We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the …
In an ideal world the headline would be “Google kills Chrome by preventing users from blocking ads”.
History repeats itself.
Some Old Thing (software/website/service/whatever) becomes bad, and people get really upset. Initially, many say that SOT is going to die. Techies switch from SOT to New Great Thing. For a while, techies at NGT celebrate and pat each other on the back for making this brilliant move.
Meanwhile, normies at SOT continue to use it. They hate it at first or even complain about it, but eventually they get used to how bad SOT is. Every now and then, they hear about NGT, but they just can’t switch because reasons.
After a few years it’s clear that, SOT hasn’t died yet, but also continues to have quite a few users too. Some people end up using both, while a small group of people vow to never touch SOT ever again. SOT and NGT both continue to exist, because apparently there are enough users for both.
I’ve seen these things happen so many times, that it’s about time to point out that there’s a pattern. Just look back at any tech controversy over the past 30 years and you can see it usually follows this pattern pretty well.
You want free and private internet - Ok You don’t want ads - Ok So who is going to give you something for free and why?
Ok So who is going to give you something for free and why?
People who value the ability to do publish information, or engage in personal expression, for starters.
What pisses me off is seeing more and more “You need to upgrade your browser for this site!” when using Firefox.
Having to use a spoof header gets frustrating frequently too.
In my head I respond “you need to upgrade your website to handle my rad browser, fellas”
