design-reviews VS uBlock

> The other value of pretty specifically addresses preventing orphans and can be more broadly applied. The algorithm behind pretty will evaluate the last four lines in a text block to work out adjustments as needed to ensure the last line has two or more words.

This is very, very badly wrong. `text-wrap-style: pretty` is explicitly not about orphans and does not have a defined algorithm. It’s about prettiness, a subjective thing that will have different interpretations in different browsers and over time, and this is extremely deliberate. What the author has described is what Chromium has implemented at this time.

All the spec says is <https://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-4/#valdef-text-wrap-style-pre...>, that `text-wrap-style: pretty` “Specifies the UA should bias for better layout over speed, and is expected to consider multiple lines, when making break decisions. Otherwise equivalent to auto”.

TAG review of the feature requested that implementers use at least two heuristics, “to avoid authors using it as a proxy for a more specific thing” <https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/864#issuecom...>.

For total clarity: ‘pretty’ is not necessarily any different from ‘auto’, and ‘auto’ is permitted to do exactly the same thing as ‘pretty’ does, and I hope and expect that browser makers will eventually go that direction for most contexts (contenteditable/ being the main exception, and maybe lower-powered platforms). If you explicitly want a greedy/first-fit technique, use `text-wrap: stable`. Firefox has had a bug open for 13 years where shifting in this direction and using Knuth–Plass almost everywhere has been seriously contemplated <<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181</a>>, long before text-wrap-style.

CSS specs are explicitly not interested in prescribing TeX-level control; text-wrap-style is a good example of this: it’s just hints, with the actual algorithms completely UA-defined. And in fact, they’re going out of their way to recommend including multiple distinct heuristics of prettiness, so that developers don’t use it as a proxy for just one thing and start relying on something that is explicitly and deliberately undefined. <https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/864#issuecom...> (And Chromium has done just this: <https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143279...>.)

In other words: you’ve already lost!

Since people seemed to believing Google PR at face value here is the w3c position in rejecting the proposal:

The intention of the Topics API is to enable high level interests of web users to be shared with third parties in a privacy-preserving way in order to enable targeted advertising, while also protecting users from unwanted tracking and profiling. The TAG's initial view is that this API does not achieve these goals as specified.

The Topics API as proposed puts the browser in a position of sharing information about the user, derived from their browsing history, with any site that can call the API. This is done in such a way that the user has no fine-grained control over what is revealed, and in what context, or to which parties. It also seems likely that a user would struggle to understand what is even happening; data is gathered and sent behind the scenes, quite opaquely. This goes against the principle of enhancing the user's control, and we believe is not appropriate behaviour for any software purporting to be an agent of a web user.

The responses to the proposal from Webkit and Mozilla highlight the tradeoffs between serving a diverse global population, and adequately protecting the identities of individuals in a given population. Shortcomings on neither side of these tradeoffs are acceptable for web platform technologies.

It's also clear from the positions shared by Mozilla and Webkit that there is a lack of multi-stakeholder support. We remain concerned about fragmentation of the user experience if the Topics API is implemented in a limited number of browsers, and sites that wish to use it prevent access to users of browsers without it (a different scenario from the user having disabled it in settings).

We are particularly concerned by the opportunities for sites to use additional data gathered over time by the Topics API in conjunction with other data gathered about a site visitor, either via other APIs, via out of band means, and/or via existing tracking technologies in place at the same time, such as fingerprinting.

We appreciate the in-depth privacy analyses of the API that have been done so far by Google and by Mozilla. If work on this API is to proceed, it would benefit from further analysis by one or more independant (non-browser engine or adtech) parties.

Further, if the API were both effective and privacy-preserving, it could nonetheless be used to customise content in a discriminatory manner, using stereotypes, inferences or assumptions based on the topics revealed (eg. a topic could be used - accurately or not - to infer a protected characteristic, which is thereby used in selecting an advert to show). Relatedly, there is no binary assessment that can be made over whether a topic is "sensitive" or not. This can vary depending on context, the circumstances of the person it relates to, as well as change over time for the same person.

Giving the web user access to browser settings to configure which topics can be observed and sent, and from/to which parties, would be a necessary addition to an API such as this, and go some way towards restoring agency of the user, but is by no means sufficient. People can become vulnerable in ways they do not expect, and without notice. People cannot be expected to have a full understanding of every possible topic in the taxonomy as it relates to their personal circumstances, nor of the immediate or knock-on effects of sharing this data with sites and advertisers, and nor can they be expected to continually revise their browser settings as their personal or global circumstances change.

A portion of topics returned by the API are proposed to be randomised, in part to enable plausible deniability of the results. The usefulness of this mitigation may be limited in practice; an individual who wants to explain away an inappropriate ad served on a shared computer cannot be expected to understand the low level workings of a specific browser API in a contentious, dangerous or embarrassing situation (assuming a general cultural awareness of the idea of targeted ads being served based on your online activities or even being "listened to" by your devices, which does not exist everywhere, but is certainly pervasive in some places/communities).

While we appreciate the efforts that have gone into this proposal aiming to iteratively improve the privacy-preserving possibilities of targeted advertising, ultimately it falls short. In summary, the proposed API appears to maintain the status quo of inappropriate surveillence on the web, and we do not want to see it proceed further.

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/726#issuecom...

Ah, I didn't realize this wasn't solved -- a quick search turns up:

- https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/788

- https://github.com/w3c/DOM-Parsing/issues/58

- https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/494

- https://web.dev/declarative-shadow-dom

In pre-render they seem to have started in this direction extremely recently:

https://github.com/prerender/prerender/pull/731/files

I don't use prerender so I can't definitively speak to it being solved and hiccup-free, but I think that limitation is going to go away in the future.

There was a ton of work across browser vendors to make this a part of spec:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html#the-canva...

It's all there. It's all official. That github page was just one part of reaching consensus. There's also TAG review:

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/627

FWIW Mozilla and Safari signed off on all of these changes at some point in time somewhere, hence why it's allowed to be part of spec. There were some changes that were not allowed to be part of the new API because one of those two said no (like perspective transforms, conic curves).

I would like to quote from the W3C TAG comments on the Managed Device Web API:

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/606#issuecom...

> > "NOTE: [RFC7258] treats pervasive monitoring as an attack, but it doesn’t apply to managed devices."

> We don't think this is adequate. Given the power dynamics at play in an employer-employee relationship, the UA should still be working in the best interests of the end-user (the employee) even if the device being used is managed by an administrator. That is to say, pervasive monitoring is never a feature.

Chrome may not consider it part of the "web-exposed platform", since the code doesn't live in blink/, but the same logic applies to view-source. The needs of the users are more important than the security theatre you wish to put on for their teacher's benefit.

One case directly related to Chrome browser, and sending data to Google, there is issue with tracking headers. [source](https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/467#issuecomment-581944600)This allows tracking specific Chrome instance among all Google services.We cannot say whether this is used for tracking, but it allows it for sure.\[Register article about the same matter.\]([https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/02/05/google\_chrome\_id\_numbers/](https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/02/05/google_chrome_id_numbers/))

Check out uBlock Origin's per site switches [1]

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

If ads, in particular on YouTube, are the problem, anything Chromium-based is probably only going to get worse and worse (see [1] and [2]). So that basically leaves you with Firefox and Safari.

I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Or if on mobile, it is well worth it to look up adblock options for the browser you use.

What are the compelling advantages of Chrome nowadays?

Chrome is working to limit the capabilities of ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...

Whereas a compelling advantage of Firefox is that uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Advertising networks have often been vectors for malware. Using an ad blocker is an important security measure. Even the FBI recommends ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221?=8324278624

> It allows for 30,000 dynamic rules

That is not what we mean by dynamic filters. From https://developer.chrome.com/blog/improvements-to-content-fi...

> However, to support more frequent updates and user-defined rules, extensions can add rules dynamically too, without their developers having to upload a new version of the extension to the Chrome Web Store.

What Chrome is talking about is the ability to specify rules at runtime. What critics of Manifest V3 are talking about is not the ability to dynamically add rules (although that can be an issue), it is the ability to add dynamic rules -- ie rules that analyze and rewrite requests in the style of the blockingWebRequest permission.

It's a little deceptive to claim that the concerns here are outdated and to point to vague terminology that sounds like it's correcting the problem, but on actual inspection turns out to be entirely separate functionality from what the GP was talking about.

> Giving this ability to extensions can slow down the browser for the user. These ads can still be blocked through other means.

This is the debate; most of the adblocking community disagrees with this assertion. uBO maintains a list of some common features that are already not possible to support in Chrome ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... ) and has written about features that are not able to be supported via Chrome's current V3 API ( https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... ). Of particular note are filtering for large media elements (I use this a lot on mobile Firefox, it's great for reducing page size), and top-level filtering of domains/fonts.

> "Its happened before"

> That's not an argument

It's a subheading to "2. Browser engine monopoly". The subsection's purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it's something to be avoided.

> in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt

That would be agreeing with the article, unless I understand what you mean.

> On top of that, the internet was very different back then.

In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.

> I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser?

The points made in the article are:

* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company

* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards

* It’s fast and has a nice user interface

Onto which I'd add:

* Content blockers work best on Firefox (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...), doubly so when Manifest V3 rolls out

* Allows more customization of interface and home page

* UX improvements, like the clutter-free reader mode, aren't vetoed to protect search revenue as with Chrome (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467)

Advertising networks are vectors for malware:

https://www.cisecurity.org/insights/blog/malvertising

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

So if you're concerned about security then you want the browser with the best ad blocker.

uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...