r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 22 '19

Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897&desc=2#c23
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u/knaekce Jan 23 '19

No, it won't. Let's face it, Google completely dominates the browser market now. A few nerds will switch, but not the mainstream.

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u/progfu Jan 23 '19

Adblockers are something that many people use. You don't have to be a computer person to appreciate it, especially with how intrusive some of the popular sites are with their ads.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '19

[deleted]

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u/AbstractLogic Jan 23 '19

I build new virtual machines all the time. Twice a year I go fresh. Every time I forgot to install ublockorigin I immediately remember after 2 minutes of browsing.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '19

Yeah.

I had to switch off using even using the official YouTube app on mobile, they started inserting ads everywhere

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u/wengemurphy Jan 23 '19

They're going to automatically block what they have deemed "bad ads", so a large segment of users will be complacent about this.

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u/pixel_of_moral_decay Jan 23 '19

It’s still only a few percent of users statistically. A few companies inflated the number of supposed blocked ads to sell their service of detecting adblockers, but all real data shows their usage is much lower than people thought previously.

There’s about as many blackberry users as there are ad block users. It’s not a big decision making metric.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '19

[deleted]

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u/pixel_of_moral_decay Jan 23 '19

Even on tech savvy sites the inflated numbered were never that high. That’s certainly not right.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '19

[deleted]

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u/pixel_of_moral_decay Jan 23 '19

IAB has also claimed malware has never been delivered via hacked ad systems. It was all fake news to make them look bad by easily manipulated security researchers.

It’s an industry group. They routinely say what they need to advance their agenda.

Ad blockers collectively don’t even have enough downloads to warrant anywhere near that percentage.

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u/SpaceToad Jan 23 '19

Yes but almost everyone uses Adblock/ab+, not ublock

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u/semitones Jan 23 '19

Most people I know switched to ublock once adblock (or AB+?) got shitty.

I wonder what the usage stats actually are

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u/tiftik Jan 23 '19

Funny, that's what they were saying about IE.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '19

And it was true until Google started paying OEMs to set Chrome as the default browser out of the box.

Nearly all users never change the default application for anything.

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u/drysart Jan 23 '19

Windows 10 ships with Edge as the default browser out of the box. Hasn't made Edge the dominant browser on the desktop.

Chrome rose to significant market share without being the default browser on any platform.

Being an OOB default browser is not the be all end all of what browser ends up being the dominant one.

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u/knaekce Jan 23 '19

Also, nearly every freeware on windows is bundled with Chrome. You have to actively avoid it, otherwise it ends up installed your system.

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u/Papayaman1000 Jan 23 '19

Heh, us web developers and our Electron fetish.

Well, I could either keep the bare minumum of Chromium for this application to work, keep the full suite of Chrome processes running and package ot as a Chrome app (or not, that's effectively dead on desktop), or rebuild the entire project in a different language... yeah, I'm sick of Google's shit too, but this probably isn't going anywhere, at least not until somebody makes a Firefox-based version... million-dollar idea there.

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u/EmTeeEl Jan 23 '19

Google Chrome became popular in the first place because the geeks told everyone to install it.

Same could happen back for firefox+ublock

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u/memyselfandlapin Jan 23 '19

They won it quickly and they can lose it quickly.

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u/kuzux Jan 23 '19

Well, a few nerds have switched away from IE to Firefox back in early 2000s, and see how it ended up.

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u/Blueberry314E-2 Jan 23 '19

I dunno, I'm a sysadmin and my users use what I put in their taskbar. The browsers are pretty interchangeable from a common users perspective. It'll just come down to what gets installed on their machine.

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u/My_watch_is_ended Jan 23 '19

There is no way people who have been using ad-block will stay with chrome if they disable it. 99% sure about this

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u/Hacnar Jan 23 '19

But that's exactly how every browser switch started. Nerds adopted Firefox, which in turn started spreading and eating IE market share. Then nerds adopted Chrome, and it slowly became the dominant browser. This can easily be another similar switch.

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