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Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream". My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and th
by mrspeaker 7y ago
Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream".
My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.
Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to "stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and "stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels inevitable!
- BiteCode_dev 7y agoYes, but doing so, they will lose the ability to be indexed, searched, archived and linked to. Like during the flash era. Which in turn will start a new trend of website that are "open". It's a cycle.
- karatestomp 7y agoPlenty of sites already give Google something different from what they show everyone else, right?
- Karunamon 7y agoI thought that was an offense that would get one either severely de-ranked or delisted from search outright?
- karatestomp 7y agoWhat do paywalled sites do, then? They don't seem to have a problem ranking just fine.
- Karunamon 7y agoThey show the abstract or the same bit of the headline and maybe a paragraph you see when hitting the page. Googlebot doesn't get the full text.
- karatestomp 7y agoI've definitely seen article text on Google that was not presented to me when I clicked the link, and not because the article was updated or something, but because I was blocked from seeing the article.
- jaywalk 7y agoNo, that's actually a great way to make Google penalize your site. It's explicitly against their Webmaster Guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355
- slig 7y agoBig properties do that and Google doesn't care.
- krisroadruck 7y agoYou sure about that? How big qualifies as big in your eyes? Medium implemented homepage cloaking in November of 2019 and within a month they lost 40% of their overall search visibility: https://www.onely.com/blog/medium-lost-half-visibility/ https://www.onely.com/blog/medium-lost-half-visibility/
- zrobotics 7y agoPinterest? Google is somehow able to crawl images on their site, but I certainly can't view these images without creating an account and logging in. Their site ranks highly enough that I gave up on google image search last year. Additionally, off the top of my head Bloomberg and NYT both won't allow me to view more than a few articles but let the Google crawler index their articles.
- jessaustin 7y agoYes Pinterest is awful. Certain categories of images are totally borked on Google and other search engines because of them.
- postalrat 7y agoTell that to linkedin, pinterest, and dozens of news sites.
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- Supermancho 7y ago> they will lose the ability to be indexed, searched, archived and linked to Sounds like an API that will be implemented.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- BiteCode_dev 7y agoIf it's not standard, it will be useless. If it is, the browser will eventually put it in the users hand.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- three_seagrass 7y agoCrawler bots are already doing site rendering and OCR. This isn't that big of a step for them.
- brnt 7y agoTIL. Wow. I guess I missed the web is not HTML anymore.
- karatestomp 7y agoI think ads will be the reason Web Assembly takes off in a massive way, actually. Much harder to block ads if the site ships its own renderer and manages to hide or obscure its traffic. Then you're in to serious application-cracking territory if you want to block ads & tracking.
- imhoguy 7y agoWeb Assembly is just a runtime, like obfuscated JS it is sandboxed and still needs to access some standard APIs to at least conform to CORS. I don't see a problem to let plugins/browsers control `window.fetch` or whatever connection method the WASM code is going to use.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoNot going to work against a CDN delivering all content through a websocket.
- karatestomp 7y agoIMO Cloudflare's a huge threat to Google for exactly this reason.
- ameshkov 7y agoActually, Web Components and Shadow DOM bother me more than Web Assembly. You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside and this creates an impenetrable barrier for content blockers. We've already seen examples of whole web pages transformed into a shadow-dom web component.
- imhoguy 7y agoThe more of pages introducing the solution you describe the more chance ad blockers / browsers will pick up the new challenge ;)
- zzzcpan 7y ago> You cannot "pierce" into a shadow DOM from the outside Why not? You can inject any script into a meta header on document start from an extension or do the same in an intercepting proxy.
- ameshkov 7y agoShadow DOM is created dynamically using "attachShadow". You can try overriding Element.prototype.attachShadow, but this is easy to detect.
- zzzcpan 7y agoWell, currently adblocking is already full of such easy to detect overrides, and extension APIs already have plenty of limitations on what they can touch and replace allowing websites to easily bypass most of the overrides, but they do work at the moment and websites don't bother.
- the8472 7y agoFirefox has openOrClosedShadowRoot available to extensions that allows them to bypass closed shadow dom.
- heartbeats 7y ago> Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things. That doesn't seem too hard to pull off. You're not trying to find objects in an image, you're trying to find near-exact matches in a digitally rendered page.
- flohofwoe 7y agoPeople will just stop visiting such webpages where it's impossible to separate the chaff from the wheat, simple as that.
- chipperyman573 7y agopeople already don't do this for example: people who don't have adblockers (like everyone in my family except me)
- flohofwoe 7y agoOf course, but if they are not bothered by those ads that's fine too IMHO. And if the majority is fine with this (which I doubt, otherwise ad-blockers wouldn't be so massively successful), than I have to accept that too and go somewhere else.
- Fnoord 7y ago1 out of 3 WWW users has an adblocker. I won't visit websites with [a lot of] ads if my adblocker stops working. I'll simply stop using these websites. Just like before Netflix, I quit watching cable TV. Thinking about it, I might as well go to Tor. Surely someone will copy/paste the plaintext content to some hidden service over there, just so the rest of us don't have to bother with ads. I might even be one of the contributors. If there is demand, there will be supply. And nobody is going to bother to "catch these copyright infringers" because nobody gets hurt, in contrast to someone selling illegal firearms or dangerous drugs.
- JohnFen 7y ago> people already don't do this Maybe not most, for now. But there certainly exist people who do this. I do, for one.
- neltnerb 7y agoI think I can only half-agree. People who don't have adblockers are willing to put up with a heck of a lot. Agreed. But if someone is not technically sophisticated enough to use an adblocker, they're also probably not technically sophisticated enough to find the actual content on a page and just give up. I see this fairly frequently; someone with limited computer literacy goes to a website from Google, doesn't see anything relevant immediately (because of bad UI or really bad ads), and goes back to Google. Often the site even had relevant content when I look later, they just couldn't see it because they aren't as good at parsing website content. There are so many websites with equivalent information, if you click on one and it's just garbage at first glance I think hitting "back" is more likely than "read and click on every ad and give them your SSN before downloading their virus scanning software".
- II2II 7y agoA lot of the future of ad blocking will depend upon why people are blocking ads. Some of us have nothing againsts ads in principle, but do not like the practices of the advertising industry. This includes things like tracking people across websites, intrusive advertising, excessive bandwidth usage, deceptive advertising, and so on. Blocking the "analog hole" would be irrelevant in most of those cases.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- scarface74 7y agoMy problem with ads on mobile are that they are very obtrusive.
- tartoran 7y agoIf ads were expensive to buy we'd see a lot fewer of them and would not need to be intrusive, they'd be be just as useful as intended, to inform people. The problem with the modern economy is that everything that works is eventually pushed over the fence and it stops working. The boom busting cycle keeps on repeating
- JohnFen 7y agoThey'd probably still engage in spying, though, which is 95% of what makes ads objectionable to me.
- pmlnr 7y agoWeb Assembly will be the end of the HTML/HTTP based web: QUIC, direct JS based render in browser, no more view source. HTTP/HTML will become the next gopher, and this makes me incredibly sad
- EvanAnderson 7y agoDon't forget DNS-over-HTTPS w/ certificate pinning to prevent DNS-based request filtering, too.
- ripdog 7y agoThis is why we cannot allow Chrome to gain dominance over the web. We all know Google would love to do this.
- birdyrooster 7y agoThose Web Assembly sites will still have memory accessible by the end user, ads will still be blocked. They would need to server side render pages like a streaming game client would.
- three_seagrass 7y agoHow would the blocker know which parts of the memory to block?
- birdyrooster 7y agoThe same way trainers, aimbots, and other hacks know which addresses are critical for exploiting game mechanics, by doing analysis of decompiled code and also searching running memory for known patterns and then patching them hot.
- three_seagrass 7y agoDon't websites compile on every page load, giving them the opportunity to obfuscate? That's a bit different than a video game that was compiled only once.
- cwzwarich 7y agoWhat about a dystopian future where sites only work via SGX-like secure compute environments that remotely attest the execution environment to the server?
- JohnFen 7y agoThat's effectively a future without the web at all.
- ukoki 7y ago> Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. This has already happened: Just look at how many websites pester you to download their mobile app or even block content unless you access from the app. From a user functionality perspective the vast majority of apps do nothing a browser can't do. But the killer feature for apps is how much easier it is for the developer to get your location data, contact list, and importantly show you unskippable, auto-playing, 90s-era-popup-level-annoying ads
- bambax 7y agoMany websites indeed pester us to download their mobile app but I have yet to find one that forces me to? Do they actually exist?
- ayushgp 7y agoReddit forces you to download the app now. You can scroll like 2-4 pages worth of content and then it'll pop up asking you to open in app. On every page you navigate to from within the website you'll first get a pop up asking to choose between browser and reddit app.
- alex_free 7y agoIf I’m ever on YouTube or Reddit I always set request desktop site to always in Safari on iOS.
- e2le 7y agoI'm using old.reddit.com and wasn't aware they started doing this. Reddit is turning into a dumpster fire, it's bad enough I have to use the old UI so that it doesn't burn a hole in the cpu.
- virgilp 7y agoForget the CPU usage, I only use the old UI because it's better/ I find it more usable. Or maybe I'm just getting old :D
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoIt's always a game of cat-and-mouse. No new technology will enable displaying ads that the ad-blocking crowd can't get ahold of eventually.
- vbezhenar 7y agoDon't paint webassembly as something terrible. Webassembly does not add anything substantial to what's already in web. You could compile C code to JavaScript before. Webassembly does not provide new API unavailable from JavaScript. Webassembly is just an optimization. Some code will work faster and consume less memory, that's all. You could write website which paints itself on canvas with JavaScript years ago. The fact that nobody goes this route means that there are inherent problems with this approach. For example that website will be completely inaccessible for Google.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JohnFen 7y agoThe threat of WebAssembly is that it may encourage more sites to require users to allow client-side code execution to work. For those of us who aren't trusting enough to allow this, it means that the web gets smaller even faster than it already is.
- thekyle 7y agoIt seems like if you replace WebAssembly with JavaScript in this comment it makes just as much sense. What is different about WebAssembly?
- JohnFen 7y agoWebAssembly expands on the ability to do client-side stuff and makes it more accessible, so my fear is that it will make it more common. That's pretty much the entire difference. It's a difference of degree more than of kind. As I said, Javascript is making much of the web inaccessible to me, and WebAssembly, if it becomes popular, will only accelerate this loss.
- ficklepickle 7y agoI wonder how feasible a rendering proxy would be. It would run the JS in a simulated browser environment and return the HTML. Interactivity would be tricky, but static HTML is better than a blank page. Edit: Found something very similar, but it targets legacy browsers using clickable image maps rather than privacy/security. https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp
- bobajeff 7y agoIt doesn't bother me if ad-blocking moves towards OCR and computer vision. These things need to be created anyways because as blockers don't always filter everything I want anyways. Personally, I would prefer to browse the web in reader mode. While we're at it we could do the have the same for PDFs.
- fuzzy2 7y agoWhy WebAssembly? Just bake ad code into a SPA and that's it. Random elements with random names at random positions in the DOM, positioned using styles. Quite low-tech. If implemented properly, it cannot be blocked. At all. Except blocking all scripts of course, which means the SPA will stop working. And then I'll just stop visiting. (:
- strbean 7y agoNobody wants to host ad content / pay for the bandwidth themselves though. I think URL blacklisting will continue to work.
- Reelin 7y ago> Nobody wants to host ad content / pay for the bandwidth themselves though. Actually the issue is that the companies paying you to run the ads don't want you to host it yourself. * They're paying for impressions, and they don't trust you to report those honestly. * Real time bidding means the ad to be displayed often hasn't been determined until a few milliseconds before the page loads in your browser. * They can't (as easily and reliably) collect demographic and behavioral data (ie spy on you) if you don't contact their servers directly.
- strbean 7y agoTrue! More (and more important) reasons why URL blacklisting will continue to work in the WASMy browser-in-browser age.
- Blackthorn 7y agoNo, they just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. Personal experience time! I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice. I paid $10/mo or $10/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again. If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see.
- vkou 7y agoThe problem with this sort of browser-within-a-browser black-hole, is that it will break screen readers and accessibility. The way to fight this is to work together with accessibility advocacy agencies, like the ADA.
- EvanAnderson 7y agoIt's absolutely going to happen. WASM isn't required for this future-- it just helps optimize it. There is a ton of money out there for the company who makes a performant and compatible browser-in-a-browser w/ proper accessibility. Somebody will eventually take the "deal with the devil" to develop it. An obligatory link to an important talk: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- jameslk 7y ago> Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed. For the time being, you can thank the threat of an accessibility lawsuit for slowing this future down. Building a custom renderer might not be as challenging as supporting the myriad accessibility needs of disable users.
- tartoran 7y agoI second this. I also hate how links behave nowadays. I used to right click and open in a new tab or save the link but in many cases it no longer works and is quite annoying. If ads were more expensive to purchase we'd see a lot fewer of them and they would not be as intrusive. But this ain't so and we need adblockers. They (the advertising industry) come back with a stronger system that is harder to ad block and we retaliate with something else. What baffles me is that they don't see that we are resisting, they produce something that nobody really wants. The whole advertising industry is something questionable.
- pixl97 7y agoIt's probably a prisoners dilemma for those in the industry as an individual. Because everything operates on the short term, there is no moderator of long term goals. If something gives you 5% better hits today, you have to do it, no matter if it's going to kill you two weeks from now. Or your competitors will and you'll see a drop in sales.
- adrr 7y agoSite needs to be compatible with screen readers otherwise you risk a lawsuit over ADA.
- tyfon 7y agoI have disabled wasm in firefox and I don't intend to enable it ever. If someone wants to force "activex" on me again to use a site I won't use the site :)
- downerending 7y agoI'd like to see (and might even work on), and overlay filter to plug that analog hole. This would probably be entirely outside of the web browser (perhaps as a custom VNC client) and would simply grey out ads and other obnoxious content. It wouldn't stop any downloading, but it might be smart enough to X out of those stupid pop-up ads automatically. Easier said than done, of course. For the record, I've no problem with "fair" advertising, the kind that used to appear in newspapers and magazines in the 1970s, for example. (Well, aside from its use as a virus vector.) But modern day web ads are simply abusive in too many cases.
- phkahler 7y ago>> My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking The answer to that is to disable Web Assembly, much like a lot of people disable JS. The whole idea of running other peoples code on your machine is the problem, and it baffles me that browser companies are still trying to enable more and more of this. I don't want your code running on my computer.
- JeremyNT 7y agoThat's great, until all the major corporate sites you actually use stop serving any content in HTML. This future seems inevitable. The only sites you'll be able to actually use without some custom web assembly renderer will be those which don't serve ads at all now - wikis, open source projects, non profits, corporate web sites, etc. Any site funded by ad revenue will effectively remove itself from the web and into its own web assembly app instead. We might even see the rebirth of something like AOL, a meta app that will be a portal to render content for others who want to use the platform. It might even just be an upcoming version of amp, or a new feature offered by Facebook or cloudflare...
- krapp 7y agoIt's funny because all the major corporate sites could already have stopped serving HTML and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java, and yet the doomsday scenario never happened. Hell, Android apps are basically the closed "meta apps" you're talking about, and have been around for years, and yet corporate, ad-driven sites still use HTML. I don't see why Webassembly should the inevitable slippery slope to the entire web becoming some kind of closed source binary-only dystopia, other than it being loosely associated with Javascript, which half of HN hates and fears to a degree bordering on mania. The FUD really needs to end already.
- pixl97 7y ago>and just gone completely with Flash, Silverlight or Java Not sure what you mean by that. There were plenty of sites not usable at times because of their use of java or flash.
- propogandist 7y ago> Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed Google's AMP technology aims to do this, although they will claim to have more altruistic motivations
- the8472 7y agoPerhaps some more web features should become opt-in via nagbars (e.g. canvas and wasm)
- tomjen3 7y agoThat seems far more likely to me than I would like to admit. I can even see a rational that doesn't start that way, but with a homegrown solution in Webassembly it would be fast enough that you could write your own font and text layout algorithms that are better than what the browser does -- so your newspaper could do a proper justified text with great kerned headlines that would also look the same way in all browsers. Then, naturally, there is no dev time set aside for copy and paste, because there is no business justification.
- UnFleshedOne 7y agoThe good outcome would be that after analog hole is plugged on the web, we can start plugging it IRL (if AR gear and/or spray paint drones mature by the time). Imagine physical space with no ads! So, bring it on?