It may be the last few years of the free web because of Google. Their goals are clear.
Please switch to Firefox, another search engine and another email provider…
The Internet in the last five or so years has just been less fun and interesting to use in general. Except for anywhere I can interact with friends, I just don’t really care for using corporate social media sites anymore. I’ve pretty much removed Google from my life except for YouTube and rarely Google Maps, and if Google tries to use this to force ads into YouTube (which I’m sure is going to be one of its uses) then I will just stop using YouTube. I will just stop patronizing any site or business that tries to implement this as a feature to stop my browser choice, OS choice, or my extension choice (which included adblock extensions). I miss the days when the Internet was less corporately controlled than it is now, and I think we need a renaissance of those days.
I’ll keep using Firefox and be extremely vocal about websites that won’t support it. I mean that’s all I can really do.
And hope the EU will oppose it.
Why would they? It’s FrEE maRKeT. Google can point to Edge and Safari as proof that they don’t have a monopoly on browsers, so no anti-trust issue there no sireee. The fact that Edge is based on Chromium does not factor into this (in fact the EU loves it, just look at what they did to “liberalize” the electricity market, aside from some extremely anecdotal stories, it’s all companies whose only job is to build a website and the fiscal “infrastructure” to buy energy from state-controlled producers to resell it at a markup using state-controlled energy distributors, but hey there is a private middleman so it’s liberal and the innovation/investment dividends will pay out any year now… any year…).
The concept of the WWW being supported by free, standard, interoperable protocols was never codified into law. Despite how much good it has done so many industries to have a common free interoperable tech stack, it doesn’t have to be this way; the French Minitel was a walled garden built by France Telecom, and that was 100% legal, because interoperability is not a legal requirement. The Apple Store and Game Consoles work under the same principle, you basically can’t sell anything on there without abiding by some asinine rules (Apple has had some issues but IIRC that has to do with them abusing their monopoly position to extract 30 % of all sales, not with the fact that they have an exclusive App Store to begin with).
Also this whole bullshit is not new and was never legally challenged because there is no case. For years you could not even browse instagram in your browser because they “only supported the mobile app”, which was a blatant way to force you into a walled garden where they can force you to watch as many ads as they want and where scraping is much harder.
Is Brave safe from these shenanigans? Asking for a friend.
Brave is built on Chromium. So, by default, no they are not safe from this. Without extra effort, Brave will have this feature. I don’t know if its feasible but there’s a chance the Brave devs can remove the code from their distribution, but that’s the best case scenario and just puts them in the same position as Firefox: they get locked out because they refuse to implement the spec.
I have to imagine they will strip it because if they don’t, it’ll be dead to all of their users.
It may be dead to its users anyway depending on how forceful Google is with this. If Brave doesn’t work on 98.8% of all websites with advertising or indeed on 49.5% of all websites (approximately Google’s ad network’s reach), it becomes as niche as lynx.
There’s a “we told you this would happen” going on here.
If chromium didn’t have a monopoly amongst browsers, they would have a much harder time pushing this through.
Imagine everyone using a browser built by an advertising company.
And this is the consequence of browser vendors relying on Chromium.
Fuck you Google.
The real two internets is happening
Don’tbe evil.Feels so good to see Google getting called out for this in the GitHub comments
Does it? It’s making me depressed.
Because every last single thing said in those comments will be ignored. I sincerely doubt they’re even reading them.
They know what they’re doing. They know what people will say. They’re going to do it anyway.
I just don’t understand why they’re trying to solve this issue on the client side. It seems like a losing battle to me.
Instead, focus on the server side. If you want to push ads, then host on (or tunnel from) the content server. Get rid of all the \s and tags and scripts and adserver links that the adblockers are using to identify ads. Just assemble the page on the host so that it looks indistinguisable from the content the user is looking for and push it out. EAT BACHELOR CHOW! NOW WITH FLAVOR! Google could even start an ad-friendly hosting service that does this - some sitebuilder tools, identify where you want Google Adsense, and host the damn thing.
So render to image? That sounds terribly inefficient. That means you’re drastically increasing the load on the server and sending way more data over the wire. And then on the client side, your page no longer changes to fit the huge variety of viewport sizes. And say goodbye to being able to copy-paste. Or any kind of user interaction. And anyone with visual disabilities can go fuck themselves, I guess.
No, they didn’t mean to render it all as an image, but that everything comes from the content server you’re getting the content you want from and thus the ads should be indistinguishable from content. I don’t understand how you could misunderstand it to such a degree as to think they meant to render it all as an image.
so… PDF then?
/sThanks, BTW. It never occurred to me that someone could interpret my comment as “render-as-an-image”.
Chrome is a bag of shit anyway, easy jump
Chromium, not chrome. Which means also Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and a lot more. Basically only Firefox and Safari are left as the big non-chromium ones.
But that’s not the worst of it. Even if you tear out this code, more and more websites will be built that rely on it. Which means Firefox etc also need to include it to keep functioning.
Not saying you don’t realize, but Safari already has this tech. They call it Personal Access Tokens.
hey everyone a friendly reminder that alternatives exist, and just drop this shit fast and move to better alternatives. In this case firefox.
The problems start to happen when buisnesses adopt this en masse. Expect all banks to implement this for example. You can use Firefox all you want, but then you won’t be able to do online banking.
Standards are really fucking important to help people stay functional in a society. This is one area that the ANCAP mindset just gets it totally wrong, unless you like the idea of being a hermit.
Anyway, we are already seeing some websites basically reject browsers like Firefox because they basically give the consumer too much protection and freedom. Arguably we’ve seen this before, but this may be a new tier of corporate lockout of open standards as consumer protection gets thrown in the trash. Thanks America.
I don’t think that checks out.
Firefox only exists because it’s primarily funded by Google. It’s funded by Google to ensure they actually have some competition and avoid becoming a Monopoly.
If they kill Firefox or otherwise make it unusable they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot.
However, if it ends up being a bad experience that no one wants to use, well that’s not on them and they have no responsibility to fix it.
What will likely happen is Firefox will also adopt this DRM.
Mozilla does not exist because of Google. Google doesn’t have controlling power over Mozilla, nor do they have power over the many forks. It’s hilarious that you think a company would give a shit about being a monopoly; that’s what they strive for. This stupid take has been going around for years, and I’m sad to see it spread to Lemmy.
This needs to be pinned at the top of every single threat about this. Far too many people are just saying “Well I’ll just keep using Firefox”. They do not understand the gravity of the issue.
Google is actively trying to drive people like me away. I have been trying my hardest to keep using Android, if Google keeps this up I might have to unwillingly move to Apple. At least they do more than just pretend to care about their users’ privacy.
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Can someone ELI5 me on what this is and why it is bad?
google want websites to be able to check whether you’re running an approved browser. And they also want to be the ones to have the authority to decide what an “approved browser” is.
Given that google is an advertising company that owns a browser, constantly tries to cripple ad blockers they will probably simply start saying that any browser that doesn’t implement the stuff they want (crippled ad blockers) is “untrustworthy”
Wow they moved incredibly fast, even considering the repository was first committed to in April 2023. I wonder why the outrage only started a few days ago? There was also a discussion, started in May.
It’s a shame that no matter the amount of outrage, no matter what the pitfalls of this change may be, it’s going to happen no matter what because money.
