Life finds a way

Yarr

And then the plan to force everyone to abandon Firefox whether they like it or not.

1. Implement the misfeatures.
2. Movie and music websites will be the first to announce requiring DRM to be able to watch movies or listen to tunes.
3. The banks will be next. "For your safety, you must use an Official Approved Browser™ to be allowed access to your money!"
4. Then ecommerce sites. "You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything."
5. Then comes the social media sites. For your safety, of course...

At that point, the userbase of anything that's not Chrome or not DRM'd to death will be so eroded that virtually everyone else will abandon Firefox support, DRM will get enabled by default. Also, comes the lobbyists to Congress demanding changes to the DMCA to throw users in prison who dare to try to crack the DRM to block ads. "Ad-blocking is stealing!"

Google is such a bad company. People should discontinue use of all their software and at the very least stop using chrome or chromium. They’ve got the internet by the balls.

We warned you about Chrome. We told you bro.

The year is 2023, every single major tech companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No. 1. And the only Hero we have is the EU, will it be able to save the day?

Google and Chrome really need to be broken up. Maybe people should start writing (physical) letters to the FTC asking to review Google's recent actions as monopolistic behavior.

It wouldn't be the first time. But showing the interest is the best way to get the ball rolling that we can do.

The internet is unusable without adblockers.

We waste intelligent minds on this rubbish when we are facing an existential crisis in climate change.

I’ve tried internet without adblock and it’s almost unusable.

Why's everyone blaming the engineers lol, pretty sure they're just doing what they're told right?

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. And it's a death knell of the internet as we know it. It won't be today or tomorrow, but slowly, over the next few years, expect surface level internet services to be extremely user unfriendly. I expect normies to just accept their fate and pay access fees to literally every website and service they use, while more tech savvy or explorative people might find their way to federated spaces or Usenet, etc.

Man I love using Firefox.

I find it disturbing that there are people out there who spend much of their time thinking about new ways to get people to see adverts. Surely it falls under the "bullshit jobs" category that David Graeber once wrote about.

I don't know if it's the Google engineers that "want" to do this

News headline, October 2078

Google finds users are covering their ears and closing their eyes; releases nanobots to force eyes open and lock hands behind back.

Ad pushing is only part of the problem… These tokens will kill the #InternetArchive Wayback machine. It’s anti-library tech.

Anti-bot tech is inherently anti-human.

There are no laws stating that we have to watch or see ads, so forcing us to watch them feels like a huge overstep. Companies shouldn't be able to have this much control over a public service.

This is why I recently switched back to Firefox.

Alright, today is oficially the day I switch to Firefox

And another question: did someone already lay out a roadmap to google's collapse?

Right now we're going through a financial crisis, big tech needs to start making proper money so they try to squeeze the users. Google hopes to "drm the internet" to maximise ad revenue. Let's assume they succeed. 3 years from now the dystopia of dead adblockers is live, google and other leeches make bank off ads.

But there's no more adblockers and no more ad revenue left to squeeze out (because every internet user is already chained to a screen and force fed ads within ads). And shareholders demand increase in profits. What do they do then? Is there any hint of a long-term strategy? How long before the maximum theoretical ad revenue is reached and plateaus? Then COVID29 or something comes, fed raises rastes again and...?

I'm not even joking, shit like this is bringing back my depression.

why has no news site also added, "and they are using their monopoly over the web to do it" as part of their title. 😭

When will they understand, if I'm introduced to your product through an advertisement, I do not want to buy it. I will make a point not to. Do not annoy me. If your product is good enough, it will be bought.

The engineers to blame are

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser

https://github.com/yoavweiss

It's fun to see capitalism doubling down on itself. 🫠

I don't know that we're watching the internet collapse. I think we are witnessing tech companies respond to growing financial pressure by accelerating their monetization plans, and it's blowing up in their faces. The result will be the reinvention of the web. I don't necessarily know if decentralized apps are going to take off, but I do think the internet will shift towards smaller (possibly open source) sites in retaliation.

Google executives want this, NOT the engineers.

Smart people coming up with smart ideas to do dumb things. When will we start shaming such people?

Similar things are done with TV and streaming unfortunately. You ever noticed how commercials/ads have louder volume than whatever content you're watching? It's intentional. If you're someone who doesn't skip them and doesn't mute them, they want you to be able to hear them from another room and then they hope you'll come back to see the ad. It's so dumb.