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by ravenstine 1720 days ago
Are these changes actually needed, though? As much as it makes sense to use service workers, for instance, this seems like a rationalization to shoehorn in Google's anti-features.

It's not like background webpages are broken or even hard to use. It's not like everyone's clamoring for their ad blockers to use less resource or for Chrome to be faster.

There was a time when I switched to Chrome because I believed it to be superior. Now that I find the extensions I use to be nearly as important as the browser itself, I can't imagine why ad-hating privacy-focused individuals would punish themselves by using Chrome. Firefox has a few performance quirks in contrast to Chrome, but overall it's in a state where it competes in most cases. As much as I can complain about Mozilla's organizational issues, I can be far more assured that they aren't going to cause my extensions to become nerfed for A Good Reason (TM).
1 comments
Lex-2008 1720 days ago
While I agree with you in general, I'd like to comment on

> It's not like everyone's clamoring for their ad blockers to use less resource or for Chrome to be faster.

some people do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28672377 - "Brave reduces the page load performance cost of its adblocker"

original article having some impressive improvement numbers.

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HWR_14 1719 days ago
What's strange is my adblocker makes everything run faster. So making the ad blocker faster at the cost of being less reliable seems like the whole system will be slower in general.
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a5aAqU 1719 days ago
> making the ad blocker faster

Does anyone seriously believe that an advertising company wants to improve the performance of ad blockers? It's obvious what Google is doing.

If you want to see where things are going in the long run, look at Chrome for Android where you can't install ad-blockers at all.

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HWR_14 1719 days ago
> Does anyone seriously believe that an advertising company wants to improve the performance of ad blockers? It's obvious what Google is doing.

I believe some people at Google want to make plugins more efficient, some want to kill ad blockers and probably a few other reasons. Obviously Google is externally (and probably internally outside of specific teams) playing up the efficiency concerns. And I don't doubt most advocates we hear honestly think primarily about that.

That said, if you claimed they got the clout and priority to do that because of the ad concerns behind the scenes, I would say "duh"

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