if ads were normal and unobtrusive. We wouldn't need ad blockers. Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate. I had been running an ad blocker for so many years that when a friend (who doesn't use an ad blocker) showed me a website, the unfiltered experience was horrifying.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
1419 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
66067 readers
4905 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I love this movie but honestly it's getting to the point where I can't even watch it without getting upset.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate.
Its even worse than just hurting usability. Lots of ad networks are not policing their advertising customers and malicious payloads have been injected from ads. So allowing ads is a security risk because of the lack of security at the various ad networks.
It's even worse when you consider the entire point of advertising is to deliver a targeted payload at a very specific demographic. So you can target IT folks of a specific company, etc.
uBO is not just an ad blocker, its almost a firewall against malware and a tracking filter
Im old enough to remember the internet before ads, and with ads became a thing and you had to make sure to keep your speakers low/off all the time less some screaming loud ad popped up somewhere to burst your eardrums at 2am.
There were so many obnoxious, visual cancer ads.
Then they became actual digital cancer by being injection points for viruses and malware, and thus adblockers became a necessity.
And they remain a necessity to this day, for the same reason as they were 20+ years ago.
and yet the ad servers want to blame the end user for adblocking.
not their absolute refusal to moderate or police any of the content they deliver.
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU WON!!!
I was about to comment something similar but you said it before I did. Sometimes I'll mistakenly open YouTube with Chrome and then I realize I messed up because I have to sit through three, sometimes one-minute long ads just to watch a twenty second video. I'll typically just nope out and switch to Firefox. The worst thing is they're unskippable and I swear for some of them the ad actually pauses if you switch to another tab or browser. I'm getting ads even on super old videos so I'm pretty sure it isn't all to do with the channels themselves monetizing their videos.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I went to help out a friend, a few years ago, he runs vanilla Edge, I can't believe anyone actually uses the internet like that.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I swapped to Chrome years ago because YouTube stopped working right on Firefox.
I've started the process of swapping back to Firefox after 10 years with Chrome over this.
There were a few extensions you could run in firefox that told youtube that it was totally for reals being accessed by a chrome browser.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
Use firefox
And if you don't like Firefox, use one of the Firefox forks. Some of them are very Chrome-like.
load more comments
(8 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
And that is why I went to Firefox once Google announced this bullshit.
Swapping is pretty painless. It even brings over all your passwords and stuff these days. Best get to swapping before Google disable that as well. They'd just love to keep you hostage.
Use a third party password manager, don’t rely on browser default ones
load more comments
(4 replies)
I take this as a sign that it genuinely still works to block ads and hasn’t sold out and become malware like those others that used to be popular.
load more comments
(1 replies)
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh
Doesn't cover 100% of what uBO did, but it still works just as good IMO with DNS based ad-blocking on top.
Surprised so few people are aware of this. It seems equivalent to me when you give it the same permissions Ublock Origin had.
Agreed. I haven't even found anything that it doesn't block that UbOrigin did.
load more comments
(3 replies)