Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube.
It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do.
It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space.
For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.
I wish this was the case, I doubt it'll be the case. Suppose for example that the foundation agrees that Manifest V3 is a bad idea (and, objectively, it is an awful idea). I can't imagine a world where the contributors from Google (which currently still make up the vast majority of the commits to the Chromium codebase) go back on their steps and re-implement support for V2, which would basically go against the profitability strategy of their own employer.
Same for intentionally crippling Google websites on non-Chromium browsers: given how deliberate such acts of crippling are, I have reasons to believe that it's part of Google's "works with Chrome" strategy, and I'd doubt that Google employees can do much against it.
The only way to fix the governance of Chromium is to effectively chop all the threads that connect it to Google. As long as Chromium developers who are employed at Google won't do anything that goes against the strategy of their employer, you can't have fair governance.
How is that possible? Would Chrome Chromium maintainer make a different implementation decision from the original Chrome, and then support and develop a real branch in the code? To have Google less influence? I highly doubt it. It is all chromewashing, to make it sound as if Chrome Chromium is an independent browser.
That's how it is advertised. But in reality all decisions are made by Google for Chrome and other Chrome forks just implement all of them without questions.
Google wants to add a new protocol - all forks add it. Google wants to cripple adblock support - all forks do it. Etc.
Since the development is done in chromium, adding owners to the project, maybe changing governance similar to Kubernetes and the CNCF, could help steering the anti-trust away and benefit the industry as a side effect.
And yet Google is a member of the initiative. Maybe, possibly, this initiative coupled with detaching Chromium from Alphabet might lead to an opening of the Chromium engine, but more likely Alphabet joined so that if it _does_ get split off from the mother-ship due to anti-trust they'll still have sway over Chromium's direction. And that will be an advertiser-centric direction.
I'll add that whatever the purpose of this project, it isn't going to help the overall openness of the web and will only continue to boost the adoption of an engine that already has an outsized influence over web standards.
Linus & co do not follow, or respect, the values of the FOSS zealots.
He actively dislikes the GPLv3, has a good working relationship with Google on Android and ChromeOS, and has criticized attitudes in the Linux desktop community for over a decade. He famously roasted his own distribution's package maintainer for wasting their life.
All hats off to him, frankly. The Linux community can be extremely delusional at times.
All that Facebook money has gone to his head I guess. Thankfully we should still have the ability to fork the kernel if he fully loses the plot to corporate interests.
Let me copy the actually important information from the sibling comment that's about to be deleted, because this is actually important:
Linus has hated GPLv3 since at least 2006.
Linux development has been over 80% corporate funded for over a decade. FOSS contributors do not have enough talent or interest to maintain the kernel for even a few weeks. If corporate interests weren't in the kernel, the kernel would not run on modern devices, period. It would have fallen behind the times and been abandoned like countless other technologies, or replaced with a new proprietary kernel from someone else.
Linux on the desktop is not somewhat usable in spite of corporate interests. Linux on the desktop is usable today because of corporate interests.
The original comment I was replying to has an inaccurate mindset: Linux supporters generally still envision this as a community project, with community contributors, and they are so successful, that companies knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.
It's actually the other way around: This is a collaborative corporate project, with corporate employees contributing, but there are some random community members who can knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.
The community-first development model died about 2 decades ago. When the Linux Foundation talks about "community," they are talking about their corporate contributors and their communities, not us. This is also why I cringe at the excessive (not all, just excessive) hate for corporations in the online community. Without their work, rip out 80%-90% of the kernel commits every year for the last decade, and see how advanced Linux would be.
This same change is also underway at another open source project - Blender; which is now increasingly corporate funded and developed. When I see online forum posts arguing that Blender is a perfect example of how we can beat the corporations as a community, I just shake my head now.
I actually agree with you that Linux development has been captured by corporations. Except that I believe it's not sustainable. Eventually the Shareholders are going to come knocking and ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on some hippie-dippy Open Source junk and not returning value to them. It needs AI in it, or maybe a Linux Pro subscription with ads for the freeloaders. This is why I'm glad the kernel is tied to the GPL, so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours.
> ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on [Linux]
Most likely the corporations will say "because that is much cheaper than developing our own; 10 of our devs on Linux an 99% of devs from other corporations are much cheaper than 1000 of our devs on our own OS". And the shareholders will likely accept that.
The key thing is that for most corporations that contribute to Linux, Linux is not the product (except Red Hat, SuSe etc). Google, Facebook, etc, just need a good OS to run their billions of servers on.
> so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours
You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.
That is also fine from the perspecitve of Free Software. The 4 freedoms do not include "the program must be maintainable with little enough manpower for people to do it in their free time, free of independence on corporate interests":
The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
> You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.
Maybe a question too radical for Hacker News, but why does Linux need 1M hours/year? How much "worse" would Linux be for the end user if this year, that time spent dropped to 100k or even 10k? And which "type" of Linux user was benefiting most from that time spent (person or corporation)? Why is more automatically treated as better than less?
> The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
Indeed, I respect the wisdom and forethought of Stallman greatly in drafting the GPL.
I think it's a reasonable question to ask, and there's surely some churn that we could do without. But don't underestimate the effort that goes into device drivers.
A. How do you contribute to the kernel in a way that only benefits the contributing organization? That's quite literally impossible in this kind of project. Even the more niche stuff like virtualization support is used by homelab enthusiasts. It's also not like Linux has 100,000 APIs for every customer under the sun.
B. Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement; CPUs, GPUs, power management, etc. Without corporate interests, try running Linux 2.2 from 1999 on a modern PC (which came out just before the $1B IBM investment). See how well it works. Fork modern 2025 Linux, and try running it on a computer that comes out in 2028. See if it even boots. If Intel's only done a minor refresh, it might work; if it's something bigger like the split to P cores and E cores, expect a brick. Even if it does boot, don't be surprised if it crashes, acts unstable, has borked performance, broken sleep/wake, broken audio, broken USB, you name it, it's probably broken.
C. A forked Linux would not have the same level of security research behind it. For example, the Linux 4 era was marked by the introduction of fuzzers and the fixing of countless bugs. A C codebase with handwritten Assembly is rather unlikely to ever become bug-free. How well would your forked non-corporate codebase handle Spectre and Meltdown, just an example, with Google's experts contributing the technique for fixing these problems efficiently (Retpoline)?
D. Added to the above, this isn't a hypothetical: The FSF didn't like the practice of proprietary firmware blobs being in the kernel; so they made their own commercial-interest-free version of Linux called Trisquel. It still uses commercially written code if it's open source; so even it can't be called completely free of commercial influence. The kicker: It runs on almost nothing, and people were complaining about how it works on nothing 13 years ago.
TL;DR: A forked Linux, is a broken Linux, that will never run well on newer hardware, and will quickly become insecure.
> Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement;
Which is why Linux is primarily corporate funded. The corporates want to sell their hardware. To sell their hardware they need to get it running on Linux, so they fund that. As hardware support constitutes most of the code contributions, most of the code that goes into Linux was because corporate actors made a decision to pay for it's development - purely in their own interests.
That's nice - this symbiosis between FOSS and corporates works well for both sides. But it's a stretch to say Linux would not exist today without it. The most you can say for certain is Linux would not have it's great hardware support without it. The BSD's don't get anything like the amount of corporate funding Linux does. They are doing fine, and notably work on common modern hardware. So could Linux even without corporate funding.
In particular, most of the interesting stuff that happens in the kernel, the stuff that determines what the kernel will look like in 10 years time, stuff like adopting Rust, is driven by people scratching itches in the FOSS tradition. Not all of it - pKVM is Google initiative. But eBPF was scratching an itch. Jens Axboe developed io_uring probably as a consequence of wanting storage to run faster at Meta - but it was definitely an itch of his. It's nice that Meta to paid him while he developed it, but saying its creation was "driven by corporate interests at Meta" is a bit of a stretch.
I believe most of this is hardware support, followed by refactoring. The core kernel functionality certainly doesn't change to the tune of 1M hours/year.
You're assuming that community driven FOSS development is sustainable, or can make a good long term project the size of a kernel, or a multimedia package, or anything larger than a tool or library.
In practice, I'm going to be honest and blunt, it's never worked.
3 decades of trying to replace Photoshop with GIMP (founded 1995)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to unsettle Windows with the Linux desktop (KDE, 1998)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to beat 3D packages with Blender (founded 1994)? Finally working now, ironically only because corporations started getting involved. Before then, Blender 2.7 was never going to do it.
2 decades of Apache trying to kill Skype with OpenMeetings (founded 2007)? Not even a dent.
2 decades of trying to kill proprietary CAD packages with FreeCAD (founded 2002)? Not even a dent.
4 decades of trying to beat Microsoft Office with what is now LibreOffice (roots in StarOffice, 1985, which was ironically a proprietary corporate project for the first decade and a half)? Barely a dent.
The Linux community, and FOSS communities, overestimate their strength without corporate interests. They have none.
Why should I care that Microsoft Office has more users than LibreOffice? I care which is the better product and has my interests as the user, and not the product, in mind. For example, and relevant to the article, I can use an ad blocker on Firefox without Big Brother Google stepping in and taking it away. Photoshop takes 30 seconds to open and illegally scrapes its users' private data for AI training. Windows has mass surveillance built in with Recall and shoves tabloid garbage and ads into the Start Menu. It means nothing to me that the worse products have more users, they are still worse products.
> Why should I care that Microsoft Office has more users than LibreOffice?
Because people are going to send you documents in Word format, and expect you to be able to send them documents in Word format. Including embedded objects, RTL text, animations, and many other features that LibreOffice barely support and do not transfer well between its own native format and the Word format.
I'm sure it's a problem for some. But at my company we've been using open/libreoffice for about 20 years and I can count on one hand the times it has actually been a problem.
And all our customers often send us MS Office documents. They never use the fancy features.
> You're assuming that community driven FOSS development is sustainable
I'm confused. Is FOSS is something more than someone or some entity contributing their time and releasing the source for for free? Does it really matter if thing doing the development is a a person in a garage or a company?
There doesn't seem to be a lot of difference to me. Both a people in garages and a company have kept their pet projects going for decades, giving away their efforts over all that time. Both people in garages and and companies have lost interest in open source projects. As an example Debian is one of the longest lived open source projects on the planet. It is a community drive development. To me it looks likely it will outlast Ubuntu, which is a fork that isn't community driven.
The central tenants that make FOSS work don't seem to have much to do with whether it's community driven or not. Both can succeed. Yes, community driven efforts can fail. But so can corporate drive FOSS, as WordPress may well demonstrate.
I mean it's still a better model than, say, Adobe Photoshop. Even if corporations are contributing to it and making use of it, it still creates a useful tool for individuals that's less susceptible to many of the downsides of corporate products.
It's not too terribly unreasonable. It's largely the Linux Foundation trying to wrest control over chromium from Google before the FTC antitrusts them or before Google does more manipulative market controlling BS.
In more polite terms they are framing themselves as an ideal long term steward for the chromium project given that courts have already ruled that Google isn't a suitable steward anymore. Chromium wouldn't be so problematic if it wasn't run by such an anticompetitive organisation. If the Linux Foundation ran chromium and orgs like Igalia (who already do a near majority of the dev work for chromiumm) took over the brunt of senior development and leadership control then it'd be a pretty solid technology stack (albeit with some weaknesses).
I personally prefer Firefox and it's associated technologies but I also acknowledge the appeal of Chromium distributions like Vanadium.
Ah yep. I'm mistaken there. I had read somewhere at one point that they were the second largest contributor to Chromium and made assumptions I shouldn't have. My apologies.
Last autumn we finally fell to third behind Microsoft, in fairness.. But we're also the second biggest contributors to WebKit (really significant there) and Gecko too, as well as the #1 contributors to Servo, and more - if you're interested: https://bkardell.com/blog/2024-Midseason.html
And the Chromium supporter group is just a subset of those corporations.
Several leading organizations have already pledged their support for the ["Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers"] initiative, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera.
Reminds me of the Open Source Initiative. People tell me that licenses like the SSPL aren't open source because the OSI says they aren't. I tell them to look at who comprises the OSI. Nobody has yet showed me a reason why we should believe the OSI when it tells us what open source is or isn't.
It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main browser, which was hugely helpful.
As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.
>> Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
Yep. A majority of HN crowd claim to like open source and all that, but then they use Chrome instead of Firefox due to some small perceived convenience. Nobody makes decisions based on principles these days, only their immediate wants. Hoe_math is right, we're on the edge of civilization collapse because to that.
To some extend this is also down to developer having to stop trying to be clever. I can understand having something look a little weird, maybe not align 100% correctly, but how to you actively go about building something like an e-commerce site that doesn't work in Firefox?
My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.
I randomly browsed the site with Firefox stable and I couldn't see any obvious malfunction. What exactly is not working? Is there a specific webpage where the malfunction can be seen?
This is a management problem, not a developer problem. Yes, developers should advocate, but it's not the developers' burden to make time out of thin air.
I agree that this is a "management problem" in the sense that if you want to support Firefox, you should allocate resources for testing on Firefox.
But also - it's not high up the priority list given Firefox's marketshare. In most cases, you'll get the support by default, but I don't really see many US managers being tasked with allocating resources to support UC browser, or Opera, and those are both in the same space marketshare-wise.
My management is actively discussing EOLing several Firefox products because we have basically no real paying customers on them, and Mozilla is unpleasant to deal with in the extension space (genuinely - https://www.neowin.net/news/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-fi...)
You're right, although you'd probably find that in many shops developers have the latitude to use Firefox off their own initiative if they so chose.
I recently finished a 7 year stint at a company where I was CTO. I always made it clear that we needed to be testing functionality in more than just Chrome because, apart from anything else, a good chunk of our users would be on mobile, and many of those on iOS (i.e., using Safari). I used Firefox as my main browser for probably 4 - 5 of those 7 years, and I suggested engineers do the same because it tends to hew closer to web standards than Chrome does (meaning that if it works in Firefox it'll almost certainly work in Chrome, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold). That gradually bled through the development team, with a number of the engineers using Firefox as their main browser. That's really all it needs is a few people using it for their day to day work.
I made the change on principle because I could see the way the wind was blowing and - even then - Google were doing plenty of things I didn't like. I like to think that influenced the team as well but, reality check, they probably did it to avoid me moaning at them about bugs running in Firefox all the time.
I had one who did say "don't make it work for firefox" but he was the only one.
The basic mechanic is that the off brand browser has to work hard to be compatible whereas the dominant browser works hard to be incompatible. If you develop Firefox first (have some really ideological devs) you'll find Chrome related bugs eat up 1% of your time if that. If you develop Chrome first you'll find supporting other browsers is a bear.
(In the early 2000's when IE was dominant I was afraid it wouldn't be possible to browse the web with Linux. I worked at a library that would have deployed Sun Rays as public computers if we could get Mozilla to compile on Solaris but we couldn't, even with the help of Sun support. I developed Mozilla-first and then Firefox-first and helped keep the flame alive back then.)
The system I work on now works on both because I develop Firefox-first. There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox, but otherwise the site spins like a top on both of those. Once in a while we run into a serious headscratcher on mobile Safari that burns up some dev*weeks.
> There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox
Firefox's performance engineers are eager for bug reports! You can record a performance profile [1] and file a performance bug report in Bugzilla [2]. It helps if the slow page is accessible to Firefox engineers for testing, but your performance profile is a big head start.
This is why I always develop to web standards and not to any browser. You follow the web standards and then check to see which browsers do it right. Then adjust for that browser if necessary.
Early fall 2023 it certainly feels like I caught Verizon discriminating against Firefox. It was a CSS issue in their payment portal where some information wasn't rendering as a DHTML popup but at the bottom of the page. You could still pay your bill, but to an untrained eye it looked broken. I reported it and was sent to "Executive Custom Service", which would never acknowledge the problem. They would call once a week and make some statements like the problem was on my side and they couldn't reproduce it at all, to which my BS meter kept responding "I don't believe you." After several weeks of this, the issue mysteriously disappeared one Saturday morning, with no further word to me. I'd also complained to my state PUC (this was a landline bill) and think the added pressure helped convince them to do the right thing, even though the PUC has no online jurisdiction.
At the time I hadn't thought to go back to tech support and ask somebody there to simply try it with Firefox. Then Verizon would have been pointing fingers at themselves.
Any Verizon developers here? I'd love to know the real story.
Aggressive ad blockers are often the cause of many “site doesn’t work in Firefox” issues. When the Firefox user then loads the site in Chrome, it works because the user doesn’t have an ad blocker installed in Chrome (because they don’t typically use Chrome) or their ad blocker hasn’t updated its blocklists recently.
The goal of a standard is to not be forced to code specific things for each implementation out there. This is failure of the web standards that the google implementation has become the standard.
We have web standards, but one area they breakdown is adoption of those standards.
Each browser seems to pick and choose which standards they want to adopt and when. Sometimes Chrome will support a new CSS syntax for months or years before another browser finally picks up support (or vice versa).
For web standards to truly work, there would need to be better coordination between browsers to adopt new standards in unison. Until then, developers (should) keep track of whether the syntax they're using is supported by all major browsers. Or, develop just for Chrome, which seems to be favored by most.
We vendors disagree about the relative value of different standards. Adopting at different times makes life harder on web devs, but it also seems like the only route forward. Do you want any one vendor to be able to force the others to implement something they disagree with, or (vice versa) to have veto power?
What issues specifically? I'm a long time REI customer and a long time (since it was called Firebird) Firefox user, and I've never encountered any issues.
It may be interactions with ublock origin. On Chrome, I only have adblock plus. However, disabling UBO on Firefox does not fix the problems. The most obvious one right now: blank page after login.
maybe my rant is going to be a bit out of place here but here it goes anyways:
sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person.
but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. they don't even know what's wrong, they can't pinpoint what's giving them that extra stress, building up day by day when they use their devices, handle their info, or consume entertainment. like account exhaustion, confusing UI changes every day, or why they have to navigate a sea of crap just to unsubscribe. and why do they need a new computer for software that worked fine 15 years ago?
and don't even get me started on what they're doing to older people. cable companies for example are ripping them off with terrible TV boxes and nonsense plans. all their appliances need subscriptions or apps and have cryptic buttons. stores now feel like border control, straight out of a black mirror episode.
i can't imagine the frustration they must feel. it just feels backwards.
AFAICT, current tech industry culture is most like what I understood of the '80s stereotype of Wall Street bro culture: sociopathic unchecked-greed that will do whatever it can get away with.
I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next.
So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general.
What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Right now, one of the few firewalls against that might be that doctors generally have traditions of ethics, and some stature to hold their ground and influence things.
Earlier Internet didn't have the same formalized ethical traditions, but had a lot of very smart people people who had altruistic intentions, as well as suspicion of those who'd attempt to twist online potential. All those ethical people were pretty much swept away in a funding gold rush, suddenly with little to no influence over it.
(Google did grab some of those people, because Google said the right words, so the altruistic techies thought it was their people, but look what eventually happened even there.)
Just like virtually every IoT product and Web site violates every user, what happens if a medical gold rush (say, some kind of implant, or transformative process) means that what we thought was a bulwark of ethical practitioners, is easily bulldozed over, by investment money and culture. And then everyone's body is violated by the newly unchecked industry-wide socipathy, with no alternatives to even live?
> What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Allow me to simultaneously assuage and stoke your fears. There is little chance of big tech disrupting the medical field; Because every aspect of the medical field has already been seized by the insurance companies. See United Health / Optum.
The irony that Google, who made their bones on the "open web", is now attacking open web standards and trying to turn the internet into their own walled garden that they control every aspect of I hope is not lost on the people here.
Agreed. It would be ironic if it wasn't literally the exact same arc that every single company in this industry goes through.
* Scrappy upstart catches the industry off guard
* Wild success and growth
* Becomes bloated, unable to innovate, and addicted to its cash cow
* Begins turning the screws on its users to appease shareholders
The lesson here is that there's no such thing as Big Tech that is not hostile towards the people. They will say whatever people want to hear on their way to market dominance, but once there, they will mercilessly fuck those same people for every cent they can get.
(I would actually extend this to all large businesses in general, but we can start with tech.)
Once the love of "Microsoft Loves FOSS Again" fades away as they aim to enter the next phase, some other company (Cloudflare? Tailscale?) will receive all the developer love until yet again, people realize that for-profit companies don't actually have their best interest at heart.
The only one who has your best interests at heart is you. And you sometimes get it wrong.
It is very common the case that someone else will do something that aligns with your best interest. (love for example) In fact it is often in your best interest to do something that helps someone else and appears to harm you. (giving money to the poor at first glance appears to harm you and thus be illogical - but there are a number of secondary results of this that make it in your best interest anyway)
I was convinced at the time--and I'm still convinced--that there was a TON of astroturfing on places like Reddit and even here when Nadella became CEO of Microsoft and there was that whole "Microsoft hearts Open Source" campaign. Every other comment was "You're just stuck in the past. You're as bad as the conspiracy theorists. It's not even the same people running the company anymore. Blah blah blah."
And now they own Github and they're training their AI models on you and your code and forcing that crap into a bunch of PCs. They were about to push out a "feature" to Windows that periodically took screenshots of what you were doing and used AI to analyze what you were doing. Then they sprinkle some glitter for the easily-distracted and tell you that it's actually a feature for you. Last I heard, they shelved the idea for now because of the backlash, but we all know they'll circle back around.
But, yeah, I'm a tinfoil hat weirdo who's just a "hater."
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat
Even market-dominant companies do this. Windows ships a bunch of backward compatibility patches. Graphics card drivers (especially Nvidia) wholesale replace shaders in popular games.
Also it boggles my mind that an advertising company (1) offers its own ad blocker to block competitors ads, and (2) circumscribes what ad blockers can do, and (3) nobody stops them... All when the FBI is saying you should run an ad blocker to avoid being the victim of a crime.
> Please don't use Chrome Mask on YouTube. It won't resolve any issues, and it will make your experience worse over time. If some issue got fixed after toggling Chrome Mask on, it most likely got fixed by the addon clearing the cache. But you can do that yourself, too, without the need for this addon.
Ehh. Youtube has been problematic for 3 or 4 Firefox versions now. If you leave a video open long enough memory usage skyrockets and the page becomes unresponsive.
Google isn't entitled to invade my privacy, harvest my data and waste my time with ads. Installing an adblocker isn't an act of entitlement, it's an act of self-defense.
You should instead support businesses with a business model that fits your philosophy and try to persuade other users to do the same. If you aren't helping make other business models successful, you aren't really achieving anything.
It's not possible to shame a group of people who can't even agree on baseline ethical issues around their profession. For every engineer who refuses to work on guided missiles or the Torment Nexus and would feel shame to do so, there's another engineer who would find it an interesting technical problem.
When such things work, it's not because people who do it feel ashamed, it's because the society ostracizes them so much that it becomes actually inconvenient to function in it.
Oh, and it is an interesting problem. In the abstract.
They are if you use their service. You agree to their terms when you want the services they provide. Of course, you can violate the terms of service, but that puts you in the wrong legally and potentially morally, depending on your specific moral values.
You aren't entitled to their service, but they are entitled to your data (as allowed under the relevant jurisdiction) if you choose, of your own volition, to use their service.
Or we could just let you and other people like you subsidize it.
I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time.
I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I should feel bad for some company with billions of dollars in profits that doesn't care about me or any of my privacy. I go the extra step further and use the banned from Chrome store extension, Ad Nauseum, to click on nearly every single blocked ad.
I'm not saying you anyone should feel bad. If you have a principled objection to the status quo you should support companies with business models you prefer, and try to persuade others to do the same. Otherwise your just taking advantage of a loop hole, and shouldn't complain if/when the company tries to block it.
I'm curious if you know of any court cases that back up your position. I've connected to a lot of servers today and downloaded all the information they sent me.
It's not the engineers making these decisions. They write the code they are told to write. Some middle manager / VP gets a promotion if they 'increase engagement', 'increase ad-spend', or some other hollow metric they chase. They are the ones deciding to send any 1-3 star ratings to customer support, and 4-5 ratings recorded as an actual rating. It's not about the users at all. It's about gaming the system for some manager's benefit.
I am not a person who normally moralizes to others, but I can say I have quit jobs where I found the work to be unethical or that company policies required me to bend my ethics.
The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical engineers who do not consider the effect of their work in the long run.
Same here. Ultimately, the engineer is the one typing in the code and hitting submit. They are at the very least complicit and need to at least share responsibility.
Mozilla is an advertising company now, and by many accounts Mozilla has been the main attack on Firefox for the many years even before they explicitly shifted to advertising.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.
There is no reason I, a user, will intentionally use your product when you fill it with ads that are, at best annoying, and at worst malware vectors.
You have your right to develop things your way, I have a right to say no thank you. Google, though, is so big it is basically saying "you don't have a choice." That's the problem and one that Google spends billions to enforce. They use the weight of the uninformed to apply pressure to the rest of us.
It was no better when Microsoft did it with IE, nor is it any way proper, now.
The solution is how we solve it. There’s a technical end to every demand, and at the end of the day regulation only can do so much for both sides. The reality sorts everything else.
The solution you mentioned is valid too.
But you cannot ignore the fact that internet is for everyone and not for google. Google minus all the shit it does to the internet can definitely exist in some form. Claiming it’s either this or nothing is just defeatist.
If google and youtube disappeared tomorrow, I’d be the first among those guys who buy hdds and torrent videos from these. For no money, like I did with all torrents in my life. There would be less professional videos obviously, but almost everyone agrees it’s a good thing (quit SM, anxiety, kids social issues, etc talks).
Sorry, I was ambiguous. I just meant not to use the ad-supported part of the web. Yes, the rest of it is fine.
Even a large chunk of the ad supported internet is happy to continue sending you bits if you don’t render their ads. This is fine, the convention has always been I’ll send whatever (non-malicious) bits I want, you send whatever you want, and we’ll render it however we want. YouTube specifically doesn’t send bits to people who don’t render their ads, on purpose, which is also fine, they just don’t want those of us who don’t render ads around.
Entitled ad guys don’t get to change the social convention to add some obligation to render their ads. If they don’t want to serve bits to users that block their ads, that’s fine, but if they send bits I’ll render them however I want on my system.
Exactly. It’s amazing that ads-ers send bits regardless and expect them to be consumed as is, as if it was some fundamental law of nature to do so. Simply don’t send, wink. That wink makes them feel uneasy because it breaks that wonderful narrative of theirs. “If you don’t want to watch ads, just don’t visit”. Yeah, just paywall us then, come on, we’re all yours, signed in, vendor locked. I’m so ready to leave and delete the bookmark, what are you waiting for?
People are playing this cat-and-mouse game with YouTube specifically, where they’ll circumvent the desire to block them for not rendering ads. I think this is a bad thing for users to do. But I mostly think it should make the ad providers uncomfortable. Because they know that most people won’t play cat and mouse for their content. In any case other than YouTube, people would just move on.
They know it. We know they know it, because if they really didn’t want to send bits to ad-blockers, they’d copy the first step of the back-and-forth that Google did with YouTube, and those users would no longer be a problem.
Because you cannot even control your ads to users? No one of you devs gets punishment for tracking users' personal information, pushing scam, phishing and malware to users, and now users are not even allowed to protect themselves? Users don't drop trackers and malwares to your servers, why do you drop trackers and malwares to users' machines?
Because you are working for a corporation that joins in World Wide Web Consortium, who literally says this in the Ethical Web Principles?
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts. We will build features and write specifications that respect people's agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
If you cannot maintain your service, paywall your features, not forcing malwares and trackers to users. No one forced you to serve 1080p, 1440p or 4K videos to everyone for free. You were the one literally "advertised" yourself as a "free" service at beginning, in order to hoard how many users you could. And now when you cannot control your own costs, you push malwares and trackers to users? The mentality of hoarding users with "baits" like "free" are the real poisons for the internet, for both of you and your users, NOT users who are doing exactly what World Wide Web Consortium tells them.
Where are all your MBAs in your corporations? The ones bragging about themselves on LinkedIn and now the only resolutions you can think of is pushing malwares and trackers to users? All of the finance classes in your college should be simplified to advertisement classes I guess? That would save a lot of resources for everyone.
Let me remind you that Ad-Block Plus collapsed when it's users revolted over their plan to whitelist simple vetted advertisements in a truce with advertisers.
ABP was foolish and actually believed it's users were trying to make a statement about invasive ads. Really their users just didn't want to see any ads at all, ever, regardless of the circumstances.
ABP didn't even address any trackings with their program. It's just pure cosmetics.
> Really their users just didn't want to see any ads at all
Because the internet was filled with malicious ads before any content blockers having more people? The hazardours time of Windows XP/7 with malwares-affected from the ads appear like meals in every day's news? Sorry, internet ads are doomed from those times. They are migrained to everyone's minds that users are walking in a landmines with those ads. If a business is entirely dependent on those ads, that business should not exist. Doing business is hard, right? I mean, like, most of other ethical jobs on the world.
Users are just doing what World Wide Web Consortium says.
And most people don't have issue with static ads like those in newspapers and magazines. People would be fine if business wants to advertise something, but the tech ads industry does not only want to promote things to you, they want to capture your attention as well, regardless of if you want the thing or not. They think they can only do so by knowing you as well as your mother does.
If a business have something to sell, just let people know. No need to help create a surveillance state.
You forgot to mention it involved paid whitelisting, and the requirements for compliance were so weak that even major malvertising vectors, like Google, were considered acceptable.
Quite frankly, at this point, I just want any business that runs on ads to crash and burn. The whole business model is insanely toxic and sociopathic and shouldn't be tolerated at all.
> Those corporations with MBAs will find another way
Not YouTube.
Those "nonsense" are from World Wide Web Consortium, users are just doing what they say. The "hipster" are the ones not respecting those Ethical Web Principles. Users are not injecting trackers and malwares to those independents' servers. Why do those independents inject trackers and malwares to users' machines?
The ones who destroyed the open web are the business, including independents and corporations, with the mentality of luring more users to use their "free" services, without any plans of controlling the cost, ETHICALLY and MORALLY. Scale, scale, scale, more users, more beautiful number; until their pocket is burnt and now their resolution is pushing those trackers and malwares to compensate the cost.
Ads, malvertisements and trackers are not the open web.
The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
The last serious performance issue I saw with FF+YT was when YT added a glowing border around videos when the tab was in dark mode. FF just wasn't able to efficiently run that effect. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that YT or any other site should be limited by the performance problems of FF. Maybe they should have detected the issue before release but the explosion of browser x platform x dark/light theme x graphics driver is a large space to sweep.
"Should have detected the issue" implies it was an accident. YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Even when they weren't actively sabotaging other browsers they had big Chrome banners and "Works Better in Chrome" signs for several years in the past. If they did it _then_, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just "missed it" now, and easier to assume they do things that are broken in other browsers intentionally.
Edge (Spartan or Legacy) had a big fight with YouTube that YouTube was doing a hidden (not visible to users) DOM animation underneath the video player in a way that Chrome ignored but tanked Edge performance. There were several release cycles where Edge would specifically target that hidden animation performance, only for YouTube to make the animation worse and ratchet it back.
I lived through that as a user. (I was one of the like 5 Edge Spartan users, I know, lol.) I could see the dumb animation in dev tools and manually delete it for better performance. It was a nice thing I had some technical skills. I know for mainstream users the solution was "watch YouTube in Chrome".
It's hard to find to other sources because Microsoft intentionally broke the SEO on the Edge brand and you know Google is the only other major search engine. Not that they'd intentionally down-pagerank bad news about a Google property, I'm sure.
A lot of the reported issues with YouTube on Firefox (especially when paired with adblockers) involve things like increased page load times, UI elements not functioning as smoothly, or even video playback glitches. Some of this is due to JavaScript that’s intentionally designed to slow things down if you’re blocking ads or using a non-Google browser, as we’ve been discussing.
IIRC the story was, when Youtube was redesigned a while ago they used an early spec for Web Components, that they were pushing to be standardized and was fully implemented in Chrome. But they had to add Polymer as a polyfill for other browsers. Then the version of Web Components we actually got wasn't entirely compatible with that early spec, so Polymer is still in use for non-Chrome browsers.
I don't know how much of that's changed since then, but the complaints are basically the same as when that happened.
I haven't seen any bugs on Firefox mobile + uBlock Origin + Android + Pixel 4a 5g (I hate upgrading phones, sue me).
The only glitch I reliably get is watching videos at 1.5x sometimes freezes video (but audio still plays). Expect that's more hardware and memory pressure related tho.
Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them. Although possibly whatever is lagging others experiences too...
I ended up switching back from Firefox to Chrome after a few weeks because I found that if I had more than about 6 YouTube tabs opened, the YouTube interface would become very laggy. I blamed it on Firefox at the time but maybe it was something intentional by Google.
My Firefox does this on Windows. I have no idea how many tabs I have open, but regularly the whole YouTube tab I have open freezes, especially if you try to watch one video, and then another, and the whole UI is delayed by many seconds. Even closing the tab will have the audio playing for several seconds in the background. It's not due to load or hardware as far as I can tell. The videos play just fine in Chrome or Edge. I still use Firefox as my daily browser (previously Chrome), but these issues are super annoying. I don't want to have to restart my browser or PC all the time. I don't know if it's some combination of extension/ad-blocking or YouTube doing stuff, but it's very annoying.
Unrelated to that, but on a Ubuntu laptop I have Firefox tabs regularly stop working entirely. They just won't load anything, and the only fix is to open a new tab and that loads fine most of the time. Other times I have to restart Firefox. I've tried searching for others experiencing this problem and even asked in Mozilla channels on Matrix, but even then I didn't come up with any answers. The laptop's hinge broke last year so I haven't used it since then, so likely never going to figure out what was going on.
Maybe more related to youtube than I thought, but I have trouble closing tabs and firefox with 15 or 20 tabs would eat all my CPU. Pages loaded much slower and the experience across the board was often pretty poor. I had to go back to Chrome and I don't miss FF at all. I tried.
I go through my feed or history and bg-open the links I want to watch. Then I watch them.
What a strange confusion, as if all people must have the same "workflow". Sorry, no intent to sound negative, but why not give it some thought at least. It's "6 tabs", not "6 videos playing at the same time".
As someone who hates the auto-recommendation system on YouTube and turns it off, I also appreciate this is sometimes the safest/easiest way to watch only the videos I actually intend to watch.
This seems intentionally YouTube's UX design fault, they too heavily try to push you to "auto-play". YouTube has a "Watchlist" feature where you can build a playlist. When it works it is exactly what I want, but it feels like every so many months it mysteriously breaks for a while or they hide the button for it behind some new hidden gesture or menu they expect you psychic out of their UI. (If you've never heard of "Watchlist", no wonder. It seems intentionally hard to discover.) Lately I've been complaining that YouTube adds random "auto-play" videos even to a manually curated "Watchlist" if you don't pay enough attention or watch past the end of the list (even with auto-play and recommendations entirely off).
Yeah, it was named "Queue" for a while at one point. I think "Watchlist" is the most consistent name it has had, and yeah that does add (intentional?) confusion with Watch Later.
The fact is, it doesn’t happen in Chrome for “magical” reasons, according to a comment few levels up. And regular non-tech users won’t debug this with click to play or whatever. We expect that YT does it absolutely intentionally.
It bends userbases however it wants due to its multi-dimensional reach, and we’re like “hmm maybe extension would help prevent accidental preloading issue”. I just don’t get it.
Empirical, but I have noscript and ublock enabled on Mozilla and whenever I go to youtube, it reloads three times in a laggy manner before it will let me type into the search. I check to see that I am not logged into gmail before using youtube.
I am happy to do all that, because I like my videos uninterrupted and my web experience lean.
>it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them.
I don't think its "almost like", I think it "actually is", and that its intentional.
There is a perspective that is now prevalent in tech and business that users are good only as far as you can monetize them. Any concepts of respect or value outside of that have been discarded.
There used to be a sense that you needed to continue improving a product to keep charging the same or more for it. Now companies expect you to pay more every year while products are stagnating or being enshittified to extract higher profit margins on top of the increased prices they are charging.
Tech is now run by Business/Sales people, and every user is a statistic in a spreadsheet they are trying to extract the most money from for the least amount of investment.
Data collection and behaviour tracking is one side of the coin, but we really don't talk about why companies are willing to pay so much for that data or what they do with it... that's a conversation I think needs to be focused on.
What irks me even a bit more is that user experience is degraded even for logged in premium users. They just really don't want us using other browsers.
FF has been my dailer driver for a long time. But google blocking ublock origin was a deal breaker. I now only use chrome when a site is otherwise unusable.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers
Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "for people using adblockers").
I unintentionally burned down a dozen houses because I was too incompetent to properly test the propane systems I was hooking up to houses, but only the ones built by competing contractors that didn't quite fit my way of doing things. How can you call that anything but unintentional and how can you possibly hold me accountable?
If you have a lot of technical churn, and only test perf on Chromium, then you could certainly claim that the result is "unintentional", but it's almost guaranteed based on that circumstance.
Google has a habit of intentionally delivering degraded versions of their services to not Chromium based browsers, particularly non-Chrome versions of their browsers (determined by User Agent).
There's a pretty famous example of Google deploying a specific variations of Youtube to Microsoft Edge browsers (back when Edge had it's own engine) and that specific variation would cause Edge's hardware acceleration to break. If you overrode the user agent to present as google chrome, the problematic invisible parts of the page disappeared and everything worked as intended. And what the specific problem HTML was would change just as fast as the MS team could roll out fixes. In effect they were playing a game of "break the browser" against their competitors to force them to apply temporary fixes that would then later have to be removed resulting in unnecessary code churn in their competitors' code bases.
Youtube intentionally degrades the user experience if you use Firefox, at least if you are using a proper ad blocker. And there really isn't much reason to use Firefox if you aren't also using uBlock. So by targeting the users of uBlock+Firefox, YouTube is aggressively degrading the experience of Firefox users. Things I've noticed include:
1. Every video defaults to the absolute lowest resolution (240 or 320) until I manually switch it to a higher setting.
2. Occasional (but fairly frequent) 30-second delay before a page loads (loads enough to show a black page, then just freezes for a while. During this delay, refreshing the page gives the same result.
3. Rarely, interstitial notice pages threatening vague consequences if I continue to use an ad blocker.
They may actually be implementing something on the server side to degrade the performance of connections because they have me flagged as a ublock user.
A while back nobody would believe that Google's search dominance could be disturbed... and now many have either switched away or stopped using search altogether. It takes me two clicks to set a search to DDG, Kagi or other and Google has lost this customer (often a family) forever.
So let them be arrogant and loose their YouTube customers over time too.
The thing is I see it everywhere around me. People don't care looking for a better search engine. Worse I am pretty sure that most people do not know they can choose their search engine and can define whatever is used when searching in the url bar.
While I’ve been using ChatGPT with web search for almost two years as a paid user, the majority of people don’t and that has just gone free in the last few months.
But when I just want a simple search, I still use Google first out of habit.
YouTube is totally bricked for me on Firefox, and the quality of use of Gmail + anything Google Drive related has degraded severely over the past ~year. Feels concerted.
freetube is a superior experience for consuming youtube content in every way, including not running google’s javascript so they cannot mess with the users in the same way. it has adblock and sponsorblock built in.
that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that).
i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)
about youtube being totally unusable on firefox: is it just youtube/google being evil as is customary or also firefox having loads of memory leaks, as its usual too? (plenty of mem leak bugs with video/audio reported over the years, many very recent and still open)
I was about to write that YouTube works flawlessly for me in Firefox on Mac, but I just upgraded to a monster of a M4 MBP, so it's probably just overcoming these issues (malicious or otherwise) via brute force.
Firefox+uBO on Fedora/W11 here, with Firefox being my primary browser for close to 8 years. I only run in to an issues maybe once a year, where I have to pop open Edge/Chrome for some random edge cases to work. I've used Firefox on dodgy, overly burdened and hacked together systems with no issues that were memorable.
The only problem I really remember is at one point Firefox having issues under linux when NVIDIA was swapping their main driver over to the "open-sourced" version, there was some performance issues with decoding, not unusable - but it was resolved within a week.
Firefox + ublock origin seems to be the combo allowing me the best user experience with youtube. I have no idea what the previous poster is talking about really.
YouTube works perfectly on Firefox if you pay for YouTube Premium. Haven't noticed any bugs, if it leaks memory or something it's not noticeable on my machine.
That's how Chrome started. I remember it showing a banner with itself on /. which froze a page on scrolling over it for a few seconds. In all browsers except Chrome. Never understood this Chrome-go-go mob mentality that everyone had back then. It was literally an ads-network prodived crappy browser with just tabs and urlbar. It was fast, because it did nothing and had no cpu pressure from the banners. I wouldn't be surprised if it was "fast" all this time only due to special treatment from google, youtube and the corresponding ads/tracking scripts.
And that was fast because google pushed on megabytes of javascript and tight loops in it. Regular ajax (now known as htmx) webpages worked absolutely fine in other browsers. I regularly scrolled through a whole freebsd single-html handbook and it never lagged in e.g. presto.
Websites aren't expensive to run even on a slow interpreter. Even medium-complexity apps don't do much and could be written in python or ruby back then.
Nah, I remember Firefox in 2008 being a miserably bloated and slow experience. Guess it was because of no Electrolysis and any other refinements in the last two decades.
Yep, same. Firefox now is decent, but back in the day it was awful. I remember trying it out early on and immediately going back to IE because Firefox was significantly slower. Chrome was a marked improvement over both IE and Firefox, so it won.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was.
I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies.
Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".
You forgot to tell another half of this story where this cafe used all sorts of tactics to kill competition and uses semi-related businesses to ensure its dominance. Then they nicely suggested everyone to pay what they can, or else. It's not an innocent local cafe as you paint it. It is a corporate network monster whose win strategy is "leave no survivors".
And rather than stop going to this evil cafe, people just go and don't pay.
So as long as you make out your flavor of the month business as "greedy and evil" you can paint yourself a moral crusader by going there and taking things for free. How convenient, eh?
"This coffee shop is a terrible place, therefore I will eat there for free everyday in protest!"
The network effect kinda prevents you from finding coffee at an honest place.
(The content is on YouTube and nowhere else)
Until this changes and one can choose to go somewhere else, I wouldn't worry too much about the terrible cafe's income, because it is one of the richest entities in the world, it already shouldn't be that rich and powerful, and if it disappeared, it would finally let one go find coffee somewhere else.
The other possibility is to stop drinking coffee, of course. Though you can't really do this with everything.
YouTube is hardly the only website on the Internet. And besides that, YouTube splits ad revenue 40/60 yt/creator anyway. So I suppose those creators are all in on the scheme too?
If that cafe was part of a megacorp that was doing shady business and driving small business in the ground, as well as exploiting others, I’d drink that free coffee every day!
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. If one really does believe the place to be evil (and not merely bad at what it does), then actions that cripple it financially and make it more likely to go out of business are commendable if anything.
Of course, better yet is to take it up a notch and advocate for other people to also use ad blockers and to help install and configure them. Thankfully, with how invasive ads are, the advertisers are basically doing all the agitprop; all you need to convince someone to use an adblocker today is to show them how websites look with and without it.
And rather than blocking me access, like in “please pay to watch it”, they squiggle and babble incomprehensibly. Note that I’m not freeloading Nebula etc.
Your analogy was shallow from
the start. Continuing it makes little sense.
At home we were talking about food ads on Youtube. Sure, once in a while you see an ad for a meal box that is actual food but I see a lot of ads for things like Huel which float in this strange space where it's not "I used to eat bread and meat and vegetables and now I drink all my meals" but where it's normal to drink your meals (they pose as if they were trying to persuade you to switch from some other meal replacement), where you have to work just as hard taking supplements every day as you would work lifting weights or not eating junk food -- there's McDonald's and there are ultra-processed foods, but this is ridiculous.
(A friend of mine received a huge quantity of 4Patriots dried food from his mom who was sucked in by some ad that claimed it was on sale because they made too much. We got some and the smell when my son made it turned my stomach.)
In terms of sponsorships there was the "Established Titles" scandal; I am a big fan of Ryan Szymanski who's a world authority on battleships. One day he got bribed to make a video about
which was a good reason to talk about battleships and Scotland. Pretty soon he's adding a cringy pitch to all his videos and unfortunately it is so hard to give somebody like the right kind of "tough love" which will set him straight, although after the scandal popped most of the people involved went back to remove the junk.
Years ago, when it was the dominant player, Ad-Block Plus sought to strike a truce with advertisers, where they would dial back the invasiveness of ads, and ABP would sign off on these and whitelist them.
This quickly led to a revolt from ABP users, and the ultimate collapse of the plugin. That is when uBlock was born and become the king.
What we have is a positive feedback cycle where creators are forced to resort to worse and worse ads to cover the cost of the ever increasing number of ad-block users. It's just plainly true that every revenue generating ad you block (not necessarily profit generating ad) is an ad that must be fed to someone else to view for you.
I've had a longtime gym habit which sometimes has me in front of the TV around noon where the ads are all for products for people who don't have any money. I remember seeing a series of ads where my first thought was "anybody except a TV executive or a politician would look at that and say it it's a medicare scam" and watching the ads for a decade before it got in the news that it really was a scam and people are going to jail.
Those ads win an auction to get there, they might be the optimal ads for that slot, but if you want to know why people have low trust in the media and low trust in the government, start there.
I watched Tubi a lot last summer, which is in a wonderful honeymoon period, and was watching saturation advertising for P&G products that featured upbeat black people cleaning up (their own messes) with Dawn and Tide. Great, I say. They've got some awareness that they shouldn't run ads that drive viewers away. Maybe targeted ads will be good for television but the specter of
Ads are what make the internet a bloated mess. Ads are why there are a thousand different results for “roasted broccoli recipe”, because they are all trying to get me to pick them so I can see ads. Its why each one is 5 pages of crap before you get to the actual recipe, so they can shove in more ads. Everything is stretched, duplicative, and needless complex, so you will move through as many ads as humanly possible.
Sure, I don't mind the ads. The pervasive tracking and data collection and profile building is where I draw the line. Tons and tons of JS churning my browser to sell me stuff. If my adblock eventually causes some sort of economic disaster, so be it.
Yet hackers would be outside shouting and banging the doors, demanding to be let in to have the free poison, writing five hundred miles of comments about why they should not pay.
That's possible, but it doesn't sound like an analogy to me, and I've known enough selfish assholes in my life to absolutely be able to picture this as a real thing that's currently happening.
Using an ad blocker (and not paying for a subscription in the case of YouTube) isn't the "user making their own choices", it's stealing content.
If a creator puts up ads or a paywall, it's because they want to be compensated. You should either respect their wish or simply not view their content.
I understand this perspective, but I disagree with it.
If someone wants to use a public space (i.e., the Internet), then they have accept that technological solutions to annoyances are also part of that.
Block it with a subscription if you don't accept this reality. But getting the benefits of a free, global audience doesn't entitle the artist to any means of revenue they choose, including what annoys and harms people.
It's like saying you have to walk the long way around to your exhibit through the concessions hall before seeing my display, when someone can just take a shortcut and skip that, and blaming them for doing so.
If the restaurant puts food on the public sidewalk I'm free to pick it up. The internet is not inside of someone's business, they are inside of it. It is a public space and if they publish without a paywall, I'm free to consume that how ever I like. Your analogy is ridiculous and makes you come across as a simp for Big Advertising.
> If the restaurant puts food on the public sidewalk I'm free to pick it up.
If someone leaves their purse on the sidewalk and you just take it, you're committing a crime. Consuming a restaurant's food without paying for it is also a crime. It being on the sidewalk doesn't make it not their property (or the property of whoever paid for it).
> The internet is not inside of someone's business, they are inside of it. It is a public space and if they publish without a paywall, I'm free to consume that how ever I like.
There's already many court precedents that no, you can't consume it "however" you like. For example, all copyright laws apply.
Ad blockers are a grey area in that yes, they're not disallowed, but that also means that companies are allowed to mess with you more or less however they want (YouTube for example throttles browsers with active ad blockers).
using an ad blocker is the ONLY option to avoid adds. You can pay evilcorp for a subscription/premium account/whatever and they'll still try to force you to watch 10 minutes of adds for a 1 minute video. Fuck them. We own them nothing.
Banksy said it better:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
> using an ad blocker is the ONLY option to avoid adds. You can pay evilcorp for a subscription/premium account/whatever and they'll still try to force you to watch 10 minutes of adds for a 1 minute video. Fuck them. We own them nothing.
On YouTube? No. I pay for Premium, there's no ads.
I pay for YouTube Premium. I'm thankful that it exists. I still get sponsored segments in the middle of my videos (from the content creators themselves). I haven't (yet) installed SponsorBlock -- currently, I have no plans to, but I do fast-forward to skip those commercials in the middle of the videos.
I pay for Amazon Prime, and they've started showing me preroll ads on my streaming content. I also still get sponsored product recommendations in my search list.
I pay for Kagi search. Thankfully, this area is still relatively clean.
> it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads
AKA depriving content creators of their revenue. If you're saying their content isn't good enough to pay for directly, and isn't good enough to endure ads in order to engage, then why are you trying to consume it? Look elsewhere.
> or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them
I agree with this depending on what you mean by "surveillance." There's a minimum amount of "surveillance" required to measure ad penetration and effectiveness and essentially provide assurance to advertisers that they aren't getting scammed. There's a whole other level of "surveillance" where the ad network (usually Google) is building a dossier on all your interests and every site you've ever visited. Some of that information enables targeted advertising, but you should always retain the right to opt-out, and see all the data that's been collected on you and edit it. You should also be able to opt-in to that data being sold and getting a cut of the proceeds, should you so desire. I wouldn't, but I could imagine some people would.
Bottom line - people gotta make money to eat and oftentimes they're not giving away content for free. If you don't want to pay for it - that's your choice as a user: pay and consume or don't pay and move on. Calling on hackers to figure out a way to steal it may not have a future that works out to your liking.
It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do.
It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space.
For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.