17 ms·

How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

423 points by d2wa 9y ago

danbruc 9y ago
As long as your are not serving visually intrusive ads you can still track the shit out of users [1] under the Better Ads Standards [1]. If you are annoyed by flashing ads this is an improvement, if you are concerned about your privacy this does not really help at all. Sure, Chrome will seemingly also block trackers as some kind of side effect when blocking visually intrusive ads but just make your ads pass the visual standards and you are back in tracking business. [1] Unless I failed to find the relevant rules. [2] https://www.betterads.org/standards/ https://www.betterads.org/standards/
samfisher83 9y ago
It sounds like Google is using it's Monopoly position to control the ad space. Microsft used these tatics to get like 90+% marketshare before the government stepped in.chrome is open source it shouldn't be too hard to modify the code so it block Google ads too. I publish a browser which is a modified version of chrome which block ads. The issue is a lot of sites now detect this and tell you to disable it. They seem to use the script on the page itself so it's harder to block.
- londons_explore 9y ago
  > shouldn't be too hard to modify the code so it block Google ads too Go re-read the article. It blocks google ads too already.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Did you read the article?
  - samfisher83 9y ago
    Can you point to the point where it says that instead of just attacking me? This is what I saw. Google have announced that their Google Chrome web browser will block every ad on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards by default. Google admits that they’re taking action against the types of web advertisements that annoy people the most in an order to halt the rise in ad blockers that block all forms of advertisements on all websites.
gigatexal 9y ago
Going to stick with Firefox and keep blocking all tracking and ads. Thank you very much.
ape4 9y ago
if (domain != 'adsense') { blockAd(); }
- akhatri_aus 9y ago
  Exactly my thoughts, this effectively puts a price premium on ads under any of Alphabet's networks.
- marktangotango 9y ago
  My thought as well, google/alphabet has a real PR problem here.
  - vgeek 9y ago
    They won't discriminate against all 3rd parties at first, it would be too obvious. They will quietly grow the list of blocked 3rd parties, with the intention of gradually shifting all spend to AdSense/DoubleClick platforms.
    - anonymousab 9y ago
      Given how many bad sites and bad ads there are out there, I think the list would quickly grow even if Google had the best of intentions.
  - Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
    And potentially an antitrust problem.
    - bitmapbrother 9y ago
      Does Facebook also have an antitrust problem? They're one of the many board members. https://www.betterads.org/members/ https://www.betterads.org/members/
- kristianc 9y ago
  More or less. It's Google's way of getting around header bidding.
rplnt 9y ago
No option for script blocking?
MereInterest 9y ago
Google's incentives here are still antithetical to my own, so I'm going to stick with uBlock. For example, on Google search, ads masquerade as legitimate search results. These used to be highlighted in light yellow, clearly marking them as different from organic search results. Now, they only have the word "Ad" in light grey text. This notice is on the right, intentionally where it will be overlooked when reading through the titles of each result. I can't imagine that Google would start blocking their own ad network, let alone their own ads. Therefore, I'm sticking with an ad blocker that I control.
- nothrabannosir 9y ago
  > These used to be highlighted in light yellow, clearly marking them as different from organic search results. The specific shade of yellow was indiscernible from background white on a cheap laptop at almost any angle. I wish I'd taken a photo when I noticed. I knew people who had never even noticed the yellow, at all, let alone understood it was ads. I know, Never Attribute To Malice and all that, but hot damn, that must have been a massive multi million dollar move of "ignorance".
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    I am more than happy to attribute it to malice because that is exactly what Google did with their competitors when they were just starting out.
  - quesera 9y ago
    Google is the company that user-tested 41 shades of blue¹. Malice or not, that yellow was surely intentional, and working as intended. [1] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
  - MereInterest 9y ago
    > I know, Never Attribute To Malice and all that, but hot damn, that must have been a massive multi million dollar move of "ignorance". I think that this saying gets misapplied quite frequently. If you are talking to someone one on one, then you should assume that they are simply mistaken. Otherwise, you don't stand a chance of convincing them to see things another way. On the other hand, in trying to predict somebody else's actions, assuming malice can give the most accurate prediction. On the part of Google, I don't know whether the nigh-unidentifiable ads are the result of some cackling executive trying to trick people to click on ads, or whether it is the result of overzealous A/B testing that stumbled upon a dark pattern. In the end, it doesn't matter, and either one is a good approximation of what will happen in the future.
rocqua 9y ago
How will this not lead to google strangling their competitors. Are we really going to have to just trust them to use this fairly? Will we really expect google to interpret the Better Ads Standard without any bias, treating their own ads equally to other ads? Maybe they will be good, but I for one am not comfortable with this. Imagine what happens when chrome decides Facebook ads deserve to be blocked.
- rmrfrmrf 9y ago
  According to the article, this is more about google's competitors strangling them (by being so intrusive that customers consider full ad blockers to be necessary).
  - bostik 9y ago
    Credit where it's due - they're right. Full ad blockers are necessary.
    - dhimes 9y ago
      And I don't expect this to change that, frankly. They say nothing about blocking the trackers, and that's what needs to be blocked.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    Google is far from being strangled, making around $100B in income. The bulk of that income comes from AdWords. AdWords are ads.
- quickben 9y ago
  Among the rest, this will lead to competitors promoting non-chrome.
carlosrg 9y ago
This is a good thing. Advertising is one of the most effective ways companies have to let people know about their products - I'd say they're essential in free market economies. But having ads is one thing and completely disrupting the user experience is another. Finding a balance is a better approach than blocking all ads.
- wyager 9y ago
  Ads are almost never how informed purchasers make decisions. In the age of the Internet, review systems (whether collaborative or curated) are infinitely better sources of product information than ads. They are also vulnerable to manipulation from would-be advertisers, but less so (and any influence can be mitigated by trusted reviewers).
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    Ads do tell you something about a company though. Like, do they waste a lot of money on marketing? Have a good sense of humour? Target my in-group as a customer? Pay attention to detail?
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Advertising is very seldom information based. Advertising is primarily about making you buy a product from a particular company, whether it's a good product or not, whether it's right for you or not. If it were about letting people know your products then 'Nide' would have "if you want these for cross-training the best show are 'Reebob' Cross2" on the advert for their training shoes. Advertising is almost orthogonal to informative disclosure.
  - carlosrg 9y ago
    >Advertising is primarily about making you buy a product from a particular company, whether it's a good product or not, whether it's right for you or not. That a pretty simplistic view. I never said ads are 100% true and want the best for you. Ads are informational as they inform you of the existence of a product and their basic characteristics. Small, well-targeted ads can be the only way someone that's just starting could have to let people know about the existence of their product. They don't hold a gun at you to force you to buy a product, they don't remove competition between companies, they don't prevent third-party review sites from existing. Buying or not buying them is up to each individual.
Santosh83 9y ago
It's a bit surreal that an advertising based company's browser will now block annoying ads by default while the privacy focused Mozilla corporation's browser is still not implementing any kind of built-in ad blocking.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  You should not see this as a Google vs Mozilla thing but as a Google vs adblockers and Google vs its competing advertising networks issue. Then it makes much more sense.
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    Well, I have Mozilla's back personally since I've always used only Firefox ever since version 1 and never used Chrome except for trying it out for a test drive from time to time, but the millions of Firefox users worldwide will now have one more reason to jump ship to Chrome and that's something Firefox can't afford at this point. Built-in ad blocking is just too good to pass up. Firefox needs to implement their own version soon, IMO.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      That I agree with, but installing an ad blocker is fairly painless in firefox.
- lucasverra 9y ago
  Latest Firefox Quantum release available with faster, always-on privacy with opt-in Tracking Protection and new features[1]- 23 jan 2018 [1]https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/01/23/latest-firefox-quantum-release-now-available-with-new-features/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/01/23/latest-firefox-quan...
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    I'm aware of this, but it seems to be only basic tracker blocking and not even near as flexible and comprehensive as say uBlock. They need to expand this significantly to offer something equivalent to this Chrome initiative. At the very least, offer the ability to add custom blacklists and per domain rules.
chaz6 9y ago
I wouldn't trust a burglar to install my security system. I won't trust Google to block ads.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  You can trust a burglar to install a security system that will keep other burglars out, but you can be 100% sure that you will not be able to keep the installer out, in fact you are just about giving them an incentive to rob you blind at the first opportunity. Google will do an amazing job at blocking competitor ads.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    Then why did the competitors, including the top competitors in terms of revenue, sign up to be part of the consortium? I see this as a shot at piracy sites, if anything. Since they cannot join reputable ad networks, they join disreputable ones that don't even try to police their ads or publishers and show shady and misleading ads. Those will all be blocked now, choking the piracy sites of revenue. The primary beneficiaries are content producers. The secondary beneficiaries are Internet companies that are hit by botnets.
    - jacques_chester 9y ago
      > Then why did the competitors, including the top competitors in terms of revenue, sign up to be part of the consortium? They don't have a choice. Either they join the cartel or they watch their ads vanish entirely[0] from the most popular browser. I don't think this is an either/or thing. Google is doing something with positive externalities. But it also so happens to align 100% with their commercial interests. [0] edit: "entirely" is hyperbole. But even a low percentage is worth giving in for.
      - lern_too_spel 9y ago
        > Either they join the cartel or they watch their ads vanish entirely[0] from the most popular browser. Why do you think they didn't want to join? They get the same benefits as Google and the Internet at large. I'm having a hard time following your logic for why this is Google attacking its competitors if its competitors are unaffected by the change.
RyanShook 9y ago
I think Google is setting itself up for antitrust action. Isn’t this essentially what Microsoft did on the desktop by blocking competitors and priorritizing their own products?
- mtgx 9y ago
  Google may have pushed for this, but the standards were agreed upon by the ad industry: https://marketingland.com/industry-groups-self-regulatory-program-coalition-for-better-ads-226109 https://marketingland.com/industry-groups-self-regulatory-pr...
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    The standards should be set by independent consumer watchdogs or the competent (one would hope) authorities, depending on the industry to self regulate has not worked in over 25 years, I see no reason why it would magically start to work now.
    - mastax 9y ago
      The ad industry had no means or incentive to self regulate. That has changed. The incentive is ad blockers. The means is "Coalition for Better Ads." Can't trust them to fight against tracking. Can't trust them to eliminate malvertising. Can't trust them to unblock your website in a timely manner or give good feedback about what is wrong with it. Can expect them to keep obnoxious use of advertising down to stop the whole industry from collapsing.
jmkni 9y ago
Will this work on the mobile versions of Chrome as well (Android, iOS, etc)? For iOS in particular, there doesn't seem to be any officially supported way to block ads.
- aaronbrager 9y ago
  Safari Content Blockers are the officially supported way. Eg BlockBear, Crystal, etc.
kodablah 9y ago
Which is it, the super secret consortium that won't even let you download the full list of bad sites, or Easy List/Privacy? Why don't they just use EasyList and report offenders there instead of this new consortium? The answer to that rhetorical question will let you know why I'll remain on uBO. They didn't need to build this in, but they did and gave the current ad-blocking community the finger instead of support.
- d2wa 9y ago
  Read the article. They do use EasyList + EasyPrivacy.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    I did read the article. That's why I included it in my comment. It should be exclusive. Not using only some of that list (e.g. no cosmetic blockers) and then using some super secret list the world doesn't have access to. Shouldn't have half of one and half of the other without the possibility of fine-tuned configurability. Otherwise, you are just an opaque piece of the system that I will supplement with a more transparent version.
  - bitcurious 9y ago
    They use EasyList+EasyPrivacy but only websites that they judge as having intrusive advertising. You can't manually enable adblocking on any website, nor add for example "youtube.com" to the blacklist.
- mastax 9y ago
  >Which is it, the super secret consortium that won't even let you download the full list of bad sites, or Easy List/Privacy? Why don't they just use EasyList and report offenders there instead of this new consortium? The lists serve different purposes. EasyList is a lit of ad-serving URLs to block. The uh, consortium list is a black/white list of which sites don't follow the standards. The standards are not about bad ads, but about sites that use ads in bad ways. The standards can't be automatically enforced since software can't reliably determine if an ad is a popunder or otherwise intrusive due to placement. Sites would quickly use CSS/JS hacks to work around the classifier.
arielm 9y ago
To have an ad network control so much of web traffic and then decide which ads to block is just absurd. If the chrome team and google’s ad teams were not controlled by the same unit that primarily makes money from ads it would have been ok, but given that they do, what incentive will they have to block their own ads and how much more powerful is it making their own network? Sadly, chrome is still the easiest browser to use, especially as a developer
- Andrex 9y ago
  In your opinion, would spinning off Chrome into its own company under Alphabet be a possible solution?
  - hyperdimension 9y ago
    Not OP, but that seems strange to me. Chrome is a product, not really a business. I can't see any way for them to make money, besides maybe enterprise deployments.
    - wmf 9y ago
      If Firefox makes $500M per year from search referrals, Chrome could make over $1B. Chrome would be very profitable as an independent company.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    No, because Alphabet is still Google. A layer of shell companies doesn't change anything. Chrome (and Android, probably) should be forcibly split off from anything to do with Google/Alphabet, as fully independent companies. Any collusion between them and Google should be illegal. ^- This is breaking up an illegal monopoly. Shuffling around which division owned by Larry Page and Sergey Brin it is is not.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  >To have an ad network control so much of web traffic and then decide which ads to block is just absurd. Google doesn't determine what ads are blocked. That's done by the coalition that's composed of the following members and affiliate: https://www.betterads.org/members/ https://www.betterads.org/members/
known 9y ago
To sneak in Google ads?
mtgx 9y ago
Do these standards and this Chrome ad-blocker also solve the issue of advertisers putting crypto-mining scripts into their ads?
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Or the minute+ unskippable ads on youtube?
kyrra 9y ago
If you want to go read the source yourself, I believe this is the implementation: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/browser/api/declarative_net_request/ https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/browser/api/... And the code reviews cover the feature are tagged with DNR: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/?polygerrit=0#/q/Dnr https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/?polygerrit=0#/q/Dn... Edit: this may just be the net blocking code.
- kodablah 9y ago
  Looks basically like an ad block filter rule list parser (there are others in C++ including one I wrote [0] and one Brave people wrote [1]). Of course, looking at the code, I am not seeing where cosmetic filters are supported. Also, you should include the code from https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/common/api/declarative_net_request/ https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/common/api/d... in this I think. Also, there's the safe browsing code at https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsing/ https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsin... of which the author references db/util.h. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/doogie/blob/master/src/blocker_rules.cc https://github.com/cretz/doogie/blob/master/src/blocker_rule... 1 - https://github.com/brave/ad-block https://github.com/brave/ad-block
- kbwt 9y ago
  Now I'm half tempted to serve up ads from a path in the form '/a{n}b/\d+' with sufficiently large n to bring the O(mn) std::string::find subpattern matcher to a crawl when it encounters my harmless 'src="/a{m}"' iframes. Preferably n > 32K/2 to blow through L1 cache.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    Which code are you looking at? I see it uses https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/url_pattern_index/url_pattern_index.h https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/url_pattern_.... Also, from what I gather from their docs, this is only for the ad-block-filter formatted lists. For their own super-secret-better-ads list, they use safe browsing lists which use a hash-some-then-phone-home approach IIRC [0]. I mean, even Mozilla that uses the safe browsing lists says at [1] that the internal documentation [2] is only available under NDA. 0 - https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/local-databases https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/local-databas... 1 - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing 2 - https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/FIREFOX/Safe+Browsing https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/FIREFOX/Safe+Browsing
Analemma_ 9y ago
So, who wants to bet on the size of the inevitable EU fine for anticompetitive activity? Another €1.2 billion?
oldpond 9y ago
Google. Advertising company. If I ever have to watch advertising on the internet, I'm turning it off.
firebender6 9y ago
This is still not going to help with websites that force you to disable adblockers to access their content. It's especially annoying when after disabling the site looks like a cluster of ads with information hidden in between. It's an abusive relationship.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  That is fine... personally those sites go on my mental block list to avoid in the future.
534b44a 9y ago
I long for the day Google asks you to disable your adblocker (uBlock, ABP, etc.) to be able to search.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  > I long for the day Google asks you to disable your adblocker (uBlock, ABP, etc.) to be able to search. That will be the day when fewer people search using Google, and someone will come up with noadoogle.
- regexnerd 9y ago
  You are part of the problem. People should not have to give up their privacy and expose their devices to the evil of the advert companies just to get online. Ads are almost the number one vector for malware. Ad servers are rarely, if ever, equipped with decent security and are frequently compromised. Ads are a poor method for making money and the system is horribly gamed at every opportunity. Anything worth having is worth paying for. Google and their ilk have ruined the Internet and the general online landscape by dint of offering "free" services that are not really free; people pay for them dearly with lack of privacy and security and the return of a "free" service is not worth what is given. I have happily paid for Fastmail since 2002. They are security conscience, responsive, and give a damn about their customers. I will use no one else. They are very transparent with their issues and enjoy providing their use base with information regarding their running of the company. Good luck with Google or Microsoft giving even paying customers this level of service and transparency. Google have become too powerful. Way too powerful. They have their awful ads, beacons, and trackers on most websites and people just blissfully go along with it. I use zero Google services and block all of their tracking with a Pi-hole and other software tools. Ditto allowing no Android devices on my network. Getting into bed with Google in any way, shape, or form is literally giving away your privacy for a few trinkets that are worth nothing. If it's worth having, it's worth paying for. It's all an electronic leash...
  - dang 9y ago
    > You are part of the problem On HN, please make your points without stooping to personal swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
asah 9y ago
I for one welcome this - uBlock is great but it's slow and creates bugs with many legit applications. My first tech support question these days is, "are you running an adblocker?"
- aluhut 9y ago
  Yeah mine too, followed by me installing one.
supertiger 9y ago
It's never good to have someone as both a player and a referee in the same game.
mabbo 9y ago
I think there's good intentions by Google here. That said, let's talk about the worst-case scenario, the thing that Google could actually do that is entirely anti-competitive. Step 1: Google finds a large number of competitors who are doing pretty well playing by their rules. Google finds some trait they all have in common. Google then modifies their own ads to not have that trait. Step 2: Google declares the given trait "not meeting the Better Ads standard", "clarifies" the standard (or their implementation of it), and blocks all their competitors ads. Their own ads of course are still meeting the new set of rules, as they knew the change was coming. If the Coalition for Better Ads disagrees or won't be bullied by the Goliath of advertising, Google will go form their own version of it claiming to be more strict, "for the sake of the users". Step 3: After a few weeks or months, the competition will modify their ads and eventually everything will be back to normal. That's when Google goes back to step 1. The final Step 4 is the opposite. Find a trait that none or few competitors have in their ads but would potentially increase click-through rates. Modify the rules to say that doing this thing is okay, and oh hey Google ads are doing that thing as of right now. Why all of this? Because Amazon is growing in the advertising business and is ruthless. "Your margin is my opportunity". So Google needs an arsenal of dirty tricks up their sleeve. Do I really believe this is the plan? No. I think Google are legit trying to meet a user need that exists. But I also know they're a publicly traded company with growing competition in a fierce industry. It's not what they plan to do that worries me, but what they can do when up against the wall.
- drngdds 9y ago
  I feel like there's a simpler explanation that's still not 'good intentions': 1. Lots of people are using adblockers to block all ads, including Google's, and they don't like that. 2. People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.* 3. By building in an adblocker that blocks annoying ads, people will stop installing full adblockers that also block Google's ads. *There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking, but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.
  - dhimes 9y ago
    This is the explanation they give in the post.
eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
I am confused. Are they doing (i) EasyList + EasyPrivacy OR (ii) List derived using better ads standard? I would imagine (i) to be much longer than (ii).
influx 9y ago
The owners of DoubleClick are going to protect you from obnoxious ads! That’s So Googly!
- Splines 9y ago
  "Focus on the customer and all else will follow" oops
LeoNatan25 9y ago
Will those idiots block YouTube as well for serving malware that mines on users’ machines?
poopslide 9y ago
"Welcome to notification hell."
fwdpropaganda 9y ago
Here's how my ad blocker works: - Install uMatrix (firefox/chrome add-on) - Manually whitelist javascript Get uMatrix folks.
- mderazon 9y ago
  Don't get how it's different from ublock or what's the benefits of umatrix
  - molloy 9y ago
    It blocks all third party scripts by default, allows first party scripts by default, and offers a very intuitive and clean interface for selectively allowing frames, xhr requests, scripts, etc. It has a better UX than uBlock in my experience.
  - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
    Does ublock allow to block all javascript and cookies by default, and manually whitelist javascript or cookies domain by domain?
    - ams6110 9y ago
      In "advanced user" mode it can do this. You can even say things like "yes allow from foo.com but only when I'm visiting bar.com" I did this for a while but it all got to be too much trouble honestly. Now I just run uBlock in default configuration and also have an /etc/hosts file, and browser set to clear all history and cookies when closed.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cornholio 9y ago
> Google’s implementation is a bit different from how most extension as blocking is enforced at an earlier stage in the rendering processes than extensions have access to. Nice to hear adblocking performance is set to have a huge boost as soon as extension authors figure out how to hijack the filter to return a BETTER_ADS violation for all sites.
gorhill 9y ago
> Google appears to be shipping the entirety of EasyList and EasyPrivacy; which includes blocking rules for Google’s own AdSense and DoubleClick advertisement platforms as well as Google Analytics, and other Google services. This is confusing. EasyList is not bound to the "Better Ads Standards", its purpose is to block all ads, regardless of their perceived intrusiveness. Also, I failed to understand why would EasyPrivacy be used: its purpose is outside that of "Better Ads Standards". The article further claims: > Google’s ad blocking capabilities will be on par with the best tools available from day one. How is this even possible if the web sites targeted are only those which are not compliant "Better Ads Standards"? The blockers making use of EasyList do not care about "Better Ads Standards", so the result can't possibly be "on par with the best tools available"[1] I would like to know how the author of the article got the information about EasyList and EasyPrivacy, I find it difficult to believe these would be used by Chrome's integrated blocker given its claimed purpose. * * * UPDATE: After looking around a bit, I understand better now how this works. As per ghacks.net[2], excerpt (my emphasis): > Google Chrome will download rules from EasyList and EasyPrivacy at regular intervals and apply them to sites that failed reviews automatically. So EasyList/EasyPrivacy are used on sites which fail to comply with "Better Ads Standards". In retrospect I suffered reading comprehension, the sentence in the article was clear enough: > These lists are used to limit what resources are loaded on websites identified by Safe Browsing as being non-compliant with the Better Ad Standards. * * * [1] Add to this that EasyList is just a complementary list on top of more advanced blocking features found on blockers such as uBlock Origin or Adguard. [2] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/02/details-about-googles-ad-blocking-integration-in-chrome/ https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/02/details-about-googles-ad-b...
- notatoad 9y ago
  >its purpose is to block all ads, regardless of their perceived intrusiveness. and that's what chrome's adblocker will do. The purpose of chrome's adblocker is not to block ads that don't conform to the better ad standards, it's to block ALL ads on websites that don't conform to the better ad standards. There's no way to block individual ads that don't comply, since the standards define things like the number of ads you can have visible at a time, or how close ads can be to each other. if your site is 90% ads and 10% content, which of those ads are intrusive and which ones should you allow through? So what google is doing instead is flagging the site as "has intrusive ads", and then blocking all advertising on that site. >I would like to know how the article author got the information about EasyList and EasyPrivacy the author says at the beginning of the article that this information comes from inspecting the chromium source code.
ultim8k 9y ago
Seems like they are using their dominance in browser market in order to kill the competition in ads market.
- pknerd 9y ago
  that seems the case.
craigmi 9y ago
youtube ads are worse than anything they're blocking
ams6110 9y ago
Slightly tangential, but: > ... Google Safe Browsing service. Chrome checks every website you visit against a list of malicious websites that it periodically downloads from Safe Browsing. So I have always disabled Safe Browsing because I assumed it was sending all my browsing activity to Google in real time to be checked. But this sounds like it's checking locally from a downloaded list. Anyone know if that's correct?
- pfg 9y ago
  Safe Browsing is implemented in a fairly privacy-preserving way. The block list is downloaded periodically and sites are checked against this list locally. The only time most browsers implementing Safe Browsing will share potentially privacy-sensitive data is when you download executable files and when you actually encounter a site included in the block list (in order to double-check whether the site has since been removed). Documentation for the Safe Browsing implementation in Firefox can be found here[1]. [1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-malware-protection-work https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...
- kodablah 9y ago
  It's half and half from what I'm reading. It checks a local list for the sha-256 hash or partial hash. Then, if found, it phones home with the partial hash it found. If you don't want to read [0], I think the Golang parser/lookup at [1] is a reasonable interpretation of what they're doing, but not sure. You can see there that the hashes generated are of different-host-combinations + different-URL-path-combinations. They do the partial hash check in a DB (local, downloaded periodically). If there's a partial hash in the DB, they phone home w/ that partial hash for the full hashes and check if it matches. So Google gets the partial hash of a URL it had told you could be bad. They return the full hashes for that partial hash. We can hope (and see) that the partial hashes do not match a broad set (and they are host possibility + URL path combo possibility). Surely Google has something that maps the hashes to actual URL patterns, but like the other commenter said, the partial hash you send is only sent when it matches a local DB already. 0 - https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsing/ https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsin... 1 - https://github.com/google/safebrowsing/ https://github.com/google/safebrowsing/
xstartup 9y ago
It seems a lot of people here work for shady ad networks whose bonus will be cut this year. It's not only "Google", it's Coalition for Better Ads. There top competitors' are all part of it. It's still a lot better for my elderly folks who can't seem to figure out how to install ublock.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Google loves to claim something is administered by a "coalition" or "alliance". But that isn't how it works internally. Remember the "Open Handset Alliance"? The industry group of companies which used Android? Well, Google threatened to remove Acer from it if Acer dared to release a phone without Google Apps on it. This was never a mutual organization, it was a Google-run organization. "Alliances" and "coalitions" are the tools which Google uses to tame the companies they've more or less taken control of.
  - xstartup 9y ago
    Adtech industry can't be compared with Handset market. You can start your ad network today with minimum capital. There are lots of smaller players in this game who are setting over each other to gain some competitive advantage by pushing nastiest ad around. These smaller players can make their own coalition and go to courts if it's that bad for their business and no court will not allow you to run shady ads, so these guys will never go to court!
manigandham 9y ago
This is 100% about reinforcing Google's ad monopoly (along with the AMP initiative). Google owns DoubleClick which is the biggest adserver on the planet and the #1 source of all the bad intrusive ads in the first place. This could've been easily solved years ago.
- krisives 9y ago
  Essentially inventory management happening
- deckard1 9y ago
  Yep. And you can see this in a lot of what Google does. Most people think Google's push for HTTPS, both in Chrome and SEO rankings, is somehow related to privacy. It's not. It's about net neutrality and it's about third parties being able to switch out Google's ads for their own, on-the-fly, using a middleman. I interviewed with a stealth-level startup a few years back. They were developing a product, similar to a WiFi router, that would be installed on premise and sit there, filtering out Google/Facebook/etc. ads and replacing them with ads that the owner of the box wanted. You can imagine this box being installed in Starbucks, airports, libraries, and everywhere else. Cutting into a massive chunk of Google's ad revenue. The Time Warners, AT&Ts, and Verizons of the world would also be doing this, for HTTP traffic. We are getting the benefits of privacy. But it's not because Google has good intentions.
  - pritambaral 9y ago
    > I interviewed with a stealth-level startup a few years back. They were developing a product, similar to a WiFi router, that would be installed on premise and sit there, filtering out Google/Facebook/etc. ads and replacing them with ads that the owner of the box wanted. You can imagine this box being installed in Starbucks, airports, libraries, and everywhere else. Funny, I was a similar boat once. They weren't a startup, yet. Good for them, because in both meetings I had to tell them their business idea was impossible unless they broke prime factorization. I was surprised I had to meet them the second time. Oh, and their business idea was a little more intrusive than merely replacing ads. They wanted to be able to read people's emails and Facebook data and serve targeted advertising based on that.
guhan_ganesh 9y ago
There are no annoying ads. All ads are annoying.
pascalxus 9y ago
I'm so glad Google is starting to put the customer first again. I hope the media gives credit where it's due, instead of this non-stop negative sensationalistic media we've been getting. I for one, hope there's some kind of blocking for embedded videos. I haven't had luck with the existing solutions out there.
- takeda 9y ago
  As someone here said, don't trust a burglar to install a security system. Google is doing this to make sure their ads will be displayed. If chrome has built in ad blocking many people won't feel the need to install ad blockers that block all ads. Another point mentioned is that this could be used in the future to hamper business of their competitors. It is very unlikely that this is why it was created, but don't forget that Google is a publicly traded company, if they will be pressed against a wall they will use anything available, and this could cause a serious damage against their competitors.
nukeop 9y ago
Google as an advertising company has been putting its pieces into place for years now. Now is the final step of their plan of total takeover of the WWW. Once you have the dominant browser and you're the largest ad provider on the internet, you can start actively destroying competition by declaring their ads "intrusive", and simply "bad", and blocking them. Since you have control over web standards and most of the browsers in the world, you hold everyone else by their balls. They either play by your rules, or they don't get to play at all. You can stifle all competition, completely, forever. Anything you do at this stage only tightens your grip on the internet.
d2wa 9y ago
Here are test pages that can be used to trigger the adblocker via Safe Browsing. http://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/s/subresource_filter_desktop.html http://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/s/subresource_filter_des... http://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/s/subresource_filter_mobile.html http://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/s/subresource_filter_mob...
krisives 9y ago
When I interviewed at Facebook almost every person I talked to said "if Google blocks ads by default Facebook will sue them" so I expect to see a lawsuit eventually
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  Out of interest how long ago was this? Asking because: "Mobile advertising revenue is reported and according to Facebook, it represented approximately 88 percent of advertising revenue for Q3 2017 up from 84 percent in Q3 2016." https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/ https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/ Facebook seem to have done an incredibly good job of reducing their exposure to the browser. That comes at the cost of exposure to Android, but it feels like Google are going to find blocking Facebook ads in the Facebook app way harder than in their website. That's all a little bit irrelevant though because Facebook are members of the 'coalition for better ads' anyway.
  - krisives 9y ago
    December 2017
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  I would like to see that lawsuit. Imagine Facebook, a board member of the Coalition for Better Ads, suing Google for blocking Facebook ads that do not conform to the standards that Facebook, a board member, helped establish.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sleepybrett 9y ago
Why am I trusting an advertising company with an ad blocker?
YTGRK 9y ago
https://youtu.be/wxU3yWAURE8 https://youtu.be/wxU3yWAURE8
kevmo 9y ago
Just use Brave, everyone. I think everyone here knows there's no way Google's sandbox doesn't morph into quicksand. https://brave.com https://brave.com
- regexnerd 9y ago
  Brave is ad friendly, something that doesn't sit well with me. I want it all blocked. No ads, beacons, trackers, bad JavaScript. It's my browser, I call the shots as to what is allowed through. Ad companies have proven themselves to be evil and untrustworthy. They are now one of the main vectors of malware. I owe it to myself and my family to block everything like ads, beacons, and tracking my our network. I'm not interested in helping other people make money, generate crypto currency, whatever... My computers, my rules. Ads are a bad way to make money anyway and I've been blocking them since 1998. No way would I use Brave or any other software that actually encourages the advert companies to continue down their dark path.
mnm1 9y ago
I hope Mozilla will do the same, only with a proper ad blocker. It's the only thing that makes sense given the two organizations' goals and purposes. Either that or they're loving their sponsorship money too much and there's no difference in goal or purpose between the two organizations. Can't wait to see if they stand up for users or lie down for money.
- Sylos 9y ago
  If webpage owners don't make money off of a browser, they'll stop testing/building their webpage against that browser or even block access from it, leading to broken webpages in that broken, which is not at all in the interest of users.
  - mnm1 9y ago
    Plenty of browsers are not supported/tested on, yet they work just fine because they implement web standards.
    - Sylos 9y ago
      Yeah, they work fine 90% of the time. But no web browser implements all webstandards and even less so implements them without bugs. Google is also adding more and more proprietary APIs to their browser, which Mozilla will not be able to implement (Chromecast, Google Earth, Hangouts) or is adding pseudo-webstandards, which have been publicly specified, but they did not push it through the standardization process to reach an agreement with other browser vendors (e.g. WebSQL, File Storage API). You're also saying "plenty of browsers". There's hardly any browsers that don't use Trident/EdgeHTML, Gecko or KHTML/WebKit/Blink. If they use one of those, then there's the major browsers IE/Edge, Firefox or Safari/Chrome that webpage owners will test/build against and as a result also cause it to work on that fork, meaning that yeah, those forks can easily implement an ad blocker without much to fear. But that's not the case, if you are such a major browser yourself. Then webpage owners will notice and will not have any reason to optimize against your browser engine anyways.
gunshot19 9y ago
Why is this in a purposefully illegible font? Am I missing something?
aplorbust 9y ago
"However, users can't add their own websites to the blocklist."
- dbbk 9y ago
  It doesn't prevent you from installing an Ad Blocker extension to block sites yourself, as you do today.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
budu3 9y ago
I don't think that browser should be in the business of blocking Ads. That's the job of 3rd party tools and extensions. A browsers job is to display a webpage as is not to alter it. At most it should scream if a man in the middle altered my page anything more is crossing the line.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  Should a browser also not be in the business of alerting a user that they're about to visit a site serving malware and using zero day exploits or is that also the job for 3rd party tools and extensions?
  - budu3 9y ago
    Alerting is fine. Altering the page is not.
    - SquareWheel 9y ago
      Browsers alter the page when they block popups.
21 9y ago
When Microsoft enabled DoNotTrack by default in IE, there was a huge outrage along the lines "how do they dare assume by default that I don't want to be tracked on the net?" Where is the outrage now "how do they dare assume that I don't want to see annoying ads by default?"
gressquel 9y ago
Kudos to the blog for not having silly facebook sharing button. Thanks for protecting my privacy / reading log
hedora 9y ago
How easy is it to disable the whitelist and notifications in chromium? It seems like an obvious, user friendly, change.
staunch 9y ago
Big Brother Google has a new definition of "ad blocker" with the novel feature of not blocking ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak
cujo 9y ago
Doesn't seem fishy at all that an ad company would develop a product that blocks ads. Nope. Couldn't possibly be used to further it's own business. No sir, no how.
imroot 9y ago
This feels like it's "DoubleClick For Publishers or Bust." Admittedly, I've only been on the DevOps side of content marketing -- and even at that, only on the cloud infrastructure side of it -- but, I think that just about everyone knew that while writing your own content and then selling your own ad inventory was ideal, if you couldn't sell your own ad inventory, DFP was the second best play for the income. To me, this screams, "Even if you have other ads, if they're not DFP-compliant, we won't show them if they are from our browser." I may be completely wrong...but, who knows.
- TekMol 9y ago
  if you couldn't sell your own ad inventory, DFP was the second best play for the income If you don't sell your ad inventory, then how is DFP different from Adsense?
SeriousM 9y ago
It's a nice writeup but to be honest, I'm so happy that I have my pi-hole setup so I don't care anymore :). For Android is an OSS app called dns66 (f-droid) which has the same functionality.
- Zizizizz 9y ago
  Couldn't you set up a VPN to that raspberry pi and use that to block ads on your phone too? I use Adaway but I don't have a pi hole
damoiser 9y ago
It sounds for me like a begin of monopoly: google ads put in silence all other ads competitors thanks a largely used in-house browser
yashksagar 9y ago
Google is not happy with third-party blockers blocking all their ads (e.g. YouTube ads), so they want their own blocker that can show more "Google-friendly" ads. It's all about the moolah...
TravelTechGuy 9y ago
Google telling us what "better ads" are is like a drug dealer lecturing you about crack quality control. They could have solved it years ago, but made tons of $ by letting the ad space become the wild west of nagware, malware, and tracking bonanza. If they were to provide a real adblocker, allowing people to opt-in to ads on sites they like, while blocking everything else, I'd have considered it, on the basis that any technology running in-browser must be more fast/efficient than an extension. But this initiative is just them trying to get people to drop their adblocker and get tracked again. All things being equal, I think I'll keep my uBlock extension - at least until Google kicks it out of their web store. I believe that would be the next logical step for them :(
- jordigh 9y ago
  To me, "better ads" sounds like "humane torture" or "acceptable manipulation". The principle of ads is repugnant to me. There's no way to make it better. I don't need to be psychologically manipulated to buy things I don't need. There's no way to make that manipulation ok. What Google considers acceptable, I consider subtle and even more manipulative, trying to sneak it in where most people won't object to the intrusion.
  - neolefty 9y ago
    Any thoughts on how web search should be funded, in an ideal world, if ads are inherently repugnant?
    - jordigh 9y ago
      I find this a really sinister bargain too. Citizen, allow yourself to be manipulated, or capitalism will crumble. Watch this ad designed to make you buy a car, or the website gets it! There are other ways. Ask for donations, like Wikipedia (which as I understand it, is rolling in the dough). Fund it with taxes. Set up a plain ol' paywall and revitalise the slow, inefficient banking system until sending money tiny amounts of money is as easy as clicking "I agree" in an Apple EULA. If we're so strapped for cash that websites will crumble unless we all submit ourselves to the Ludovico technique, surely we have enough of an incentive to work on micropayment technology instead.
trackingpixel 9y ago
Full disclosure: I work in ad-tech. 1. Why do you guys downvote civil, informative posts that just happen to be philosophically different than yours? Seems anti-knowledge, and a net negative to HN. 2. What do you think pays for the internet? This is the first time I've ever engaged in a discussion, but I've been lurking for a year or two, and at least half of the links shared in the comments are ad-supported. Probably more. Sharing information is going to be more difficult when the money dries up and everything is behind a paywall. 3. People are annoyed that they see the same ad over and over again, but "tracking" is a cardinal sin. How is this supposed to work?
- ericheymer 9y ago
  The notion that advertisements pay for websites is entirely fabricated. Recent research shows massive amounts of fraud with the involvement of the ad industry which eats through the money flowing through the ecosystem. See https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/ad-industry-insiders-are-connected-to-a-fraud-scheme-that?utm_term=.cqVM0x3aYJ#.pnzYnK19rE https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/ad-industry-insiders... and https://blog.confiant.com/uncovering-2017s-largest-malvertising-operation-b84cd38d6b85 https://blog.confiant.com/uncovering-2017s-largest-malvertis....
  - wweee 9y ago
    I don't see how the two links you posted supports the assertion that the "notion that advertisements pay for websites is entirely fabricated." First link is about fraud against advertisers, selling them fake ad impressions. Second link is about a sophisticated scheme to deliver malware to the end users using the ad ecosystem. How does that dispute the fact that people who have websites can profit from putting ads on them?
- lucb1e 9y ago
  > How is this supposed to work? By paying, not with your data but with your money. Why does Linux work if nobody pays for it? People like to work on it and it's a community project useful to everyone. Lots of site are run this way, but too many see that they could make a few pennies out of it and turn that way. Then it turns to a dependency, people start blocking ads, and oh my god the whole internet cannot be paid for, you argue. I'd much rather pay for things that are expensive (large sites like HN and Reddit, streaming licenses like Spotify, bandwidth and storage of Youtube, etc.) if then they didn't try to invade my privacy. In fact, I do pay for Reddit and Spotify. Youtube won't stop invading my privacy because they're Google's and HN does not have a donation option. I host websites myself and it costs me a little, but even HN-frontpage events are not expensive enough to warrant subjecting my visitors to modern ads (which means not only annoying ads, but sometimes malware, and always invasive tracking). > 1. Why do you guys downvote civil, informative posts that just happen to be philosophically different than yours? I suspect you can't point out which post you're talking about or you'd reveal your real account, so I don't know what you're talking about specifically. I'm going to wager it's because they think those arguments didn't further the discussion and are really just plain wrong. (That's what I think they think, not saying that I think so, because I still have no idea which post it is about.)
Markoff 9y ago
I am fine with this, at least less work for of ad blocker shame I don't use chrome
Ajedi32 9y ago
It'll be interesting to see how sites respond to this. Will they eliminate intrusive ads[1] from their sites entirely? Or start trying to force users to disable their ad blockers before using the site? I have a feeling this is going to lead to an increase in both of those behaviors. [1]: https://www.betterads.org/standards/ https://www.betterads.org/standards/
Animats 9y ago
Can you easily modify Chrome to use a more restrictive list that blocks all known ads? Is there any reason you would ever want to see anything from DoubleClick?
galori 9y ago
On mobile I’ve been using incignito mode exclusively. This prevents a lot of tracking, and bonus is it avoids many paywalls. I’m liking it so far - might try to do the same on desktop.
Corrado 9y ago
I use an Ad blocker and I kinda regret it sometimes. Most of the time the blocker keeps me from seeing annoying, repetitive ads for things I have zero interest in learning about (trucks, loans, cash back, etc.) However, I have realized that by blocking all Ads I am missing out on some cultural things, events that I want to know about. Movie information (Avengers, Hellboy, etc.) is one thing that I don't get informed of anymore. I didn't even see the latest Spiderman Homecoming movie in theaters because I had no idea it was even out until it was too late. I'm sure there are other things that I'm missing out on, but it's hard to know what you don't know. Anyway, I think Ads are not evil or bad but they do need to be targeted better. If the Ad companies can figure out how to tell me about things I care about, or will possibly care about in the near future, then I'm OK with being exposed to them. If anyone should be able to do this it would be Google (they know everything about me). So I turned of uBlock Origin and started using Chrome's built-in blocker. So far it's been terrible; I'm seeing all kinds of Ads for things I just don't care about. I think I'm going back to my blocker. :/
- Feniks 9y ago
  I know what you're talking about and feel the same. If you block marketing you are blocking a part of society. It reminds me of a Christian friend who never watches television.
nibnalin 9y ago
I’m all for ad-blocking and the existence of ad blockers. But I really don’t like the idea of corporations making decisions about what ads we get to see. It’s a slippery slope to go down. The existence of an entity which may even be “blamed” by content creators for taking their money(not exactly, but to some extent) for not meeting a standard they virtually have very little control over is almost un-democratic. And I won’t be surprised if there are some “oops, these guys meet all criterias but are still getting blocked” unintentionally(or even intentionally) by Google. I don’t use Chrome very often, but I’d recommend everyone to disable this feature when it ships(and use ublock/other open source blockers if one has to).

423 points by d2wa 9y ago

As long as your are not serving visually intrusive ads you can still track the shit out of users [1] under the Better Ads Standards [1]. If you are annoyed by flashing ads this is an improvement, if you are concerned about your privacy this does not really help at all. Sure, Chrome will seemingly also block trackers as some kind of side effect when blocking visually intrusive ads but just make your ads pass the visual standards and you are back in tracking business. [1] Unless I failed to find the relevant rules. [2] https://www.betterads.org/standards/ https://www.betterads.org/standards/

samfisher83 9y ago

It sounds like Google is using it's Monopoly position to control the ad space. Microsft used these tatics to get like 90+% marketshare before the government stepped in.chrome is open source it shouldn't be too hard to modify the code so it block Google ads too. I publish a browser which is a modified version of chrome which block ads. The issue is a lot of sites now detect this and tell you to disable it. They seem to use the script on the page itself so it's harder to block.

londons_explore 9y ago
> shouldn't be too hard to modify the code so it block Google ads too Go re-read the article. It blocks google ads too already.
jacksmith21006 9y ago
Did you read the article?
- samfisher83 9y ago
  Can you point to the point where it says that instead of just attacking me? This is what I saw. Google have announced that their Google Chrome web browser will block every ad on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards by default. Google admits that they’re taking action against the types of web advertisements that annoy people the most in an order to halt the rise in ad blockers that block all forms of advertisements on all websites.

gigatexal 9y ago

Going to stick with Firefox and keep blocking all tracking and ads. Thank you very much.

ape4 9y ago

if (domain != 'adsense') { blockAd(); }

akhatri_aus 9y ago
Exactly my thoughts, this effectively puts a price premium on ads under any of Alphabet's networks.
marktangotango 9y ago
My thought as well, google/alphabet has a real PR problem here.
- vgeek 9y ago
  They won't discriminate against all 3rd parties at first, it would be too obvious. They will quietly grow the list of blocked 3rd parties, with the intention of gradually shifting all spend to AdSense/DoubleClick platforms.
  - anonymousab 9y ago
    Given how many bad sites and bad ads there are out there, I think the list would quickly grow even if Google had the best of intentions.
- Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
  And potentially an antitrust problem.
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago
    Does Facebook also have an antitrust problem? They're one of the many board members. https://www.betterads.org/members/ https://www.betterads.org/members/
kristianc 9y ago
More or less. It's Google's way of getting around header bidding.

rplnt 9y ago

No option for script blocking?

MereInterest 9y ago

Google's incentives here are still antithetical to my own, so I'm going to stick with uBlock. For example, on Google search, ads masquerade as legitimate search results. These used to be highlighted in light yellow, clearly marking them as different from organic search results. Now, they only have the word "Ad" in light grey text. This notice is on the right, intentionally where it will be overlooked when reading through the titles of each result. I can't imagine that Google would start blocking their own ad network, let alone their own ads. Therefore, I'm sticking with an ad blocker that I control.

nothrabannosir 9y ago
> These used to be highlighted in light yellow, clearly marking them as different from organic search results. The specific shade of yellow was indiscernible from background white on a cheap laptop at almost any angle. I wish I'd taken a photo when I noticed. I knew people who had never even noticed the yellow, at all, let alone understood it was ads. I know, Never Attribute To Malice and all that, but hot damn, that must have been a massive multi million dollar move of "ignorance".
- jacquesm 9y ago
  I am more than happy to attribute it to malice because that is exactly what Google did with their competitors when they were just starting out.
- quesera 9y ago
  Google is the company that user-tested 41 shades of blue¹. Malice or not, that yellow was surely intentional, and working as intended. [1] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
- MereInterest 9y ago
  > I know, Never Attribute To Malice and all that, but hot damn, that must have been a massive multi million dollar move of "ignorance". I think that this saying gets misapplied quite frequently. If you are talking to someone one on one, then you should assume that they are simply mistaken. Otherwise, you don't stand a chance of convincing them to see things another way. On the other hand, in trying to predict somebody else's actions, assuming malice can give the most accurate prediction. On the part of Google, I don't know whether the nigh-unidentifiable ads are the result of some cackling executive trying to trick people to click on ads, or whether it is the result of overzealous A/B testing that stumbled upon a dark pattern. In the end, it doesn't matter, and either one is a good approximation of what will happen in the future.

rocqua 9y ago

How will this not lead to google strangling their competitors. Are we really going to have to just trust them to use this fairly? Will we really expect google to interpret the Better Ads Standard without any bias, treating their own ads equally to other ads? Maybe they will be good, but I for one am not comfortable with this. Imagine what happens when chrome decides Facebook ads deserve to be blocked.

rmrfrmrf 9y ago
According to the article, this is more about google's competitors strangling them (by being so intrusive that customers consider full ad blockers to be necessary).
- bostik 9y ago
  Credit where it's due - they're right. Full ad blockers are necessary.
  - dhimes 9y ago
    And I don't expect this to change that, frankly. They say nothing about blocking the trackers, and that's what needs to be blocked.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  Google is far from being strangled, making around $100B in income. The bulk of that income comes from AdWords. AdWords are ads.
quickben 9y ago
Among the rest, this will lead to competitors promoting non-chrome.

carlosrg 9y ago

This is a good thing. Advertising is one of the most effective ways companies have to let people know about their products - I'd say they're essential in free market economies. But having ads is one thing and completely disrupting the user experience is another. Finding a balance is a better approach than blocking all ads.

wyager 9y ago
Ads are almost never how informed purchasers make decisions. In the age of the Internet, review systems (whether collaborative or curated) are infinitely better sources of product information than ads. They are also vulnerable to manipulation from would-be advertisers, but less so (and any influence can be mitigated by trusted reviewers).
- akvadrako 9y ago
  Ads do tell you something about a company though. Like, do they waste a lot of money on marketing? Have a good sense of humour? Target my in-group as a customer? Pay attention to detail?
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Advertising is very seldom information based. Advertising is primarily about making you buy a product from a particular company, whether it's a good product or not, whether it's right for you or not. If it were about letting people know your products then 'Nide' would have "if you want these for cross-training the best show are 'Reebob' Cross2" on the advert for their training shoes. Advertising is almost orthogonal to informative disclosure.
- carlosrg 9y ago
  >Advertising is primarily about making you buy a product from a particular company, whether it's a good product or not, whether it's right for you or not. That a pretty simplistic view. I never said ads are 100% true and want the best for you. Ads are informational as they inform you of the existence of a product and their basic characteristics. Small, well-targeted ads can be the only way someone that's just starting could have to let people know about the existence of their product. They don't hold a gun at you to force you to buy a product, they don't remove competition between companies, they don't prevent third-party review sites from existing. Buying or not buying them is up to each individual.

Santosh83 9y ago

It's a bit surreal that an advertising based company's browser will now block annoying ads by default while the privacy focused Mozilla corporation's browser is still not implementing any kind of built-in ad blocking.

jacquesm 9y ago
You should not see this as a Google vs Mozilla thing but as a Google vs adblockers and Google vs its competing advertising networks issue. Then it makes much more sense.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Well, I have Mozilla's back personally since I've always used only Firefox ever since version 1 and never used Chrome except for trying it out for a test drive from time to time, but the millions of Firefox users worldwide will now have one more reason to jump ship to Chrome and that's something Firefox can't afford at this point. Built-in ad blocking is just too good to pass up. Firefox needs to implement their own version soon, IMO.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    That I agree with, but installing an ad blocker is fairly painless in firefox.
lucasverra 9y ago
Latest Firefox Quantum release available with faster, always-on privacy with opt-in Tracking Protection and new features[1]- 23 jan 2018 [1]https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/01/23/latest-firefox-quantum-release-now-available-with-new-features/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/01/23/latest-firefox-quan...
- Santosh83 9y ago
  I'm aware of this, but it seems to be only basic tracker blocking and not even near as flexible and comprehensive as say uBlock. They need to expand this significantly to offer something equivalent to this Chrome initiative. At the very least, offer the ability to add custom blacklists and per domain rules.

chaz6 9y ago

I wouldn't trust a burglar to install my security system. I won't trust Google to block ads.

jacquesm 9y ago
You can trust a burglar to install a security system that will keep other burglars out, but you can be 100% sure that you will not be able to keep the installer out, in fact you are just about giving them an incentive to rob you blind at the first opportunity. Google will do an amazing job at blocking competitor ads.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  Then why did the competitors, including the top competitors in terms of revenue, sign up to be part of the consortium? I see this as a shot at piracy sites, if anything. Since they cannot join reputable ad networks, they join disreputable ones that don't even try to police their ads or publishers and show shady and misleading ads. Those will all be blocked now, choking the piracy sites of revenue. The primary beneficiaries are content producers. The secondary beneficiaries are Internet companies that are hit by botnets.
  - jacques_chester 9y ago
    > Then why did the competitors, including the top competitors in terms of revenue, sign up to be part of the consortium? They don't have a choice. Either they join the cartel or they watch their ads vanish entirely[0] from the most popular browser. I don't think this is an either/or thing. Google is doing something with positive externalities. But it also so happens to align 100% with their commercial interests. [0] edit: "entirely" is hyperbole. But even a low percentage is worth giving in for.
    - lern_too_spel 9y ago
      > Either they join the cartel or they watch their ads vanish entirely[0] from the most popular browser. Why do you think they didn't want to join? They get the same benefits as Google and the Internet at large. I'm having a hard time following your logic for why this is Google attacking its competitors if its competitors are unaffected by the change.

RyanShook 9y ago

I think Google is setting itself up for antitrust action. Isn’t this essentially what Microsoft did on the desktop by blocking competitors and priorritizing their own products?

mtgx 9y ago
Google may have pushed for this, but the standards were agreed upon by the ad industry: https://marketingland.com/industry-groups-self-regulatory-program-coalition-for-better-ads-226109 https://marketingland.com/industry-groups-self-regulatory-pr...
- jacquesm 9y ago
  The standards should be set by independent consumer watchdogs or the competent (one would hope) authorities, depending on the industry to self regulate has not worked in over 25 years, I see no reason why it would magically start to work now.
  - mastax 9y ago
    The ad industry had no means or incentive to self regulate. That has changed. The incentive is ad blockers. The means is "Coalition for Better Ads." Can't trust them to fight against tracking. Can't trust them to eliminate malvertising. Can't trust them to unblock your website in a timely manner or give good feedback about what is wrong with it. Can expect them to keep obnoxious use of advertising down to stop the whole industry from collapsing.

jmkni 9y ago

Will this work on the mobile versions of Chrome as well (Android, iOS, etc)? For iOS in particular, there doesn't seem to be any officially supported way to block ads.

aaronbrager 9y ago
Safari Content Blockers are the officially supported way. Eg BlockBear, Crystal, etc.

kodablah 9y ago

Which is it, the super secret consortium that won't even let you download the full list of bad sites, or Easy List/Privacy? Why don't they just use EasyList and report offenders there instead of this new consortium? The answer to that rhetorical question will let you know why I'll remain on uBO. They didn't need to build this in, but they did and gave the current ad-blocking community the finger instead of support.

d2wa 9y ago
Read the article. They do use EasyList + EasyPrivacy.
- kodablah 9y ago
  I did read the article. That's why I included it in my comment. It should be exclusive. Not using only some of that list (e.g. no cosmetic blockers) and then using some super secret list the world doesn't have access to. Shouldn't have half of one and half of the other without the possibility of fine-tuned configurability. Otherwise, you are just an opaque piece of the system that I will supplement with a more transparent version.
- bitcurious 9y ago
  They use EasyList+EasyPrivacy but only websites that they judge as having intrusive advertising. You can't manually enable adblocking on any website, nor add for example "youtube.com" to the blacklist.
mastax 9y ago
>Which is it, the super secret consortium that won't even let you download the full list of bad sites, or Easy List/Privacy? Why don't they just use EasyList and report offenders there instead of this new consortium? The lists serve different purposes. EasyList is a lit of ad-serving URLs to block. The uh, consortium list is a black/white list of which sites don't follow the standards. The standards are not about bad ads, but about sites that use ads in bad ways. The standards can't be automatically enforced since software can't reliably determine if an ad is a popunder or otherwise intrusive due to placement. Sites would quickly use CSS/JS hacks to work around the classifier.

arielm 9y ago

To have an ad network control so much of web traffic and then decide which ads to block is just absurd. If the chrome team and google’s ad teams were not controlled by the same unit that primarily makes money from ads it would have been ok, but given that they do, what incentive will they have to block their own ads and how much more powerful is it making their own network? Sadly, chrome is still the easiest browser to use, especially as a developer

Andrex 9y ago
In your opinion, would spinning off Chrome into its own company under Alphabet be a possible solution?
- hyperdimension 9y ago
  Not OP, but that seems strange to me. Chrome is a product, not really a business. I can't see any way for them to make money, besides maybe enterprise deployments.
  - wmf 9y ago
    If Firefox makes $500M per year from search referrals, Chrome could make over $1B. Chrome would be very profitable as an independent company.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  No, because Alphabet is still Google. A layer of shell companies doesn't change anything. Chrome (and Android, probably) should be forcibly split off from anything to do with Google/Alphabet, as fully independent companies. Any collusion between them and Google should be illegal. ^- This is breaking up an illegal monopoly. Shuffling around which division owned by Larry Page and Sergey Brin it is is not.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
>To have an ad network control so much of web traffic and then decide which ads to block is just absurd. Google doesn't determine what ads are blocked. That's done by the coalition that's composed of the following members and affiliate: https://www.betterads.org/members/ https://www.betterads.org/members/

known 9y ago

To sneak in Google ads?

mtgx 9y ago

Do these standards and this Chrome ad-blocker also solve the issue of advertisers putting crypto-mining scripts into their ads?

dawnerd 9y ago
Or the minute+ unskippable ads on youtube?

kyrra 9y ago

If you want to go read the source yourself, I believe this is the implementation: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/browser/api/declarative_net_request/ https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/browser/api/... And the code reviews cover the feature are tagged with DNR: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/?polygerrit=0#/q/Dnr https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/?polygerrit=0#/q/Dn... Edit: this may just be the net blocking code.

kodablah 9y ago
Looks basically like an ad block filter rule list parser (there are others in C++ including one I wrote [0] and one Brave people wrote [1]). Of course, looking at the code, I am not seeing where cosmetic filters are supported. Also, you should include the code from https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/common/api/declarative_net_request/ https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/extensions/common/api/d... in this I think. Also, there's the safe browsing code at https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsing/ https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsin... of which the author references db/util.h. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/doogie/blob/master/src/blocker_rules.cc https://github.com/cretz/doogie/blob/master/src/blocker_rule... 1 - https://github.com/brave/ad-block https://github.com/brave/ad-block
kbwt 9y ago
Now I'm half tempted to serve up ads from a path in the form '/a{n}b/\d+' with sufficiently large n to bring the O(mn) std::string::find subpattern matcher to a crawl when it encounters my harmless 'src="/a{m}"' iframes. Preferably n > 32K/2 to blow through L1 cache.
- kodablah 9y ago
  Which code are you looking at? I see it uses https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/url_pattern_index/url_pattern_index.h https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/url_pattern_.... Also, from what I gather from their docs, this is only for the ad-block-filter formatted lists. For their own super-secret-better-ads list, they use safe browsing lists which use a hash-some-then-phone-home approach IIRC [0]. I mean, even Mozilla that uses the safe browsing lists says at [1] that the internal documentation [2] is only available under NDA. 0 - https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/local-databases https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/local-databas... 1 - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Safe_Browsing 2 - https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/FIREFOX/Safe+Browsing https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/FIREFOX/Safe+Browsing

Analemma_ 9y ago

So, who wants to bet on the size of the inevitable EU fine for anticompetitive activity? Another €1.2 billion?

oldpond 9y ago

Google. Advertising company. If I ever have to watch advertising on the internet, I'm turning it off.

firebender6 9y ago

This is still not going to help with websites that force you to disable adblockers to access their content. It's especially annoying when after disabling the site looks like a cluster of ads with information hidden in between. It's an abusive relationship.

paulie_a 9y ago
That is fine... personally those sites go on my mental block list to avoid in the future.

534b44a 9y ago

I long for the day Google asks you to disable your adblocker (uBlock, ABP, etc.) to be able to search.

IncRnd 9y ago
> I long for the day Google asks you to disable your adblocker (uBlock, ABP, etc.) to be able to search. That will be the day when fewer people search using Google, and someone will come up with noadoogle.
regexnerd 9y ago
You are part of the problem. People should not have to give up their privacy and expose their devices to the evil of the advert companies just to get online. Ads are almost the number one vector for malware. Ad servers are rarely, if ever, equipped with decent security and are frequently compromised. Ads are a poor method for making money and the system is horribly gamed at every opportunity. Anything worth having is worth paying for. Google and their ilk have ruined the Internet and the general online landscape by dint of offering "free" services that are not really free; people pay for them dearly with lack of privacy and security and the return of a "free" service is not worth what is given. I have happily paid for Fastmail since 2002. They are security conscience, responsive, and give a damn about their customers. I will use no one else. They are very transparent with their issues and enjoy providing their use base with information regarding their running of the company. Good luck with Google or Microsoft giving even paying customers this level of service and transparency. Google have become too powerful. Way too powerful. They have their awful ads, beacons, and trackers on most websites and people just blissfully go along with it. I use zero Google services and block all of their tracking with a Pi-hole and other software tools. Ditto allowing no Android devices on my network. Getting into bed with Google in any way, shape, or form is literally giving away your privacy for a few trinkets that are worth nothing. If it's worth having, it's worth paying for. It's all an electronic leash...
- dang 9y ago
  > You are part of the problem On HN, please make your points without stooping to personal swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

asah 9y ago

I for one welcome this - uBlock is great but it's slow and creates bugs with many legit applications. My first tech support question these days is, "are you running an adblocker?"

aluhut 9y ago
Yeah mine too, followed by me installing one.

supertiger 9y ago

It's never good to have someone as both a player and a referee in the same game.

mabbo 9y ago

I think there's good intentions by Google here. That said, let's talk about the worst-case scenario, the thing that Google could actually do that is entirely anti-competitive. Step 1: Google finds a large number of competitors who are doing pretty well playing by their rules. Google finds some trait they all have in common. Google then modifies their own ads to not have that trait. Step 2: Google declares the given trait "not meeting the Better Ads standard", "clarifies" the standard (or their implementation of it), and blocks all their competitors ads. Their own ads of course are still meeting the new set of rules, as they knew the change was coming. If the Coalition for Better Ads disagrees or won't be bullied by the Goliath of advertising, Google will go form their own version of it claiming to be more strict, "for the sake of the users". Step 3: After a few weeks or months, the competition will modify their ads and eventually everything will be back to normal. That's when Google goes back to step 1. The final Step 4 is the opposite. Find a trait that none or few competitors have in their ads but would potentially increase click-through rates. Modify the rules to say that doing this thing is okay, and oh hey Google ads are doing that thing as of right now. Why all of this? Because Amazon is growing in the advertising business and is ruthless. "Your margin is my opportunity". So Google needs an arsenal of dirty tricks up their sleeve. Do I really believe this is the plan? No. I think Google are legit trying to meet a user need that exists. But I also know they're a publicly traded company with growing competition in a fierce industry. It's not what they plan to do that worries me, but what they can do when up against the wall.

drngdds 9y ago
I feel like there's a simpler explanation that's still not 'good intentions': 1. Lots of people are using adblockers to block all ads, including Google's, and they don't like that. 2. People mostly install adblockers to block really annoying ads.* 3. By building in an adblocker that blocks annoying ads, people will stop installing full adblockers that also block Google's ads. *There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking, but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.
- dhimes 9y ago
  This is the explanation they give in the post.

eh78ssxv2f 9y ago

I am confused. Are they doing (i) EasyList + EasyPrivacy OR (ii) List derived using better ads standard? I would imagine (i) to be much longer than (ii).

influx 9y ago

The owners of DoubleClick are going to protect you from obnoxious ads! That’s So Googly!

Splines 9y ago
"Focus on the customer and all else will follow" oops

LeoNatan25 9y ago

Will those idiots block YouTube as well for serving malware that mines on users’ machines?

poopslide 9y ago

"Welcome to notification hell."

fwdpropaganda 9y ago

Here's how my ad blocker works: - Install uMatrix (firefox/chrome add-on) - Manually whitelist javascript Get uMatrix folks.

mderazon 9y ago
Don't get how it's different from ublock or what's the benefits of umatrix
- molloy 9y ago
  It blocks all third party scripts by default, allows first party scripts by default, and offers a very intuitive and clean interface for selectively allowing frames, xhr requests, scripts, etc. It has a better UX than uBlock in my experience.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  Does ublock allow to block all javascript and cookies by default, and manually whitelist javascript or cookies domain by domain?
  - ams6110 9y ago
    In "advanced user" mode it can do this. You can even say things like "yes allow from foo.com but only when I'm visiting bar.com" I did this for a while but it all got to be too much trouble honestly. Now I just run uBlock in default configuration and also have an /etc/hosts file, and browser set to clear all history and cookies when closed.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

cornholio 9y ago

> Google’s implementation is a bit different from how most extension as blocking is enforced at an earlier stage in the rendering processes than extensions have access to. Nice to hear adblocking performance is set to have a huge boost as soon as extension authors figure out how to hijack the filter to return a BETTER_ADS violation for all sites.

gorhill 9y ago

> Google appears to be shipping the entirety of EasyList and EasyPrivacy; which includes blocking rules for Google’s own AdSense and DoubleClick advertisement platforms as well as Google Analytics, and other Google services. This is confusing. EasyList is not bound to the "Better Ads Standards", its purpose is to block all ads, regardless of their perceived intrusiveness. Also, I failed to understand why would EasyPrivacy be used: its purpose is outside that of "Better Ads Standards". The article further claims: > Google’s ad blocking capabilities will be on par with the best tools available from day one. How is this even possible if the web sites targeted are only those which are not compliant "Better Ads Standards"? The blockers making use of EasyList do not care about "Better Ads Standards", so the result can't possibly be "on par with the best tools available"[1] I would like to know how the author of the article got the information about EasyList and EasyPrivacy, I find it difficult to believe these would be used by Chrome's integrated blocker given its claimed purpose. * * * UPDATE: After looking around a bit, I understand better now how this works. As per ghacks.net[2], excerpt (my emphasis): > Google Chrome will download rules from EasyList and EasyPrivacy at regular intervals and apply them to sites that failed reviews automatically. So EasyList/EasyPrivacy are used on sites which fail to comply with "Better Ads Standards". In retrospect I suffered reading comprehension, the sentence in the article was clear enough: > These lists are used to limit what resources are loaded on websites identified by Safe Browsing as being non-compliant with the Better Ad Standards. * * * [1] Add to this that EasyList is just a complementary list on top of more advanced blocking features found on blockers such as uBlock Origin or Adguard. [2] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/02/details-about-googles-ad-blocking-integration-in-chrome/ https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/02/details-about-googles-ad-b...

notatoad 9y ago
>its purpose is to block all ads, regardless of their perceived intrusiveness. and that's what chrome's adblocker will do. The purpose of chrome's adblocker is not to block ads that don't conform to the better ad standards, it's to block ALL ads on websites that don't conform to the better ad standards. There's no way to block individual ads that don't comply, since the standards define things like the number of ads you can have visible at a time, or how close ads can be to each other. if your site is 90% ads and 10% content, which of those ads are intrusive and which ones should you allow through? So what google is doing instead is flagging the site as "has intrusive ads", and then blocking all advertising on that site. >I would like to know how the article author got the information about EasyList and EasyPrivacy the author says at the beginning of the article that this information comes from inspecting the chromium source code.

ultim8k 9y ago

Seems like they are using their dominance in browser market in order to kill the competition in ads market.

pknerd 9y ago
that seems the case.

craigmi 9y ago

youtube ads are worse than anything they're blocking

ams6110 9y ago

Slightly tangential, but: > ... Google Safe Browsing service. Chrome checks every website you visit against a list of malicious websites that it periodically downloads from Safe Browsing. So I have always disabled Safe Browsing because I assumed it was sending all my browsing activity to Google in real time to be checked. But this sounds like it's checking locally from a downloaded list. Anyone know if that's correct?

pfg 9y ago
Safe Browsing is implemented in a fairly privacy-preserving way. The block list is downloaded periodically and sites are checked against this list locally. The only time most browsers implementing Safe Browsing will share potentially privacy-sensitive data is when you download executable files and when you actually encounter a site included in the block list (in order to double-check whether the site has since been removed). Documentation for the Safe Browsing implementation in Firefox can be found here[1]. [1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-malware-protection-work https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...
kodablah 9y ago
It's half and half from what I'm reading. It checks a local list for the sha-256 hash or partial hash. Then, if found, it phones home with the partial hash it found. If you don't want to read [0], I think the Golang parser/lookup at [1] is a reasonable interpretation of what they're doing, but not sure. You can see there that the hashes generated are of different-host-combinations + different-URL-path-combinations. They do the partial hash check in a DB (local, downloaded periodically). If there's a partial hash in the DB, they phone home w/ that partial hash for the full hashes and check if it matches. So Google gets the partial hash of a URL it had told you could be bad. They return the full hashes for that partial hash. We can hope (and see) that the partial hashes do not match a broad set (and they are host possibility + URL path combo possibility). Surely Google has something that maps the hashes to actual URL patterns, but like the other commenter said, the partial hash you send is only sent when it matches a local DB already. 0 - https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsing/ https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsin... 1 - https://github.com/google/safebrowsing/ https://github.com/google/safebrowsing/

xstartup 9y ago

It seems a lot of people here work for shady ad networks whose bonus will be cut this year. It's not only "Google", it's Coalition for Better Ads. There top competitors' are all part of it. It's still a lot better for my elderly folks who can't seem to figure out how to install ublock.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Google loves to claim something is administered by a "coalition" or "alliance". But that isn't how it works internally. Remember the "Open Handset Alliance"? The industry group of companies which used Android? Well, Google threatened to remove Acer from it if Acer dared to release a phone without Google Apps on it. This was never a mutual organization, it was a Google-run organization. "Alliances" and "coalitions" are the tools which Google uses to tame the companies they've more or less taken control of.
- xstartup 9y ago
  Adtech industry can't be compared with Handset market. You can start your ad network today with minimum capital. There are lots of smaller players in this game who are setting over each other to gain some competitive advantage by pushing nastiest ad around. These smaller players can make their own coalition and go to courts if it's that bad for their business and no court will not allow you to run shady ads, so these guys will never go to court!

manigandham 9y ago

This is 100% about reinforcing Google's ad monopoly (along with the AMP initiative). Google owns DoubleClick which is the biggest adserver on the planet and the #1 source of all the bad intrusive ads in the first place. This could've been easily solved years ago.

krisives 9y ago
Essentially inventory management happening
deckard1 9y ago
Yep. And you can see this in a lot of what Google does. Most people think Google's push for HTTPS, both in Chrome and SEO rankings, is somehow related to privacy. It's not. It's about net neutrality and it's about third parties being able to switch out Google's ads for their own, on-the-fly, using a middleman. I interviewed with a stealth-level startup a few years back. They were developing a product, similar to a WiFi router, that would be installed on premise and sit there, filtering out Google/Facebook/etc. ads and replacing them with ads that the owner of the box wanted. You can imagine this box being installed in Starbucks, airports, libraries, and everywhere else. Cutting into a massive chunk of Google's ad revenue. The Time Warners, AT&Ts, and Verizons of the world would also be doing this, for HTTP traffic. We are getting the benefits of privacy. But it's not because Google has good intentions.
- pritambaral 9y ago
  > I interviewed with a stealth-level startup a few years back. They were developing a product, similar to a WiFi router, that would be installed on premise and sit there, filtering out Google/Facebook/etc. ads and replacing them with ads that the owner of the box wanted. You can imagine this box being installed in Starbucks, airports, libraries, and everywhere else. Funny, I was a similar boat once. They weren't a startup, yet. Good for them, because in both meetings I had to tell them their business idea was impossible unless they broke prime factorization. I was surprised I had to meet them the second time. Oh, and their business idea was a little more intrusive than merely replacing ads. They wanted to be able to read people's emails and Facebook data and serve targeted advertising based on that.

guhan_ganesh 9y ago

There are no annoying ads. All ads are annoying.

pascalxus 9y ago

I'm so glad Google is starting to put the customer first again. I hope the media gives credit where it's due, instead of this non-stop negative sensationalistic media we've been getting. I for one, hope there's some kind of blocking for embedded videos. I haven't had luck with the existing solutions out there.

takeda 9y ago
As someone here said, don't trust a burglar to install a security system. Google is doing this to make sure their ads will be displayed. If chrome has built in ad blocking many people won't feel the need to install ad blockers that block all ads. Another point mentioned is that this could be used in the future to hamper business of their competitors. It is very unlikely that this is why it was created, but don't forget that Google is a publicly traded company, if they will be pressed against a wall they will use anything available, and this could cause a serious damage against their competitors.

nukeop 9y ago

Google as an advertising company has been putting its pieces into place for years now. Now is the final step of their plan of total takeover of the WWW. Once you have the dominant browser and you're the largest ad provider on the internet, you can start actively destroying competition by declaring their ads "intrusive", and simply "bad", and blocking them. Since you have control over web standards and most of the browsers in the world, you hold everyone else by their balls. They either play by your rules, or they don't get to play at all. You can stifle all competition, completely, forever. Anything you do at this stage only tightens your grip on the internet.

d2wa 9y ago

Here are test pages that can be used to trigger the adblocker via Safe Browsing. http://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/s/subresource_filter_desktop.html http://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/s/subresource_filter_des... http://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/s/subresource_filter_mobile.html http://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/s/subresource_filter_mob...

krisives 9y ago

When I interviewed at Facebook almost every person I talked to said "if Google blocks ads by default Facebook will sue them" so I expect to see a lawsuit eventually

mcintyre1994 9y ago
Out of interest how long ago was this? Asking because: "Mobile advertising revenue is reported and according to Facebook, it represented approximately 88 percent of advertising revenue for Q3 2017 up from 84 percent in Q3 2016." https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/ https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/ Facebook seem to have done an incredibly good job of reducing their exposure to the browser. That comes at the cost of exposure to Android, but it feels like Google are going to find blocking Facebook ads in the Facebook app way harder than in their website. That's all a little bit irrelevant though because Facebook are members of the 'coalition for better ads' anyway.
- krisives 9y ago
  December 2017
bitmapbrother 9y ago
I would like to see that lawsuit. Imagine Facebook, a board member of the Coalition for Better Ads, suing Google for blocking Facebook ads that do not conform to the standards that Facebook, a board member, helped establish.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sleepybrett 9y ago

Why am I trusting an advertising company with an ad blocker?

YTGRK 9y ago

https://youtu.be/wxU3yWAURE8 https://youtu.be/wxU3yWAURE8

kevmo 9y ago

Just use Brave, everyone. I think everyone here knows there's no way Google's sandbox doesn't morph into quicksand. https://brave.com https://brave.com

regexnerd 9y ago
Brave is ad friendly, something that doesn't sit well with me. I want it all blocked. No ads, beacons, trackers, bad JavaScript. It's my browser, I call the shots as to what is allowed through. Ad companies have proven themselves to be evil and untrustworthy. They are now one of the main vectors of malware. I owe it to myself and my family to block everything like ads, beacons, and tracking my our network. I'm not interested in helping other people make money, generate crypto currency, whatever... My computers, my rules. Ads are a bad way to make money anyway and I've been blocking them since 1998. No way would I use Brave or any other software that actually encourages the advert companies to continue down their dark path.

mnm1 9y ago

I hope Mozilla will do the same, only with a proper ad blocker. It's the only thing that makes sense given the two organizations' goals and purposes. Either that or they're loving their sponsorship money too much and there's no difference in goal or purpose between the two organizations. Can't wait to see if they stand up for users or lie down for money.

Sylos 9y ago
If webpage owners don't make money off of a browser, they'll stop testing/building their webpage against that browser or even block access from it, leading to broken webpages in that broken, which is not at all in the interest of users.
- mnm1 9y ago
  Plenty of browsers are not supported/tested on, yet they work just fine because they implement web standards.
  - Sylos 9y ago
    Yeah, they work fine 90% of the time. But no web browser implements all webstandards and even less so implements them without bugs. Google is also adding more and more proprietary APIs to their browser, which Mozilla will not be able to implement (Chromecast, Google Earth, Hangouts) or is adding pseudo-webstandards, which have been publicly specified, but they did not push it through the standardization process to reach an agreement with other browser vendors (e.g. WebSQL, File Storage API). You're also saying "plenty of browsers". There's hardly any browsers that don't use Trident/EdgeHTML, Gecko or KHTML/WebKit/Blink. If they use one of those, then there's the major browsers IE/Edge, Firefox or Safari/Chrome that webpage owners will test/build against and as a result also cause it to work on that fork, meaning that yeah, those forks can easily implement an ad blocker without much to fear. But that's not the case, if you are such a major browser yourself. Then webpage owners will notice and will not have any reason to optimize against your browser engine anyways.

gunshot19 9y ago

Why is this in a purposefully illegible font? Am I missing something?

aplorbust 9y ago

"However, users can't add their own websites to the blocklist."

dbbk 9y ago
It doesn't prevent you from installing an Ad Blocker extension to block sites yourself, as you do today.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

budu3 9y ago

I don't think that browser should be in the business of blocking Ads. That's the job of 3rd party tools and extensions. A browsers job is to display a webpage as is not to alter it. At most it should scream if a man in the middle altered my page anything more is crossing the line.

bitmapbrother 9y ago
Should a browser also not be in the business of alerting a user that they're about to visit a site serving malware and using zero day exploits or is that also the job for 3rd party tools and extensions?
- budu3 9y ago
  Alerting is fine. Altering the page is not.
  - SquareWheel 9y ago
    Browsers alter the page when they block popups.

21 9y ago

When Microsoft enabled DoNotTrack by default in IE, there was a huge outrage along the lines "how do they dare assume by default that I don't want to be tracked on the net?" Where is the outrage now "how do they dare assume that I don't want to see annoying ads by default?"

gressquel 9y ago

Kudos to the blog for not having silly facebook sharing button. Thanks for protecting my privacy / reading log

hedora 9y ago

How easy is it to disable the whitelist and notifications in chromium? It seems like an obvious, user friendly, change.

staunch 9y ago

Big Brother Google has a new definition of "ad blocker" with the novel feature of not blocking ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

cujo 9y ago

Doesn't seem fishy at all that an ad company would develop a product that blocks ads. Nope. Couldn't possibly be used to further it's own business. No sir, no how.

imroot 9y ago

This feels like it's "DoubleClick For Publishers or Bust." Admittedly, I've only been on the DevOps side of content marketing -- and even at that, only on the cloud infrastructure side of it -- but, I think that just about everyone knew that while writing your own content and then selling your own ad inventory was ideal, if you couldn't sell your own ad inventory, DFP was the second best play for the income. To me, this screams, "Even if you have other ads, if they're not DFP-compliant, we won't show them if they are from our browser." I may be completely wrong...but, who knows.

TekMol 9y ago
if you couldn't sell your own ad inventory, DFP was the second best play for the income If you don't sell your ad inventory, then how is DFP different from Adsense?

SeriousM 9y ago

It's a nice writeup but to be honest, I'm so happy that I have my pi-hole setup so I don't care anymore :). For Android is an OSS app called dns66 (f-droid) which has the same functionality.

Zizizizz 9y ago
Couldn't you set up a VPN to that raspberry pi and use that to block ads on your phone too? I use Adaway but I don't have a pi hole

damoiser 9y ago

It sounds for me like a begin of monopoly: google ads put in silence all other ads competitors thanks a largely used in-house browser

yashksagar 9y ago

Google is not happy with third-party blockers blocking all their ads (e.g. YouTube ads), so they want their own blocker that can show more "Google-friendly" ads. It's all about the moolah...

TravelTechGuy 9y ago

Google telling us what "better ads" are is like a drug dealer lecturing you about crack quality control. They could have solved it years ago, but made tons of $ by letting the ad space become the wild west of nagware, malware, and tracking bonanza. If they were to provide a real adblocker, allowing people to opt-in to ads on sites they like, while blocking everything else, I'd have considered it, on the basis that any technology running in-browser must be more fast/efficient than an extension. But this initiative is just them trying to get people to drop their adblocker and get tracked again. All things being equal, I think I'll keep my uBlock extension - at least until Google kicks it out of their web store. I believe that would be the next logical step for them :(

jordigh 9y ago
To me, "better ads" sounds like "humane torture" or "acceptable manipulation". The principle of ads is repugnant to me. There's no way to make it better. I don't need to be psychologically manipulated to buy things I don't need. There's no way to make that manipulation ok. What Google considers acceptable, I consider subtle and even more manipulative, trying to sneak it in where most people won't object to the intrusion.
- neolefty 9y ago
  Any thoughts on how web search should be funded, in an ideal world, if ads are inherently repugnant?
  - jordigh 9y ago
    I find this a really sinister bargain too. Citizen, allow yourself to be manipulated, or capitalism will crumble. Watch this ad designed to make you buy a car, or the website gets it! There are other ways. Ask for donations, like Wikipedia (which as I understand it, is rolling in the dough). Fund it with taxes. Set up a plain ol' paywall and revitalise the slow, inefficient banking system until sending money tiny amounts of money is as easy as clicking "I agree" in an Apple EULA. If we're so strapped for cash that websites will crumble unless we all submit ourselves to the Ludovico technique, surely we have enough of an incentive to work on micropayment technology instead.

trackingpixel 9y ago

Full disclosure: I work in ad-tech. 1. Why do you guys downvote civil, informative posts that just happen to be philosophically different than yours? Seems anti-knowledge, and a net negative to HN. 2. What do you think pays for the internet? This is the first time I've ever engaged in a discussion, but I've been lurking for a year or two, and at least half of the links shared in the comments are ad-supported. Probably more. Sharing information is going to be more difficult when the money dries up and everything is behind a paywall. 3. People are annoyed that they see the same ad over and over again, but "tracking" is a cardinal sin. How is this supposed to work?

ericheymer 9y ago
The notion that advertisements pay for websites is entirely fabricated. Recent research shows massive amounts of fraud with the involvement of the ad industry which eats through the money flowing through the ecosystem. See https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/ad-industry-insiders-are-connected-to-a-fraud-scheme-that?utm_term=.cqVM0x3aYJ#.pnzYnK19rE https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/ad-industry-insiders... and https://blog.confiant.com/uncovering-2017s-largest-malvertising-operation-b84cd38d6b85 https://blog.confiant.com/uncovering-2017s-largest-malvertis....
- wweee 9y ago
  I don't see how the two links you posted supports the assertion that the "notion that advertisements pay for websites is entirely fabricated." First link is about fraud against advertisers, selling them fake ad impressions. Second link is about a sophisticated scheme to deliver malware to the end users using the ad ecosystem. How does that dispute the fact that people who have websites can profit from putting ads on them?
lucb1e 9y ago
> How is this supposed to work? By paying, not with your data but with your money. Why does Linux work if nobody pays for it? People like to work on it and it's a community project useful to everyone. Lots of site are run this way, but too many see that they could make a few pennies out of it and turn that way. Then it turns to a dependency, people start blocking ads, and oh my god the whole internet cannot be paid for, you argue. I'd much rather pay for things that are expensive (large sites like HN and Reddit, streaming licenses like Spotify, bandwidth and storage of Youtube, etc.) if then they didn't try to invade my privacy. In fact, I do pay for Reddit and Spotify. Youtube won't stop invading my privacy because they're Google's and HN does not have a donation option. I host websites myself and it costs me a little, but even HN-frontpage events are not expensive enough to warrant subjecting my visitors to modern ads (which means not only annoying ads, but sometimes malware, and always invasive tracking). > 1. Why do you guys downvote civil, informative posts that just happen to be philosophically different than yours? I suspect you can't point out which post you're talking about or you'd reveal your real account, so I don't know what you're talking about specifically. I'm going to wager it's because they think those arguments didn't further the discussion and are really just plain wrong. (That's what I think they think, not saying that I think so, because I still have no idea which post it is about.)

Markoff 9y ago

I am fine with this, at least less work for of ad blocker shame I don't use chrome

Ajedi32 9y ago

It'll be interesting to see how sites respond to this. Will they eliminate intrusive ads[1] from their sites entirely? Or start trying to force users to disable their ad blockers before using the site? I have a feeling this is going to lead to an increase in both of those behaviors. [1]: https://www.betterads.org/standards/ https://www.betterads.org/standards/

Animats 9y ago

Can you easily modify Chrome to use a more restrictive list that blocks all known ads? Is there any reason you would ever want to see anything from DoubleClick?

galori 9y ago

On mobile I’ve been using incignito mode exclusively. This prevents a lot of tracking, and bonus is it avoids many paywalls. I’m liking it so far - might try to do the same on desktop.

Corrado 9y ago

I use an Ad blocker and I kinda regret it sometimes. Most of the time the blocker keeps me from seeing annoying, repetitive ads for things I have zero interest in learning about (trucks, loans, cash back, etc.) However, I have realized that by blocking all Ads I am missing out on some cultural things, events that I want to know about. Movie information (Avengers, Hellboy, etc.) is one thing that I don't get informed of anymore. I didn't even see the latest Spiderman Homecoming movie in theaters because I had no idea it was even out until it was too late. I'm sure there are other things that I'm missing out on, but it's hard to know what you don't know. Anyway, I think Ads are not evil or bad but they do need to be targeted better. If the Ad companies can figure out how to tell me about things I care about, or will possibly care about in the near future, then I'm OK with being exposed to them. If anyone should be able to do this it would be Google (they know everything about me). So I turned of uBlock Origin and started using Chrome's built-in blocker. So far it's been terrible; I'm seeing all kinds of Ads for things I just don't care about. I think I'm going back to my blocker. :/

Feniks 9y ago
I know what you're talking about and feel the same. If you block marketing you are blocking a part of society. It reminds me of a Christian friend who never watches television.

nibnalin 9y ago

I’m all for ad-blocking and the existence of ad blockers. But I really don’t like the idea of corporations making decisions about what ads we get to see. It’s a slippery slope to go down. The existence of an entity which may even be “blamed” by content creators for taking their money(not exactly, but to some extent) for not meeting a standard they virtually have very little control over is almost un-democratic. And I won’t be surprised if there are some “oops, these guys meet all criterias but are still getting blocked” unintentionally(or even intentionally) by Google. I don’t use Chrome very often, but I’d recommend everyone to disable this feature when it ships(and use ublock/other open source blockers if one has to).