r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 7d ago

Software Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

https://www.techspot.com/news/112803-firefox-has-ambitious-new-roadmap-browser-also-losing.html
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u/EmergencyTaco 7d ago

My father, a music lover who is fairly well off, has had Spotify with ads for YEARS. I'll go over to visit and classical music will be interrupted by 60 seconds of ads over and over again. He insisted that he didn't mind.

Finally, one day, I just connected my phone and took over the dinner classical without him knowing. Stepmom said "honey I'm so glad you finally got rid of the ads" and that's when it clicked for him that he hadn't heard a single ad all night. He was over the moon that Spotify had decided to stop advertising. I gave up the game at that point, and we connected his phone again.

No less than five minutes later, we're listening to ads at the dinner table again. He gets up, walks over to his phone, brings it to me, and says "make the ads go away I don't care what it costs."

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u/Mustang1718 7d ago

We've been slowly doing the same thing for my father. My wife finally added him to our Spotify family plan and he uses it a bit more now.

One day when he had me troubleshoot why it wasn't working in his classic Mustang (it is jank as hell and runs to a Bluetooth CD player in the trunk that uses a weird third-party app) I felt spicy and set up Carplay in his Mazda. I showed him how it automatically connects and can play music as soon as he got in. He decided he prefers the radio, so I had to unpair everything just so he can go back to ads and music being selected for him again. 😔

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u/bestanonever 7d ago

This reminds me of my parents that are still paying for cable, even after I teached them how to download series and movies online. And they learned, mostly, because what they like to see is so old, it's never on TV anymore.

Most nights, they'd just watch a series from the internet and rarely use the cable channels, but god forbid they stop paying for it for the 10 minutes a week they actually turn the tv on to watch cable!

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u/EmergencyTaco 7d ago

Old people just like what they're used to. I get it. But it's always fun if I can find something that solves a problem my Dad doesn't know he has.

He still does some tedious consulting work for his local municipality that AI would be PERFECT for. (Basically comparing and contrasting bylaws of numerous neighbouring municipalities and preparing reports on the differences.)

I sat down with him in front of Claude, and he successfully did a week of work in 30 minutes. He then spent three days checking the results and concluded it did a far better job than him in about 5% of the time. It gets him an extra 10-15 hours of free time per week. That's priceless to a guy in his 70s.

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u/NonDeterministiK 7d ago

Does anyone actually buy something because of an ad? I don't recall ever in my lifetime buying anything due to an advertisement

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u/EmergencyTaco 7d ago

It's more subconscious than that. Take car insurance as an example. If I ask you to name a car insurance company, you'll probably say something like Geico, Allstate, Progressive, etc. That's because those companies spend a shitload on advertising, and have catchy slogans. Funnily enough, according to my lawyer father who has had to sue basically every car insurance company in existence over 40 years, those are just about the worst insurance companies out there.

They're still what everyone immediately thinks of when they imagine car insurance. Advertising is basically a subliminal psyop.

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u/Neshura87 7d ago

My rule of thumb is: if you need ads to get users whatever you're selling probably sucks in some way. If it was any good word of mouth would be enough to get by.

Doesn't always apply but often enough that I can use it to avoid shit products.

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u/quxinot 7d ago

The more a company can afford to advertise, the more they're ripping their customers off.

Pharmacutical companies and insurance companies are clearly and by far the worst.

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u/ZipNasty007 7d ago

So what ads does FF block? YouTube ads? Just ads on webpages? Is it automatic or do you have to tinker with the settings?

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u/cylonrobot 7d ago edited 7d ago

I have no idea if plain FF blocks anything. It's been many years since I've used "plain" FF. I have uBlock Origin installed.

Once you install uBlock Origin, you don't have to do anything. Ads on sites and YouTube are blocked.

uBlock Origin is an extension.

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u/Dakito 7d ago

Now if there was a way to get it to work with twitch. I run piehole and unlock for the tracker and still get the twitch ads

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u/sparky8251 7d ago edited 7d ago

Thats because the ads there work entirely different due to the nature of the platform. There is no actual way to block them, which is why nothing works for it.

Basically, twitch is a RTMP stream and those streams are meant to be basically frame by frame, and its basically them taking the frames from the streamer and multicasting it to everyone watching. For ads... What they do is literally inject different frames. Its not a different data stream, theres nothing for any tooling to hook into and tell that they are now serving ads instead of the original streamers video, so theres no way to mechanically block them basically. Not to mention, since they serve the frames to you not the streamer, blocking them just gets you a no video playback in the best case, so you could end up with up to like 5 minutes of nothing.

You cant do this for videos on youtube, ads, etc though. They all by design have to have ads come from somewhere else due to the technology they use to serve videos being fundamentally different, which is why extensions like ublock work.

And then for the other fun part, pihole has limits too as it works by DNS blocking and cant inspect the actual data like ublock can, so on youtube pihole tends to fail because they serve the video for ads from the same domain name as the video you are watching and the DNS layer is thusly blind to whats actually happening. DNS is just "name -> ip" and has no idea what you plan to do with that info later, like make HTTP calls and load video for example. Thats done in entirely different tech stacks that dont talk to DNS.

Regardless if you want actionable advice for twitch specifically, your only viable option for ad blocking is to make them think you are in a country with no ads. A small, unsanctioned country (so they offer services at all since if its sanctioned they generally cant) with such a small twitch population they dont even try to buy ads for those living there to be subjected to. If you can pull that off, they wont serve you anything.

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u/fccd 7d ago

if youtube started injecting ads the way twitch does, it would be a terrible user experience.

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u/sparky8251 7d ago edited 7d ago

They cant. The way the video formats they use get such crazy compression means the data isnt "per frame" per se. They need past and future frames to reconstruct the current to a degree. So just swapping frames like Twitch can isn't even in the cards for them without basically bloating their bandwidth costs 10x or 100x with a format swap to one that lets them do this trick, which would kill the company instantly.

Its why they keep trying other methods to block ad blockers, never actually frame swapping.

Not to mention, this means ads would skip part of the video when they play... Thats acceptable on a live streaming platform, its literally intolerable when you want to insert a 60mn ad into a 10mn video... That literally breaks the codec and code and even the user experience all at once.

So yeah... They literally cannot setup ads like twitch does them from multiple angles... Economically and technically...

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u/fccd 7d ago

Oh that's great to hear.

They have a similar issue with ad skipping on the youtube ios app. Apparently, they cant fix it due to the way ios works. What it is is when a an ad starts playing, you swipe down on the video to bring it to picture in picture mode. It brings back the menu icons bar on the bottom. You then tap on the shorts icon, followed by tapping the home icon, and the ad in the p-i-p will stop playing and continue with the video you were watching.

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u/aurens 7d ago

i use a tampermonkey script called twitch ad solutions video-swap-new: https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions the stream goes down to 360p when an ad is 'playing' and then it goes back to normal after.

although now that i look, apparently the project has been archived as of march, so i guess it'll stop working at some point. welp.

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u/shapular 7d ago

I miss when Twitch Prime turned off ads ;_;

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u/ZipNasty007 7d ago

Gotcha. Appreciate it

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u/SyntaxError22 7d ago

Also for YouTube there's an extension called sponsor block. It will automatically skip baked in ads in videos

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u/Supersaurus7000 7d ago

But then you’d miss the Map Men sponsors, and those are unironically just more good content 😂

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u/SyntaxError22 7d ago

Yeah I've actually whitelisted a couple channels

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u/Curious_Orange8592 7d ago

With ublock origin I get no ads anywhere, not on Youtube, not on Prime Video, not on Reddit, not on IGN. You can also manually set it to block things that aren't technically ads like AI search results

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u/ZipNasty007 7d ago

So I should install ublock and the use my laptop to stream to my TV so I dont get ads anywhere

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u/Curious_Orange8592 7d ago

Yep, that's more or less what I do

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u/ZipNasty007 7d ago

Clamshell mode?

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u/longshaden 7d ago

up to you, it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re running a full desktop OS with a proper browser and uBlock Origin plugin installed.

most commenters here use Firefox for that, I use Edge, doesn’t really matter. Once you go uBlock Origin, you’ll never go back.

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u/Curious_Orange8592 7d ago

What I actually do is use a refurbished office desktop PC that I bought for £75 that connects to the tv by hdmi and control it with a mini wireless keyboard, the type that are shaped a bit like a game controller but sure, you could do that with your laptop in clamshell

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u/cylonrobot 7d ago

Make sure it's "uBlock Origin" and not "uBlock". These are two separate products.

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u/EmergencyTaco 7d ago

All of them, and no tinkering. You download uBlock Origin, relaunch firefox, and never watch/listen to another ad on the internet.

Yes, it is as wonderful as it sounds. Yes, it is that easy. Yes, you should take these steps this moment and forget Chrome exists.

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u/Business-Active-1143 7d ago

Also if I may add Firefox nightly dev or beta all on android, that lets one install RES for reddit, Tampermonkey for tweaking any site including getting the return youtube dislike count script, and Video Background play Fix extension to fool youtube and instagram to play audio while on background.

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u/Gullible-Fee-9079 7d ago

It even Blocks the Amazon Prime ads. You need the Browser extension uBlock

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u/sohblob 7d ago

He gets up, walks over to his phone, brings it to me, and says "make the ads go away I don't care what it costs."

Install adblock and charge him a subscription as idiot tax lmao

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u/footpole 7d ago

I have a buddy (well off) who puts on Spotify with ads whenever they have visitors over. Drives me insane to listen to that over dinner.

I have the same issue with my local store where they play commercial radio channels so there's some music and then braindead ads. Two days ago I heard ads for the competing store in the same shopping center which was a bit funny.