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Many of these complaints seem... odd. The primary complaint with Web Bundles is "they make the web like SWFs" - last I remember, people LIKED the fact that Flas
by kmeisthax 6y ago
Many of these complaints seem... odd. The primary complaint with Web Bundles is "they make the web like SWFs" - last I remember, people LIKED the fact that Flash content could be bundled that way. You actually were able to distribute Flash content like a normal web application, broken up into multiple SWFs, images, and so on. The vast majority of Flash content was a single file, because it's easier to distribute that way.
With WebBundles, if you want to deny specific subresources, you can still have the browser block them by identifier or hash, which is the same as you can do with a regular web request. The reason why there are no content blocking tools for PDFs is because nobody's bothered to write a PDF reader with that capability. Furthermore, I don't see how putting the resource identifier in the content of a bundle makes it easier than changing the URL. Both of those will either defeat or be defeated by caching.
If you have a CDN that generates random URLs for a single cached resource and serves them on the same domain as user websites, then identifier-based blocking won't work with or without WebBundles. You can do this today with Apache rewrite rules and PHP, which are about as economical as you can get. If your threat model is "people who just know how to SFTP a handful of JavaScript files" then yes, WebBundles makes things "easier". But I'd argue your threat model is laughably unworkable if that's the case. The state-of-the-art in adtech is to smuggle your fingerprinting platform as a randomized subdomain of the client site - how do you even begin to block that with identifiers alone?
- jiggawatts 6y ago> The reason why there are no content blocking tools for PDFs is because nobody's bothered to write a PDF reader with that capability. The reason why nobody has bothered is because PDFs contain the desired content only. Generally, when viewing a PDF, you're not bombarded by five concurrent video ads competing with the text for your attention. There's no clickjacking, or overriding of scrolling behaviour to force a full-page popup down your throat the instant you scroll up, scroll down, or interact with the page in any way. The latest insanity that has suddenly become popular in the HTML world is the ad-forward page. When you first visit a site, it forwards you to the content page, but if you try to click "back", you end up going to a full-page advertisement instead of the referrer page. I'm sure someone thought this up to defeat ad-blockers: You can't get to the content without being forwarded through the ad page, and then the browser history is polluted, so it's too late to simply block content. Pretty soon, uBlock will have to rewrite the browser history to stop ads. This is bordering on insanity. It's the same behaviour as when I walk into a whitegoods shop and a pushy sales guy steps into my way and demands to "help" me. Or when on holidays in a third world country, where being white means being endlessly harassed by hawkers. Doesn't it make you people feel dirty to have to write the code to do these things? Why, for the love of God, can't we have some sort of model where browsers pay for content with microtransactions? I know it has been talked about a lot in the past, and rejected for various reasons, but seriously: It has to be better than this. Mark my words: The inevitable outcome of funding content only with ads will be all such pages eventually evolving into DRM-protected video with the ads overlaying the text. It's just a matter of time.
- reaperducer 6y agopeople LIKED the fact that Flash content could be bundled that way Developers did. People didn't. People hated Flash because it was bloated, downloaded slowly, and killed anything with a battery. All this pining for Flash is just revisionist history inside the HN bubble from people who have forgotten how much Flash was hated by the general public.
- jimktrains2 6y agoNone of that has anything to do with how it was bundled.
- SahAssar 6y agoThey are not talking about flash in general, just the feature that you could bundle up all assets within a single file.
- untog 6y ago> All this pining for Flash is just revisionist history inside the HN bubble from people who have forgotten how much Flash was hated by the general public. At least in my social circle that's incredibly far from the truth. My friends and I loved Flash videos and games. Downloading the Flash runtime was a very small price to pay for the functionality it unlocked. And these people are definitely not HN users.
- rrobukef 6y agoWasn't the majority of Flash content made before the rise of JIT-compliation and the use of mobile devices everywhere? For me, the downfall of Flash were security issues and its similarity to Java plugins. Additionally, Adobe never invested all that much in Flash, Macromedia is still more associated with the name.
- kmeisthax 6y agoYes and no. Strictly speaking, there is nothing particular to Flash that precludes JIT compilation. In fact, AS3 code runs on a VM specifically built with JIT in mind. AS1/2 code does not, but that could be remedied with shittons of guard statements like modern JavaScript VMs have.