Why This Time The New Browser Wars Are Different (theverge.com) 89
The Verge argues that the browser wars "are back, but it's different this time."
The mobile web is broken and unfettered tracking and data sharing have made visiting websites feel toxic, but since the ecosystem of websites and ad companies can't fix it through collective action, it falls on browser makers to use technological innovations to limit that surveillance, however each company that makes a browser is taking a different approach to creating those innovations, and everybody distrusts everybody else to act in the best interest of the web instead of the best interest of their employers' profits... I've been avoiding getting into the precise details of the proposals out there to fix the tracking problem because things are changing so quickly across so many different tracks... Until then, know that there are two important things to know.
First: there are new browser technologies and limits coming that could radically change how ads work and could make it easier for you to protect your privacy no matter what browser you use. Since this is the web, it'll take time, but everybody seems committed. Second: the way many of us think about a Browser War is in terms of marketshare -- and that is the wrong metric this time. There is a browser war, but it won't be won or lost based on who can convince the most people to switch to their browser. Because most people can't or won't switch on the platform that matters: mobile.
In 2020, the desktop is a minor skirmish compared to browsers on phones. On phones, many people aren't really free to choose their browser. That's literally true on the iPhone, which Apple locks down so apps can only use its web rendering technology. And it's for-intents-and-purposes true on Android, where the vast majority of browsers just use Chromium. Yes, there is an Android browser ballot happening in Europe, but it's much too early to know what its effects will be....
The new Browser Wars aren't about who makes the fastest or best browser, they're about whose services you want and whose data policies you trust.
The mobile web is broken and unfettered tracking and data sharing have made visiting websites feel toxic, but since the ecosystem of websites and ad companies can't fix it through collective action, it falls on browser makers to use technological innovations to limit that surveillance, however each company that makes a browser is taking a different approach to creating those innovations, and everybody distrusts everybody else to act in the best interest of the web instead of the best interest of their employers' profits... I've been avoiding getting into the precise details of the proposals out there to fix the tracking problem because things are changing so quickly across so many different tracks... Until then, know that there are two important things to know.
First: there are new browser technologies and limits coming that could radically change how ads work and could make it easier for you to protect your privacy no matter what browser you use. Since this is the web, it'll take time, but everybody seems committed. Second: the way many of us think about a Browser War is in terms of marketshare -- and that is the wrong metric this time. There is a browser war, but it won't be won or lost based on who can convince the most people to switch to their browser. Because most people can't or won't switch on the platform that matters: mobile.
In 2020, the desktop is a minor skirmish compared to browsers on phones. On phones, many people aren't really free to choose their browser. That's literally true on the iPhone, which Apple locks down so apps can only use its web rendering technology. And it's for-intents-and-purposes true on Android, where the vast majority of browsers just use Chromium. Yes, there is an Android browser ballot happening in Europe, but it's much too early to know what its effects will be....
The new Browser Wars aren't about who makes the fastest or best browser, they're about whose services you want and whose data policies you trust.
uMatrix (Score:5, Funny)
Re:uMatrix (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet you've seen plenty of "We respect your privacy" overlays though
(along with unbelievably complex dialogs if you dare to click on "let me see my options").
The idea is to make them stop doing this because they'll get nothing.
(I hope...)
Re:uMatrix (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:uMatrix (Score:5, Informative)
I have found that websites that outright deny you access when their anti adblock systems aren't really worth the trouble of trying to circumvent. You can always find that content on a different site.
But even when you play nice and don't use adblockers, Google's clumsy and oafish ad system usually ends up effectively blocking content anyway.
The most amusing thing is when a giant ad pops up over the content and you dismiss it, a stupid dialog remains asking you why you dismissed it. There is even an option, "Blocks content" which after selecting clicking OK, the empty box is still blocks the content.
The quality of Google employees has apparently dropped considerably.
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We all smile as we close the browser tab
Except when a Slashdot story's featured article is behind anti-adblock. Then you get modded down for making an uninformed comment after having not read the featured article (RTFA).
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Only if you let them, the worst that can happen is that some webs outright deny you access when their anti adblock system triggers.
These adblock detectors are often implemented as a script which hides content when ads are not downloaded within some timeout. If that is the case then disable the script and you will be able to read the site without ads. uMatrix is your friend.
No JS? Enjoy your one paragraph. (Score:3)
Occasionally, I've seen websites configured not to show anything past the first paragraph unless the browser is configured to run non-free JavaScript. This gives the user something to look at above the fold while third-party analytics and adtech spin up. TV Tropes is a mild case, as the examples are in collapsible sections hidden with CSS by default and unhidden once the site's script applies an unhide class to each section's content. This can be overridden with Stylus or another user style extension. But s
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uBlock + element picker (Score:3)
Many of these overlays can be easily removed by filtering on their tags, for example with uBlock "element picker" or direct document element inspection + manual blacklist.
Content rendering is still the job of the browser, and as long as there is a control that allows to express your "I do not want to see that part of the content", not all is lost.
Re:uBlock + element picker (Score:5, Insightful)
Content rendering is still the job of the browser, and as long as there is a control that allows to express your "I do not want to see that part of the content", not all is lost.
One thing I learned early in web development is that everything is a suggestion. I can "suggest" that an image appear here or there but the browser can ignore the formatting and move it elsewhere, or not show it all all. Web developers that think a web page is like laying out a page in a magazine will often make a huge mess of things if someone is using a browser other than what they used to make it, or if there was a "hiccup" in the connection somewhere and not all the layout elements loaded. Your web page shouldn't fall apart just because some irrelevant logo didn't load fast enough.
One thing that really bothers me is the auto-play of videos. If I go to a webpage to read a news article then I don't need a recording of some newscaster eating my bandwidth to read it to me. I certainly don't want my bandwidth eaten up by adverts I don't want to watch or hear. You want adverts on the page? Fine, keep it to text and images, put it inline with the article. I've gone out of my way to NOT buy from places with annoying advertising. If you have a good product then it shouldn't take adverts popping up all over the place with animations and noise for me to buy it.
Of course these annoying adverts aren't the problem they used to be. Browser publishers wised up on how to disable these "features", advertisers learned this turns people off, and with more people using mobile devices to browse the web these tactics just don't work on that kind of interface.
Element inspection and deletion is very useful to dispose of some of the annoyances that remain. I'm thinking I need a web browser that makes these deletions easier.
Lesser of two evil suggestions (Score:2)
One thing I learned early in web development is that everything is a suggestion. I can "suggest" that an image appear here or there but the browser can ignore the formatting and move it elsewhere, or not show it all all.
Users can configure their browsers to ignore suggestions, and sites can detect this and fall back to different suggestions.
One thing that really bothers me is the auto-play of videos. If I go to a webpage to read a news article then I don't need a recording of some newscaster eating my bandwidth to read it to me. I certainly don't want my bandwidth eaten up by adverts I don't want to watch or hear.
But if you block a silent video from autoplaying, a site might fall back to suggesting that your browser display it as an animated GIF. And if you block animated GIF, a site might fall back to suggesting that your browser display it as a PNG or JPEG filmstrip animated with JavaScript or with CSS. Blocking all autoplaying video is a Hard Problem(tm), as shown in this video blocking test [pineight.com]
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I just have a dedicated overlay blocker. Some sites do need whitelisted to function though.
Re: uMatrix (Score:3)
I don't. I use anti-adblock killer and similar script to remove those overlays as well as the GDPR cookie overlays, and Pi-Hole network-wide adblocker running on a Libre arm PC for network wide adblocking, and a VPN I run that uses the Libre as DNS so I get the same benefit of the Pi-Hole on my phone too, no matter where I am. None of that took long to setup, either.
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You're already running a VPN, why isn't that VPN going to your home network, forcing everything to go through the pi-hole?
It is. I guess I didn't communicate that effectively? That is exactly how I'm using it.
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I usually see them for about a second before I close the tab and pick the next down the list in the Google results.
Nope. There's a block list for that. (Score:2)
I recommend going to the settings, and enabling the lists for blocking ad blocker detection, cookie warnings and "social" media.
In any case, adding a new filter is trivial with the built-in element picker.
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I just use Cookie Auto Delete. Ignore those warnings (or block then with a uBlock filter) and any cookies that the site sets get deleted after I leave anyway. Obviously 3rd party cookies are disabled entirely.
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I bet you've seen plenty of "We respect your privacy" overlays though
One of the uBlock 'anti-annoyance' filter lists takes care of those; it must be manually enabled in the lists of filters. I wouldn't travel without it, that filter is vital for hassle-free browsing. I'd go as far to say that whoever maintains those lists is doing a true service to mankind.
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Me too ("real browsers" support AD-blockers...)
Not real browser (Score:2)
"real browsers" support AD-blockers...
The problem is that on mobile platform (specifically Android) the dominant browser isn't a "real browser" (Android Google Chrome doesn't support Web Extensions, so no uBlock/Privacy Badger/DecentralEyes/etc.) luckily on aAdroid we can install Firefox (also support web extension exactly like the desktop version).
For me, Firefox is a realer browser than Google Chrome.
Re: Not real browser (Score:1)
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How practical is it to carry two devices: one to run Firefox with NoScript on Android, and one to run whatever iOS-exclusive app your job requires on iOS?
Re: Not real browser (Score:1)
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Your job doesn't happen to require iOS. The last company to interview me required iOS.
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Why would you be doing your personal browing on your company-provided iPhone?
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1. Company browsing, such as testing that a web application that the company is developing works as intended in Mobile Safari.
2. Many organizations don't provide a device but instead fully or partially compensate employees for the purchase of one.
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PBCAK (Score:2)
What Android phone does NOT allow it's user to install FF as the summary mentioned?
The problem is between the chair and the key... huh, ooops: the image actually breaks.
The problem is between the toilet seat and the siny touch screen: most users are a combination of lazy and clueless.
You need to know that you can change the browser, and you need to know that one peculiar browser doesn't the same Chrome engine as everybody else.
Same problem faced back in the "Internet Explorer" monopoly. Technically it's possible to replace, but seldom users actually did it, and often for a browser which w
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No you don't. (Score:2)
Having a business is not enough. You have to stop thinking like a beggar.
Of course, if you beg clients to give you there money for your shitty product, you're still serving someone.
But if you have something actually great (I know, rare nowadays), all you have to do, is stand there. And say no often enough. They will come and beg *you*.
That hot girl you want, is not serving any guy, now is she? She chooses.
That is why saying no is so important. It defines your worth.
Although saying it on its own, to achieve
INB4 grammar correction. (Score:2)
This is amazing. I did not realize I had written "there" instead of "their" until after submitting. Makes me wonder how often this happens to other not-just-stupid people.
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Corollary: most people are not choosers and should be thankful for the scraps that they get.
Am I wrong?
No fix (Score:2)
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> Since the major browsers are made (Chrome) or at least heavily sponsored (Firefox) by the tracking companies, the browsers will never fix it.
We all know that other teams are taking those rendering engines and doing more interesting things with the browser at a high level.
I think Brave is furthest along this path, but the market is still young and apt is complaining to me this morning that their signing key can't be found on the keyservers, so we're still in the growing-pains phase.
I can't see any reaso
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Since the major browsers are made (Chrome) or at least heavily sponsored (Firefox) by the tracking companies, the browsers will never fix it.
You can say what you like about Firefox but at least the blockers actually work, unlike Chrome, etc.
ask microsoft about "telemetry" (Score:4, Interesting)
browsers ?
I dont think you understand data brokers...
all your linkedin belongs to microsoft
all your github metadata belongs to microsoft
all your dynamics CRM data is enriching microsoft data
all your Windows telemetry belongs to microsoft
browsers are such a small unreliable data point's compared to CRM data even...
good luck
John Jones
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Browser data is 100 times more valuable than that. Also the majority of people don't have LinkedIn, GitHub or CRM anyway.
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all your linkedin belongs to microsoft
all your github metadata belongs to microsoft
all your dynamics CRM data is enriching microsoft data
all your Windows telemetry belongs to microsoft
None of those here
It's not a war (Score:1)
mobile web? (Score:2)
The mobile web is broken?
Hell, the complete mobile system is broken!
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As long as I can still make phone calls or send/receive texts, the mobile system is working. The rest of it is froth.
But the web is broken TOO. :) (Score:2)
Ever since they started treating the WWW as an application platform instead of a large book.
What we need, is a proper distributed application protocol. Something that can fulfill that purpose without all that messy spaghetti UI crap.
Think something like QML and the X protocol, reimagined for this. (So without the disadvantages of X, but with its advantages.
A universal application frontend/client. A true graphical terminal.
And then we kill the BatWhatWGman. And the HTML5 with it.
And use the web for (multimed
Golden age of voyeurism (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as there are enough voyeurs who will pay for other people's personal data, there will be someone there to collect and supply it.
The point is not to try too block it altogether, but to make it cost-ineffective.
For example Firefox plus Privacy Badger, uBlock, No-Script should put enough of a crimp on the data flow to make it lower value than it costs to collect it. Also, clearing all data at the end of each session.
Keep in mind that data collection is not cost-free, those data centers cost a fortune to run and maintain.
Making it more expensive to collect than the revenue generated from selling it is the best way to put a dampen the practice.
Re:Golden age of voyeurism (Score:4, Insightful)
No, have fun with it! Poison the data well with bogus data until they can't tell real from fake and have to throw out the whole sample.
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No, have fun with it! Poison the data well with bogus data until they can't tell real from fake and have to throw out the whole sample.
This! Trying to block the tracking is just a tit for tat game that will go on forever. Sending the good folks all manner of bogus data to make their tracking worthless is the only thing that will stop them in their tracks. As well as tracking data, a little add on that can open a Google page, and surf random things from the spelling dictionary. or even drill down the searches.
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I get 2-4 duplicate hard copies of catalogs (Land's End, J. Jill, Company Store, etc...) in my physical mailbox on a daily basis. It seems that very few people have to respond positively to the hard-copy catalogs (which cost at least a couple of orders of magnitude more than an on-line advertisement) for the business to be profitable. Go ahead and try to overwhelm the on-line tracker people, but if they get 1% signal and 99% noise, it's probably going to continue.
Just making their lives a little more difficult. Especially when you send opposing data to track. If they send out 99 percent more junk email they will be engaging in a very impressive DoS sort of blanket.
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The point isn't that you don't get spam. You do. And will. And probably will get more. The idea is to give them misleading information so their profiling goes haywire.
I also picked up the hobby of collecting information about the privacy harvesting process. But it's essentially boring. I started to use different mail addresses with different companies to see which of them sell your private information to whom. But in the end I had to realize, they all sell it. To everyone.
Online ads are increasing... (Score:2)
Re:Online ads are increasing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the price increase has more to do with the fact that online advertising is now dominated by a few players, who are all extolling the virtues of targeted ads, and using that as well as their near-monopoly to demand higher per-click prices. The advertisers see little benefit of that targeting tech, and if you define an ad's value as the benefit to the advertiser in terms of the cost per conversion (which is a pretty good measure), then yes, their value is declining: every $ spent on advertising is now bringing less actual sales. Looking at those numbers, it would not seem to make much sense for vendors to engage in a loudness war. You want targeting that actually works, not clicks that bring no business.
It looks like the improved click-through rate mostly benefits the advertising platforms: they have 50% fewer unclicked impressions which means more room for more ads, and more clicks translates directly to more revenue. So the platforms have every reason to engage in a loudness war. I suspect this is driven by them, rather than merchants demanding a more prominent presence.
Who stands to profit (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't take a genius to look at how each big tech player makes their money, and know what their motivations are. At the very least, some of them have very conflicting motivations between profit and privacy.
Obviously, Google and Facebook each profit hugely from tracking users. Google's profit comes from selling advertising, and selling advertising works best when you know that a person visited a web page about coffee makers earlier in the day, so now you show them an ad for coffee makers on an entirely different website. In fact, tracking users in this way is the crux of their entire existence. Facebook is in the exact same boat, and in some ways Facebook is even worse. Any website that adds the Facebook "Share" or "Like" buttons are allowing FB to track all traffic to that page. Further, it is clear that FB and Google do at least some degree of data sharing, as I see ads within the FB app itself that are from Google that are the same highly targeted ads I see on web pages.
While FB doesn't obviously produce a web browser, they most certainly have one. And it is actually massively, massively used on mobile devices. ANY URL you pull up within the FB app or messenger is rendered in their built-in browser. So their access to your browsing history, and depending on the platform and implementation, your cookies, is a given. This is a major PITA for many developers, such as myself, because the FB internal browser does everything it can to keep users from breaking out of that environment or using any browser technology that pulls a user away from FB. For example, Deep Linking, Apple Smart Banners, push notifications, and more, are all unsupported when browsing within FB, and getting a user to navigate menus to open the URL directly in Safari, Chrome, etc is pretty much a non-starter.
Microsoft has mostly thrown in their hand in this game, as they are canceling Edge and their own html rendering engine. While they do have Bing, it is not a hugely profitable search engine (and more specifically, MS doesn't make the bulk of their profit by selling advertising space anyway, like FB and Google do). So they could have been a good, neutral proponent of privacy in the browser arena, but they aren't even a player now.
That really only leaves Firefox, which is *mostly* neutral (it appears over 90% of their revenue comes from Google paying for search engine hits, to the tune of 9 figures annually, so ticking off Google isn't in their best interests), and Apple, who actually stands to gain financially by putting the user first.
Apple is in a great position. Every time it's major news that the FBI or Trump or whoever is pressuring them to unlock a criminal's phone... my gosh, you might as well just be handing Apple cash. So having a very privacy-centric browser fits this narrative perfectly.
So anyway, I said all that to say that I don't trust Chrome truly being focused on user privacy any more than Google feels they *must* do this to not lose too much market share. Claiming that there is a war for maximum privacy and Google is actually in that battle is nothing but a bunch of PR.
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Obviously, Google and Facebook each profit hugely from tracking users. Google's profit comes from selling advertising, and selling advertising works best when you know that a person visited a web page about coffee makers earlier in the day, so now you show them an ad for coffee makers on an entirely different website.
That's sufficient, but not necessary. Another way to accomplish the same goal would be to do all the work of figuring out what your interests are locally, then have the browser just send a list of interests, completely obscuring any information that identifies you as an individual or could your browsing of this site with any other site. Then the ad system can serve personalized ads, without any need to track you.
Based on some stories from last week, it appears that this is the approach the Chrome team i
The same reason Star Wars is back (Score:2)
but different this time.
All the old tricks don't work on a mobile device (Score:5, Interesting)
Pop-up and pop-under adverts don't work on a mobile device. Auto-play videos often don't have sound on a mobile device either, this makes them unnoticed or easy to ignore. If there's an advert that plays before someone can read the content on a page then people looking for something fast will simply go somewhere else.
Cookies on mobile devices don't work the same as they do on a desktop, and this limits tracking the user. With people moving from home WiFi, to cellular connections, to WiFi at their work or whatever, then this makes tracking by IP address more difficult. Efforts to use some kind of scripting on the browser is likely to fail as mobile browsers can't handle scripting like a desktop.
Newer tactics to track mobile users like taking GPS coordinates is starting to fail now that people realize this is possible and disable this when they can. Given the growth in advertising I've seen for VPN services I'm wondering how many people are going further to thwart such tracking by this means.
This isn't a "browser war" because it's not the browsers fighting for market share. The assumption with the "browser war" was that people would keep the same device but switch their browser. In this age of "the browser is the computer" this assumption does not hold, and I'm not sure the article makes this clear.
I believe this is more analogous to the computer platform wars from before. This is like people fighting over Apple II or Commodore 64, or Macintosh vs. Windows vs. OS/2. This is a platform war with Apple and Google being the biggest players, and Microsoft barely in the running.
I always thought it curious that Microsoft was a company that rarely made hardware, and when they tried they often failed. Their reliance on other companies to produce the hardware to run their software was something I thought was quite unique, and something that I thought might end up causing their demise. They certainly hung on, that's for sure. One thing that saved them was the familiarity it gave for people that used Microsoft where they worked and then could use that familiarity at home. This is not something that holds now, people are more familiar with their phones and tablets than their PC at work. If "the browser is the computer" holds then it will be interesting to see how Microsoft fits in as time moves on.
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A VPN service will be detected the same way not displaying an ad is detected.
The user will see the content removed and replaced by a request to stop using the VPN as it not good for how ads work.
When the VPN is stopped the content will be displayed.
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this makes them unnoticed or easy to ignore
You don't browse much on mobile, do you! Every page is so chock full of ads, that it takes minutes to load, and every time a new picture or video loads, the whole page re-flows itself, forcing you to scroll back to where you were.
Unnoticed? They are so in your face that it's hard to notice the actual content!
What wars? (Score:1)
You mean Chrome against Chrome against Chrome against Chrome against Firewishitwaschromefox?
Like Panasonic "versus" JVC in the 90s.
"...it falls on browser makers ..." (Score:3)
Legislation (Score:2)
Mobile web is 99% webkit/blink (Score:2)
Browser Wars 2.0 are already over... (Score:2)
And Google/Chromium have already won this round. Chrome's market dominance has gotten to the point where Apple and Microsoft aren't even bothering to maintain their own browser rendering engines, and just create a different UI skin for Google's.
This really isn't a good thing, either, as now malware authors only need to target one platform to find an exploit that potentially targets over 80% of the browser users. Not cool.
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Blink is a fork of WebKit (which is itself a fork of KHTML).
AFAIK, Safari still uses their own WebKit engine, not Google's Blink.
Which means there's still three desktop browsers: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, but you need to be running macOS to be able to use Safari.
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And Google/Chromium have already won this round. Chrome's market dominance has gotten to the point where Apple and Microsoft aren't even bothering to maintain their own browser rendering engines, and just create a different UI skin for Google's.
This really isn't a good thing, either, as now malware authors only need to target one platform to find an exploit that potentially targets over 80% of the browser users. Not cool.
Also fortunately not true. Where is Apple using the Chromium renderer? Safari is based on WebKit, with Apple contributing their changes back to the open source community.
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Chromium is based on WebKit, right? If it is, it would seem that all three browsers have a similar code base. Only Firefox is using something substantially different out of the remaining major browser versions.
ISP advert-injection is crazy in Argentina (Score:3)
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...you know the ones where they try to get you to "update" your video player with dozens of bogus options.
Um, no.
IT is called competition. (Score:1)
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This is an American website. There can only ever be two choices, and everything is war.
Re: IT is called competition. (Score:1)
Because it is apps and browsers (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatâ(TM)s the biggest browser in the world? Chrome? Nope, Facebook. The wars are totally different this time because apps are super customized locked down proprietary browsers solely for the sake of delivering ads and lock-in . There is nothing you can not do in a native browser that FB does in their app. So for browsers we have Chrome, FB, Instagram, Snap, Safari, Edge, Firefox.
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I don't care if it embeds a web rendering engine or not, if you can't access the regular web with it then it's not a web browser.
"feelings" journalism (Score:1)
iPhones run several browsers (Score:2)
FTA:
That's literally true on the iPhone, which Apple locks down so apps can only use its web rendering technology.
I have Safari, Firefox, and Chrome on my iPhone 6s.
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No, they run 1 browser engine with different front ends. It's all webkit.
Webtest.app (Score:1)
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heh "new browser" wars (Score:1)