NeXT
Veteran Member
So as we all started hearing over the last few months, Google was getting annoyed that ad blockers on Youtube were restricting their ad revenue and (possibly?) user tracking telemetry, so in September or so they started going down on people using ad blockers because as any of us who have logged in over the last 20 years know, the cheesy "taze the monkey and win a free ipod" and "this tiny camera can go ANYWHERE" x10 banner ads were one thing, but modern ads are awful and wander the line of creepy as they stalk your browsing history. Back then you'd be paid static amounts for marketing to put ads on your site. Now they want feedback on how well the ads are performing (or if they are just being blocked, which means they'll pay you less....or to reuse that data for additional data mining revenue)
uBlock has been the go-to for most folks ever since AdBlock Plus started whitelisting ads a number of years ago and it partially runs on how the Chrome's extension API works on most (I'll explain) browsers. Well, Google figured out how to fix that.
Yes I'm aware there's alternatives. There always are. You can't go far into any tech thread these days without someone plugging some alternate program or service which sure, it's a dubious clone of whatever you are trying NOT to use (I'll use Twitter as an example because when the buyout happened everyone just dicked off to "totally-not-twitter" clones which sure made it fun to follow people on a half dozen sites, rather than one)....but you'll still end up using Google's services every once and a while when your day isn't perfectly laid out for you. (or in the example, you rattle off on how someone is terrible, but you never actually deleted your account. ;^) )
To me this feels weird. So if you are old enough you remember the big anti-monopoly case put against Microsoft when they were bundling Internet Explorer with every version of Windows (and integrating the Internet Explorer engine into the OS itself, which in turn strongly encouraged developers to build for their own API's), the idea back then was Microsoft could afford to undercut all other browser developers by providing it free (because paying for a full-featured browser was a thing and Netscape was great). The fallout from that legal case was Microsoft had to provide an independent browser experience from Windows so that end-users could use any other browser they wished (Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Mosaic etc.)
What Google however has managed over the last decade is to push its own browser and it's own API that is independent from an operating system. In the article it's talking about the Chrome web browser, however Chrome for the most part runs on their own open-source system called Chromium. You can develop your own thing on it and hey, it's free but I'm sure google doesn't mind dumping its own resources into doing a lot of the heavy lifting just to make it more attractive to use. Chromium is now the core framework that most other web browsers now use rather than continuing to develop their own thing. Even Steam uses Chromium (hence why in a little over a month Steam stops working on Windows 7: Chromium support breaks) They can still fork off to their own thing, but it's still chromium....I think.
My question is what stops Google from working around what Microsoft set in stone and rather than controlling a monopoly on web browsers they instead put their monopoly on the underlaying code that makes all the alternatives work? If they don't want people bypassing their ad revenue channels with extensions they can just move the goalposts for their own browser. If they make a similar change to Chromium what stops it from being sidestepped beyond everyone having to fork their own builds? I don't like it.
uBlock has been the go-to for most folks ever since AdBlock Plus started whitelisting ads a number of years ago and it partially runs on how the Chrome's extension API works on most (I'll explain) browsers. Well, Google figured out how to fix that.
Yes I'm aware there's alternatives. There always are. You can't go far into any tech thread these days without someone plugging some alternate program or service which sure, it's a dubious clone of whatever you are trying NOT to use (I'll use Twitter as an example because when the buyout happened everyone just dicked off to "totally-not-twitter" clones which sure made it fun to follow people on a half dozen sites, rather than one)....but you'll still end up using Google's services every once and a while when your day isn't perfectly laid out for you. (or in the example, you rattle off on how someone is terrible, but you never actually deleted your account. ;^) )
To me this feels weird. So if you are old enough you remember the big anti-monopoly case put against Microsoft when they were bundling Internet Explorer with every version of Windows (and integrating the Internet Explorer engine into the OS itself, which in turn strongly encouraged developers to build for their own API's), the idea back then was Microsoft could afford to undercut all other browser developers by providing it free (because paying for a full-featured browser was a thing and Netscape was great). The fallout from that legal case was Microsoft had to provide an independent browser experience from Windows so that end-users could use any other browser they wished (Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Mosaic etc.)
What Google however has managed over the last decade is to push its own browser and it's own API that is independent from an operating system. In the article it's talking about the Chrome web browser, however Chrome for the most part runs on their own open-source system called Chromium. You can develop your own thing on it and hey, it's free but I'm sure google doesn't mind dumping its own resources into doing a lot of the heavy lifting just to make it more attractive to use. Chromium is now the core framework that most other web browsers now use rather than continuing to develop their own thing. Even Steam uses Chromium (hence why in a little over a month Steam stops working on Windows 7: Chromium support breaks) They can still fork off to their own thing, but it's still chromium....I think.
My question is what stops Google from working around what Microsoft set in stone and rather than controlling a monopoly on web browsers they instead put their monopoly on the underlaying code that makes all the alternatives work? If they don't want people bypassing their ad revenue channels with extensions they can just move the goalposts for their own browser. If they make a similar change to Chromium what stops it from being sidestepped beyond everyone having to fork their own builds? I don't like it.
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