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YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.

This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.

This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.

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[–] 188 points 2 years ago (18 children)

To anyone using Chrome and complaining about Google having too much control: shut the fuck up. You're part of the problem.

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  • [–] 65 points 2 years ago (11 children)

    Firefox for the win. Or Librewolf even better.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    I love Librewolf, I just can't work for hours using a browser that has dark mode disabled in order to preserve its privacy features.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Because the dark mode that's built into Firefox and other browsers sends requests to websites that can identify you. If you want dark mode on Librewolf, do as the devs recommend and get Dark Reader, as that's clientside and doesn't identify you, and works with pretty much every website, including ones that don't offer a dark version.

    I use regular Firefox, and I have the default dark mode disabled and Dark Reader installed. I don't need to ask permission from websites to use dark mode any more than I need to ask Google for permission to block their ads.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    that's great! Yeah I understand the privacy implications but had no idea about Dark Reader. That's why I love this community for answers like this. I'll look into it as I'd prefer to use Librewolf as my daily driver.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Like I said, it doesn't look good on every website, but for the vast majority it's a really nice experience, especially if you are often online after dark. It's definitely earned the high ratings it's got, and it's 100% getting downloaded anytime I use a new computer.

    Besides the enhanced privacy it gives you, there's also the fact that it doesn't require loading additional style sheets, so it saves you a very small amount of bandwidth and time.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    sends requests to websites that can identify you

    What requests? I though that only information that the browser gives to website regarding dark theme is that your preferred-color-scheme is now dark.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Well some sacrifices has to be done.

    I use an add on called "Dark background, white text" or something like that. Less bloated than Dark Reader.

    Has to be somewhat usable while privacy oriented.

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  • [–] 35 points 2 years ago*

    Imo this extends to chromium too. Google owns the source code and can pull it whenever they want. Sure, chromium browsers might be able to putter along for a little bit, but my understanding is that the reason why we're now at Chrome/Chromium vs Firefox vs Safari is because Google shits out so many new """standards""" and "features" that you need a large team to keep up. It's supposedly why browsers like Opera switched to using chromium instead of trying to maintain their own source code.

    This is a feature, not a bug.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    This is one reason why I don't want the EU to force Apple to allow other rendering engines. Whether you think using Apple's rendering engine on iOS is bad or good, it's basically the only thing keeping Google from having complete control of the market.

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