I can’t believe I’m witnessing the death of the internet, at least it isn’t going quietly into the night.
As a Linux user this has got me very worried. Chromium has so much market share that this change will certainly go through, and I feel like Safari won’t care as it benefits them and their ecosystem to have device checks. I feel like Firefox and non standard OSes will almost certainly be blocked on a large range of websites with little impact on total users, not to mention completely blocking ad block and anti-tracking clients.
I think eventually regulators in the US will file an antitrust lawsuit and break chromium off of Google if this actually happens, but until then Fediverse/FOSS and personal websites are going to be the only places untouched by this.
Google already rolled out AMP which is overtly hostile to an open internet and faced zero repercussions from it. The same will be true for this. The average person has no idea what this means, doesn’t care, and won’t be bothered by it. Politicians always side with big business.
I’m hoping the average user will be sufficient annoyed by the lack of adblocking to finally give a shit.
Average users view the web raw, this will go totally unnoticed by >90% of users. If web-drm becomes a thing then it will be easy enough to block those sites and add them to the list of media that is morally acceptable to pirate.
Is there any reason Firefox or anyone else can’t just draw blank elements over the ads to block them on a separate layer? That way the site still thinks ads are being displayed. Kind of like the browser internal version of cutting out sticky notes and pasting them over your screen to cover the ads.
good stuff, glad to see this opposition.
Also slightly related, but I’d absolutely hate if I were an employee having to work on this project and having my name attached to this. Quite embarrassing for all those involved.
welp, who isnt on firefox might want to start using it now.
It’s a little slower and a little more broken and a little less compatible, but its not google’s.
I don’t think OP had any nefarious purpose in it, but this title is ridiculous doublspeak. Google might have a vested interest in trying to bullshit us about this being about “web integrity,” but that doesn’t mean we have to accept its dishonest framing!
I don’t follow.
The first line of the comment is: “Mozilla opposes this proposal because it contradicts our principles and vision for the Web.”
And the proposal is called: “Web Environment Integrity API”
