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What can we do to keep the web open?
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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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It's a big threat because once it's easy to block unapproved browsers, lots of people will do it. Yeah, there will always be a few weirdos like us that don't enable it, but just imagine when it's your bank, your insurance company, your government, and most every linked-to page on Lemmy. You'll be forced to use Chrome to interact with large parts of the internet then.
netflix on linux firefox comes to mind. Just changing the useragent shows that it's not a technical problem.
I'm banking (ha) that most web dev is lazy and won't change shit that isn't broken. It'll be YouTube mainly since Google hasn't figured out how to stop uBlockO.
Most other websites are probably not worth it and the Internet is designed day one to route around damage. A whole bunch of Blogspam SEO sites banning Firefox is a win.
Otherwise they're be a addon extensions for Firefox developed in a week probably to "fake" it.
I wouldn't count on that. Web devs aren't going to push for this, it'll be the suits that have some dumb automated "security" tool tell them they need to enable it or they'll get hacked.
There will always be a cat and mouse game where some people figure out clever ways around this, but I wouldn't count on it being as easy as installing an addon. Sites could start requiring a specific attester that requires that you run their rootkit malware to spy on your entire OS and only supports a few popular OSes. Thanks to projects like TPM, your own hardware could be working against you.
As usual, Stallman predicted the world that large companies would like to drag us into: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Exactly right, gonna be some big corpo push that it has to get done because "1% of our userbase is getting around the ads, that's 1% of our profit we need!!". And as a web dev, sure I could say I refuse. and then get demoted, fired, and they'll get someone else to do it anyway.
The saving grace is that this will be expensive to do, and Google has proven time and time again that their tech isn't trustworthy or long-term to most companies. If this does get through, that's how I'd pitch it to my company. Google gets ideas, gets bored of them, throws them away or changes them so drastically that we have to redo all the work anyway, so it's not worth doing any time soon. A great case of this is AMP, and while there are some pages that did switch to AMP, the vast majority of sites didn't bother with it. Not worth the investment. Granted this is different because its ads, and we should by no means rely on this and give up the fight.
First line in the sand is to say this goes against the web's foundations directly and that Google is actively trying to monopolize the internet.
That's a great way to push back internally. "Oh you know Google, always killing things. Why should we waste the effort? This'll just end up on https://killedbygoogle.com/"
That's how I'd approach it. All of their programs are just hell to maintain, and one that actively blocks users will be worse. Even simple things like Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics for some reason still need someone touching the code at least once a year
If those can't be avoided then use a compatible browser for those functions and a free browser for anything else. It's a pragmatic solution.
I guess, but somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of people already use ad blockers. It’s not a small segment of the population. Even more people use some sort of plugin.
I think it is more likely that certain sites require secure mode; just like today. I guess I could be wrong, and most sites will end up doing it. I still suspect there will be a work around; even if it is as complicated as a secure browser being run in a virtual machine and then AI removing the ads to show you the ‘clean’ version.