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

[Awesomeness]

Tracking, I have no problem with. If I'm to be presented ads, I'd rather have ads that might interest me.

Great. Then opt-in. But tracking by default is a no-go.

[Luke_Wolf]

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.

There really isn't a future for the web. Not as we currently know it (HTML+JS+CSS). Now that we have WebAssembly, things are going to evolve in the manner that they should have done in the first place.

[SilverMachine]

I realize blocking ads cuts revenue for sites. The problem is that ads are dangerous. Webdevs must accept this and think of new ways to make money. Without putting their visitors at risk. As long as I can get shit I don't want on my PC. Without my knowing. I block everything I can. Too bad for the revenue. But I can't help it when a webdev puts me at risk. So it works 2 ways.

[Rich Oliver]

I do think we've stumbled into insanity. Seriously its now, immoral not to look at ads. It is my moral duty to look at ads. Looking at ads is now part of the duties of the progressive right on citizens along with electric cars, recycling and buying fair trade coffee.

I'm totally overloaded with my own open source software projects, which I'm not getting any income from yet, but if someone wants to develop an ad watcher app, I'll happily run it when I'm away from my computer. Perhaps with Wayland we could include an ad watcher as part of the screen saver, that would automatically start browsing and clicking on ads from my favourite sites. The Ad watcher could of course emulate any browser any machine. It could even use proxies to emulate multiple browser /ad clickers. Because of course you don't actually need me to look at ads, you just need the HTTP Get requests.

The whole point of ads was that the viewer didn't have a choice. Most ads are an unwanted intrusion, a deliberate violation of the individuals personal sovereignty. If an ex girl friend or boy friend follows you around demanding you to reconsider breaking up, demanding your attention, they're called a stalker. They are socially condemned. They may be arrested and charged. But corporate stalking though advertising is not only legal it is socially sanctioned. Adverts have become politically popular because they are a mechanism of wealth redistribution for market economies, albeit a highly inefficient mechanism. Advertising allows poor people to use services that are funded by richer people looking at adverts and then going on to buy products and other services.

The great paradox is that information technology exploded under the liberal market economies and failed to develop under the socialist planned economies. The Soviet Union seemed to have a competitive economic model in the 1930's, 40s and 50s, when Steel production and heavy manufacturing dominated the advanced economies. Yet software production fits the classical supply/ demand market model extremely poorly, where as steel production, ship building and the other classic heavy engineering fits it almost perfectly.