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From the author of uBlock on this: What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public.

From the author of uBlock on this: What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do. This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3: In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business. The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business. The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-496009417 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...

user17843 7y ago
Indeed, almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. The fact that Eyeo has >150 employees tells us something about the amount of money to be made from ad blocking. Although they have only published the numbers from 2016, it seems they are quickly approaching around €50 million yearly revenue, with almost 50% of pure profit. For Google this Acceptable Ads Program may be more than a 100 million dollar business. The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google's own software to eliminate their core business model. Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved. Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously. Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users. In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads. ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users. Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don't see the stuff they recommend to you. The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user. ABP/Eyeo is a wolf in sheep's clothing. uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.
- jwr 7y ago
  > uBlock (not confused with uBO) This naming is a catastrophe. I just tried to find out which is which and it isn't easy, even if you know what you're looking for. I'd think that uBlock Origin should consider changing the name. Yes, "it means giving up", but it's a battle they can't win anyway, and at least users will be able to tell which one is owned by eyeo. EDIT: AdBlock and AdBlock Plus are similarly confusing.
  - Quiark 7y ago
    If uBO changes name to for example "Ant Block", somebody will come and create "Ant Block Plus"
    - brlewis 7y ago
      Change it to "Ant Block", offer a paid "Ant Block Pro" so that the name is used in commerce, and register a trademark.
      - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
        And Plus, and Ultimate, and Super, and so on...
- ljm 7y ago
  This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the embedded framework... We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7/8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome. The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in the browser space, not helped by the underlying HTML/JS spec becoming exponentially more convoluted to the point where building your own renderer is nigh impossible. And since everyone is standardising on a Google, their decisions on ad blocking and supporting APIs are automatically going to flow down into every dependent product. It’s frustrating that MS copped out and went Chromium. Like we never learned this lesson the first time. We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least. These need to be protected if we don’t want Google and the ad network to totally control the browsing experience. Although, controversially, we as a web dev collective have learned nothing if we continue to only develop for a single browser. Not for the web itself, but for one particular rendering engine. “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept.
jasonhansel 7y ago
uBlock should really just instruct users to "switch to firefox for a fast, up-to-date ad-blocking experience"
- rohan1024 7y ago
  Yes we can ditch chrome. But what about general population? Now that websites may choose to give incompatiblity prompts to Firefox since it impacts there revenue through ads. They will ask users to switch to chrome. This might affect Firefox in long run. It's market share might drop.
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    See Firefox vs IE6. It's the same story all over again.
  - dotancohen 7y ago
    Google already blocks some of its features from working in Firefox. We discussed this in April: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - rando444 7y ago
    General population will follow the tech crowd. The main reason Chrome is so popular is because tech people have been saying "just use chrome" for forever. Firefox is taking back that role. It'll take time, but with google becoming such a PII hoarder, it's a change that will likely continue.
    - otabdeveloper1 7y ago
      > The main reason Chrome is so popular is because tech people have been saying "just use chrome" for forever. Utter bullshit. Chrome is dominant due to two factors: a) Distribution deals by Google to bundle Chrome everywhere they can. (Including shady crap like 'warez' sites, illegal music, OEMs, etc.) b) Google aggressively peddling Chrome on their properties and making them deliberately slow and buggy with other browsers. It's not a coincidence that Gmail suddenly became slow and buggy under Firefox with their latest redesign.
3xblah 7y ago
"The deprecation of the blocking ability of the WebRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome." In the same way a company trying to determine what a user looks at on their computer screen is a privacy issue, this is too. Those filters should be private.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  The filters 99.9% of people use are completely public. Otherwise how would you use them?
  - 3xblah 7y ago
    The filters that get applied are private.
dmix 7y ago
Welcome to the point when even free market people will no longer defend your monopoly, Google. The number of egregious examples of their centralization backfiring against the freedoms within the day-to-day life of internet users keeps growing bigger at a seemingly exponential rate. The barrier for competition may be high but history is littered with examples of giants withering under their own decision making. Nor will they forever be immune from antitrust laws.
- bhauer 7y ago
  I am as free market as they come. I don't consider Google a monopoly. I figure many "free market people" define a monopoly pretty strictly. They're not forcing me to use their browser, search engine, maps, email, or many other services. However, they do have a disturbingly high level of market dominance. So seeing as I am a part of the free market (after all, the "economy is us"), I have opted to minimize my use of Google products and services and encourage others to do the same. This wasn't the tipping point for me; I've been advocating alternatives for quite some time. I don't want Google punished with anti-trust laws if that can be avoided. I'd much rather see users apply corrective pressure. Of course, that assumes users appreciate the importance of their privacy, which makes this a lengthy game of messaging and persuasion.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    What we call "monopoly", is "being big enough to put a thumb on market scales" in legal theory these days (note that this doesn't even require a company to have even 50% of market share...)
simias 7y ago
Even if you decide to believe that Google is doing this for the "right reasons" (improving performance for instance) it should still be a huge red flag. Due their conflicting business model they have no incentive to improve the adblocking interface later on. You can therefore expect the adblocking capabilities to degrade every time they can come up with a reasonable reason to do so while they'll never take the time to actually come up with a better solution. Switch to Firefox people, it's not perfect but at least it's not Chrome.
nullandvoid 7y ago
AKA the old bait and switch! Well I've been needing a reason to finally make the full switch to firefox ( the containers were already compelling )

user17843 7y ago

Indeed, almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. The fact that Eyeo has >150 employees tells us something about the amount of money to be made from ad blocking. Although they have only published the numbers from 2016, it seems they are quickly approaching around €50 million yearly revenue, with almost 50% of pure profit. For Google this Acceptable Ads Program may be more than a 100 million dollar business. The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google's own software to eliminate their core business model. Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved. Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously. Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users. In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads. ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users. Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don't see the stuff they recommend to you. The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user. ABP/Eyeo is a wolf in sheep's clothing. uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.

jwr 7y ago
> uBlock (not confused with uBO) This naming is a catastrophe. I just tried to find out which is which and it isn't easy, even if you know what you're looking for. I'd think that uBlock Origin should consider changing the name. Yes, "it means giving up", but it's a battle they can't win anyway, and at least users will be able to tell which one is owned by eyeo. EDIT: AdBlock and AdBlock Plus are similarly confusing.
- Quiark 7y ago
  If uBO changes name to for example "Ant Block", somebody will come and create "Ant Block Plus"
  - brlewis 7y ago
    Change it to "Ant Block", offer a paid "Ant Block Pro" so that the name is used in commerce, and register a trademark.
    - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
      And Plus, and Ultimate, and Super, and so on...
ljm 7y ago
This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the embedded framework... We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7/8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome. The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in the browser space, not helped by the underlying HTML/JS spec becoming exponentially more convoluted to the point where building your own renderer is nigh impossible. And since everyone is standardising on a Google, their decisions on ad blocking and supporting APIs are automatically going to flow down into every dependent product. It’s frustrating that MS copped out and went Chromium. Like we never learned this lesson the first time. We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least. These need to be protected if we don’t want Google and the ad network to totally control the browsing experience. Although, controversially, we as a web dev collective have learned nothing if we continue to only develop for a single browser. Not for the web itself, but for one particular rendering engine. “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept.

jasonhansel 7y ago

uBlock should really just instruct users to "switch to firefox for a fast, up-to-date ad-blocking experience"

rohan1024 7y ago
Yes we can ditch chrome. But what about general population? Now that websites may choose to give incompatiblity prompts to Firefox since it impacts there revenue through ads. They will ask users to switch to chrome. This might affect Firefox in long run. It's market share might drop.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  See Firefox vs IE6. It's the same story all over again.
- dotancohen 7y ago
  Google already blocks some of its features from working in Firefox. We discussed this in April: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- rando444 7y ago
  General population will follow the tech crowd. The main reason Chrome is so popular is because tech people have been saying "just use chrome" for forever. Firefox is taking back that role. It'll take time, but with google becoming such a PII hoarder, it's a change that will likely continue.
  - otabdeveloper1 7y ago
    > The main reason Chrome is so popular is because tech people have been saying "just use chrome" for forever. Utter bullshit. Chrome is dominant due to two factors: a) Distribution deals by Google to bundle Chrome everywhere they can. (Including shady crap like 'warez' sites, illegal music, OEMs, etc.) b) Google aggressively peddling Chrome on their properties and making them deliberately slow and buggy with other browsers. It's not a coincidence that Gmail suddenly became slow and buggy under Firefox with their latest redesign.

3xblah 7y ago

"The deprecation of the blocking ability of the WebRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome." In the same way a company trying to determine what a user looks at on their computer screen is a privacy issue, this is too. Those filters should be private.

IshKebab 7y ago
The filters 99.9% of people use are completely public. Otherwise how would you use them?
- 3xblah 7y ago
  The filters that get applied are private.

dmix 7y ago

Welcome to the point when even free market people will no longer defend your monopoly, Google. The number of egregious examples of their centralization backfiring against the freedoms within the day-to-day life of internet users keeps growing bigger at a seemingly exponential rate. The barrier for competition may be high but history is littered with examples of giants withering under their own decision making. Nor will they forever be immune from antitrust laws.

bhauer 7y ago
I am as free market as they come. I don't consider Google a monopoly. I figure many "free market people" define a monopoly pretty strictly. They're not forcing me to use their browser, search engine, maps, email, or many other services. However, they do have a disturbingly high level of market dominance. So seeing as I am a part of the free market (after all, the "economy is us"), I have opted to minimize my use of Google products and services and encourage others to do the same. This wasn't the tipping point for me; I've been advocating alternatives for quite some time. I don't want Google punished with anti-trust laws if that can be avoided. I'd much rather see users apply corrective pressure. Of course, that assumes users appreciate the importance of their privacy, which makes this a lengthy game of messaging and persuasion.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  What we call "monopoly", is "being big enough to put a thumb on market scales" in legal theory these days (note that this doesn't even require a company to have even 50% of market share...)

simias 7y ago

Even if you decide to believe that Google is doing this for the "right reasons" (improving performance for instance) it should still be a huge red flag. Due their conflicting business model they have no incentive to improve the adblocking interface later on. You can therefore expect the adblocking capabilities to degrade every time they can come up with a reasonable reason to do so while they'll never take the time to actually come up with a better solution. Switch to Firefox people, it's not perfect but at least it's not Chrome.

nullandvoid 7y ago

AKA the old bait and switch! Well I've been needing a reason to finally make the full switch to firefox ( the containers were already compelling )