[jauntywundrkind]

I personally think the upsides of WebBundles are huge. There's nothing that would stop the browser from being able to filter & ignore content coming from in a WebBundle, so I'm not sure what Brave's greivance is here. The adserving topic is complicated as heck, but everyone seems to acknowledge big change is necessary & Google and Firefox both have proposals to radically overhaul the system while enhancing user privacy; Brave's own primary distinguisher at this point is their BAT tokens, their own answer here. There's complicated topics here, but I see Brave following the standard pattern of trying to be a lightning rod of discontent.

It's also surprising to me how almost no one has commented on Private Access Tokens shipping for Apple. Which do the same thing. Here's them bragging about being able to avoid catchpa's since the devices are all vouched for by Apple as unmodified & controlled by Apple: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10077/

There was a decent submission on this recently, but not much engagement. https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2023-07-25-web-integri... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36866355

I think this is absolutely the worst shit, almost as bad as MV3 being a utterly neutered shitty hell hole version of what web extensions were. But it's notable to me that both Google didn't start this particular trend, Apple did, and more broadly - I have such a hard time picking words here - it feels like the stark polemics have been on overdrive to create a reality distortion field, where Chrome is purely bad/evil/awful/no-good everywhere. We should be upset & mad! But I feel like we're pretty far into losing our minds territory, and slipping into strokes of broadsweeping public madness.

[sircastor]

I don’t mean to be an apologist here, but Google’s vs Apple’s intention seem crystal clear.

Google is trying to make it impossible not to see the ads it’s selling. Apple’s intent seems to be lock down the Apple platform…? I know Apple is blatantly abusive in lots of spaces, but Chrome is a super-majority of the browsers in use. It’s an odd take to spin this into “they started it” finger pointing.

The reason Chrome is getting all the hate is that Google finally realized its power, position, and needs and became self-serving. Apple is just a lesser demigod is this fight.

[jsnell]

The stated goal of both is the same: to provide a privacy-preserving primitive for anti-abuse. Both explicitly state that the goal is not to exclude competing browsers or operating systems or to limit things like browser features or extensions.

You're just assuming that they're both lying about the motives, and making up the worst possible motives you can think of for each. I think in both cases you're wrong, and the stated goal is the actual goal. (Apple is not looking to lock down their platform with this, and Google is not thinking about ad blockers at all here.)

Their reasons for needing such an anti-abuse primitive are not the same, but the mechanisms are very similar, and the range of attestations they could provide without public opinion or regulatory backlash is probably almost identical.

[orangecat]

Google is not thinking about ad blockers at all here.

The first example in the WEI doc is enforcing that ads are viewed by humans: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

[jsnell]

Sure, and that text has nothing to do with preventing the blocking of ads. It is not saying "humans shall be forced to watch ads", like you're implying. It is saying that bot clicks/views to ads should not count. (It is also saying that websites want proof of probable humanity, usually via captchas, and we should have better ways of doing that. But that aspect of the bullet point isn't really specific to ads in any way.)

[ryukafalz]

If you're pointing a gun at me, I don't care if you say it's your intention not to shoot.

Whether it's their goal or not to exclude competing/upstart browsers and operating systems, that will be the end result given the content of the proposed standard.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I don't pay enough attention to comment on Apple, but of course I assume Google is lying; they're an adtech company trying to ship something that would make it trivial to break all adblockers. Why would you ever trust them?

[jsnell]

Because it is functionality they really need for other (legit!) reasons, and since trying to turn it into an anti-adblock technology would be a PR and regulatory nightmare, and make it harder to ship for the uses they actually need it for.

Lying tends to be stupid, especially for a company under so much scrutiny.

[jauntywundrkind]

I was trying to paint a broader picture of how we view Google. I think in many cases there is a lot more complexity, and in most cases, we don't see or appreciate a lot of good things that do help us all. blink-dev is generally a pretty great mailing list of good things, in my view.

This comment is a return to what kind of disturbs me, of using a very narrow focus on one specific thing: one specific thing I already said is the very worst shit.