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There’s no argument to use chrome either. Hopefully they will lose users.

Microsoft needs to be broken up as well, but that didn't/isn't happening either. Do we have a justice system that will protect people?

> Google needs to be broken up

It's very unlikely that any break-up would result in Chrome floating off on its own.

Between Wordpress's bullshit and capitalist bullshit like Google doing things like this, I'm honestly just in utter shock at what the internet actually _is_ now adays.

What a dystopia.

Why should the developer do that? So Google won’t lose users? So uBlock Origin won’t lose users?

In the end there are alternatives, like using Firefox. Saying the developer ‘should’ do something when you admit that something is worse than what he has going now is super weird.

Personally I think if Google wants to kill their browser engine for everybody who hates ads, we ‘should’ welcome it, because it will hopefully cause Chromium’s browser dominance to fade at least somewhat, and Google’s monopolising position in terms of browser market share is what enabled Google to make this Manifest 3 decision in the first place.

There's plenty to speculate or inquire about without jumping straight to assumptions about a stranger's personal motives. What about all of the users that haven't been flipped yet, all of the ones using Chrome based browsers still supporting v2 but using the Chrome Web Store for the extension at the moment, all of the users and corporations using ExtensionManifestV2Availability who won't be flipped for a year? Heck, maybe it's even a good thing users have Chrome tell them the old extension is expressly disabled so they can find out the limitations in the new one and chose for themselves rather than have their extension's functionality cut silently made for them.

Swiching from chrome to firefox at work, this was the final straw. Internet/youtube etc is almost unusable without uBlock origin. Glad I already use FF privately.

Immediately moved to Firefox after "ad topics" were introduced.

https://youtu.be/2RmUMmUj3u8?si=PmRdQqMs3KURXytI

I used Firefox for 5 years until I met my husband, who pointed out how much time I waste dealing with Firefox rendering bugs and freezing and how much it aggravates him. After the 15th time I switched to Chrome and it's helped my relationship grow. But I use uBlock Origin religiously so it's time to go hunting again...

And when all those idiots die because the spent time destroying the very society they lived in, all the people that choose not to poison the well will be free to make the world a better place. It's not going to last forever. Their time is limited.

> Imo, Google's plan is to make Chrome a sealed OS like Windows, where MS has all the control and users have no control.

ChromeOS is already (albeit a different) thing

You know that's the argument used against people switching channels during advertising breaks, right?

And against the mute button?

And against the VCR?

And against DVRs?

When I buy the newspaper I don't read every ad in the paper. I might even skip an entire section of the paper. If you have the money you could even pay someone to clip out the articles and get no advertising at all.

History therefore 1) provides strong evidence that the unwritten social contract you are thinking has a clause that people are free to do what they can to avoid advertisements, and 2) shows that pro-advertising people will try to guilt trip them over exercising that clause.

Just like you are doing.

If there's a social contract, it goes both ways, and it wasn't the operators of user agents who broke it. They can't expect me to let their ads and trackers load if it's going to add 20MB and potentially compromise my system because they don't actually control where any of it comes from.

The websites are welcome to expect payment if they so desire. They chose to host the content for free, and we get to choose which of that content we consume, and which of it we block. They have as much of a right to advertise as we have to block advertisements.

>There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads.

I'm not seeing the "unwritten social contract" when I look up something on Wikipedia, or download an old textbook or manual or something off Archive.Org. I don't remember seeing advertising on either of those services.

You should have control over what content gets displayed on your screen.

This is an ad network using another unrelated product (chrome) to enforce its market dominance.

Except the “social contract” is manifested as laws and enforced by the state.

Currently at least 50% of online ads are outright illegal in most parts of the world.

Nobody is morally required to have their legal rights violated to get information. Period.

>If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system.

No, it wasn't: it was on what I would call "the ignorance system". The vast majority of users were simply too lazy or ignorant to install ad-blockers. Ads made money because most users had no idea they could be blocked, or because the users just didn't care. Hang around non-technical people and talk to them about this and you'll see: many users just don't see what the big deal is, while others will admit to finding the ads annoying but don't even know it's possible to block them easily.

However, this is slowly changing, as 1) word spreads about ad-blockers, which isn't just word-of-mouth, but all these news articles lately probably help too, and 2) the ads get more and more annoying and intrusive. Remember how everyone wanted pop-up blockers 20 years ago when those became so popular with advertisers? It took a while there too, for word to get out about the ability to block pop-ups, but eventually it became the norm and was even built into browsers because the pop-ups were SO annoying and even destructive.

>But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service

Yes, they should, if they want to. Contracts require two parties to agree to something, and there is no such thing here. You can't just come up with a business model (e.g. pop-up ad supported website) and then claim there's a "social contract" in place when you just implemented this unilaterally.

The REAL social contract that's in place is the HTTP system the entire WWW is built on, where you send a request to a web server and it sends a response. What you do with the data you receive is up to you. It's absolutely no different than watching a TV show (in pre-DVR days) and then muting the volume or leaving the room when the commercials come on. Or better yet, in 2002 buying a DVR and just skipping the commercials.

You do have a point that a lot of services are funded by ads, and depend on enough people seeing these to sustain operations financially. But that's a business model chosen by these companies; they're free to choose a different business model if too many people start blocking ads. If people block ads, it's their own fault anyway, for making the ads too annoying. Back in the days of banner ads, almost no one cared about blocking them, because they just weren't that bad, just like no one really cared much about all the ads in newspapers. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They brought ad-blocking on themselves by their own actions.