Why has nobody made a browser which adblocks without the website detecting it?

[YurkshireLad]

If you go to any of the old school media sites, you'll find they are among the worst offenders. I can got to cnn.com and at first NoScript will only show the option to allow cnn.com, but once that's done you will see that cnn.com wants to run scripts from over 25 other domains!

Check out https://dailymail.co.uk for one of the worst offenders. With MS Edge and its default settings, with no additional ad-blockers, the front page loads almost 260 resources, about 10.5M and it took 1 minute to load the complete page. The dev tools console reports 169 issues (errors, including blocked resources).

[NiHaoMike]

I suspect (?) that the cost of running/verifying a single hash is < the cost of submitting a single hash to them over the network, so DOSing them with false results probably isn't worthwhile. 

Not so if you aren't actually hashing anything but rather are just generating pseudorandom numbers and giving it to them.

[langwadt]

Some ad companies let the client supply their own code, but don't actually check it's not crap.

and then you get this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising

a good reason to block ads

[peter-h]

Yes the Daily Mail is the horrible website. It is actually a trash paper but is worth reading because they are the best paper which is both (a) free online and (b) regularly gets the real dirt behind stories (which the BBC would never host because of PC issues). The DM started detecting adblock only quite recently.

But all the major "dirt" papers are the same server behaviour e.g. The Sun.

[Zero999]

The paradigm of web content has shifted greatly.  Originally pages were sent to you in plaintext HTML, CSS and images were shown using <img> tags.  Now some sites serve a blob of javascript that runs in a (semi) secure VM in your browser to generate the page.  This dramatically shifts the level of control & power away from you and into the publisher's hands; they can do any sort of computations they want in return for you being able to see their pages.  Detecting adblockers is just the tip of the iceberg.

I really dislike this trend. There are very few things on the modern internet that I find superior to the old days when sites loaded quickly on even a dialup connection. Most of the modern bloat just gets in the way of accessing the information.

You're right that all of this advertising and scripting is bad, but you need to remove your rose tinted spectacles. The Internet used to be very crappy. Most sites didn't comply with web standards and would only display properly on either Netscape, or Internet Explorer. Insecure Macromedia Flash was widespread and it got worse when IE won the browser war, with its blatant disregard for security and ActiveX nastiness. It was a dream for anyone wanting to gain access to everything on your computer. Winblow$ 95 had no security, with everything running as administrator. Scammers made loads of money with rogue diallers on dodgy porn sites. Eventually IE lost the second browser war, probably due to smart phones, just as much as superior alternatives, sites became standard compliant and we're now where we are, which isn't perfect, but better than the bad old days.

[PlainName]

The Internet used to be very crappy

If you'd said it used to be less aesthetic I'd agree, but the quality of the internet resource (ignoring AOL and Compulink) was as high, if not higher, than today. What has changed is what's being made available - pretty much any business now has an online presence which wasn't previously the case. Any datasheet you care to name is probably available from somewhere, etc. But these things don't define 'the Internet' any more than Youtube defines video production.

Most sites didn't comply with web standards and would only display properly on either Netscape, or Internet Explorer.

Yeah, one to take up with Microsoft - they are the primary reason for standards not being adhered to, or 'enhanced'.

Insecure Macromedia Flash was widespread and it got worse when IE won the browser war

Yeah, another one to blame on the Internet! Actually, why not just blame to developers of the application instead. But, even better, why not stop with the victim blaming? Think for a moment: once upon a time no-one communications protocols had to think about data that might be corrupted accidentally, or a standard not quite being met. Things worked fine, and if there was a problem, well, shit happens. What made it a big problem and the nightmare we have today was (and are) the fuckwits who think breaking stuff for lulz is fun, or scamming millions of dollars a fair way to make a living, or viciously SWATing a game opponent fair play. They are the ones that made ActiveX a bad move, not the functionality of it per se.

[Someone]

Modern pages are so heavily reliant on running local scripts, that local processing power seems to be a bottleneck.

Party CPU but also request latency (which hasn't changed much across different consumer access technologies). Browsers hide this by caching, parallel requests, and speculatively loading content that you might need, but the proliferation of scripted/dynamic content broke that system.

Say you like reading Hagar the Horrible, loading their site natively:

Loading with a light sprinkling of content blocking:

Handing back control of what the user wants to have (ads still come through, but most of the crufty stuff is left as opt-in and not preloaded). Roughly 4x faster load time, which can make a big difference when you're just wanting to pull up websites for a small snippet of information. (reading a comic only takes a few seconds)

[peter-h]

I am finding contrary stuff. For example most banking websites (hardly ones loading 100 3rd party scripts) are taking 5-10 secs to do "something".

It could be just server loading.

[SparkyFX]

You overlook the point of the advertisement: that people look at it, click on it or come back later and buy/use something.

An adblocker can be made very sophisticated, but it certainly does not buy stuff in your name... so guess what it means if ads are not displayed to a substantial amount of viewers. Imho it will change the approach to the problem in new ways, but certainly won't make advertisement go away.
This might lead to ads and content not being distinguishable anymore or the browser market being dominated by a marketing agency or subscription only services. Such developments may even make adblocking itself obsolete.

In other words, you are not really saving or preventing anything by "better" adblocking, it will just come in a different form. As long as the ads are relevant (and not intrusive) i don't see a big problem with them as they are for a webhoster making money to run the site.

[GlennSprigg]

I notice that, (and yes I use adBlock etc.), that the BIGGEST delay-times by FAR, are when some 'page' should be loading, but
down at the bottom left of FireFox it is stalling on 'googleapis.com' before finally displaying what you want!!  I admit I have not
researched it, and when I see it, I call it 'Google Piss'... because it pisses me off!!   

[NiHaoMike]

You overlook the point of the advertisement: that people look at it, click on it or come back later and buy/use something.

An adblocker can be made very sophisticated, but it certainly does not buy stuff in your name... so guess what it means if ads are not displayed to a substantial amount of viewers. Imho it will change the approach to the problem in new ways, but certainly won't make advertisement go away.
This might lead to ads and content not being distinguishable anymore or the browser market being dominated by a marketing agency or subscription only services. Such developments may even make adblocking itself obsolete.

In other words, you are not really saving or preventing anything by "better" adblocking, it will just come in a different form. As long as the ads are relevant (and not intrusive) i don't see a big problem with them as they are for a webhoster making money to run the site.

Adblock Plus has had the option of "acceptable ads" with the idea that if ads weren't so annoying (by creating an incentive to make them "acceptable"), there wouldn't be much need to block ads in the first place.

Next step is an AI based adblocker that "paints over" ads, making it very hard to detect.
https://www.engadget.com/2017-04-16-potentially-undefeatable-ad-blocker-looks-at-content-not-code.html

[peter-h]

That's what I had in mind, yes. Unfortunately the link there is dead.

[NiHaoMike]

Here's a direct link to the code: https://github.com/citp/ad-blocking
I think Google's attempt to suppress it should be seen as a clue that it's effective - if it wasn't, wouldn't they want to keep it out there to fool users with the false impression that it works?

[peter-h]

That project is 4 years old. Is that the right one?

And I can't see where the actual plug-in is No idea how to compile this stuff.

[Zero999]

The Internet used to be very crappy

If you'd said it used to be less aesthetic I'd agree, but the quality of the internet resource (ignoring AOL and Compulink) was as high, if not higher, than today. What has changed is what's being made available - pretty much any business now has an online presence which wasn't previously the case. Any datasheet you care to name is probably available from somewhere, etc. But these things don't define 'the Internet' any more than Youtube defines video production.

Most sites didn't comply with web standards and would only display properly on either Netscape, or Internet Explorer.

Yeah, one to take up with Microsoft - they are the primary reason for standards not being adhered to, or 'enhanced'.

Insecure Macromedia Flash was widespread and it got worse when IE won the browser war

Yeah, another one to blame on the Internet! Actually, why not just blame to developers of the application instead. But, even better, why not stop with the victim blaming? Think for a moment: once upon a time no-one communications protocols had to think about data that might be corrupted accidentally, or a standard not quite being met. Things worked fine, and if there was a problem, well, shit happens. What made it a big problem and the nightmare we have today was (and are) the fuckwits who think breaking stuff for lulz is fun, or scamming millions of dollars a fair way to make a living, or viciously SWATing a game opponent fair play. They are the ones that made ActiveX a bad move, not the functionality of it per se.

The Internet is the sum of technologies: the browser, ActiveX/Flash/Javascript/HTML5 etc. and the hardware. Companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, Apple etc. have a big influance on making the Internet what it is.

Back in the bad old days, it was easier for your computer to get owned, than it is today. What platform you were using i.e Windows, Mac, Linux mattered. Many sites only worked with Internet Explorer, which made it difficult to use any other operating system than Windows. I accept that there were advantages back then. There wasn't the same amount of annoying advertising, whitespace, gross GUIs and a lot more useful content by those who did it as a hobby, but the Internet as a whole, is much better now.

[d-smes]

Say you like reading Hagar the Horrible, loading their site natively:

@Someone-  What tool is this?   Very Cool!   Is there a Linix version?

I'd like to run it on a RaspberryPi which loads pages significantly slower than a Win computer.  Then I'd like to figure out how to speed up the Pi.

[Someone]

@Someone-  What tool is this?   Very Cool!   Is there a Linix version?

Thats a "timeline" plot from the developer tools in a browser, most modern browsers have something similar.

[tooki]

@Someone-  What tool is this?   Very Cool!   Is there a Linix version?

Thats a "timeline" plot from the developer tools in a browser, most modern browsers have something similar.

And FYI, if you connect an iPhone to a Mac, you can use the dev tools in Safari on the Mac to view this graph for mobile Safari. (I assume Android has something similar?)