising would ultimately prevent all evil advertising it would also prevent any not evil advertising from ever happening as well. Now again, that may be perfectly acceptable to you, your argument that advertising should not happen at all isn’t really practical for absolutely everyone who does or doesn’t support your absolute opinion on advertisements, as contrary to you, but they want you to simply affirm that their opinion is not absolutely based on them supporting the evil ads that you both abhor.
> Therein lies the rub (or more precisely the problem) advertising at its core does _NOT_ have to be evil.
Interestingly, I agree that it doesn't have to be evil, but in practice it is, so close to 100% of the time that the exceptions are actually not worth discussing.
I'm not sure what your point is but I'll respond to this:
> advertising at its core does _NOT_ have to be evil
Advertising has inherent and irreconciliable conflicts of interest that make it worthless to any rational person. They're trying to sell you stuff, it's literally guaranteed that they will be overstating the pros and downplaying the cons. When you want to make an informed decision, the last person you want to listen to is the advertiser. You want to listen to people you personally trust or independent third parties, not the seller who has every incentive in the world to lie to you.
Therefore the existence of advertising is incompatible with a rational society. There is no such thing as "non-evil" advertising. It doesn't inform anyone. On the contrary: it is disinformation, inherently untrustworthy.
But again, why is selling stuff abhorred by you as an absolute. A transaction which is facilitated by money is the key component to guaranteed assertion that a single valued skill can be exercised for any good or service at any time so long as everyone agrees that the compensation is fair and reasonable by all concerned parties. It’s one of fundamental components of an interdependent system that furthers the entire race at the same time and regulates itself to follow the current definition of justice needed to ensure continued success of all parties involved. As progress moves forward so then does the equality shared benefit of a longer and more fulfilling existence than would have otherwise been impossible.
I have no problem with buying and selling stuff or with transacting in general. I have a problem trusting sellers. I refuse to take them at their word. I do not want to hear what they have to say at all. I want to decide what I want to buy based on completely independent factors and then, after I have decided, come to the seller to finalize the purchase. I do not want or need advertising, I need its antithesis: quality, trustworthy information.
But again, why can’t one of the factors be advertising first followed by due diligence before finalization? Especially in the instance of stated facts that can be fairly easily verified by anyone’s personal definition of a trusted source, most especially when presented with simply an incentive to use a stored resource that neither you or any of your trusted sources of truth were even aware existed at all to begin with? Again with specificity at advertisements on a digital medium where there is an enticement to spend money suggested by a third party and they are not evil?
But how is it beneficial to those who don’t feel violated beyond the point of absolute necessity to always refuse consent because not every advertisement is guaranteed by nature to always be evil and have not yet come to a similar conclusion as yours as they believe that advertisement as a whole on a digital medium specifically in regards to transactions on a monetary level has not yet met their personal defined level of it being ultimately net evil. And therefore feel arguing against a ban of the practice entirely is not currently the most pressing issue with advertising that you keep telling them, their argument holds no merit, which lends itself to the personal assumption that what they are doing is ultimately wrong and therefore they should feel ashamed for it. They are not currently experiencing a feeling of guilt or shame about expressing their opinion and you are insisting, but not projecting, that they should. Ultimately this devolves into a basic summation of simply having their feelings hurt and wanting you to stop arguing your point, as you both actually understand each each other and can therefore continue this civil discussion we’re having and all continually agree that ultimately our shared responsibility society is working and we are still progressing despite the challenges.
I don't use google search (most of the time) as it's inferior - it ignores what I'm searching for, and substitutes what it thinks I should be searching for - and it's been doing that for years. There were free search engines before there were ads.
I don't use gmail because why would anyone want to use gmail for anything but temporary throwaways that'll get spammed.
I don't use google maps. nokia heremaps and openstreetmap (I use magic earth) are better in most ways, worse in others. When I go to a different country, I click "download country" and have a fully searchable map. No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection. No, I don't want to have to visually search the map for the thing I'm looking for, because someone barfed up a salad of dots that are place ads for things unrelated to my search. Google maps is not usable to anyone who has used something else. People who always use google maps don't know any better.
I do use google translate. This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads. You saying that the current ad-free service will disappear if ads were blocked from it... Can't make the comment on here that I want to make, so I'll let you imagine <words>
Youtube... Who give a crap. There were sites with videos before, there are other sites now. No, no one can host a huge expensive platform like that for free. So how about the people posting stuff, pay for their stuff being hosted. Then those people can inline talking ads or put a coke can on their desk, in their videos. You know, how ads in videos have been done since the existence of the video format, in 1920 all the way up to right now.
Google products, google customer service, and google the company, are inferior to the competition in almost every way. Except for google translate. Which again - has no ads.
>No, I don't want a map that needs a data connection.
Google Maps has had the ability to download maps for offline use as long as I can remember -- at least since 2013.
>This does not support your argument, because that's a service that is free, and does not display ads.
All Google services are ad-supported, at least indirectly. That's because Google pays for their development and upkeep, and Google's primary income stream is ads.
So when I go to Australia I can click "download Australia" in google maps before I board my flight? Or does it still let you only download a little zoom square like it did in the year 2013 to which you are referring? Does search work in those maps as it Didn't back then? I specifically gave an example, you then purposely ignored most of what I wrote to create a claim I did not make, and then said that claim is false. Do you do this often? Word on advice - this works on fox news where people only see the out-of-context sentence. It does not work when the people who read your reply, first have to read what I actually wrote.
Now, speaking of reading, I unfortunately stopped reading after your first sentence. This is because you immediately made it clear you are not communicating in good faith.
You have a good day, and enjoy winning all those arguments you yourself made up. The adults in the room ignore people like you and just move on.
Thanks for not overreacting, or conveniently misinterpreting my comment.
>I specifically gave an example, you then purposely ignored most of what I wrote to create a claim I did not make
No. Your next sentence implicitly claims that Google Maps is unable to download maps in general, and I succinctly contradicted this claim. Google Maps is able to download maps, but there are size limits, and Australia is much too big for it to download in a single offline map. True, it would be more convenient if it could download the entire country -- but wouldn't those other apps likewise be more convenient if they could download entire continents, or even the entire world at once? Why can't they? I haven't found the offline map size limit in Google Maps a hindrance in practice, and I've relied on it all over the world for years.
In case you've bravely shrugged off the mountains of bad faith that you have no doubt uncovered in this reply so far, and are still reading: Search works on downloaded maps, though only for car trips (not public transport or walking).
> Deliver your site only to the "inner browser" (that the user has no control over because it's heavily obfuscated and tricked-out with anti-debugging code) and you eliminate all ad blockers. Throw some DNS-over-HTTPS w/ certificate pinning in for good measure and you kill DNS-based ad blockers too.
I'm confused how the "inner browser" meaningfully helps you accomplish this. How is this any easier or more effective than just having a website that hosts its own advertising assets (or proxies them) and obfuscates/randomizes its DOM structure to make ads difficult to target with simplistic ad-blocking rules?
I can't wait until this Browser-on-JS/WASM-on-Canvas loads an IFrame from a site that also has its own Browser-on-JS/WASM-on-Canvas.
Hell, the inner IFrame is probably going to get around IFrame recursion and domain rules too.
We're going to eventually end up with IFrame fork bombs, and IFrame topologies that cannot be meaningfully mapped to Euclidean space (amongst all the other privacy, user control, etc. concerns, of course).
> advertisers REALLY don't want you to do that because it's far too easy to cheat.
I expect that they are already cheating as much as possible to convince their customers to continue paying for advertising that has a negligible effect on the bottom line.
Adtech and PR firms would have you believe that it is impossible to sell a product or service online without first paying them $10k/m. It's also why google search is so awful - if they could get you the information you were looking for they are sidelining their customers, so their search has to, by design, be limited so that their customers are more prominent in the search results than non-customers.
Note: I'm not saying that this is by design; they could get to this stable equilibrium simply by each isolated team within search, advertising, etc aggressively pursuing its own metrics.
I was worried from the very start of the WASM tech, that it would lead to the end of the user-controlled client. You don't even really need an embedded browser, a motivated provider could create a completely proprietary protocol for rendering their pages.
Taking power away from the user seems to be a large part of the appeal of WASM. Wasn't it just a year or two ago that it was being reported that 75% of WASM modules are malicious? A study from a previous year had said 50% of all websites using it were malicious so the trend line isn't looking great.
I don't know how we got from "don't download and install random software from untrusted sources on your devices" to "let anyone with a website run code directly on your hardware. Sandboxes are impossible to breach!"
I get that it's cool tech and the promise of writing software to run on many different platforms is exciting, but from a real world/user perspective it's insane.
> I don't know how we got from "don't download and install random software from untrusted sources on your devices" to "let anyone with a website run code directly on your hardware. Sandboxes are impossible to breech!"
The whole point of WASM is that it's the alternative to downloading and installing random software.
It has exactly the same potential in the control and code-running respects as (minified) JavaScript. It’s overrepresented in malware because it’s faster, i.e. better for cryptominers. (Many sandbox breaches come from JavaScript’s complexity.)
Right, did everyone forget about ASM.js? We already had conpile-to-js, it was just a horrible subset of more efficient JS. WASM is just the extension and further development of that.
A browser is nice because the provider can continue to use their whole tech stack, hosting, dev tools, etc. Just wrap it in a proxy that only wants to talk to the "inner browser".
At that point I'm just going to have my ad blocker block the entire "inner browser." No website that would employ such a lovecraftian horror is worth visiting anyway.
Presumably the worry is that the big ad companies would get approximately every website in the world to use this technique, which is already the only reason web advertising is such a big problem.
and stop participating in online society? Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites, viewing youtube, and reading your gmail?
I think it's an inevitable future tbh. The users have lost - they just dont know it yet. Google's WEI [1] is their first foray into this, and i dont doubt there will be future iterations they try to push through. The browser-in-browser is but one alternative idea.
Sure. This site is one of very few sites I can bear to visit. I come here for the comments, I don't even open the links anymore, I just assume people will quote anything important.
When I made my own website, I deliberately set out to avoid as many of these obnoxious dark patterns as humanly possible. The result was basically a marginally improved motherfucking website and I'm actually pretty happy with it. I think that's how websites should be.
If the web is gonna turn into an opaque proprietary mess for the benefit of advertisers, it doesn't even deserve to exist.
> Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites
Absolutely. I already avoid it.
> viewing youtube
Absolutely. I already use yt-dlp, if that stops working I'm just gonna forget about it.
Ha, I'm not the only one. Barely ever visit the links unless that's something I'm actually personally interested in, by coincidence. Mostly come here for the comments.
The parts of it that try to force ads on me, sure.
> Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites, viewing youtube, and reading your gmail?
I would, yeah. I've already stopped using all google services to whatever extent possible and deleted my google account long ago. I do sometimes watch a youtube video (in an external player) if one is linked to me, but I don't think I'd particularly miss youtube if it were gone altogether.
I would hope that there will remain at least one e-commerce site that doesn't try to force ads on me. But if there isn't, I'll drive to the store.
> Are you going to stop buying from ecommerce sites
E-commerce is the online sector with the highest incentives to deliver an ad-free and user-friendly experience, because they actually want to sell products. If you're selling something you should do everything possible to get out of the user's way and let them make a purchase. This includes having your site load and operate extremely fast, not using cookies and not using advertising. This also includes having the highest quality content on your page, so that users find what they're looking for and to build enough trust that they want to do business with you.
As for YouTube there's premium and for e-mail the ad-free and spy-free options are legion.
If we exclude the online content that is free and without ads, the online content that we can pay for and the online content that we can pirate, that's already a huge chunk of what is valuable on the internet. So I don't think the ad-fueled internet has the upper hand here.
When ecommerce becomes unweildy enough, I'll just go to walmart in person. I can pay my credit card bills by mail.
I'd be ok losing youtube. There's some good content there, but there's so much garbage and I can only hear people begging me to like and subscribe so many times. I've got more dvds and blu-rays than I can watch, and there's so many at good will too.
All I get in gmail is transactional mail for other people. It would be no loss. My personal email is at fastmail, and I'd expect them not to participate in the browser in browser thing, but if they do... That's fine. Email isn't that important anymore. What am I going to miss? If you want to contact me, send me a letter or call me or text me or ... ?
Thankfully, the biggest ad company - Google - would hate it because it would dramatically reduce page performance. And webpage performance apparently has a big impact on ad clickthrough rates.
The internet advertising industry needs to move past insisting that user machines have to be involved in a business relationship they have nothing to do with and no legal, or ethical, obligation to uphold. All other forms of advertising work that way. The advertiser and host need to figure out how to keep each other honest without involving passers-by.
Thing is, internet adtech involves a rock paper scissors evolution.
It's not just a advertisement and a viewer, it's also the bots.
Adtech is where it's at now just cause it wants you to see it but because a industry of faking viewership built up around it.
No other advertisement has really had to deal with how ads are bought on per viewer basis.
All the targeting tech is equally a response to "personalization" as it is to "fraudulent botters"
You can then understand that if ads reverted to the old static billboard or tv commercial state, there's probably be little incentive to harass the user.
I agree that it's an arms race, but I consider static advertisements (billboard/tv type) an improvement.
I think that the only way to get to the endgame I want, which is "advertisers simply give up, the sites sell the ad-space directly, with no tracking necessary and no sharing of information between sites" is for everyone to click on more ads for things that they aren't interested in.
Make it a browser plugin: the plugin works quietly in the background, and clicks on every single advertisement it sees, going as far as possible in the funnel, all the way to checkout, but without doing the final payment.
Until the signal/noise ratio of adverts are 99.999% noise, we're still going to have this arms race.
It's happened already: https://earth.google.com is a Flutter app that's entirely drawn in a canvas. Its accessibility sucks. Things that you use to be able to copy and paste like names of places or phone numbers etc you no longer can. It's horrifying. Accessibility or translation extensions have nothing to look at.
It's also the new flash since like flash it's just a bucket of pixels. Like when say VisionOS comes out and their browser has made tweaks to all the HTML form elements so they work well with finger gestures in the air but of course here this page is just a block of pixels so it will have the wrong interface for the device.
I can't believe how many people seem to be excited about this whole WebAssembly Bring Your Own Everything stuff.
Every time there's an article about some kind of "Here's a really simple core to build stuff from scratch" technology people seem to get really excited.
I was hoping we'd be going the other way and building web tech into OSes!
People could have been doing this with JS for a long time. This is hardly the first virtual machine in JS and it seems like overkill.
The far more likely way we'll see push back against Ad Blockers is by simply detecting that an Ad did not play and then refusing to display content until it does.
This might be something you fear, maybe even legitimately, but it seems hyperbolic to assign an equivalence to your worst fear and the passion project of an individual who made this and probably does not have any of the nefarious intentions you default to attributing to anyone who could create something resembling it.
As a developer, JavaScript does not scale due it lacking static checkability and for some, performance.
So we slap TypeScript on top, which mostly solves this problem.
But starting a massive browser UI project today, I think Qt on WASM + WebGPU makes a lot of technical sense.
That would have the added commercial benefit of making ad blocking harder. Although the binary could be cracked by a modified browser.
The eternal cat and mouse game continues.
The next step in the arms race is to provide hosted ad blocking, where the action happens (however nested) in a headless server and an AI looks it over and relays only the stuff that looks like content into a cleaned up session for the user. It would eventually start looking like a CDN where the ad blocker caches the content so it doesn't have to bother contacting the underlying site so often.
I wouldn't, because sending all of your browsing history to any third party is going to result in them mining and selling it, or exposing it to state actors or someone else for direct surveillance/malware injection.
Eventually, AI will be something we can run locally on a typical desktop, or even a cell phone, and at that point we could locally host that kind of ad blocking, but trusting all of your traffic to some random company that promises to delete ads but not abuse their position seems naive given our situation today. It preserves the worst dangers of ads while adding even less control and transparency for the user.
I’ve been interested in a desktop AI ad blocker for awhile, but it doesn’t solve the issue of malware being distributed via ad networks, or the performance impact of all that extra js and network traffic.
Run the whole thing in a sandbox and have the AI exfiltrate the content (but not the ads) as a static DOM (no js). Once you know which DOMs go with which URL's you can gossip those peer-to-peer and not bother actually talking to the site at all (although one of us should hit the actual site every now and then, just in case the content changes). Isn't that more or less how cloudflare works?
I think this evokes the static vs dynamic linking argument again though. If you consider your browser client code as your "source code" and the browser as a "dynamically linked library", then there are substantial pros and cons.
Your proposal, while feasible, turns this into a static linking affair. This comes with many risks, like becoming complacent and not updating the "inner browser" due to browser incompatibilities and bugs. It creates a giant mess of dependency update hell if you aren't regularly updating the webview.
At that point, you might as well ship a desktop app that does something similar and proxies ads through the first party server since it's probably less work.
You are right that it would work. I just don't know if going to such lengths is required to achieve the same thing.
A good counter is that a desktop app could be exploited to alter the behavior via reverse engineering. But a browser would show you the WASM as well, so I'm sure you could reverse engineer it and alter it with an extension like a traditional binary.
Maybe I'm missing something though - I'll admit that I'm an advocate of WASM but don't keep super up to date on all advancements.
user doesn't want to download an app, since that has a lot of friction. Going to a url and waiting (even if the download time is the same) feels like there's less friction, and so this idea of shipping a blackbox is more desirable.
The only problem really is the jankiness of any non-browser controls. The user expects a good right-click context menu, keyboard navigation, scrolling, etc, which all would have to be implemented if you're compiling a native app into WASM. But if the app itself is just HTML+javascript, then shipping a WASM browser, then using that browser as the app layer solves all of those UX jankiness (since the user should not really be able to tell it's a WASM browser).
The idea is insidiouly bad for user freedom, but great for businesses like google (who wants to control the user space completely).
Reaching into my pessimistic, dark side - if we transition to most processing being done in the cloud, such that we eventually give up powerful devices for simpler cloud AI terminals in general, I could see the concept of the "client" side also living in the cloud, similar to cloud gaming. In that case, the internet would be more like cable where you just accept the commercials because you can also watch ninja turtles in between them.
i don't feel having like extra virtual dom over the virtual dom of react, will make things highly-performant, god we need this doesn't happen.
i wish to see the 0,1 fps react crud app, that will come from this.
As an SWE who used to work on Internet Explorer (yeah, laugh), I know I can't say that JS is somehow impervious to possible attacks and privilege-escalation out of the browser-imposed sandbox (which can and does happen), but when one compares even the basic nature of Flash's plugin/ActiveX control vs modern browser JS engines, the threat-model and browser-vendors' mitigation strategy, it means I have easily 100x more trust in in-browser JS as a far, far "safe"-er environment than Flash.
I don’t understand why ads aren’t just served from same origin as the rest of the content. Seems to work great for YouTube creators, while YouTube itself is fighting
I need someone much smarter and more willing to engage on this issue to explain this remark or set it straight, pretty please and pretty-thank-you in advance
Think of the browser as an operating system, and a web page as an app. If that app is another browser, custom built, it could be built to prevent adblockers.
Inasmuch as any app, eg., a video player, can include DRM or otherwise lock things down.
This is feasible, but its unclear how successful it would be -- it would just start an arms race to hack it.
When desktop applications running in electron, just doesnt have enough web abstraction to keep up with mores law, a hero comes along, to ensure there can always be one more level of java script between you and a responsive UI.
Speaking of Electron... when I start my Slack client for work, there are a series of processes where at least one reports 1.130 terabytes of virtual memory. (Shown in top as "VIRT".)
Now, maybe that's just a potential usage that trust-me-bro it'll never actually try to use or access in RAM or on disk... but how on earth is that number for a chat client so much bigger than either Firefox with 100+ tabs or even Java-based IDEs like Webstorm?
V8 allocates a “gigacage” around every wasm memory area on modern 64 bit processors and marks them so the OS will trap on an unexpected access. This is much more efficient than doing a bounds check on every access. These pages are not actually resident.
“Big number is scary” is not a good way to understand performance.
No, but it means there is one less thing we can rely on to identify "process gone whacky".
Plus, admittedly I didn't think about this thoroughly just now, this sounds like a cheap hack for speed. You could still have an OOB access that would land in some valid memory and thus lead to an exploit, right? It's just made very unlikely by making these areas very large and having ASLR. Proper bounds checks wouldn't have that problem.
Sounds like somebody is playing tricks with virtual addressing, yeah. See BIBOP (1980) [1] for an example, though it is not used literally in current garbage collectors as far as I am aware. Or look at what AddressSanitizer does with its nominal terabytes of “shadow memory”[2]. Chrome has a bewildering variety of low-level stuff in it, to save memory among other things[3], so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn there was virtual-memory tagging somewhere in there, too.
This all reminds me of that description of the gigantic rover wheel from KSP:
> The RoveMax Model 3 was developed in total secrecy by Kerbal Motion's R&D team over the course of a year and a half. When it was finally revealed to the company's chairman, he stared in shock, screamed 'WHY', and subsequently dropped dead on the spot.
Yeah, but they added sockets at some point. It was pretty handy for minimal clients for flooding/desyncs. Not that I was doing any of that (sorry undernet).
We are sorely lacking inner browser virtualization. This way web pages can virtualize other web pages internally via canvas and get true micro-front ends! Every component can be fully isolated from every other component and they will communicate via network requests to each other
To make the web entirely like a TV, everything should be rendered on canvases. To let you truly deploy your org chart, each team should be responsible for one isolated canvas.
For example you could set cookies before visiting another website. This is currently impossible in an iframe but possible in a browser.
I've wanted to do this to automatically login users on some external websites.
That's a security feature. If you would have that in any environment it would be massive security issue. If you actually own the service you can still do that.
I don't know how people can say that JS is a great language with a straight face. Sure it has a lot of advantages mostly due to how widespread it is. But it's really obviously not a great programming language by itself...
Reality: JS is a great language, and that's why it won. The idea that it's merely the case that it was everywhere and that that is the reason it won is something that people who are sore tell themselves to avoid grappling with the truth. JS's ubiquity (a) was neither a fait accompli, and (b) is insufficient to completely explain its success—it only explains it if you're willing to overlook a lot of confounding factors.
JS is a language I can cobble together something hacky in and I don't have to care about types or anything yet, just making something work. It's fun! :)
Pretty much the solution to better browsing that I've been thinking of for some time and of course never managed to even start about implementing it (or believing I could or should): have one browser / hidden level get all web pages complete with all the bad stuff (or at least the required cookies and advertising) left in, then give the user a sanitized view of that. Note you could do things like rendering obnoxious play-on-load videos as subdued stills that still allow the user to click on to view if they feel inclined; also should be possible to somehow cut the ads out of YT videos with some more work, and YT wouldn't know (the way it should be).
Second: I'd love to be able to see it access Wikipedia!
(Wikipedia should be a fairly "low-hanging fruit" in terms of functionality that must be implemented to achieve compatibility -- if I were writing a web browser, I'd always start with Wikipedia compatibility first, then once that has been obtained, move on to more challenging, technologically complex sites... But that being said, Wikipedia is probably a bit more complex these days than when it was first implemented... still, it would be a great "win" to be able to browse Wikipedia with it!)
1. Wikipedia changes so rarely that it's almost considered a short of a misfeature, so it's hardly a moving target the way that other stuff would be
2. Even despite the breadth of subject matter, most pages are fairly similar, and the more exotic stuff will be used infrequently via templates and confined to supplementary items like infoboxes
3. Your bang-for-buck once you have a passable implementation will be enormous (not to mention: doesn't outright contribute to the decay of society), in contrast to e.g. a social networking site where a quarter of the world uses it and 3/4 either revile it or are indifferent to it when stacked up against their preferred platform
One thing to be considered is that the general look of unstyled pages that is common to almost all browsers isn't actually prescribed by any spec—browsers are free to come up with their own UA style sheets—so anyone developing a new browser should just make unstyled content look by default like what it would look like under reader mode. Pretty crazy that mainstream browsers haven't changed the way unstyled content is presented.
I think it's pretty cool. Maybe browsers are the kind of thing that should be written in s high level language like js. Except for the JavaScript engine of course.
There’s something really beautiful about creating a browser that can run in a browser. We can finally steamroll a lot of those cross browser incompatibilities by replacing the host browser engine entirely. It’s like the nuclear option to fight against the new IE (Safari)
I dunno I'd say the new IE is Chrome. They basically control the ecosystem and everyone targets them when developing.
"Best viewed with I̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ ̶E̶x̶p̶l̶o̶r̶e̶r Chrome"
This is interesting. Chrome is the new i.e. as i.e. was in 2002, namely, most people regarded it as “the only browser any normal person would ever use.”
Safari is the new i.e. in the sense that i.e. was in the late 2000s/early 2010s, meaning it’s the browser that we would like to ignore due to how weird it is compared to the browser we normally target. And how stubborn the vendor is in neither acting like the majority browser, nor giving up and adopting a different engine (or in the case of iOS, even allowing a different engine to run).
I’m not hearing that. Safari has its share of CVEs, including many of the jailbreak methods of the past, meaning one click to root the device. Apple isn’t any better at software than any other html engine vendor. And by having a monoculture on iOS, every time there’s a WebKit bug 100% of iOS users are guaranteed exploitable. There’s zero net security benefit to banning Gecko and Chromium (and any upstart innovators).
Oh and before anyone says anything, I'm a staunch Firefox user and have been continuously since its first release. And in the last few years I'm starting to see a marked growth in sites which don't work in Firefox, usually because of something like a bug in their Content Security Policy which Firefox correctly rejects and Chrome doesn't.
It's becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority of web developers are now exclusively using Chrome and resent the idea of testing elsewhere.
Yes, that is what I meant. I have to work on a lot of e-commerce websites and the WebKit browser engine is the one that seems to always be late to the party or outright won’t support new features. But of course most shoppers on a website are on mobile Safari, especially the ones making purchases. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it because Apple won’t allow other types of browser engines on iOS.
If you need “new features” not available in Safari in order to run an ecommerce website, I’m fairly confident that you’re doing it wrong.
(Of course usually when one delves into exactly what features Safari is missing, specifically the ones which piss off web developers, it’s push notifications. And to that I salute Apple for bravely holding the line against that nonsense.)
No, for me they have more to do with web performance. Look up how to track Largest Contentful Paint in Safari, for example. Many other types of ways to optimize websites are not available in Safari.
The absence of LCP reporting doesn’t affect your ability to build a website that works in Safari. My suggestion is to stop embedding eighteen third party performance metric platforms and your website will be faster than any of those platforms could ever make it.
I work in this field too and I’ve heard it all before — and 99% of it is bullshit. Web performance is a solved problem and has been for a decade, unless you build some ridiculous Rube Goldberg machine of libraries atop libraries.
> My suggestion is to stop embedding eighteen third party performance metric platforms and your website will be faster than any of those platforms could ever make it.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about but the snark and continuous incorrect assumptions aren’t constructive so this is where our polite debate will end. Good day, sir!
Right after we made the browser to fight cross-OS incompatibility, which were made to fight cross-smaller-OS incompatibility, which were made to fight machine code and punching card and hardware incompatibility...
At some point maybe the web dev world will understand that, sometimes, you just have to live with the fact that there is no one true best solution, and instead build tools that are built with cross-platform in mind (like Qt, SDL, etc.).
I can't seem to get it to work. Just shows a white screen, sometimes with a black bar over the bottom half-ish of the screen. Tried in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari and see the same thing.
This was by virtue of WebKit itself being (relatively) small and fast. I don't know what they call "the core component", it is quite misleading.
I used the last version of Uzbl in an old Debian container to debug a game I made specifically supporting the iPad 2, which is quite resource constrained, because Uzbl was based on a similar version of WebKit. WebKit somehow had to fit the iPad 2 and still be quite fast, so Uzbl, which is very bare-bones, felt very fast indeed on a decent computer.
I was looking at similar browsers, apparently epiphany (Gnome Web) is the only remaining open source browser based on WebkitGTK+ that's still maintained. Last version of Surf was released in 2021, Midori is actually a Gecko browser which I need to check out [1]. I guess someone could contribute and update Surf or Uzbl or fork the old Midori.
qutebrowser is a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI. It’s based on Python and Qt and free software, licensed under the GPL.
It was inspired by other browsers/addons like dwb and Vimperator/Pentadactyl.
https://qutebrowser.org/
This one is based on Qt Web Engine, which uses Blink (behind Chromium). Similarly, you also have Falkon, from the KDE project.
> Not sure why my original post was downvoted.
I didn't downvote, however I initially found your message a bit off-topic. The article is about a brand new browser engine, for fun, in js, and you are saying that you wish the dev worked on this abandoned browser UI. These things are actually quite far, in the intent, motives and technically.
The fonts look terrible in LibreWolf and the FPS is only ~60. LibreWolf is also extension heavy. My default zoom on a page is 120% on a 1080 screen.
It doesn't load in (updated) Firefox, which is interesting. It only shows that the FPS is around 60. Not as many extension (vs LibreWolf). I rarely use FF (opting for LibreWolf).
On Brave (no extensions at all, except built in protections), the site runs at ~121FPS and the fonts look normal enough (no zoom, page at 100%). Fonts continue to look fine even when I zoom to 150% or higher.
I expected that my CPU temp would increase, maybe the fans might kick in... nothing. Cool as a cucumber. I have 4 browsers all opened on this page.
Interesting project. I read what @EvanAnderson wrote (evil software). I tend to agree. Respectfully, I don't see how this would be used. Browsers that already run JS don't need this. Browser that need this usually don't run JS (fails on Dillo, NetSurf, Lynx for example).
Zoom isn't taken into account so probably why it looks bad. The FPS is locked to your monitor's frame rate (or what your browser provides, LibreWolf might always send 60 to avoid fingerprinting).
Deliver your site only to the "inner browser" (that the user has no control over because it's heavily obfuscated and tricked-out with anti-debugging code) and you eliminate all ad blockers. Throw some DNS-over-HTTPS w/ certificate pinning in for good measure and you kill DNS-based ad blockers too.
Accessibility will be a challenge but if it sells that'll get "fixed".
(I think this idea is evil, BTW, but somebody is going to do it.)
Edit: As an aside this needs to go here, too. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...