They’ve lost the war. As soon as this all rolled out I started looking for an alternative. It isn’t so much that they lost one customer, but they’ve created an environment where they will lose customers. Silly mistake. All they had to do was nothing and they would have kept me as a customer. But once again they felt the need to learn the most important lesson in tech. If it ain’t broke don’t fucking fix it.

Firefox anyone?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

YouTube can instantly switch up its ad delivery system, but once Manifest V3 becomes mandatory, that won’t be true for extension developers.

If ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game of updates and counter-updates, then Google will force the mouse to slow down.

The current platform, Manifest V2, has been around for over ten years and works just fine, but it’s also quite powerful and allows extensions to have full filtering control over the traffic your web browser sees.

Engadget’s Anthony Ha interviewed some developers in the filtering extension community, and they described a constant cat-and-mouse game with YouTube.

Firefox’s Manifest V3 implementation doesn’t come with the filtering limitations, and parent company Mozilla promises that users can “rest assured that in spite of these changes to Chrome’s new extensions architecture, Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions.”

Google claims that Manifest V3 will improve browser “privacy, security, and performance,” but every comment we can find from groups that aren’t giant ad companies disputes this description.

The original article contains 915 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is a lot like the Reddit issues. You would think that most people would take umbrage to being treated like this by a company, but alas, most people don’t care, aren’t technical enough, or have become too invested in a company to want/need to change.

Companies like Google know this, and it makes me wonder if the ‘don’t be evil’ thing was ever real, or it was simply a bait & switch catchphrase to get them to the point where they were big enough to no longer care what people thought.

Just as with piracy I always wonder what percentage of the market really uses blockers, how relevant that segment truly is, and how much of it can be regained by simply improving service quality.

For example when it comes to ads I often see unhealthy lifestyle ads such as fast food. Or those money grab mobile games I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. I honestly wouldn’t mind being served a trailer for baldur’s gate, or an ad for a local restaurant.

Furthermore it’s not that I wouldn’t pay for something like YouTube. But it’s just that I have no choice as a customer in what service to use and it feels forced. YouTube is the only choice for many things. Google has an unfavorable privacy license and so I prefer to avoid them altogether.

So in my eyes it’s a service issue. It’s like they are mopping with an open faucet. It’s just a waste of resources.