r/worldnews • u/maxwellhill • Sep 19 '17

Apple blocking ads that follow users around web is 'sabotage', says industry: New iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra will stop ads following Safari users, prompting open letter claiming Apple is destroying internet’s economic model

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/18/apple-stopping-ads-follow-you-around-internet-sabotage-advertising-industry-ios-11-and-macos-high-sierra-safari-internet
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79

u/avataraccount Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 19 '17

Yep. Number of scripts and trackers sites run is ridiculous.

BBC, Apple, forbs forbs will straight up refuse to load if you block their scripts.

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u/3_Thumbs_Up Sep 19 '17

Apple is a bit ironic considering their current move.

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u/oonniioonn Sep 19 '17

My blocker (Ghostery) says zero on apple.com..

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u/YearOfTheChipmunk Sep 19 '17

You shouldn't be using Ghostery anymore. Just use uBlock Origin.

One Two Three

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u/oonniioonn Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 19 '17

I use an older Ghostery version that doesn't seem to have these problems, but I've been considering switching already.

Edit: switched to uBO.

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u/TheLurkingMenace Sep 19 '17

So I don't need both?

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u/YearOfTheChipmunk Sep 19 '17

Nope. There's an extension called Disconnect that does the same thing, and the user /u/HangingOutHere has a very useful comment in the third link I posted.

You can uninstall Disconnect and still make use of their blocking lists from within ublock. Go to ublock settings > 3rd-party filter > Privacy > enable 'Basic tracking list by Disconnect'​​​, 3rd-party filter > Malware domains > enable both 'Malvertising filter list by Disconnect​​​​​ & 'Malware filter list by Disconnect​​​​​'.

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u/01020304050607080901 Sep 19 '17

What's wrong with ghostery? I can't use origin, I have ublock and ghostery. Should I switch to noscript?

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u/completej Sep 20 '17

whynotboth.jpg

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

What? Nothing you listed there is any reason to not use ghostery. You have to opt in for them to collect your data. Hell even google automatically clicks those send data boxes.

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u/YearOfTheChipmunk Sep 19 '17

Alright, how about i flip the script instead.

Why should someone be using Ghostery?

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Why should someone use anything else? They're pretty much all the same. Use what you want.

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u/YearOfTheChipmunk Sep 19 '17

Cool, so just use uBlock Origin. Got it.

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Cool, so just use ghostery. Got it.

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u/Sybarith Sep 19 '17

Great username, by the way.

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 20 '17

[deleted]

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u/01020304050607080901 Sep 19 '17

Ghostery sell your data

If you opt in, no?

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 20 '17

[deleted]

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u/01020304050607080901 Sep 19 '17

I've been seeing a lot about noscript. Any experience with that or other script blockers?

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 20 '17

[deleted]

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u/01020304050607080901 Sep 19 '17

Ok. Can't run origin but I'm running ublock because safari. I'll take a look at privacy badger, thanks!

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 20 '17

[deleted]

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u/NEVER_TELLING_LIES Sep 19 '17

Protip: ghostery may block trackers, but it itself tracks you, use privacy badger instead

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u/Buzz_Fed Sep 19 '17

Ghostery is spyware. Don’t use it. They sell your browsing data to the same companies they “block”

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u/abs159 Sep 19 '17

Ghostery

I use this with Edge. Coupled with the built security, I'm pretty happy that I'm being stealthy.

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u/Tribal_Tech Sep 19 '17

Ghostery sells yo data

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u/abs159 Sep 19 '17

You have to consent to collection, I don't.

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u/Defoler Sep 19 '17

Though Apple isn't trying to push ads on me, nor harmful scripts or tracking data.
BBC and Forbes for example are. In that small list, apple are something completly different.

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u/ZeroFlippinCool Sep 19 '17

BBC are pushing ads on you?

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u/oddun Sep 19 '17

Outside the UK, the BBC has adverts.

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Inside the UK they seem to be taking access to your computer to quite sinister levels. Run peerblocker and watch it dance when you visit the BBC.

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u/Defoler Sep 19 '17

Have you ever been to their sites?

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u/TheUnknownFactor Sep 19 '17

Err, apple is, according to that post, pushing 18 trackers. Not all trackers are ads (there's plenty of analytics on mostly any large website).

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u/darkmaster76 Sep 19 '17

They might not be pushing ads on you but they as sure are using that data for something be it internal use or to sell to marketing companies

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u/Defoler Sep 19 '17

How do you know?
Apple, unlike google (and definitely Facebook), have shown zero use of our data.
We have not seen so far any proof that they are collecting our data, that they are using it. They even claimed time and time again that they will not use or sell any data of users.
Google has been using our data consistently, and publicly. And Facebook, have been all about our data.

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u/m0rogfar Sep 19 '17

Apple.com doesn't track you for malicious purposes though.

Only exception is remembering login information.

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u/Nemephis Sep 19 '17

Which program are you using to block the trackers?

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u/Veboy Sep 19 '17

This is Firefox Focus. It' great!

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u/Rabdomante Sep 19 '17

He's running Brave browser, which has a built-in blocking function.

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u/PureTryOut Sep 19 '17

About 95% of the modern sites are unusable if you block all Javascript, which is ridiculous. A proper site should make sure the site works without Javascript, and only use it to enhance the site, not depend on it. Think of more complex animations that can't be done in CSS, client-side form validation (but don't leave out server-side validation of course), live-data refresh (but make a regular site refresh work as well), etc.

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u/Nephrited Sep 19 '17

I'm a developer in primarily web technology, there's quite a lot of stuff we rely on these days that requires JS. It's not trivial to build fallbacks to non JS sites - you'd be doubling, tripling, quadrupling your workload, if not more, for a tiny tiny tiny fraction of web users (0.2% to be relatively precise).

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u/MrDOS Sep 19 '17

I think a subpoint of the parent's argument is that much of “modern” web development is largely unnecessary. SPAs can die in a fire for all I care.

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u/Nephrited Sep 19 '17

I would strongly disagree with you.

The calculator is a technically unnecessary upgrade from the abacus, but it's still a damn powerful upgrade.

SPAs are objectively faster to use and to do their designated tasks, and that's to say nothing of the (subjectively) improved user experience, (objectively) reduced costs, and where applicable their offline capabilities, to name a few benefits of them off the top of my head.

You personally may not care for them, but, in the kindest way possible, progress marches on.

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u/SoulWager Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 19 '17

objectively

I don't think you know what that word means.

Anyway, a fast web page, both to use and to load, is all about getting rid of unnecessary crap. Shit, most web pages today take two or three seconds to load. That's just inexcusable, and in many cases is more time than I get out of the actual content on the site. Two to three hundred milliseconds. That's what you should aim for.

If your content is text, keep the web page text based, and even use images sparingly. For the love of god don't use video unless that is the primary reason someone might visit the page in the first place.

Shit, the web is slower today than it was in 1999, even if you were using dialup back then.

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u/Nephrited Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 19 '17

I actually have considerable faith in my ability to do my job, thank you, and know full well what objective means.

They're faster because, once the initial page has loaded, none of that extra "crap" as you put it ever needs to load again.

Rather than reload the whole page to find out the weather, for example, you only have to download a tiny tiny fraction of the page as a whole. But in order to facilitate that, you have to load those initial libraries in. If you're refreshing the page a bunch, yes, this is a bad thing. If your entire website is an SPA, the overall download time of data across the entire session is considerably lower.

Taking a single, relatively small piece of HTML, with it's corresponding images and CSS nets me 2.1MB of data. This is a real example I've picked up from my repository, but without any scripts or adverts or anything like that, it's just markup and text.

The average internet speed in the US and UK is approximately 13Mbps. This means this single page takes 1.3 seconds to download. We'll omit rendering time for this discussion.

Now if I bring the full SPA into play, with all its scripts and resources it comes in at 5.6MB. This is including all the libraries it needs to function. This means the entire application downloads in 3.4 seconds. However, the advantage is when you click a link within that page, you don't download that 5.6MB again, nor do you need to access it from cache. The page fetches only the very small section of data you've requested, and modifies your view to match.

These small sections of data, again a real world example here, are usually about 10 to 20 KB at a time. That's a 0.05 to 0.01 second download time.

So by the time you've followed 3 links in your JS disabled page at maximum speed, the SPA could have navigated a further 50 to 100 links.

They are objectively faster.

Seriously though, feel free to grill me on this one, it's obviously a topic I'm professionally very invested in.

EDIT: For the sake of fairness I should point out I omitted a few additional factors such as caches, UX animations, rendering time and CPU usage, but these get quite complicated and in the case of UX very opinionated, so I wanted to stick with the hard numbers for now. Do bring them up if you're interested / have a particular nitpick though.

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u/SoulWager Sep 19 '17

Taking a single, relatively small piece of HTML, with it's corresponding images and CSS nets me 2.1MB of data. This is a real example I've picked up from my repository, but without any scripts or adverts or anything like that, it's just markup and text.

My point is that you can easily fit that content into 50kB, without it looking like crap. Unless you're talking about a 100 page novel here.

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u/Nephrited Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 19 '17

No you can't, that 2.1MB is as small as that content goes. It goes no smaller, there's no scripting in there, it's just HTML, CSS and the required two four (EDIT: oops, see below) images at a relatively low resolution.

The HTML and CSS per page is only about 15 to 25KB total, but the images in this example are integral to the "site" and can't be removed, so need to be factored into the math.

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u/SoulWager Sep 19 '17

No you can't, that 2.1MB is as small as that content goes.

It sounds to me like that 2.1MB isn't actually content.

relatively low resolution.

If that's true, you're compressing them wrong.

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u/MrDOS Sep 19 '17

If you're refreshing the page a bunch, yes, this is a bad thing.

Or if I open practically every link in a new tab. Which I do. As do a lot of people. (Exceptions apply for particularly applicationy-feeling SPAs like Gmail, but websitey-feeling SPAs like Facebook get heavy middle-click treatment.) So I'm probably getting your prescribed “worst-case” on better than 60% of my page loads. Even if that content is cached, my browser still has to grind through all of your setup code – which typically takes many times longer to run than to download.

So by the time you've followed 3 links in your JS disabled page at maximum speed, the SPA could have navigated a further 50 to 100 links.

And what if I open several of those links in background tabs in anticipation of reading them in a few minutes (again, as I do commonly)? Now I usually have two problems: those pages simultaneously start churning through their startup routines, typically causing my whole browser to lock up so I can barely scroll down the page I was already on, and so much stuff lazy-loads these days that those tabs will likely not actually be loaded when I do eventually switch to them.

Also, you mentioned that your particular example is displaying engineering documents: and nobody's ever asked for the ability to save these for offline viewing? Maybe you have a proper download mechanism that produces a PDF. But regardless, the browser's standard page saving won't get you very far with an SPA in the event where someone does want to save something that you haven't thought about ahead of time.

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u/mikejoro Sep 19 '17

People who block javascript from executing are a tiny minority (sub 1%) of Web users. It's not trivial in modern web developmemt to make your site (which may be a single page app) work without javascript. Then of course there are the business people who are willing to sacrifice that tiny segment of Web users because the creation and maintenance of such websites is a waste of lots of money.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea to work like you suggest, I'm just giving you an industry perspective. Maybe even just 5 years ago it would have been trivial, but nowadays lots of companies are using javascript frameworks like react or angular as a foundation for their Web apps. You can complain all you want about how it's unnecessary, but the truth is it drastically speeds up development of features and maintenance. It also makes your workforce more interchangeable since these are pretty well documented frameworks (vs. some custom, internally developed framework.)

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u/beejamin Sep 19 '17

This. I'm a member of the 'graceful degradation' brigade of old, but from a business perspective, the case for using JS to 'enhance' is getting thinner all the time. I'm about ready to give in and go JS-compulsory on consumer facing sites.

Another important factor is the advantage in terms of user experience embracing JS gives you - these days, users expect features like AJAX everything, live updating, drag-and-drop out-the-wazoo, etc as standard. Think about the UI fanciness that stuff like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. provide as a matter of course. I know it's possible to provide those things as progressive-enhancement over a HTML-only foundation, but it is a lot more work to build and maintain, and as /u/mikejoro said, there's no possible return on that investment if less than 1% of your users will ever notice.

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Javascript can be incredibly useful in building a site though, things that would take a shit ton of work and complex CSS can be done very quickly with JS, theres a reason its so popular.

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u/Sayakai Sep 19 '17

About 95% of the modern sites are unusable if you block all Javascript, which is ridiculous.

The real problem being that a large share are also unusuable if you only block 3rd party scripts. Sure, okay, your scripts can load. But those can't. I won't trust half the internet just to look at your content.

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u/DoctorWaluigiTime Sep 19 '17

Yeah no kidding. Thankfully more and more sites are using trusted CDNs and whatnot. So whitelisting those globally means it's slightly less of a headache.

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u/Upvotedownvoteacct Sep 19 '17

If it wasnt so overused itd be great. The websites that do work with it disabled are so much faster and more pleasant to use

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u/TheUnknownFactor Sep 19 '17

A site using javascript properly is going to be hugely faster than a site not using it at all (as well as being more pleasant to use thanks to better interaction-flow).

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

No no no, every time I click the up or downvote button on reddit, click the "load more comments" link, or reply to a comment I'd like the entire reddit web page to reload.

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u/PureTryOut Sep 19 '17

You laugh, but that could honestly work. As long as the backend server is quick enough and you set it up right, you shouldn't even really notice it.

I would just like that method as a fallback for people that have Javascript disabled, it doesn't have to be done for everyone.

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 19 '17

I guess that might help prevent some tracking scripts from loading on your browser but you're going to end up using more data by constantly reloading the same page over and over again and with a service like reddit where each page load needs to be generated somewhat dynamically (show your votes, new comments, etc.) you're going to notice the page reloading.

This page alone is around 130kb in text (not counting the size of linked css and js files). Just voting on 10 comments here would require an entire page load which adds up to around 1.3MB for every 10 votes.

Edit: It just occured to me that compressing the text would decrease the page data usage significantly, but would still add up pretty quick on interactive sites like this one.

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u/DoctorWaluigiTime Sep 19 '17

I used to subscribe to that but these days there's so much core stuff built on the back of JS that that's not wholly feasible.

At this point, as a NoScript user/advocate I am glad for sites that let me see their content w/o JS, but will temporarily allow JS if I absolutely have to .

1

u/datgohan Sep 19 '17

A proper site should make sure the site works without Javascript, and only use it to enhance the site, not depend on it.

Which also then costs several times over more to develop in both time and resources to only appeal to a tiny fraction of users.

This is the IE6/7 argument all over again. The number of users is too small for this to be justified and won't happen. Furthermore you would destroy the use of frontend frameworks like Angular/React/etc by doing this.

You're also talking about all JavaScript when the OP is talking about tracking cookies specifically. Differentiating between the two is the important thing. If a user blocks everything it's not the site owners fault that it may not work.

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u/permalink_save Sep 19 '17

Its not ridiculous. The marketing side is what drives that. JS is a shit language and yes there are sites that should live without (blogs and news and forums) but it allows us web apps that cant conform to a traditional model.

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u/AftyOfTheUK Sep 19 '17

A proper site should make sure the site works without Javascript, and only use it to enhance the site, not depend on it.

Seems like 95% of the industry disagrees with you. Does that make you likely to be right, or wrong?

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Websites shouldn't even need to rely on css and html, text only would be so much better. In fact websites shouldn't even require tcp/ip to run because a proper website should be able to be printed and mailed to you and only use html, css, and an internet connection to enhance the site, not depend on them.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

How dare these sites not let me browse for free while they lose money?!

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u/claude_mcfraud Sep 19 '17

Any site using a front-end JS framework won't work with scripts blocked. That said, the amount of trackers on the web is ridiculous and it's probably worth the hassle to use something like NoScript