The new thing is Google valuing their profits over the wishes of a large population of their users.
This is how big companies lose their way and get eaten by smaller companies. We all think Google is invincible because of their technological monopoly, but the problem of having to grow forever due to the way public markets work necessitates product evolution or squeezing blood from the stone. The real monopoly is philosophy, not technology, and it's so, so, so easy to lose the logos/pathos/eros high ground (and thus the philosophical war).
In Google's case, their innovation has never been able to eclipse their original sin: advertising. As long as your god is ads, you will make compromised product decisions that are not in alignment with your users. This is part of why I actually hope FB's currency takes off because maybe they can stop worshipping at the altar of click revenue.
Who am I kidding, it's just another revenue line-item on the 10K.
Did you perhaps mean ethos?
I guess if I had to really sort it, I would only talk about love and power, in that order, but I think it's more addressable to speak in language people already kinda get.
But no, I specifically meant eros, not ethos.
It's exactly the same, go to the Firefox add-on store and install uBLock Origin.
You're making a very big assumption here. Last I checked people who blocked ads counted in the hundreds of millions and the number was growing rapidly.
Some old stats I found with a quick search:
https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/
> 615 million devices now use adblock
11% of the global internet population is blocking ads on the web
Adblock usage grew 30% globally in 2016
Mobile adblock usage grew by 108 million to reach 380 million devices
Desktop adblock usage grew by 34 million to reach 236 million devices
However, over 300 million users run adblockers[2][3] and it's probably a fair assumption that most of those users are relatively nontechnical and only run them because they're very easy to install.
I think this push is just to add a tiny bit of friction into the process so that 'casual' adblockers stop bothering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
This is not about google wanting to harm the current power users. It is probably the idea that someone could come along and destroy their business.
If such an extensions goes mainstream that could seriously harm them.
They may also want to get rid of paying Adblock Plus money for their highway robbery.
Now that I think about it, getting rid of ABP may be the primary reason for this move. They have to basically pay a third party to get access to their own users.
Either way, the battle is not over the power user minority, but over the average user.
The idea is to make the API just powerful enough for the most annoying ads to disappear. Most users would probably be content with this. They will probably make it so they won't lose all of their power users. I think what they really want is increasing the amount of works it takes to have full adblocking functionality to the point where the average user has no access to it.
This makes no sense to me.
ABP is already publishing a version using a declarativeNetRequest-like API, it's in the Mac App Store[1], so clearly it's not going to "get rid of ABP".
Google benefits from ABP and AdBlock[2] being the most used content blockers, as they do not block Google ads by default, and do not block trackers/data miners out of the box.
If Google (rightly) deems content blockers as unavoidable, it sure would want people to install the ones which are not blocking its ads and trackers by default.
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[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock-plus-for-safari/id14...
[2] The two most-used content blockers as per Chrome Web Store.
If I land on some page where annoying adds still get past ABP I close and never visit the page again.
As I have written elsewhere I consider ABP and AdBlock as "infiltrated" by Google, so they definitely want to see the rigorous blockers disappear first. Should have made that clearer in the comment.
(Edited for accuracy regarding rule count)
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[1] https://gitlab.com/eyeo/adblockplus/adblockplussafarimacos/t...
See: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/declarativeNetReques...
This is API that ABP can use. But with the new API the rules list will be limited to 30 000 rules vs. for example 42 000 EasyList is using, and an update to the rules will require a full update of the plugin.
See also comments from gorhill: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
This means they anticipate Google to target the Acceptable Ads program.
Originally I thought 30,000 rules wouldn't be enough to cover things, but according to this research, only a couple hundred rules are enough to block >90% of the ads: https://brave.com/the-mounting-cost-of-stale-ad-blocking-rul...
So maybe there's another limiting aspect of the declarativeNetRequest API I don't know of.
(register 50k domains, use 50k different subpath/subdomains and mix content+ads on something like youtube where you cant wholesale block youtube, etc)
Thats just false. Every adblocker using webrequest will be affected, including ABP.
In other words, to block ads on third party networks but leave Google ads alone. That's a bold move these days, when antitrust regulators are putting big tech under the microscope.
well, anti-trust these days is just a buzzword, in a legal sense it is defined in a very strict way, and the cost for companies to anticipate an anti-trust ruling is way higher than just pushing their own interests.
With 66% market share and countless other browsers available, the only question for antitrust when it comes to browsers is if users have equal access to browsers, not whether google supports ad blocking.
I think they will make sure that the ad blocking capability does not explicicly favor google ads.
You know that's wrong. There's Chrome, Safari, and Firefox that support most things and which most people actually use; Internet Explorer is dead and Edge is becoming Chromium; and Brave, Midori, and Vivaldi are also Chromium.
There's also Lynx, Links, w3m, Dillo, and Netsurf, but very few people use those and ad-blocking isn't much of a concern there, because they don't enable JavaScript necessary.
To be clear, you can still block ads under Manifest v3. I don't know where this idea that you suddenly won't be able to block ads came from, but somebody is being dishonest about it.
It doesn't make a logical sense because if they are banning the ad-blockers, it means they accept that chrome is largely used by power users who can install these blockers (otherwise, what's the need?). But they should realize that a power user who installs an addon can just as easily move to another browser like firefox/brave. And the PR repercussions will ensure that a lot of newbies will leave too (because they usually follow the power users on youtube) which will essentially kill the advertising income that they wanted in the first place?