This is somewhat concerning to me. While I'm all for blocking obtrusive and obnoxious ads, I'm not sure I want Google using it's position as a web giant and browser vendor to push these standards by default via Chrome.
An open web means I can host whatever (legal content) I want on my website and people are free to view it or not view it if they find it undesirable. Current ad blockers play well into this scheme because they protect the end user's right to view content in the way that they want.
This move by Google on the other hand is telling websites that they have to play by Google's content rules or have their website broken by default.
I'm not sure that's the web that I want to live in.
This move is mainly about making sure their own ads don't get blocked because of people trying to escape the bad behavior of others. But like you, I have doubts about an ad blocker created by an advertising company.
i'm concerned about this as well, but i'm fine letting Chrome function simply as a dev tool and actually browse with Firefox, Opera, Servo, etc. w/uBlock Origin & uMatrix
No, Firefox Dev Tools is a completely seperate project historically. Firebug version 3 and up built on top of it, but that’s the only connection (beyond commonality in tool function).
> i'm fine letting Chrome function simply as a dev tool and actually browse with Firefox, Opera, Servo, etc. w/uBlock Origin & uMatrix
I'm definitely in the same boat. That makes me wonder if it would be a bad long-term move for Chrome. Just guessing here based on personal anecdata, developers are more likely to use ad blockers, which could alienate the developer community. If that's true, I wonder if we would see a resurgence in Firefox and other browsers.
Firefox needs to improve its dev tools first. I love Firefox as a browser but I find myself forced to use chromium devtools because I can't figure out how to get our source maps to work with Firefox :(
I don't think this would will be the case as it will only make people who know how to install an ad-blocker move to firefox. I think they target the users not having an ad-blocker installed.
So Google is going to be picking winners and losers here? In some instances, the ad company in question may behave better than Google (The Deck was one before they folded). In a worse case scenario this could lead to anti-competitive behavior where Google is essentially blocking out competition while still enabling its own tracking/ad placement.
If it doesn't block Youtube's ads then I don't see any motivation to switch to it, and I can't imagine it will. I think YouTube is the only site with quality content that I'd find unusable without a blocker.
In fact this "ad blocker" is more of a popup and auto play blocker. It doesn't really mean to block ads. And worse than that, it does nothing to block or even reduce the tracking of users. In fact I haven't seen a single new feature in Chrome that would make tracking more difficult. Rather the contrary.
> it does nothing to block or even reduce the tracking of users. In fact I haven't seen a single new feature in Chrome that would make tracking more difficult.
Of course not. Google makes their money through ads; they wouldn't do anything that would hurt their money-making abilities.
Popups and popunders were due to a browser feature (window.open) which was open to horrible abuse, and browsers were right to make this feature more restricted over time.
Browsers fixing their own UI mistakes and browsers setting and enforcing rules for content are two entirely different things.
Of which Google is a founding member and the only traditional ad publisher (AdSense/AdX/etc) who serves ads to 3rd party properties. [1] I'm sure they have plenty of control to shape the standards to their benefit. In other words, the "consortium" is biased by Google themselves.
I used to work for a small company that did print (and web) medical journals targeted at dentists and dental professionals. We handled all the ads ourselves and hosted the images on our server as any other image. This meant we were basically impervious to adblock. Except for the occasional iframe embedded ad that was given to us by the client we basically never had an issue with adblock.
Same thing on a nightlife website I worked on. Ads hosted by others were blocked but our own hosted ads were never a problem.
Granted our own ads also had zero chance of being hijacked by a bad actor since they were simple <a><img></a> ads.
If only everyone did this we wouldn't be having this arms race.
Pretty much. If Ads were without JS and videos (or, at least autoplaying videos) I really wouldn't care. Hell, if they were relevant ads to the website, I'd probably even click on them and buy things occasionally.
But when a modal pops up or I get redirected, or your ad floats over your content and tries to follow my scrolling not only are you not going to sell to me, but I'm going to leave your website.
I had to watch youtube without an adblocker recently for the first time pretty much ever.
The ads were not only extremely irrelevant. They were extremely sexist, strongly offensive and discriminating. Without exception (note I'm not in the US, so these probably aren't the same you're seeing!).
I was incredibly surprised that most of the population watching youtube was exposed to this daily but not completely outrage.
I don't know. For me it's as simple as right-click on the link and choose "block this item" from context menu. Ok, often I need to adjust the suggested css-selector to block the item permanentely. But the general rule is that I have full control over how websites are shown. It's more than just ad-blocking. I block menu panels or whole parts of websites which I don't use. On youtube, for example, I blocked everything except the video-frame. No comments, no logos, no headers, only video.
The images were being served through a PHP passthrough script at /media/$ID
You would have no way of knowing if the image was an ad or part of the article content since they were all served through the same thing. No silly subdomains like ad.domain.com either.
> You would have no way of knowing if the image was an ad or part of the article content since they were all served through the same thing. No silly subdomains like ad.domain.com either.
Still quite feasible to detect by size and styling.
That doesn't change anything, it just makes your site more annoying. I block "one off" ads like that every time I notice them. If I have to keep doing it then I just turn off images for the page.
I wish web developers had more respect for their audience. If I say, "No ads," I really mean "No ads." Your site is not a special snowflake where I suddenly don't mind seeing advertisements.
I think you missed the part where I mentioned the content was targeted towards dentists and dental professionals. Our typical visitor would be a dentist in his 50s or 60s looking up some medical text. They generally had almost no technical expertise with the web or computers. Let alone ad blockers.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "respect for their audience". If I put an ad on a website I didn't ask your opinion and frankly I don't care what you think. Unless you wanna pay my bills. If what you're saying is I should detect the existence of ad block and actually proactively stop writing the code for said ad into the website.....well... that's just silly.
I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way.
But that only defeats simple adblocks that blacklist domains. It's theoretically possible to make an adblock that detects ads through machine learning and removes them. Doesn't matter where they are hosted.
But advertisers can run scripts to detect modifying the web page and stop it. So adblock would have to move to having a headless browser that renders the page, and then copies it and removes the ads.
Then the advertisers would have to try to trick the machine learning itself. Adversarial machine learning is a thing, with neural networks trained to fool other neural networks. And images that are highly optimized to exploit subtle defects in other neural networks.
As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.
> I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way.
This is already happening. Further, embedding paid for content in the middle of original content at the server side is also already happening.
> As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.
This is also already happening. Brand placement deals are nothing new to advertising and they are basically table stakes to most content purveyors.
The real question isn't if those things are going to happen, its how those sorts of deals will handle the analytics side of the equation. How will you prove that your instagram feed is the best place for the yoga pants provider to spend their marketing budget?
Google AMP content and Facebook Instant Articles are served from Google's and Facebook's servers now. "Served" is not quite the same as "hosted" but it's close.
We are already doing this on our sites. We run a whitelist of ads, and when we encounter Adblock we just serve an image tag and HREF with no JS. Works well for us and the user.
The basic "problem" with this approach is that the customer (be it a client or an agency) can't be 100% sure if the view data you deliver them is correct, they can only count the clicks. If the ads are on your server and there is no external content involved, only you get the stats. It's not a problem only for in-house ads, or when the customer doesn't care about the views and is only interested in clicks.
That's not the problem. The problem is ad networks where the publisher never even serves the ads. You vetted the ads before serving them; but other publishers do not.
IMO, if Google's goal is to improve the web experience, it would be much better if Chrome was spun off into a non-profit of its own, and not controlled directly by Google.
A non-profit not directly controlled by Google would eliminate the major conflict of interest that is:
1) Google is the biggest ad publisher/network in the world.
2) Google controls the majority of web browsers today.
3) Google will control how ad blocking is implemented, managed, corrected, adjusted, etc., as they see fit.
Google already made Chromium completely open source. Anybody's free to fork it and move it in any direction they want.
As for Chrome, it's likely worth many 10's of billions of dollars. It would be absolutely indefensible to throw it away, especially when there are so many yet unexplored avenues to improve the web without requiring such massive and unneeded sacrifices.
In practice, Google controls everything that goes into Chromium, and without being able to fund comparably enormous manpower, this will not change. Forking it over ad policies perceived to be unreasonable is not a feasible option.
Chrome isn't open source. I'd say that if you decide to use Chrome you're accepting fact that you're using closed source program with Google's proprietary telemetry baked in.
> Chrome is already 'non profit' because it does not cost money to the end user.
a) non-profit is a clearly defined term [1] which doesnt apply to google, nor any of its products
b) by your definition, any website which utilizes ad revenue is a non profit, because the end user doesn't have to pay money for its use. i'm pretty sure this was the point the parent was trying to convey.
> non-profit is a clearly defined term [1] which doesnt apply to google, nor any of its products
Mozilla is a non-profit, they make a browser.
> by your definition, any website which utilizes ad revenue is a non profit, because the end user doesn't have to pay money for its use
That's nonsense and you are well aware of it.
The customers there are the advertisers, not the users of the product but that does not mean there is no payment.
And if you put a value on data then you could argue that there is a payment of sort from those end users as well.
I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve with all this flak you're throwing up, it is pretty clear that no large browser manufacturer is selling browsers, that a large chunk of the web is at present ad supported and that it would be possible for Google to move Chrome into a non-profit.
Chrome is the googlebot crawler so they can't bin it. Is it a non-profit? No. Is it a profit center? Potentially. It saves them money using their own machines to do it and has powerful lock in and tracking ramifications.
> Mozilla is a non-profit
Ya. They don't run an ad network or search engine. This doesn't make any sense. Basically:
Is MacOS a non-profit because Linux is free? Apple does not charge for it but it's the bloody platform
I generally agree with your point, Mozilla is very much the odd one out being a non-profit browser vendor, but that last line is just weird.
MacOS is a product, not a company, and I don't think you can even buy it if you wanted, it just happens to come with the hardware you buy from the for-profit Apple company. MacOS also has nothing to do with Linux, except that they're both POSIX-y.
A not-for-profit company is different from a company that doesn't make any profit. A nonprofit company just means a company in which profit is not a goal for its own sake. It is quite possible for a nonprofit to make a profitable product, and this is what Mozilla does.
"auto-playing video ads with sound and “prestitial” ads that countdown before displaying content."
I guess Google will have to block ads on Youtube as well, not only does it have auto-playing ads with sound, but they block the display of content (prestitial/pre-roll).
I think there's a clear difference between an ad that plays sound as part of watching a video with sound, and as part of browsing a website that doesn't have sound / where the ad plays sound over the actual content.
News websites already do things this way (have a text version of a news report, with an auto-playing video version of the same report embedded somewhere on the page, that has a pre-roll ad.) I'm not sure how Google will view that—I think it might come down to whether the user was expecting the video version of the news report.
Maybe, yeah. The point isn't to enforce some magical unicorn principle of advertising purity, it's to limit advertisements to forms that users are known not to hate.
Users have been OK with commercials in their TV shows for like six decades now. So my non-expert eyes would expect an ad embedded with video content to be broadly acceptable.
This is a good thing. Ad blockers as they are today don't work because the "block everything" approach is not sustainable.
Advertising is a good model, it works, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Ad blockers, by being selective, can actually act as an agent of change by forcing the market to move towards the formats people actually prefer.
Ad Block Plus attempted to do this with their pay-per-play whitelist approach but that obviously has major issues since it didnt have realistic goals, wasn't transparent, and clearly let crap through anyway.
I wish the ad standards also included outstream video (the autoplaying video ads inside of an article) but this is a good start.
Ad blockers work just fine. It's very rare for an advert to make it past the filters, and it will be quickly fixed if it does. The preferred format is "no ads". The web existed before ads and it will exist after ads. It's not my problem if you've built a business around the unethical practice of manipulating people into buying things against their own interests.
In nineteen ninetyfive, I was around 20, I started using the Internet. I was amazed and started looking for ways to communicate with others. I realized everyone wanted to communicate with everyone. I started subscribing to newsletters. When I opened my inbox I thought to myself "wow, the Internet is communicating with me".
Today my stomach turns when the internet communicates with me (ads, messages, pretend news). The original idea is lost. Newbies never get a glimps of what I saw, back in the day. I wonder if it's lost forever.
I blame Google. They solved big data. Made it queryable. And then implemented a business idea very far from "not evil".
They also solved email hosting and dns and spam and the browser wars and map directions and domain hosting and reactive web guis and streetview and maybe self driving cars...
I get it, I was there, I remember how it felt to see the internet in the first blush of its commercial blooming. Also, I can be pretty biased against where we are today, but to act like it was all lollipops and gumdrops in 1995 and its terrible today ignores a bunch of the improvements.
>but to act like it was all lollipops and gumdrops in 1995 and its terrible today ignores a bunch of the improvements.
Yes, the world was both worse and better than today. I agree. Today is different. Compared to 1995, not worse or better. That's depressing because as a planet, back in 1995, we really needed to improve, as a species.
I don't know how to make an influence in world politics other than to create a business built upon my values. That's what I'm looking for right now. A technical leader. I have given up on politics.
That technical leader is not Google. I personaly share none of the ideas behind ad networks. I like how they solved big data back in the day. And since they have great people they started to solve other problems as well, like mail. And maps. That's not evil.
Sucking the air out of the browser market the same way they did with the web search industry and then standardizing an ad-blocking mechanism is not just evil, it's vicious.
I see those as two orthogonal things: solving problems for the web is the thing Google lives to do. Monopolizing internet advertising is the thing Google does to live.
Is that reasoning a way of solving the problem of doing good for the sake of evil perhaps?
Edit: This and my previous posts are very toxic towards Google. I shall try to be more positive. Maybe they really are doing good for the world. I mean, how will we have selfdriving googlecars if we don't have ads?
The era of the (non-promotion/"lifecycle"-oriented) email newsletter is dead. But, such content is still produced! In order to avoid the devaluation of text (that is, the process where people stopped reading the good newsletters because they blended into the bad newsletters), the creators of worthwhile broadcast-style media have had to move to audio or video production. Those "newsletters" are now podcasts and Youtube channels.
There was nothing wrong with letting commerce do their thing on the internet I suppose but since there was never a non-ad driven competitor to Google non-ad driven businesses now have a hard time succeeding, which is a shame I think.
Before ad-driven internet business, remember what we had? I do very well. It was called non-profitable business. Are we that plain and narrow-minded that we therefore cannot have non-ad driven business on the web today?
The information you leak when you use ad-driven services, that's the product. I know of tons and tons of other type of products that could be driving an internet business where the product was something else entirely. But I don't see them around so much. Most buy in to the Google ad circus.
What is a "non-profitable business" and why would anyone want that? Unless you truly are talking about registered non-profits (as in charities) and are expecting a Google like organization run that way?
You know there was mass advertising before the internet right? A lot of it, on TV, radio, billboards, magazines, newspapers, door-to-door salesman, etc. The commercialized web of today is vastly different from the early beginnings and 99% of the content and services you use online are funded through advertising.
You might want to go back to plain-text message boards but the world has moved on and there is an immense amount of commerce and utility conducted over the internet. If you have a job today, it is with almost absolute certainty that the company you work for is successful because of advertising in some form.
Everything is manipulation, that is the action of the world against your thoughts and wishes. Have you never recommended anything to your friends? That's advertising, whether you like it or not, so I don't see what's unethical about it specifically. There are certainly dishonest campaigns and we have some (but do need more) regulation around that, however people do have free will and the final choice, regardless of the ads they see.
> The commercialized web of today is vastly different from the early beginnings and 99% of the content and services you use online are funded through advertising.
Not sure about this value. For instance, Wikipedia, the 5th website in Alexa rank, does not use advertising. Besides, there is an argument to be said that if advertising really became unsustainable, then the services who would disappear would not necessarily be the ones that we miss most.
The idea that "creating content costs money so the reader must pay for it" is simplistic. Many people put quality content on the Web because they enjoy doing so, and don't ask for payment, they even pay for hosting out of their own pockets. That's how it started, and it hasn't disappeared, just became less visible when for-profit content arrived.
> If you have a job today, it is with almost absolute certainty that the company you work for [...]
This statement is far too general to be accurate. I have a job, but I don't work for a company; I doubt that my university significantly relies on ads to be successful.
> You know there was mass advertising before the internet right? A lot of it, on TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, door-to-door salesman,
All of them manageable and skippable through various means. For instance I know/knew many people who would record TV to video, just so they could skip past the ads.
The difference is that this new medium puts the receiver in control, not the transmitter. And that means people will gravitate towards what they consider the best experience, the experience with no ads.
If that doesn't work for whatever publisher or site-owner, they'll have to ask for direct payments, and the market will get to decide which web-sites the internet eventually ends up with.
> Have you never recommended anything to your friends? That's advertising
It's not advertising, because you don't profit from it. Advertising is fundamentally dishonest, because I (as the viewer) cannot know if you're recommending a product because it's good, or because you get paid for it. On the other hand, recommendations are more likely to be honest, because the person making them doesn't profit from making them (and in fact stands to loose something, if the recommendation turns out to be bad).
> The web existed before ads and it will exist after ads.
That's only speciously correct in the sense that the technology had to be there before the economy could use it. Online advertisements and email spam predate HTML by quite a bit, and ad-funded sites (c.f. Yahoo) were some of the very first successful businesses to be built on the platform.
A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads.
B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site.
C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?
Point A is as valid as any sort of baseless religious claim. It's a delusional fantasy. Do you think people need ads to know that McDonald's sells burgers? Try talking to anyone who actually creates advertisements for a living. Try investigating even the tiniest bit to check whether your hypothetical models actually match reality.
Say I know that I want a new refrigerator. Is it in my interest to see carefully crafted ads promoting whichever products have the highest ad budget? No, I want to see objective information in order to choose the best product. And that's just one of the most benign examples, whereas ads often promote things nobody needs at all.
You think cartoon characters connected with sugary cereals are giving kids useful information about the food‽
A - counterpoint: Great products can succeed without ads. The customers find YOU. Crap needs to be advertised.
B - yup, and bye
C - yup
"Content" of any type is just not worth much anymore. It's plentiful and cheap. What's worth something is eyeballs.
As the price of content, of all sorts, approaches zero, the work is taken over by amateurs. Old timers have seen an amateur web and are absolutely not afraid of its coming back.
This is exceedingly rare and anyone at a major company will tell you that marketing and sales is usually more important for success than the actual product and it's qualities.
> I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?
But where things get murky is when the primary value of a site is the content generated by its users. Why should I look at ads when I'm going to the effort of creating the content?
Because you get the value of the content created by other users. You are absolutely free to not contribute anything or even visit if you don't get any value from it, but someone is providing the service in the first place and there is nothing wrong with monetizing that service with advertising.
> nothing wrong with monetizing that service with advertising
True, except for the various ways that advertising is typically unethical in manipulative design, the unjust and problematic imbalance of power between platform owners and the communities who use the platforms, the fact that ads are usually tied to privacy-invading tracking… besides those sorts of things, nothing's wrong.
> You are absolutely free to not contribute anything or even visit
This rhetoric needs to die. You are free to not go to the grocery store and buy food, unless of course you want food besides that you can grow on your own as a subsistence farmer. I suppose the fact that grocers operate at scale with very organized corporate models in order to consolidate their economic power while consumers are divided into being individual shoppers is totally irrelevant to the market factors here‽
If the supply side were divided into individual programmers etc. while consumers were all organized into powerful consumers' unions with near-monopsony, it would then be equally ridiculous and insulting to say "hey, you individual programmer — if you don't want to make the specific product the consumers' union wants to use, you don't have to; you are free to choose what you make".
Well, they're free to try. It's not completely trivial. (The resulting cat-and-mouse game would probably be won by publishers in principle, but an unbeatable solution would require significant changes in ad distribution.)
> A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads.
I think that's a pretty rosy description of things. Advertisements are an effective way to influence peoples' choices. Sometimes good products get advertised, sure; and sometimes when you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, you get lucky and land in a pile of snow.
> B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site.
>
> C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?
Absolutely! I don't think many reasonable people would object to anything here. I personally don't block ads on most of the sites I enjoy, and I have to problem with websites paywall-ing me if I use adblock.
This is such a giant genie to try to put back into the bottle with Adblock usage growing 30% last year and accounting for 10-12% of total worldwide users. How do you convince those people to worsen their experience - but only slightly - toward the noble goal of letting content producers monetize? Or do advertisers just consider that a lost cause at this point?
The real question is whether Chrome will get more draconian and start preventing competing ad blockers in the browser.
On the other hand, I feel like we've been here with Google before, and they've generally done The Right Thing[tm]. How do we generally feel about people using this? Has Google done enough right that we might feel comfortable with them doing this? The general sense of other comments looks fairly bleak.
Seeing as how the public debate has deteriorated, and the results that it has led to, I'm willing to put up with almost anything that can bring civil societies back to, well, "civility".
One of the most important pillar of that is varied, but high-quality media. These, however, have been squeezed relentlessly over the last years, with no end in sight. People think reporting isn't worth anything (an almost literal quote in many of these threads), just because they can read the same stories at different outlet–ignoring that somebody still had to be there. Or they're legitimising their use of aggressive ad blockers with the tired the-media-is-so-bad cliché (...then why are you reading it?).
There are two paths that I believe print media can get back on track: First, such an ad blocker that allows reasonable ads, i.e. not moving, obscuring, or for low-quality products.
Second: a netflix-style subscription that gives access to many publications. Because as it is now, I can't justify paying for any single subscription (except for the rather cheap New Yorker). But I'm willing to pay something like $30-$50 dollars/month for the written words I consume. There's just nobody to take the money.
I don't actually have much of a problem with Google. They have always been really excellent in such regards, especially considering how much potential for scandals they have. But I'd prefer more diversity, if at all possible.
I guess this will hurt other adblockers quite badly, and I'm wondering if they didn't create this problem by not creating a product that fairly accounts for publishers' interests.
It's impossible for them to treat competitors' ads different from their own. That chrome update wouldn't have time to download before they got dragged to court by every ad network, the European Union, and the Department of Justice.
The DOJ has clearly given up the ghost of even attempting to regulate US companies, and the current political news is just more evidence in that direction.
Google can draw out these lawsuits for decades while continuing their practices with impunity. They already have two incredibly well studied playbooks to draw from: Microsoft v DOJ and SCO v IBM.
I think the next move will be disabling other ad-blockers from the chrome plugin store with an excuse that it "will interfere with native chrome functionality"
There are no plugins available for mobile chrome anyway, which is where I do 90% of my surfing. If anything this half-assed ad blocking will drive people to Firefox where you can block ads (and trackers and auto delete cookies etc) properly.
As long as Chromium is open source, either filter lists will be supported in the new add blocker or someone is going to fork Chromium to keep list-based adblock support.
Is Chromium actually used by many people? I was under the impression that people mostly use Chrome because of Google's advertising & bundling. [1] supports my theory with desktop Chrome amounting to ~25% usage and Chromium amounting to ~0.03% usage.
Some people use it. I think it's especially common on Ubuntu since they have it in their "Software center", whereas if you want to get Chrome proper you have to go to their website and get the .deb.
However, as you say, it's a very small % of people. I think most people don't even know Chromium exists, let alone what the differences are between it and Chrome. That might change though if Google starts abusing their position and doesn't get this ad blocker right.
I've been around long enough to know that no browser dominates forever, especially if companies start taking their users for granted. It happened to Netscape, IE, and Firefox. It could happen to Chrome too. If they screw this up I'm going to a Chromium fork + uBlock Origin. :)
I use Chromium on macOS for development and occasional browsing. Chrome Dev Tools is really in a league of their own. But my primary browser is Safari, because it performs much better during regular usage on my 2012 retina macBook Pro which only has a paltry 8GB RAM.
On my mobile android device I use Firefox, since it allows you to install extensions. Running uBlock Origin makes mobile web a vastly superior experience. I also use Firefox on Ubuntu and Windows, since it has the least invasive defaults and it lets you easily sync content across devices.
I think browsers are actually in a great state. People have lots of incredibly high quality options to chose from! Although I'll admit I'm a bit worried that there appears to be a bit of a Chrome monoculture growing.
Google's apparent quest is to make it so that the web only really works with Chrome anyways. I doubt they honestly see Firefox as a threat enough not to take this blatantly obvious next course of action.
Chrome was, and has always been about giving Google full control over content from their servers to the users. They've spent the past decade relentlessly removing middle-men out of their way (most obviously Adobe, but also other advertisers, and now the search engine is even extracting information from sites so you don't even need to click on links anymore, see AMP and their various "search enhancements") - they aren't about to stop at removing "misbehaving" apps. You already can't get AdBlock on Android without rooting - it's an easy equivalence for them to make and base their rules around, however false it may be.
My thinking exactly. Hopefully this will provide a good enough experience to 90% of current adblock users to go with this instead of blocking everything, so that Google never gets forced into a position where it has to choose between removing ad-blockers or taking big ad revenue hits, and heat from advertisers. Like how netflix, hulu, hbo now were the best ways to reduce piracy because they treated the problem, not the symptoms.
Considering Chromes market dominance I think this move is highly problematic from a legal point of view, as it will allow Google to effectively ban certain ads from the web at its own discretion. While this might be a great idea if it's really targeted at "obnoxious" ads, it also gives Google a perfect handle to force publishers into their ad ecosystem (because surely Google ads could never be obnoxious) while driving down impressions and revenue for its competition.
I would be highly surprised if this will not incur a swath of class action lawsuits and another anti-Trust investigation by the European Union and possibly the US.
Again, ad blocking is good and important, but the people who build the ad blockers should not run an ad business on the side.
I agree but I wouldn't be surprised if nothing happens in terms of anti-trust. Google has a monopoly on search in EU, and is leveraging this monopoly to gain a monopoly in other areas (e.g., ads on the Google Search homepage telling people to use Chrome), which I think is clearly problematic. This has been going on for years but nothing happens about it...
As was previously discussed when this was first rumored, this is just begging for an anticompetition lawsuit of gigantic proportions as Google is using their dominant control of web browsers to block their competitors' ads from working.
It is one of the most clear examples that the only way to remediate the differences between Google and a law abiding corporation is to break it up.
EDIT: I think the strong feedback from everyone I've seen when this was first rumored was that this idea was concerning and likely illegal, and yet Google is proceeding anyways. I feel that should dismiss any notion that Google or the industry as a whole has the ability to self-regulate.
To detail, I think Android and Chrome need to both be legally/forcibly detached from Google. Android could easily operate on funding from the OEMs that use the platform and the Play Store, which would go with it, and Chrome could use Mozilla's model, including letting companies like Google and Yahoo bid for the default search. (And obviously, would be prohibited from picking Google Search if it isn't the highest bidder.)
Dominant platforms being tied to dominant services is just too large a conflict of interest.
But bear in mind: They're largely responsible for setting the standards by which these ads will be treated. Therefore, the standards will obviously be set in a manner that all their own ads will comply, and other businesses must change their business to suit Google's expectations or be blocked.
Bear in mind, ads are like over 95% of Google's business, they would not be doing this if they thought it would impact their own ads at all.
And since, by design, the standards will never go after Google ads, as a site owner, your best bet to not have your ads blocked will be to 'just' go with Google as your ad provider.
What's even worse is that special Chrome feature where the site asks you to allow it to send you notifications. It's a tiny window with a single button "accept" and a minuscule "x" for closing it that is light gray on white (hard to even see). What is missing is an option to reject all site subscription/notifications and never have to deal with that kind of intrusive offers again. They're not even popups or in-page popups, they are part of the browser UI. So it's an officially allowed way to send "popups" and pester people for subscribing. Many newspapers in my country use this shit technique.
News like this makes me glad I've moved entirely to edge. It has ublock and lastpass and RES. It's as fast as Chrome and much more responsive than Firefox. There are some bugs but Microsoft is doing a good job of gradually ironing those out. That's enough for me.
I think the ad-based business model for internet companies could possibly be toppled in the next few years:
1. The ads are becoming increasingly ineffective, the CTR keeps falling, even as the ads are being personally customized. People are growing biological ad-blockers that block ads subconsciously. There is an interesting theory of "Peak Advertisement": http://peakads.org/.
2. The value of digital assets/services are being recognized, and people are more willing to pay for online services.
So maybe in the future internet companies will rely more on customer's subscription fee + ads that are more transparent (sponsored content).
> While blocking pesky ads is appealing to consumers,
> it also threatens a vital source of revenue for publishers
Are "pesky ads" really "a vital source of revenue"? Is there any data? Everyone I know hates them, especially the autoplaying videos, animations, and pop-ups (the "pesky" ones). Are you saying that there are people who see these things and say, "Oh, that's interesting," and clicks the ad? Furthermore are you saying that there is a "vital" number of these people in the world?
I believe that if anything, depeskifying ads will bring advertisers more success. I have always believed that intrusive ads were a lose-lose proposition. Not only do readers lose by being bothered, but advertisers lose because such ads make people just look away. Furthermore it makes people hate your website, tarnishing the brand. I, for one, am starting to remember at least some websites that are especially rude with ads, and I won't click the link if there is a choice (like on Google News).
I remember many years ago when Google first insisted on text-only ads, relegated to the right side of the page so they were clearly advertising. Everyone thought Google was crazy. Billions of dollars later, people think Google is on to something. It was the most tempted I've ever been to click an ad (I still don't think I did, though). Because they weren't flashing, I didn't immediately ignore that whole area, an automatic response that most of us have developed. And so some of them I actually read. And because they were narrowly targeted ads, based on the words in my search, they were more interesting.
In other words, if publishers switched to text-only ads, I bet their click-rate would go up. Maybe a tasteful still picture would be okay. I'm thinking of what is in newspapers and magazines. I actually used to look at some of their ads (back in the ol' paper days). I even enjoyed some of the more artistic or clever ones. The only times they annoyed me is if there were too many of them or it was those loose-leaf subscriptions cards in the middle of a magazine (pre-internet pesky ads).
It's one of the easiest businesses to optimise for revenue/profit, so I'm pretty sure that the the current situation is at least a significant local minimum. At this point, many publishers have run trials with more/less, intrusive/low-key ads and any other variable you can think of.
There are maybe some publishers who found success with running ads only very selectively, but those are usually very small (The Deck, i. e. daring fireball comes to mind). Large, high-quality publications such as the new York Times are somewhere in the middle: ads that include animation, but don't obscure content, and not spam or fraud. For the mass of publishers without a famous brand name, the low-quality ads they're running are probably the best they can do.
And ads do bring in significant revenue, although it's too little to offset the losses in print.
Yes, those "engaging" ads as marketers say tend to have better metrics precisely because they're designed to.
All these autoplaying videos have more video starts, completion rates and more time in view - which is obvious since it's forced and not voluntary - but add in layers of agencies and clueless CMOs and you have the situation today where this kind of format takes over the market.
Also not every or even most advertising is about sales or direct response. There are billions spent on general awareness and top-of-funnel product consideration so clicks and other actions beyond viewing the ad are not necessary.
The problem here is that marketers are only measuring click through. If they measured other metrics in addition I wouldn't be surprised if these ads had negative value. I personally put any company that engages in annoying advertising on my mental shitlist, and avoid purchasing anything by them whenever possible. Unfortunately, that behavior doesn't show up clearly on analytics.
They're not, as I mentioned in my comment. Clicks are common but not the only metric. Plain old impressions are still widely used and with video it's usually time played or views (completed play through).
Annoying advertising shows up great in metrics because it gets so much attention (which is what makes it annoying in the first place). It's a self fulfilling prophecy for advertisers and agencies and a result of a major lack of proper oversight, incentives or regulation in this industry.
Advertisers don't just care about clicks. "Impressions" are also an important metric. Much of the jank caused by ads is caused by JavaScript or Flash code that is inefficiently polling the DOM to see if more than 50% of the at is within the browser viewport. This situation should improve with the introduction of the Intersection Observer API which lets the browser call you back when your ad (or other lazily loaded content) is in or near the viewport.
It weird language... they say things like "Included ad experiences tested: Auto-playing in-line video with sound" and "The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself."
I think that means pre-roll is OK if it fits into the content, but auto-playing inline video with sound is not.
> The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before (“pre-roll”) or during (“mid-roll”) video content
Funny that they would have a special rule for this kind of ads, that's exactly what Youtube does ... (Except that for me it usually is completely irrelevant, like ads for cosmetics or video games in the middle of a chemistry video.) I'm not expecting them to include this type of ads in the methodology any time soon except to find that they are totally fine.
On one hand I applaud Google's decision[1] to put its weight against autoplay videos, prestitial ads, and huge above-the-fold ads that are the main driving factor for me and many others to install an ad blocker in the first place.
I would love to live in a world in which ad blockers are not necessary, everyone displays tasteful ads and every party involved gains something in the end.
On the other hand advertising companies are still hell-bent on tracking and profiling people by whatever means necessary to target them better with ads. They amass huge amounts of information that, if put in the wrong hands, could lead to a disaster.
This is what still makes (and will still make) blanket ad-blocking a necessity, IMO.
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[1] I'm ignoring the huge conflict of interest for the sake of argument here.
That is not adblocking, it is enforcing Better Ads Standards in Chrome.
It might be useful to detect and block clickfraud sites.
Imo it will be very hard to sell it as pro user change. I would not be surprised if few would even go further and call it insulting to think people are that gullible.
When you put it that way, it sounds surprising, but of course Google won't block their own ads, so you could say "the first mainstream browser to block other companies' ads by default" and it would sound less strange.
Not that I'm against it! This is a big move from the biggest browser that will push its competitors to do the same and change the web, likely for the better. Brave is pushing a similar agenda from behind the front lines.
Only a dominant player could pull it off. Detecting ad blockers is kinda hard, but sniffing user agents is easy. If Edge blocked ads by default some sites might choose to block Edge users entirely.
Not really - detecting ad blockers is pretty straightforward, try to insert a DOM node that triggers their ad pattern matching then check if it's been blocked.
Not to mention spoofing your user agent is very easy! It's built into the devtools of most desktop browsers (including Edge), or can be modified by a proxy like Fiddler.
I wouldn't ever want to rely on useragent to identify a browser if the idea was to completely block that software from accessing your site.
Disagree. As blockers actively try to thwart ad block detection. Especially for popular sites, it's a losing proposition. And Microsoft is never going to ship a browser that completely steals another browser's user agent.
It's a catch 22 really - If adverts are modified or removed, the dom will reflect that. If you completely spoof that you effectively break the dom for everything else.
If you only spoof the advert's own properties, you can infer state from other inline elements.
If you block domains you can check for their response on the client.
If you proxy the incoming asset before it hits the browser and replace it's content is harder to detect client side but the ad provider will be able to see what happened and would most likely not display your modified content, taking you back to the conventional detection strategies.
Not to mention Safari and IE user agents have included strings like "Mozilla/5.0" and "like Gecko" for years now to 'demonstrate compatibility' with those browsers.
User, estate and recruitment agents are all equally untrustworthy!
Yandex.Browser (also Chromium base) already has one. Works perfectly well, but at the same time you can't block ads from Yandex.Direct network at all. uBlock, Adblock or whatever - they will just reappear after you apply a new rule.
what about porn sites blocking for kids? can chrome have a parent control mode somehow that kids can use chrome "safely" on android and on the PC these days?
If ad revenue wasn't based on impressions and clicks no one would want to shove them in their users faces. Ad networks like Google's are the cause of the problem.
Google's tracking can be a terrible thing and we can still acknowledge that advertisers unrelated to Google do awful shit and always have. Advertising can be unethical even when payments aren't tied to clicks. Click-driven advertising makes it worse but isn't the cause of all problems.
Regardless of how they are presented, all ad networks do awful shit. It's an entire system built on distrust and the users machine is responsible for fixing it. It's an absolutely insane business model. Show me an ad network that doesn't work that way and I might consider it acceptable, until then all of them need to be universally disabled.
So we've come full circle. The biggest ad peddler on the world and a predominant distributor of malicious ads (because ain't nobody got time to check that stuff) is now integrating an ad blocker and offering tools for publishers to check their sites for the bad ads they themselves offer.
Why is this person being so vehemently downvoted? Anyone who has ever tried browsing the web for more than a couple minutes on a computer without an ad-blocker has run into fake download button ads. As they point out in a later comment, getpaint.net has them: I literally just went on there right now and what do you know: http://i.imgur.com/Ygjyn3H.png . If I go to Sourceforge, another malicious Google ad for "antivirus" software that at best just scams people out of their money then does nothing: http://imgur.com/a/WlcQB .
Once while visiting my family I happened to be at the dinner table with my parents when my mom mumbled something about a message prompting her to update. Just out of curiosity I walked over and saw her about to click on a completely fake Java update message that would have almost certainly installed malware... served by Google.
It's counterproductive to live in denial of this massive problem. The original commenter has posted evidence; if you want to deny this claim, you ought to be prepared to supply some of your own.
Eh? I don't see much content in revelation's comment?
As for the images you posted, I checked out EasyPhotoEdit and thetop10antivirus.com and neither site appears actively harmful (the former looks like an online photo editor and the latter an antivirus comparison page), so while the ads may be distasteful I'm not sure they should be called malicious ads since that's usually reserved for actual malware.
...That's the Chrome team. But fake download buttons are alive and well at Google AdWords. (Most of them you'll find on sites like paint.net are from Google.) As far as I understand, they aren't even against Google AdWords' policy. Google allows malicious ads which Google says are bad.
And as a computer technician, most malware I remove, I check web history to figure out where they got it. Almost always it's a malicious Google ad at the top of search, which Google has progressively made look more and more like real search results over the years. Great for Google's bottom line, but terrible for everyone else.
To me, it was reasonably clear the link was for FileSendSuite - but perhaps some other people could get mistaken?
If you hit the "x" in the top-right of any ad, you can report an ad (e.g. for being misleading/spammy), or simply say you never want to see that ad again (it gets filtered).
I absolutely disagree with your suggestion it's "obvious" FileSendSuite is what that download button is for. Notice how the text for the actual name is drastically smaller than the Download command, which is at the top of the ad, so it appears to directly follow the page content above. Notice how it also lacks a border or background so it is more easily mistaken for page content.
I am not inclined to go into the detail here, but I have spoken with Google employees on this issue before. And reporting an ad Google doesn't think violates it's policies is pointless.
From the recent HN discussion on this topic, site owners have confirmed that even if they ban these malicious providers, they're rapidly replaced by other accounts doing the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14336695
This will hurt professional journalism. Print is gone. Journalists survive on ads - and the only ones that work are quite obtrusive. Removing these annoying ads and moving to standardized google ads will just tighten the journalist's budgets. This will help the fake news blog outlets spread like the cancer they are. Sad.
There are other ways to monetize without (intrusive) ads.
Produce quality content and people will be happy to support it. If your entire business model only revolves around ad-driven revenue and it doesn't work any other way, then perhaps that business model simply offers nothing of value.
If it means good ads, without tracking, without popovers/unders, basically without all the bullshit that most ads do now, it'd be a good thing. Content creators need to eat too, you know.
An open web means I can host whatever (legal content) I want on my website and people are free to view it or not view it if they find it undesirable. Current ad blockers play well into this scheme because they protect the end user's right to view content in the way that they want.
This move by Google on the other hand is telling websites that they have to play by Google's content rules or have their website broken by default.
I'm not sure that's the web that I want to live in.