147
YouTube is getting serious about blocking ad blockers
(www.theverge.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
147 points (92.5% liked)
Technology
58076 readers
3694 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Because Google broke how websites load in Chrome specifically to destroy adblock. They can punch holes in any adblocker that uses the Chromium web rendering engine. However Firefox does not use any Chromium code and still works the way it always has. uBlock (use uBlock Origin instead) will likely still work somewhat on Chorme, but would be helpless to block some ads.
This may be true for chrome, but as far as I can tell anyone building chromium can also change that open source code to not break ad blockers?
While in theory that is true, Chromium is still mostly controlled by Google. Some people may decide that they are going to maintain forks of Chromium that strip out certain features of Chromium, but the pace of development is relentless, releasing new builds several times per day. It would take some seriously deep pockets to be able to staff developers who can keep up with the contributions from Google and Microsoft and others and ensure their fork remains up to date and not broken.
So yes, someone could change that open source code, but it’s really not feasible in the long run, and so Google (and to a lesser extent Microsoft), can control the browser experience for the majority of desktop users, including things like Manifest V3 or that “Digital DRM” that we were hearing about a while back.