[cotelletta]

I wonder how much of this is actually about Adblockers... vs Googlers just wanting to make some performance numbers go up in aggregate to make their own internal company stats better.

Cos sure as hell no user is waiting for this.

[rootlocus]

> Cos sure as hell no user is waiting for this.

Why do you assume Google implements features that users want? They implement features that their clients want: the ones paying for ads.

[cameronbrown]

As someone who's used digital advertising in the past I wouldn't really care about forcing my content upon all customers. It's a self selected opt-out for someone who won't ever click anyway.

The real problem is news websites don't show restraint and shovel (so, many) ads to customers, making impressions go up and clicks go down. IMO ads won't go away and adblockers won't kill them completely as too many market forces (privacy, performance, revenue) is making the industry adapt.

Disclaimer: Personal opinion, Googler, not in ads or Chrome.

[chungus_khan]

This is absolutely the real thing hurting online advertising right now. Nobody wants their eyes molested by that many ads, and it makes the user's eyes glaze over. Fewer, better quality, better placed, and less obnoxious ads have consistently worked out better for my clients in terms of clicks.

[contravariant]

Given that they added an arbitrary limit to the number of rules that is high but not quite high enough for modern adblockers I'm gonna assume this was intentional.

[cromwellian]

Apple/Safari adopted pretty much the same architecture on Ad Blockers. Maybe just maybe the conspiracy theories are all wrong, and there was actually a legitimate, technical reason for choosing a restricted API.

[sha666sum]

If there was, they could've communicated it clearly already a year ago. There is no reason to give Google the benefit of the doubt, since it's clear they're not trying to get it.

If this rolls out, I'm going to very loudly tell my friends to use Fox, and not stop.

[cherioo]

They have, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3Nzz..., and reading it I have always thought it makes sense, as much sense as why Safari decided to do it. However, I don't think I have ever thoughtful discussion why their intended goal (security and privacy) is wrong or could be done in other ways.

I feel sad that each time this comes up even on HN it's always "Google, ad company, bad". There's a mention elsewhere about 30k limit being limiting. Why aren't we discussing alternative enforcement metrics, and request for inclusion?

[fwn]

> maybe [...] there was actually a legitimate, technical reason for choosing a restricted API

Without any further explanation that sounds rather unlikely.

The change is very publicly criticized and keeping legitimate reasons that could've increased support secret is a really counter intuitive strategy.

Apart from that I think it's not far-fetched or particularly conspiratorial to assume that an ad-company might have an interest in restricting ad-blocking.

"When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras."

[Mindwipe]

Safari's limit is significantly higher, and bluntly nobody is using Safari because they think it gives them user freedom.

[mrtksn]

I use Safari because it gives me freedom. I paid Apple for their product, now I own the product. It works well except for some Chrome demo apps(which gives me the chills "For the best experience use Internet Explorer" == "Your browser is not supported, use Chrome 46 or newer")

What kind of freedom do Chrome users get?

[pilif]

Safari has a much larger limit for blocking list entries though.

[saagarjha]

It’s not all that much larger; the limit is a combination of a hard cap of 50,000 rules and what Jetsam will let you get away with.

[hombre_fatal]

You can bundle many rule lists inside one extension. It's how 1Blocker works, and I did it myself for my own adblocking extension.

I'm not sure if this is possible in Chrome's proposal though.

Maybe this change will finally get people to prune Easylist which had 30% outdated cosmetic-filter cruft when I last sampled it along with hobby horse websites <0.00001% people would ever visit. Right now it's basically like an append-only legacy CSS file.

[my123]

+ the limit there is per-extension, not global

[rmsaksida]

And the limit is easily circumvented by having multiple extensions. I've seen Safari extensions that split themselves up to one extension per block list.

[me_me_me]

Google is an advertisement company there is nothing conspiratorial about them using their market share to force ads on people. After all whats the point of supporting chrome if it sells no adds.

[cromwellian]

The point would be

1) avoid being locked out of platforms by not controlling the default search. Apple and Microsoft could either extract a high toll, or crush search engines by controlling what search engines people see by default. On iOS, Apple does extract a toll to be the default, but MS was denied this, by Chrome beating out Windows Mobile and Edge/IE. If your company is wholly a web company, and someone else controls the key onramps to the web, you're potentially in trouble.

2) If the Web becomes a toxic wasteland (which was happening prior to Chrome when IE6 ruled), users flee more towards silo'ed platforms and apps. A healthy web is as beneficial to Google as a healthy forest is to a timber company.

It's like saying "The New York times is an advertising company, not a news company, so why would they invest in journalism schools if the point is to sell classified ads?"

And then there's just plain old interest in technology. Lots of projects at Google start from 20% engineers time, and grow to large successful projects, without any business model, they're just costs. You've got more than a thousand open source projects I bet being run by Google engineers, the majority of which exist because someone wanted to scratch an itch. Go, Angular, Tensorflow, Guava, et al, don't make money and aren't intended to.

[lifthrasiir]

(You need a standard disclaimer for your employer in this particular thread.)

I disagree that Google is a web company proper. It might have been years ago, but nowadays Google is capable of bending the very rules of the web and internet at their liking. As a result it can now essentially define what the web (okay, the modernish web) is, and that makes your points moot. Also Google's open-source projects are irrelevant to this discussion, much like that using React doesn't void your rights to criticize Facebook.

[kretor]

With Google's new API, all ads can still be blocked. There will be a limit for network request blocking rules, but it's very high so that normal users don't reach it. And for those that reach it, only network requests are affected, so adblockers can still use other APIs to hide the ads.

[jtbayly]

This is the first time I’ve heard the suggestion that there are ways around this by using other API’s. Can you elaborate?

[Liquid_Fire]

You can use other APIs to hide ads (i.e. prevent them from being displayed), but they would still be downloaded so you lose the privacy, performance and security benefits of the ad blocker.

[Freak_NL]

It makes sense to me that a company that is heavily invested in an ad-driven internet economy would limit the use of ad-blockers in their very popular browser. They surely weighed the risks of losing some users to better browsers, and probably found that they were by now acceptable.

[kjaer]

I don't know if this actually helps Google show more ads. With a 30k rule limit, I'm imagining most adblockers will prioritize the most common ad domains, and I'm pretty sure Google would be at the top of that list. This may really be a win for the long tail of smaller ad networks rather than the bigger players.

[ignoramous]

> Cos sure as hell no user is waiting for this.

Most of the web browsing happens on mobile devices where Chrome has a staggering 5B+ installs (though possibly not all active) vs Firefox's 100M+. Chrome on mobile never did support extensions let alone content blockers.

The manifest v3 offensive is meek compared to their hegemony already on display in the Android world which has 2B+ active users that almost exclusively use Chrome.

I see an anti-trust case in here somewhere or for Mozilla to simply buckle up and sign deals with OEMs that makes them the default browser and webview on Android.

[dewey]

As the browser is made by an ad company I'd probably go with "actually about adblockers" and not performance metrics.

[onion2k]

Google's internal motivation doesn't really matter.