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Google Backtracks on Chrome Modifications That Would Have Crippled Ad Blockers (zdnet.com)
Google has changed its stance on upcoming Chrome Manifest V3 changes as benchmark shows they lied about performance hit. Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: A study analyzing the performance of Chrome ad blocker extensions published on Friday has proven wrong claims made by Google developers last month, when a controversy broke out surrounding their decision to modify the Chrome browser in such a way that would have eventually killed off ad blockers and many other extensions. The study, carried out by the team behind the Ghostery ad blocker, found that ad blockers had sub-millisecond impact on Chrome's network requests that could hardly be called a performance hit. Hours after the Ghostery team published its study and benchmark results, the Chrome team backtracked on their planned modifications. At the root of Ghostery's benchmark into ad blocker performance stands Manifest V3, a new standard for developing Chrome extensions that Google announced last October.
I'd still want an ad blocker. It's optional anyways. Don't like the performance? Don't install the extension.
The only commitment given by Google is to keep the observational API, but that's not the API adblockers care about! Adblockers need the blocking API, and there's no commitment to keep it by Google. Most likely Google will still remove it later, when the heat is off and people moved on to the next outrage.
I have warned in several posts that the current browser monoculture is bad for the web. Mo$illa is too closely connected with Google and browsers like Pale Moon and Waterfox also have their own paid deals. Until we have a truly independent browser engine we will be at the mercy of ads which are a form of DRM.
I'll take that sub milisecond delay to prevent the ad that takes much longer.
Remember when Google primarily had text ads? Not even pepperidge farms remembers, their products are pure garbage now. They cheaped them out so much in content without lowering the price, in pursuit of profit, that they're no longer worth buying.
Sadly, many people still make purchases without any consideration for whether they're getting anything for their money. The ad on heavy rotation right now on YouTube is for some shitty horror movie sequel. I see this ad because we use a fire tv stick, obviously I block such things on my PC. Some ads still sneak through occasionally, so if I actually want to watch something without interruption I YouTube-dl it first. But back to the ad. How much have they spent to ensure that I see their unskippable ad 20 times a day? That kind of entrainment might work on toddlers, but it's alienating to everyone else. Even horror movie devotees must get tired of it after the tenth time or so. I, for one, don't want to hear a woman screaming in terror right before I watch a comedy clip, or some daily show. That puts me off right quick.
Did an unskippable ad ever increase revenue?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I guess someone at Google made an honest mistake. Now if we lived in some alternate universe, one in which Google made, say, $116.3 billion dollars in 2018 selling ads primarily viewed through web browsers, then the skeptic in me might think shenanigans were afoot. But since we don't live in that universe, we can have peace of mind that this was purely an error by an overzealous software engineer trying to make browsers faster. Because, you know, there is absolutely no performance impact (CPU, rendering time, network bandwidth) caused by loading multiple advertisements on every web page that stream video. Anyone with a modicum of common sense would realize that blocking those ads in the first place would surely require far more resources than loading and rendering them. So I can totally see how this honest mistake was made.
Better known as 318230.
I already switched to Firefox.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It was never an issue of performance. That was just an excuse that Google expected would be hard to prove otherwise. As you say, it is a very shaky excuse too, when add-ons are optional. Google is #1 in the ad space and they make their money from that, not from Chrome directly. Controlling the browser market does help them maximize their ad revenue and disallowing Ad-blockers they don't control it is one way. As they are trying to not alienate people too much, once this excuse was shot down they backtracked and will find another way later on.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Support Firefox
So don't use Chrome. Problem solved.
Good luck with that. Native applications built with Electron, such as Discord, Slack, Skype, Atom, and Visual Studio Code, all bundle a copy of Chromium. This is Google Chrome with a handful of non-free parts cut out, mostly related to video DRM and Adobe Flash Player. The use of Chromium in Electron encourages development of web applications that work only with Chromium. For example, the owner of a Discord server can upload images to that server for use as emoji, but clicking the upload button does absolutely nothing in Firefox. This encourages Firefox users to switch to Google Chrome (on Windows or macOS) or Chromium (on X11/Linux) to make web applications work again.
In addition, on a phone or tablet running Android 4 or later, Google Chrome has a RAM use advantage over Firefox because its HTML engine is always loaded. This is analogous to IE's advantage on Windows 98 through 8.1.
The shit Microsoft and IBM did seems a lot less bad than what Google's been up to recently. Perhaps it's time for a FTC inquiry?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?