[aaron-santos]

Merging js deps into one big resource isn't difficult. The number of ads point is interesting though. How would one determine what is an ad and what is an image? I have my ideas, but optimizing on this boundary sounds like it would lead to weird outcomes.

[zozbot234]

Adblockers have to solve that problem already. And it's actually really easy because "ads" aren't just ads unfortunately, they're also third-party code that's trying to track you as you browse the site. So it's reasonably easy to spot them and filter them out.

[thrwaway69]

Though, advertisers are already using first party redirection. Future of adblockers is bleak.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/780/

[dredmorbius]

Back in the early days of banner ads, a CSS-based approach to blocking was to target images by size. Since advertising revolved around specific standards of advertising "units" (effectively: sizes of images), those could be identified and blocked. That worked well, for a time.

This is ultimately whack-a-mole. For the past decade or so, point-of-origin based blockers have worked effectively, because that's how advertising networks have operated. If the ad targets start getting unified, we may have to switch to other signatures:

- Again, sizes of images or DOM elements.

- Content matching known hash signatures, or constant across multiple requests to a site (other than known branding elements / graphics).

- "Things that behave like ads behave" as defined by AI encoded into ad blockers.

- CSS / page elements. Perhaps applying whitelist rather than blacklist policies.

- User-defined element subtraction.

There's little in the history of online advertising that suggests users will simply give up.

[thrwaway69]

Some of those techniques will make the whole experience slow compared to the current network request filters and dns blockers.

And that will probably be blocked or severely locked down by your most popular browser, chrome.

I don't need to give advertisers data myself when someone else I know can. I really doubt it is easy to throw off chrome monopoly at this stage. I presume we will see a chilling effect before anything moves like IE.

[dredmorbius]

At this point, I'll take slow over shitshow.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

That is fixed since 1.24.3b7 / https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases ?

[reaperducer]

In the early days of DMOZ, some editors would rank sites lower based on the number of ads they had.

[zozbot234]

I don't think DMOZ had ranking per se? They could mark "preferred" sites for any given category, but only a handful of them at most, and with very high standards, i.e. it needed to be the official site or "THE" definitive resource about X.

[reaperducer]

You are correct, the sites weren't "ranked" the same way that Google ranks sites now. But there were preferred sites, and each site had a description written by an editor who could be fairly unpleasant if they wanted to.

I had a site that appeared in DMOZ, and the description was written in such a way that nobody would want to visit it. But it was one of only a few sites on the internet at the time with its information, so it was included.