It may be the last few years of the free web because of Google. Their goals are clear.
Please switch to Firefox, another search engine and another email provider…
The Internet in the last five or so years has just been less fun and interesting to use in general. Except for anywhere I can interact with friends, I just don’t really care for using corporate social media sites anymore. I’ve pretty much removed Google from my life except for YouTube and rarely Google Maps, and if Google tries to use this to force ads into YouTube (which I’m sure is going to be one of its uses) then I will just stop using YouTube. I will just stop patronizing any site or business that tries to implement this as a feature to stop my browser choice, OS choice, or my extension choice (which included adblock extensions). I miss the days when the Internet was less corporately controlled than it is now, and I think we need a renaissance of those days.
I’ll keep using Firefox and be extremely vocal about websites that won’t support it. I mean that’s all I can really do.
And hope the EU will oppose it.
Why would they? It’s FrEE maRKeT. Google can point to Edge and Safari as proof that they don’t have a monopoly on browsers, so no anti-trust issue there no sireee. The fact that Edge is based on Chromium does not factor into this (in fact the EU loves it, just look at what they did to “liberalize” the electricity market, aside from some extremely anecdotal stories, it’s all companies whose only job is to build a website and the fiscal “infrastructure” to buy energy from state-controlled producers to resell it at a markup using state-controlled energy distributors, but hey there is a private middleman so it’s liberal and the innovation/investment dividends will pay out any year now… any year…).
The concept of the WWW being supported by free, standard, interoperable protocols was never codified into law. Despite how much good it has done so many industries to have a common free interoperable tech stack, it doesn’t have to be this way; the French Minitel was a walled garden built by France Telecom, and that was 100% legal, because interoperability is not a legal requirement. The Apple Store and Game Consoles work under the same principle, you basically can’t sell anything on there without abiding by some asinine rules (Apple has had some issues but IIRC that has to do with them abusing their monopoly position to extract 30 % of all sales, not with the fact that they have an exclusive App Store to begin with).
Also this whole bullshit is not new and was never legally challenged because there is no case. For years you could not even browse instagram in your browser because they “only supported the mobile app”, which was a blatant way to force you into a walled garden where they can force you to watch as many ads as they want and where scraping is much harder.
I expect we’ll lose about 90% of the web within five years as this becomes normalized.
It will primarily be the seo driven AI crap driven ripoff regurgitated shitfest that’s arisen in the last 5 years tho.
I’ll be waiting for a search engine to arise that only shows user controllable presentation and will use that.
A way to filter out the corporate trash will make the human web better, not worse.
Yeah, this is pretty much my take.
The web sites that are interested in this tool never wanted to be actual web sites. They wanted to be closed client-server systems with proprietary, opaque protocols… HTTP was just a convenient implementation to leverage.
What WEI does is basically allow all of these wanna-be walled gardens to become actual walled gardens.
They never wanted to be interoperable in the first place, so what are we losing? Good riddance.
Maybe with this in place, we’ll be able to start rebuilding the interoperable web that we had before VC money took it over.
We just need a compelling business model for it. “Free” ad-supported is toxic for open discourse, and now it’s functionally deprecated on the open web. I think that’s a good thing, but good changes are not necessarily easy to endure.
I’m not sure how we’ll do it. Attention tokens and all that crypto stuff seems like garbage, but having a thousand different subscriptions to get past paywalls is not great either.
Check out Kagi. It’s a subscription search service since they don’t show you ads, but that also means they don’t track you at all (no search history, for example). They also let you influence the priorities of the sites you see in the results or even completely block them, and the results are usually better than Google with less bullshit – or even at worst as good as Google. Some people seem to be skeptical about paying for a search engine, but everybody wanting shit for free is what got us into this fucking mess in the first place
I second this, was about to recommend Kagi, auto filters listicles, fantastic for actually finding information written by real people on blogs and things that aren’t SEO spam
Quick bangs alone almost make it worth it for me. The functionality exists in other browsers but it’s not synced, so being universal in the search engine itself is a giant usability improvement for me. Especially when using in conjunction with Orion.
Is Brave safe from these shenanigans? Asking for a friend.
Brave is built on Chromium. So, by default, no they are not safe from this. Without extra effort, Brave will have this feature. I don’t know if its feasible but there’s a chance the Brave devs can remove the code from their distribution, but that’s the best case scenario and just puts them in the same position as Firefox: they get locked out because they refuse to implement the spec.
I have to imagine they will strip it because if they don’t, it’ll be dead to all of their users.
No brave users don‘t care. Brave proved how untrustworthy they are and in any case their business model is unethical yet they still have a cult like following plus a group of crypto bros that are obsessed with getting digital pennies.
I’m a Brave user that certainly cares. They’re not untrustworthy.
It may be dead to its users anyway depending on how forceful Google is with this. If Brave doesn’t work on 98.8% of all websites with advertising or indeed on 49.5% of all websites (approximately Google’s ad network’s reach), it becomes as niche as lynx.
Yeah Brave would probably be fucked then. If you can’t have privacy anyway, might as well use Chrome.
Brave devs have stated that their fork of chromium is essentially degoogled, detracked,etc. Just the browser core and built from there… They don’t automatically add in new features into their fork just because chromium does.
I see, thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t sure about the specifics of how they produce their product from the upstream source.
There’s a “we told you this would happen” going on here.
If chromium didn’t have a monopoly amongst browsers, they would have a much harder time pushing this through.
Imagine everyone using a browser built by an advertising company.
I moved to FF the same time I found out about the DRM shit. It takes literally 10 minutes and the only thing FF lacks is tab groups. Not a big loss compared to a stupid bigtech telling me what I can use.
The problem is that Mozilla dropped the ball so hard, by focusing on making their C-staff into millionaires instead of making a good product, that it no longer matters. Their market share is so small that Firefox compatibility no longer matters.
Soon websites will require that DRM and either Firefox will implement it or it will be unable to render those websites.
Firefox is awesome and I never switched to chrome because Google is the devil
And this is the consequence of browser vendors relying on Chromium.
Fuck you Google.
Don’tbe evil.Pardon my ignorance but Can someone explain what google is trying to do?
The real two internets is happening
this is a userbase killer right here
If manifest 3 didn’t change egoogke chrome share I doubt this will.
Manifest 3 didn’t create noticable chnages for the average user. Not yet anyway.
The idea is these changes are never a full at first. The internet will not break tomorrow because of integrity checking.
But it will in a few years. And people will be upset then. When it’s far too late.
hey everyone a friendly reminder that alternatives exist, and just drop this shit fast and move to better alternatives. In this case firefox.
The problems start to happen when buisnesses adopt this en masse. Expect all banks to implement this for example. You can use Firefox all you want, but then you won’t be able to do online banking.
Standards are really fucking important to help people stay functional in a society. This is one area that the ANCAP mindset just gets it totally wrong, unless you like the idea of being a hermit.
Anyway, we are already seeing some websites basically reject browsers like Firefox because they basically give the consumer too much protection and freedom. Arguably we’ve seen this before, but this may be a new tier of corporate lockout of open standards as consumer protection gets thrown in the trash. Thanks America.
I don’t think that checks out.
Firefox only exists because it’s primarily funded by Google. It’s funded by Google to ensure they actually have some competition and avoid becoming a Monopoly.
If they kill Firefox or otherwise make it unusable they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot.
However, if it ends up being a bad experience that no one wants to use, well that’s not on them and they have no responsibility to fix it.
What will likely happen is Firefox will also adopt this DRM.
Mozilla does not exist because of Google. Google doesn’t have controlling power over Mozilla, nor do they have power over the many forks. It’s hilarious that you think a company would give a shit about being a monopoly; that’s what they strive for. This stupid take has been going around for years, and I’m sad to see it spread to Lemmy.
This needs to be pinned at the top of every single threat about this. Far too many people are just saying “Well I’ll just keep using Firefox”. They do not understand the gravity of the issue.
When websites start blocking clients that don’t implement the wei handshake, you’ll be forced to use one that does if you want to visit those sites. Firefox will either adopt it or become a second rate browser.
Websites should be able to block me. I can just go elsewhere.
Could there be lawsuits over this?
Reasonable people will disagree… but no, probably not. This is a feature which websites can choose to use in the same way that websites can choose to use notifications. Even if you dislike the fact that web browsers provide the option, it’s the website itself that’s actively choosing to impose on you.
Now, the counterpoint to this argument is that the feature in question will most likely further strengthen Google’s position as the market leader and lock out new independent browsers. This is certainly true and similar logic has indeed been employed in cases like the Microsoft antitrust case. With that being said, Google still has that extra layer of abstraction sitting between it and the actual mechanism of action (i.e.: independent website owners who want DRM). Think of it like the Uber of anti-trust law.
Chrome is a bag of shit anyway, easy jump
Chromium, not chrome. Which means also Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and a lot more. Basically only Firefox and Safari are left as the big non-chromium ones.
But that’s not the worst of it. Even if you tear out this code, more and more websites will be built that rely on it. Which means Firefox etc also need to include it to keep functioning.
Not saying you don’t realize, but Safari already has this tech. They call it Personal Access Tokens.
I just don’t understand why they’re trying to solve this issue on the client side. It seems like a losing battle to me.
Instead, focus on the server side. If you want to push ads, then host on (or tunnel from) the content server. Get rid of all the \s and tags and scripts and adserver links that the adblockers are using to identify ads. Just assemble the page on the host so that it looks indistinguisable from the content the user is looking for and push it out. EAT BACHELOR CHOW! NOW WITH FLAVOR! Google could even start an ad-friendly hosting service that does this - some sitebuilder tools, identify where you want Google Adsense, and host the damn thing.
So render to image? That sounds terribly inefficient. That means you’re drastically increasing the load on the server and sending way more data over the wire. And then on the client side, your page no longer changes to fit the huge variety of viewport sizes. And say goodbye to being able to copy-paste. Or any kind of user interaction. And anyone with visual disabilities can go fuck themselves, I guess.
No, they didn’t mean to render it all as an image, but that everything comes from the content server you’re getting the content you want from and thus the ads should be indistinguishable from content. I don’t understand how you could misunderstand it to such a degree as to think they meant to render it all as an image.
so… PDF then?
/sThanks, BTW. It never occurred to me that someone could interpret my comment as “render-as-an-image”.
Wow they moved incredibly fast, even considering the repository was first committed to in April 2023. I wonder why the outrage only started a few days ago? There was also a discussion, started in May.
It’s a shame that no matter the amount of outrage, no matter what the pitfalls of this change may be, it’s going to happen no matter what because money.
