Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible
In recent news, Google has put forth a proposal known as the "Web Environment Integrity Explainer", authored by four of its engineers. On the surface, it
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Man I love using Firefox.
This topic is a bit beyond me so I may have misunderstood but I think it's not going to matter that you use Firefox if this goes ahead and gets widely adopted because it sounds like websites will request these trust tokens and if your browser isn't forthcoming with one then they will assume you are a bot (or a user that blocks ads and is therefore one whose traffic does not benefit them). What happens then is unclear, do they not serve up the website? Do you get a degraded experience or different content? Do they just throw a lot of CAPTCHAs at you?
Sounds like they're going to make life on the web a whole lot less convenient for folks that don't want to use their new token system. But it's totally voluntary though, no browser has to implement it.
Yes it will affect you even if you use Firefox. If a lot of us still used Firefox, Google would not be able to do it as websites would not give up on a big chunk of their audience.
I suspect the next step in the ongoing war between people who want to make websites unuseable and people who want to use websites is going to be some kind of spoofing method to keep browsing. Maybe your secure browser of choice runs a regular chrome instance as intended and then scrapes the non-add data from that process and presents it to you in an add free format.
This might sound silly but assuming you are using firefox or even safari how will this proposal affect these browsers. Only thing I can currently think of is banking sites (on android) would force you to use chrome and check play integrity (safteynet) to block acess.
At the end of the day won't this only affect people using Google chrome? (Forks of chrome, firefox, safari could by pass the issue)?
Sorry if I seem a bit ignorant
Firefox could always spoof the standard to maintain compatibility.
If it could be spoofed easily, wouldn't that defeat the point?
I mean you can't just "spoof" a ssl cert or private ssh key, I have to assume this is at least that good.
You're relying on the device to provide a signal of authenticity with this model. Firefox can simply say it's authentic. However this will just lead to any signals from Firefox being ignored by any site... So Firefox would actually just need to spoof whatever signals Chrome is using... And thanks to Chromium being open source that shouldn't be too hard. If it's a device ID or mac address that's being used to show uniqueness, that can be randomized and presented to sites...
I haven't looked at the spec... and from my understanding the Spec isn't even finalized yet... I could be wrong. But It's certainly not going to be a case that each webhost has a complete list of ssl certs from every client... That's never going to happen. It could be that a cert is issued to Apple and Google, and they sub-cert out to individual devices for identities. Not sure what would stop firefox from just pulling a glut of certs and rotating them out regularly.
Yeah, I just don't get the point of what Google is doing with all of this. The while point is to require attestation because than you know people are viewing ads. So websites can either "trust" certs issued by Firefox, or not and lose out on ad revenue. I guess Google absence doesn't have to trust firefoz attestation, but then it is going to payout less and people will seek other providers.
SSL certs provide trust because you ultimately trust the issuing authority, which is supposedly garunteednby world governments. Their are known corrupt actors issuing certs, but ultimately you can be pretty sure that the SSL cert matches the domain you are on, and that it was requested by the owner of that domain. But you can still choose to not visit that domain if you don't trust it. There are a lot of services that will block its already, so I don't really get what the point of attestation is.
Good point.
Mozilla is working on their own v3, without a lot of the restrictions Google has added. I think you can already try out the relevant mode in Firefox.
On Firefox Nightly looks like they have v3 enabled
Yeah. I saw the announcement in the nightly channel couple of days ago. They're letting extension makers port their add-ons as well in advance.
Yeah, as far as i understand, the browser needs to support the API. But firefox will implement it nonetheless after some protest, or no money from Google anymore.
Pair it up with DDG + Protonmail and world will smile to you! 😄
I prefer startpage or Qwant. Protonmail is great though!
Would love to use Firefox if it wasn't so slow
Hope more developers give special support to the gecko engine
Firefox really isn't slow.
Especially when its blocking all the ad bloat that chrome runs on... What in the fuck are these people smoking?
I'm not sure how recently you've used it but I actually find chrome to be much more resource hungry. Maybe it's worth a try again if you haven't?
lol Firefox + adblock beat Chrome any day.
Have you seen the recent benchmarks where Firefox surpassed Chrome? Sure, they may not reflect actual use cases, but it shows that there isn't much of a speed difference.
Firefox isn't slow, you just want an excuse.