Gregory's ServerYou should stop using Google Chrome. The company is following through on its threat to ban the ad/tracker blockers that a) help protect your privacy and b) make your web experience much more pleasant.
 46 comments
 @jztusk @dangillmor They might keep gmail free, because of its value to them as a platform-agnostic social graph.  Well yeah, they keep them free, but will change the terms and conditions so that they can exploit our personal information more and more. I'm pretty sure the number of ads they insert between actual emails had increased recently. (Only in the Promotions tab ..... so far) ...interesting tidbit, I keep one gmail account on an unprotected browser just for dealing with drain-bamaged websites, frequently local governments or utilities. I hit the browser back button on it when my computer was kind of busy doing other stuff, and what briefly appears in the URL field is "accounts.youtube.com". Yeah, start thinking about your protonmail move now.  @jztusk @dangillmor , yeah true. My private (paid) email is awash with spam and it doesn't sync email addresses with my Android phone unless i'm using it on my phone. All my contacts are Google contacts. Well aint that enshittified?! @jztusk @dangillmor the criticism is mostly valid for browsers that are produced by companies. How about Firefox?  @jztusk @dangillmor fwiw I've found migadu to be a reasonably painless swap as I already have domains I need to keep alive, it's reasonably cheap, and as a bonus I now have a spam-can gmail email to use mostly as a junk bin. The main pain is email search being worse outside of Gmail webmail but it is what it is  I would like to... But the other options just don't work on the websites I use. I'm left with no choice. @lupus_blackfur @dangillmor If you're stuck with it for now you can at least turn off the built-in tracking and ad features https://blog.zgp.org/google-chrome-checklist/  What I do is keep a copy of Chromium around for when a site has compatibility issues with Firefox. But I also ask people to fix their shit. The web wasn't made to be accessed via a single web browser. Don't let Google take away your choices -- it's a vicious cycle. @lupus_blackfur@mastodon.world @dangillmor@mastodon.social would you mind giving a couple of examples? I'm curious and would like to do some testing. @dangillmor It also now has built-in advertising features that give a data advantage to YouTube compared to niche independent sites. Tricky stuff https://www.adexchanger.com/the-sell-sider/googles-topics-api-picks-on-smaller-publishers/ @dangillmor Because of this post I'm not using Firefox on a Chromebook. The current Firefox is better than the last, but it's still an 'android' app and has some quirks you don't see on a real desktop version of Firefox. @killick @dangillmor You can also use Firefox from the Linux VM in ChromeOS too. It works super well. @dangillmor I see blocking ads as unethical. Content and service creators invest time and resources assuming posted ads will bring a return. Unless you are using a browsing system such as Brave to provide an alternate method of compensation it matters little which browser you use to respect their work. Avoiding sites with ads is more appropriate. @grabe @dangillmor ads worked fine before big tech started using it as a pretext to invade privacy. “Content and service creators invest time and resources assuming posted ads will bring a return” This is exactly why a major paradigm shift needs to happen. Content creators need to stop assuming that buying ads is the solution to gaining an audience or selling a product on the internet.  @grabe @dangillmor I see my computer as exactly that: mine. I decide what will run on it and what will not run on it. And what will **not** run on it ever if I can help it is code that explicitly tries to get as much information as possible about my private life for fucking late-stage capitalist rent-seekers to profit from. If it's just displayed ads, fine. No harm no foul IMO. But if it's running code that rapes my machine for every bit it can find? TO HELL WITH THE FUCKERS. @grabe @dangillmor Entrepreneurs argue that they deserve big returns because they take big risks. I have zero ethical obligation to make sure those risks succeed. If they can’t make money because I won’t watch their ads, then they should fail, then find another business model. The web was much better before ads. @grabe @dangillmor adds is one way of income for content creators, another one is a subcription service. If someone doesn't decide for a subcription to share his content, well I think its up to the user to decide how to consume the content either if he decides to have or block adds and both seems to me completly valid and personal choices. @grabe @dangillmor The most ethical approach, I think, is to block trackers and malware rather than ads. This nudges the ad industry in a better direction. In uBlock Origin, you can easily do this by disabling "uBlock filters – Ads", as well as all filters under "Ads" and "Multipurpose", but enabling everything under "Privacy" and "Malware protection, security".  @dangillmor g00gle management doing everything it can to alienate it's target audience. Strange.   @dangillmor so this is why they are tying to throttle Firefox, my browser of choice and the descendant of the original Netscape browser @dangillmor  @dangillmor for our followers: we don't like to proselytize but we do agree with this conclusion @dangillmor Google's move to ban ad blockers also extends to YouTube, but there is a way around it. Create a private blog, (eg a Blogger blog). Copy the embed code for a YouTube video. Paste it into a Blogger post and publish. When you watch the video on the blog it will be ad free. This is only worth doing for long playing YouTube videos, but it also works with playlists. This is not a good move though for a YouTube channel you like that deserves support.   @dangillmor Google used a healthy internet to become one of the most powerful companies in the world. Now, it seems possible that their services might actually end up being locked off to only users of their own web browser. @dangillmor Or, sign up for NextDNS and stop things at the source. I use that via Tailscale and life is great. @dangillmor I pretty much don't use Google anyway. I use one of the other standbys instead i.e. Brave or Firefox.  @dangillmor This is the Internet Explorer problem all over again. If one corporation controls a majority web technology then you get de facto standards instead of universal standards, and the corporation gets to shove whatever crap technology they want at the user. If we don't want another experience like Microsoft's IE browser we can't keep using their technology, including Chromium based browsers like Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc. @dangillmor Firefox is fine, Pulse is fine, Librewolf is even better, albeit it is more limited in some useful functions, like syncing. Currently, the worst is probably MS Edge, infected with ChatGPT… @dangillmor And this is why I will now instead use browsers that are not Chrome. Including Firefox. |
@dangillmor
The bummer is that this probably portends similar moves on its other zero-payment products, eventually.
I won't mind de-Google-ifying most things, but I'm not enjoying thinking about replacing Gmail.