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.
That’s not even the biggest level of “we told you this would happen.”
They pulled this shit previously with other standards (WebHID). Where they proposed a terrible standard, and then implemented it ignoring all feedback. Only last time it played out over months, and this time… weeks?
Sweet jesus.
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.
FF has tab containers which, while I haven’t used much myself, seem pretty similar to tab groups from a quick search. Edit: Also looks like there’s “Simple tab groups” extension which maybe even more similar to what you may want
Containers have nothing to do with tab groups. One is an organisation tool and the other is a privacy tool.
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
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…
I’ve long been trying to de-googlify myself, but it’s certainly ramped up this year.
Been trying out Kagi and just set up proton mail account. Not sure what I’ll land on in the end but it’s nice trying out newer services.
Any recommendations for free email providers?
> Any recommendations for free email providers?
I’m using proton. I like it a lot.
Register your own domain name with Gandi and they gift you free email with a choice of two webmail interfaces. It’s really good, and owning the domain name enables moving to a different provider later if you wish.
Nothing is free. How would they make money as a company to pay employees and pay hosting bills?
All these big tech companies are free exactly because they are preditory on users.
Pay for good email like Fastmail or Proton.
I understand the sentiment, but email is a necessary part of modern life and not everyone has the luxury of paying for it.
A lot of things are necessary parts of modern live and you also have to pay for it, a mobile plan for your smartphone for example.
I had a smartphone but not a mobile plan for years. People can get very creative when times are tough.
Don’t get me wrong, I think everybody should have the guarantee for social participation, I’m just saying that Email is no exception. If you did not have a mobile plan for whatever reason, you were just not participating.
Not really; I could do everything everyone else was doing; just not make phone calls or send sms texts. I used wifi to connect to the net and I could still make emergency calls. Im actually considering going back to that to save money, lol.
I mean, Proton, which you just mentioned, also has a free tier, which is just as usable as Gmail is for 90% of people, myself included.
Proton’s free tier is a step to right direction, and at least they don’t run a huge advertisement company that could benefit from the free tier users’ data. And if you pay for Proton Unlimited, you also get access to SimpleLogin’s Premium tier which is nice. I just found this out when I finally bit the bullet and changed away from Gmail over to Proton. Now I don’t have to expose my real email address to some random never-to-be-seen-again websites or campaigns if I don’t want to.
If one has enough motivation, time and interest in purchasing their own domain, you can get one step forward with changing away from Gmail. Then you can pay something like 5€/month for Proton Mail Plus, use your own domain as your email address and if one day you find a better email provider, you could just change the MX records for that service and wouldn’t have to go through all your accounts and update the new address to all the places.
I had pondered moving away from Gmail years and years ever since I found out Google doesn’t have any real customer support and HN had stories where people had suddenly been locked out of their Google accounts because of some silly reason and couldn’t get their accounts back without some inside connections. At one point most of my digital life was at the mercy of Google and losing access to my Gmail or Google Calendar or G Drive would have been a disaster. Reading all these web-DRM news reminded me that I should continue de-googlefying my life and finally made the change. Firefox has been my primary browser for years and I moved over to iPhone with my phone.
Don’tbe evil.Be Evil, Do Ads
There might have be a time when Google tried not to be evil, but they’ve been Satin himself for a good number of years now. It just took them a while to realize the irony of their mission statement. It’s funny I used to get mad at Microsoft for being evil, but they’ve got nothing on Google.
They removed ‘don’t be evil’ from their code of conduct 5 years ago.
Can you explain this to a layman what this does?
It’s DRM, but for the whole web.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
Web dev here. It enforces the original markup and code from a server to be the markup and code that the browser interprets and executes, preventing any post-loading modifications.
That sounds a bit dry, but the implications are huge. It means:
- ad blockers won’t work (the main reason for Google’s ploy)
- many, if not most, other browser extensions won’t work (eg.: accessibility, theming, anti-malware)
- people are going to start running into a lot of scam ads that ad blockers would otherwise prevent
- malicious websites will be able to operate with impunity since you cannot run security extensions to prevent them
- web developers are going to be crippled for lack of debugging ability
These are just a few things off the top of my head. There are endless and very dangerous implications to WEI. This is very, very bad for the web and antithesis of how it’s supposed to be.
TBL is probably experiencing a sudden disturbance in the force.
deleted by creator
If this becomes heavily used, I will probably go back to reading books for entertainment instead of browsing the web.
It’s a way to disable ad blockers.
Presently web servers send data to your browser, which can arrange the content however you wish, because it’s your browser on your device. Excluding content you don’t like is fairly trivial.
This drm stuff will basically make the browser refuse to display anything unless the whole page is unaltered.
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.
EU really is the one doing all the good work. Meanwhile, the US government is useless as a government for its size.
corporate-owned america, baby!
Why aren’t the vaccuous, corporate whore sociopaths defending our freedoms!?!
The US government being useless against megacorps is not a bug, it’s a feature
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 mean that’s all I can really do.
Unfortunately when my bank or other critical institution rejects Firefox for failure to use attestation, I can’t even do that. I’ll be forced to use Chrome. Firefox would have to adopt WEI to remain compatible. In that case I can use Firefox, but it would be the same as using Chrome.
I’d say the monopoly Google has with Chrome is way more threatening than in the early 2000’s with MS and IE. That threat resulted in an anti-trust lawsuit, but not a peep from any government about the destruction Google is doing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And this is the consequence of browser vendors relying on Chromium.
To be honest - easy to pull a Microsoft a fork a branch without the crap.
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.
This won’t be used just to block ads. If you’re signed in to Google, this DRM will be used to track you, as well. VPNs will be useless because the tracking won’t be done through your IP address, but through your browser, identified by DRM and tied to your Google account.
That’s what this is really about. Knowing, where you go, what you see, what you buy, who you associate with. Forcing you to watch ads is just the icing on the cake
Can someone ELI5 me on what this is and why it is bad?
google want websites to be able to check whether you’re running an approved browser. And they also want to be the ones to have the authority to decide what an “approved browser” is.
Given that google is an advertising company that owns a browser, constantly tries to cripple ad blockers they will probably simply start saying that any browser that doesn’t implement the stuff they want (crippled ad blockers) is “untrustworthy”
I guess I’ll never use Chrome or Google products again then
Fuck you Google.
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.
Well, I don’t know about now, but this Microsoft employee says some time ago an outrage worked.
From what I read in the related links they only claim to have applied pressure, they didn’t cave because of that pressure though. Again it seemed to be about money.
“The only saving grace was Vista’s very painful and long development period where Palladium was eventually killed so Vista could actually ship.”
Right, so outrage that they couldn’t get enough money.
I wonder how many people will be ok with this, considering that there’s a large portion of folks who does not know what’s AdBlock
Could there be lawsuits over this?
If there will be, google is powerful than most governments. They know there will be some lawsuit and they are prepared for it. Its just cost of doing business.
Google isn’t more powerful than any governments it’s just the USA that allows them to have power.
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.
I run Chrome to use work (Google) email and services, and Firefox for as much as possible. The challenge is that about a 10% of things I use only work properly on Chrome. It’s IE6 all over again, history repeating itself.
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.
