4 ms·

Worried? Are you kidding? I would love to compete against Google. I would pretty much beg for the opportunity to do it. Other companies are too reactive; you d

Worried? Are you kidding? I would love to compete against Google. I would pretty much beg for the opportunity to do it. Other companies are too reactive; you do something, they do something, the entire competition is just a boring back-and-forth game of mostly minor incremental improvements of dubious benefit to the end users. But Google? Now that would be fun. A lot of fun. If you let them get ahead of you even once, you've just dramatically decreased your odds of winning, and they have an awful lot of smart people working for them. You'd have to be more nimble, and you'd have to be able to guess at what they were going to do before they did it ... and then you'd have to do it better, and do it before they do. Beating Microsoft is like playing chess in the park. Beating Google ... that's like playing speed chess with Big Blue. It would be a blast.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
icefox 17y ago
I hack on Arora a cross platform WebKit based web browser. And your right, I am having a blast. I have even contributed to Chromium so I know what I am up against :) Knowing that they have a team of really smart people working full time and Arora is a few devs in their free time really does make me think about what is important. I did realize one thing though. While Chrome can never ship with adblock, Arora can, and 0.10.0 out next week will ship with it. :D
- natrius 17y ago
  Have you considered how blocking ads is bad for the way online services are currently monetized? I'd rather have advertisers pay for my services than have to pay for it directly. If you don't like that trade-off, why not ask sites you use to offer an ad-free paid version? It sounds like you're trying to get the best of both worlds, and it isn't sustainable.
  - icefox 17y ago
    It isn't enabled by default so users still have to turn it on at this point. AdBlock was the highest voted feature that users wanted and was the biggest feature I could include that Chrome could not. From a bang for my time/effort AdBlock was a winner.
    - thaumaturgy 17y ago
      Hallelujah! Thank you for making that leap. I'm no longer as fond of Firefox as I once was. It has persistent memory issues, and is getting more and more bloaty. But, it's also got AB+, and that for a lot of people is a killer feature. I think there are a bunch of sound counter-arguments to the people saying that AB+ will kill their websites: one, users are sick of websites with more advertising-related content than actual content; two, fake virus alerts and other related ads are now one of the most common vectors for new spyware and malware; three, the ad revenue model is already starting to fall over due to over saturation, and maybe it's time that website owners start looking for a better way to do it. So, thank you. I'll be trying out the next release of Arora.
      - natrius 17y ago
        Passive AdBlock use is a very implicit, inconsiderate way of telling people to get a new business model. How about, "Hey, the ads on your site are annoying, and I think I almost got a virus from one. I suggest you fix it. In the meantime, I'm using AdBlock on your site." There are perfectly good reasons to block ads, but far too many people take a brute force approach to it that will result in good sites going away, or charging users instead of advertisers. I think both of those outcomes suck. If you want to block ads, I'm sure you can spare 30 seconds to let people know why and how to get you to stop.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

icefox 17y ago

I hack on Arora a cross platform WebKit based web browser. And your right, I am having a blast. I have even contributed to Chromium so I know what I am up against :) Knowing that they have a team of really smart people working full time and Arora is a few devs in their free time really does make me think about what is important. I did realize one thing though. While Chrome can never ship with adblock, Arora can, and 0.10.0 out next week will ship with it. :D

natrius 17y ago
Have you considered how blocking ads is bad for the way online services are currently monetized? I'd rather have advertisers pay for my services than have to pay for it directly. If you don't like that trade-off, why not ask sites you use to offer an ad-free paid version? It sounds like you're trying to get the best of both worlds, and it isn't sustainable.
- icefox 17y ago
  It isn't enabled by default so users still have to turn it on at this point. AdBlock was the highest voted feature that users wanted and was the biggest feature I could include that Chrome could not. From a bang for my time/effort AdBlock was a winner.
  - thaumaturgy 17y ago
    Hallelujah! Thank you for making that leap. I'm no longer as fond of Firefox as I once was. It has persistent memory issues, and is getting more and more bloaty. But, it's also got AB+, and that for a lot of people is a killer feature. I think there are a bunch of sound counter-arguments to the people saying that AB+ will kill their websites: one, users are sick of websites with more advertising-related content than actual content; two, fake virus alerts and other related ads are now one of the most common vectors for new spyware and malware; three, the ad revenue model is already starting to fall over due to over saturation, and maybe it's time that website owners start looking for a better way to do it. So, thank you. I'll be trying out the next release of Arora.
    - natrius 17y ago
      Passive AdBlock use is a very implicit, inconsiderate way of telling people to get a new business model. How about, "Hey, the ads on your site are annoying, and I think I almost got a virus from one. I suggest you fix it. In the meantime, I'm using AdBlock on your site." There are perfectly good reasons to block ads, but far too many people take a brute force approach to it that will result in good sites going away, or charging users instead of advertisers. I think both of those outcomes suck. If you want to block ads, I'm sure you can spare 30 seconds to let people know why and how to get you to stop.