KDE / Qt Fiber Web Browser To Take The Reasonable Approach To Dealing With Ads

[Awesomeness]

I don't talk about framework but about graphic engine....what it uses? blink, qtwebengine webkit, geko or servo or other one?

Is it really that hard to click that related link directly below the blog post? https://kver.wordpress.com/2015/08/2...es-and-breeze/

[bug77]

Fwiw, I think this guy is going to make Fiber do the only sane thing a browser should do: display pages as they are intended to be displayed. Any further modifications should be left to extensions and the end user.
But what I still don't know is why Fiber? What is it bringing to the table that isn't already there?

[DeepDayze]

One of the reasons I don't even consider leaving Firefox is because I trust nothing else to provide reliably-functioning *cough*chrome*cough* equivalents for my stack of half a dozen tracking-blocking extensions. (To be fair, ad-blocking comes as a side-effect of tracking blocking... but I do also block ads for performance reasons. Firefox is sluggish and stuttery as it is and ?Block gives noticeable speed-ups.)

Also ads use up valuable bandwidth, especially if you are on a mobile device that has a restricted data plan.

[Almindor]

Implicit notrack/noscript and ad blocking is the future. I realize this is a big problem for a lot of legit. sites like Phoronix or a lot of newspapers, but this is how it is. 99% of the web is overflowing with horrible privacy invading ads and scripts and anyone willing to NOT have "protection" going there will be in for a lot of eventual trouble.

Not to mention indirectly earning scumbags money by giving them all the information about your private life. Revenue through ads is dead, Michael and everyone else needs to realize this. If there is no alternative, well then too bad for everyone, but that's life.

I'm not happy about the situation but pretending it's not there and asking people to use unreasonable defaults is just stupid.

Sad thing is, the uneducated majority will swallow a private flash-like extension again that will force proprietary ads-included formats down everyone's throats once the big guns realize ad blockers are becoming too wide-spread.

After all it takes to get <insert stupid content here> is to install this one super-cool browser extension and you're ready to view are ads!

[duby229]

Implicit notrack/noscript and ad blocking is the future. I realize this is a big problem for a lot of legit. sites like Phoronix or a lot of newspapers, but this is how it is. 99% of the web is overflowing with horrible privacy invading ads and scripts and anyone willing to NOT have "protection" going there will be in for a lot of eventual trouble.

In fact I don't know if there is a future for the web at all. I mean we are all fairly in the know, but most people aren't. I do a lot of PC repair, where most of the money I earn comes from, and those are mostly windows machines. I have customers ask me all the time what can I do for their machine to prevent it from getting infected? I always tell them there is nothing I can do, if they browse the web it will get infected again. The only thing that can be done is to strictly limit web browsing to those few sites that they know won't infect their machine. Any browsing outide of those it's inevitable.

The only solution I can think of is don't browse the web at all. Which can only mean that the web has no future. The current situation is totally unsustainable. The status quo is not acceptable. You will be tracked and you will get infected.

[Awesomeness]

But what I still don't know is why Fiber? What is it bringing to the table that isn't already there?

A proper Servo-capable browser.

[Luke]

Someone claimed that Evercookies and strong trackers cannot be beat. If trackers were unbeatable Torbrowser would not be able to defeat the Great Firewall of China and Iranian censorship authorities. What you probably can't do is simultaniously defeat the trackers and make all websites work! On the one hand, I tested by heavily hacked Firefox install against Evercookie, running it in RAM as always. Evercookie could track it across one session but lost all data on closing and reopening, which includes writing a new .mozilla directory from a never-surfed source directory. Known fingerprinters like BlueCava and the typing cadence analyists at Scout Analytics are blocked in /etc/hosts. Google and Facebook are blocked both there and in NoScript.

There is of course a price for everything. Most commercial sites on my machines open to broken pages, that is expected. On a Linux machine with the strongest possible blocking and security by default, you will find that the malicious links in emails and websites go to empty pages and sites that don't work. This is good, but so will many links to commercial news articles. On the other hand,their paywalls won't work either, and those news sites with deliberately porous paywalls will have unrestricted access to basic text and often the photo thumbnails. The hard paywall sites will be all the way broken, but they are anyway if you don't use money online. Few if any commercial news sites' videos will work, but that's totally acceptable given that's most of their cost. You will have to stop using things like Facebook and Google, as you won't be able to log in without disabling your security. In fact, I recommend blocking both when not using Tor

I speak as one who posts activist news to deliberately non-monetized websites and sends video to Archive.org instead of Youtube. My desired future for the Internet would be the collapse of all the ISP's and their replacement with mesh networks, plus the collapse of the entire cloud server model and it's replacement with distributed hosting. For instance, to watch video you would provide bandwidth and storage for video with your own hardware, not watch ads. The entire network could be designed to make leeching without providing bandwidth impossible if it became necessary to do so, or simply to throttle connection when bandwidth in became too high a percentage of total bandwidth.

[Jonathan Silverblood]

Disclaimer: I already paid for phoronix premium.

My view on this matter is more personal. I believe such time that the default is to give users the choice, rather then the developers, all who can should encourage users to take action and make a choice. With regard to ads, the choices should be at least the following: "Do you want to display ads?" and "Do you want ads to be customized to your profile?" with proper information and notices on what the options really mean. That includes telling the user that sites they visit will or will not get paid, and informing the user of the dependencies of their choices such that "By not allowing customized ads, some sites will be unable to show ads at all and will thus not gain any income from your visits, furthermore this sets the configuration choice for Do-Not-Track to enabled."

I don't give squat about what webbrowser developers think, it's the users that matter.

On a sidenote, I also think there should be an option to pay the site a very small amount each visit to prevent adds, and that it should be built into the protocol. That would give the content providers the same revenue and the users the speed benefits of not having to deal with the advertisment code.

[ssokolow]

Also ads use up valuable bandwidth, especially if you are on a mobile device that has a restricted data plan.

True. I didn't mention that because I have no smartphone and went out of my way to find an unlimited home DSL plan. (I'm a bit of a DRM-free games collector and don't want to have to clutter up my TODO list with "download X GiB of new GOG.com games if there's room left at the end of the month.")

[bug77]

In fact I don't know if there is a future for the web at all. I mean we are all fairly in the know, but most people aren't. I do a lot of PC repair, where most of the money I earn comes from, and those are mostly windows machines. I have customers ask me all the time what can I do for their machine to prevent it from getting infected? I always tell them there is nothing I can do, if they browse the web it will get infected again. The only thing that can be done is to strictly limit web browsing to those few sites that they know won't infect their machine. Any browsing outide of those it's inevitable.

The only solution I can think of is don't browse the web at all. Which can only mean that the web has no future. The current situation is totally unsustainable. The status quo is not acceptable. You will be tracked and you will get infected.

Actually, this problem is very easy to fix: advertisers must stop using JavaScript (or any kind of script) to display ads.
Tracking, I have no problem with. If I'm to be presented ads, I'd rather have ads that might interest me. I'm not delusional enough to believe I'm so important to a commercial entity that they will actually dedicate resource to find out how many times a day I visit Phoronix. But running arbitrary scripts is a big no-no and the point where NoScript comes into play.