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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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Fine. I propose we create a proxy for hostile web browsers. Install the proxy on your device to run locally. Browser tells proxy to fetch the page. Proxy unfucks it before handing it over to the browser. Someone likely already has something like this out there somewhere.
If they want to turn this into an arms race they absolutely will lose.
So long as they get paid while the ship sinks, they don't care.
Why give a shit about the digital commons if it isn't making you, specifically, money hand over fist. Short sighted idiots.
“Why did we teach peasants to read? We have AI to do that now.”
Current year makes me want to yell from a fucking mountain, man.
Problem is this requires SSL intercept- the browser has to blindly trust the proxy otherwise SSL verification will fail on the browser level
Antiviruses have been doing this for years.
Oh I'm not saying it's an unsolved problem. It's absolutely been done, both by antivirus programs and commercial firewalls (although the merits of the ladder are open to some debate).
I am just saying it adds a potential complication.
Yes it does but we can’t just sit back and give up because it’s more convenient.
Why not? It's what the rest of the browser world is doing... :P
'Google's dumping MV3 support, guess we have to dump it also, too bad so sad guess there's nothing at all to be done here'.
Jokes aside- I agree giving up (in any regard, including proxy-side filtering) is the wrong answer. But the more I'm thinking about this, the more I'm convinced that the current essentially Internet-wide reliance on Chromium (with a small carve-out for WebKit) is a real problem that needs urgent attention.
Mozilla's the obvious choice but they seem determined to piss off their users with UI rewrites and blow all their cash on literally everything other than browser development.
Sad thing is there's a real opening here. I was a mainly Mozilla user years ago. I switched to Chrome because it was fast- there was a youtube ad (which actually aired on TV for a while) showing Chrome rendering a webpage in 100ms. Those days are of course long gone. Partly because Chrome is now bloated with a ton of Google shit, partly because with fast javascript rendering, web developers started treating javascript as 'free' so now a news article comes with 10+mb of tracking code that literally runs an auction client side for advertisers to bid on the opportunity to bother you and many of the most basic websites are rendered client-side because why not.
Point is though- come up with a FAST, standards compliant rendering engine that can compete with Chrome, with no bloat, and push it as 'we are what Chrome was- fast, effective, clean'.
I actually believe this is an unwinnable scenario for clients. Just whenever the block app/db updates, automatically check if ads are blocked. If they are, have an engineer or AI iterate until it no longer is the case.
And the reason why blocking solutions can't do the same is that there's cery kittle money in it and not enough people working for free on it. Or that's atleast my hypothesis..
So train the AI to recognize and respond to obfuscation attempts. Hell, make the web whitelist only. People subscribe to the vetted whitelists and anything sus gets blocked by default.
Basically pihole which blocks adverts at the DNS level so they don't even connect to their servers at all.