Google Chrome Now Has Resource-Blocking Adblock 335
Posted
by
timothy
from the advertising-wants-to-be-shunned dept.
from the advertising-wants-to-be-shunned dept.
MackieChan writes "It seems to have slipped under the radar, but Google Chrome now has resource-blocking abilities, and may have had the ability for some time. Using the 'beforeload' event on the document, an extension can now intercept resources from loading. Adblock for Chrome has already added it, and I expect the other 'ad-blocking' extensions have as well. Before you start praising Google, however, it's the WebKit team that deserves your credit; one Chromium developer responded to praise by stating '... thank Apple — they added it to WebKit, we just inherited it.' Firefox vs. Chrome just got a bit more exciting."
It does say something about Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, you have to admire that the biggest online advertising corporation on the internet didn't pull out the ad blocking feature on it's own brand of webkit browser. Yes, Google is a corporation like any other, but at least they have a little respect for not pissing it's costumers off. I think a lot of companies in the same position would have made it so their browser ADDED ads.
Re:Uh, not really (Score:2, Interesting)
Still not as good as what Firefox has (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't catch every single resource -- ad blocking plugins for Chrome admit that it won't catch everything and still has to just hide some ads. And it's not nearly powerful enough for NoScript to work.
So there is still no Firefox vs. Chrome/Chromium. Firefox still leads, big time, because of this issue.
I'm rooting for Chrome/Chromium/Webkit to get proper blocking abilities, because it's great otherwise. But until they can do what's necessary to get true blocking, I won't use it.
Re:Uh, not really (Score:3, Interesting)
I migrated from Opera. I sorta miss the complexity, but Chrome starts simple, and lets you make it complex.
Re:Not entirely random (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple is closely involved with Webkit (it's the backend Safari uses), and this feature that made better ad-blocking possible was contributed by Apple. So it's not entirely random.
Others have asked why google didn't "fix" apple's anti-advertising system by customizing webkit to meet their corporate advertisement-friendly goals. What I ask is why Apple hasn't appeared to capitalize on their adblocking engine (right, right! "not enabled without an extension, but neither is Chrome's yet")
I hear its resource-blocking isn't perfect, but being an Apple-run project, the devs and PR could have appeased the public a week ago for the new Safari 5 release. They remained hushed, and we know they much need good news in light of the iPhone antenna blemish. Something doesn't smell right, with either Apple or Google. I downloaded Chromium just a couple days ago. I still have got the old Safari 4 on this machine... don't feel like ever adopting FF 4.0 or completing my 3.7 beta testing. The next big move in the browser games will choose my winner for another couple years.
Re:Chrome does NOT have NoScript (Score:2, Interesting)
NoScript makes it possible to restrict JavaScript based on the originating domain
I love that feature. Even if only because it's fun to see sites that load Javascript from a dozen other sites. It's quite impressive how many ad, social app, tracking, etc. scripts some sites cram into their pages.
Still waiting for... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is everyone ever going to make an adblock-alike which, rather than "blocking" ads, just prioritizes them differently so I don't need to wait for fifty ads to load before I can view actual page content? I really don't mind ads. I'm okay with them. I don't want to block them, and I think people who do block them are assholes. But I don't want to wait for them.
a sad day (Score:3, Interesting)
i hate to sound like Kyle Reese, but this is how it happens:
July 2010, Apple adds ad-blocking to WebKit.
it makes its way slowly into most popular web browsers cutting off the revenue stream for content publishers on the internet.
those publishers make a move onto one of several closed platforms originally designed for mobile platforms.
after an initial intense fight, a single closed platform dominates. the others fade away.
internet use drops significantly. only free content is available on it, and the mainstream views it increasingly as a refuge for subversives. most households disconnect.
April 3rd, 2017: the internet backbone is shut down.
premium content and visiting traffic moves predominantly to the closed platform.
Re:Chrome does NOT have NoScript (Score:1, Interesting)
Used for this, RequestPolicy is vastly superior than NoScript. I used to use it with Firefox. When I moved to Chrome, I could no longer use it of course -- and that's when I realized how much of a control freak I was. It's liberating moving away from all the fine-grained WWW manipulation schemes... it is too easy to become unnecessarily immersed in. Now? Let JavaScript and CSS do its thing. Flash, PDF, Silverlight? They can all go to hell.
Re:Uh, not really (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you still have to use some behind the curve hacked version to keep all your data from being sent to Google? Because Google's data mining and installing "updaters" that refuse to uninstall with the app made it a non starter for me. Does it have an easy way to allow some scripts but not others? A FEBE style backup? Imagezoom? Something like iMacros that makes automating the things I do trivial? A downloadhelper that will put videos in folder a and executables in folder b?
While Chrome has the buzz right now, too many things like data mining made me uncomfortable with it. And FF is simple enough with its extension framework that even my 67 year old clueless dad has his FF customized. I know everyone talks about its JavaScript engine, but seeing how many "malware o' the day" uses JavaScript I'd prefer NOT to load a bunch of unapproved JavaScript really fast, thanks anyway. And side by side I really can tell a difference anyway, as both load a page as fast as I can click. So while I wish anything that isn't IE the best of luck, for me and my customers it'll be FF for the foreseeable future.
Exactly! (Score:1, Interesting)
Thank you. If I hadn't just gotten rid of my mod points I'd mod you up. People are all about wanting 'free' web content, but they aren't willing to let the ads that pay for said content to load? That is indeed an assholish thing to do, or at the very least quite selfish.
Re:Chrome does NOT have NoScript (Score:3, Interesting)
http://noscript.net/abe/ [noscript.net]
Re: a sad day (Score:3, Interesting)
I know this is just an attention-seeking post, but I feel compelled to explain one thing. Namely, if you are connected to the Internet, you can host your own content. That's how the Internet works. I pay my ISP for both download and upload speed. Sure, the latter is always a magnitude slower so that the ISP can earn more on "corporate" connections, but I still can host my own website and am not upload amount capped.
Even if companies stop hosting content because they won't make any money on it, there still will be people who just host their own website as a hobby and do not care about profits from it nor that the download speed from it is capped at 32 KB/s. Websites should be about text and be light. A few small images and that's it. No front-page 10MB flash loading crap menu. As for big file hosting, that's what torrents are for.
Re:Still waiting for... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is everyone ever going to make an adblock-alike which, rather than "blocking" ads, just prioritizes them differently so I don't need to wait for fifty ads to load before I can view actual page content? I really don't mind ads. I'm okay with them. I don't want to block them, and I think people who do block them are assholes. But I don't want to wait for them.
How can you be OK with ads? It's humanly impossible to read text from a screen while 6 flashing ads are begging for attention.
Before ABP I used to stick post-it's to my screen just to cover them up. Ad blocking software is a big step forward.
Re:Most of Google's revenue is advertising. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not anti-ads, I am anti-eyesore and anti-slow-flash-crap.
Well said. I wish there is a way I can state my own ad preferences so that the web sites know what kind of ads I will accept. Like browser sends a string that says, "Will accept text ads, static image ads. No animation, no flash ads, so sound, no pop-ups or pop-unders. Currently in the market for: Digital camera, scuba vacation, college visits"
I want only the obnoxious advertisers to go out of business. I want to provide a carrot for the sites that are willing to play nice.
Re:Uh, not really (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you still have to use some behind the curve hacked version to keep all your data from being sent to Google? Because Google's data mining and installing "updaters" that refuse to uninstall with the app made it a non starter for me.
Erm, it's called Chromium, and it's kinda more ahead of the curve than behind it, since it's what Chrome is based upon. (Google just adds its data-mining crap to the OSS Chromium code base in order to release Chrome.) So if you use Chromium, you get all of the good stuff and none of the Google rubbish. It's also worth remembering that Chromium's sandboxing of tabs provides some level of security against web malware exploits, even if it can't replace all that noscript offers.
But I've got no dispute with your other comments. And until Chromium makes --enable-vertical-tabs work under linux, it'll never replace Firefox for me in a million years. It's a viable browser alternative for the less computer-literate, though, and I often wish Firefox had the lithe memory footprint of Chromium, rather than one of a giant elephantine beast ...