this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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This seems like a pretty dumb thing to do to try to wipe out a browser with 2% marketshare.
"I'm switching from Chrome because they killed ad blocking."
"OMG! Firefox takes 5 seconds to even load webpages! I'll just go back to Chrome."
The goal is to prevent the competition from growing.
The EU should investigate this
Do not worry Vestager lives for shit like this. She’ll make them bend over, take it deep, and pay her for her pleasure.
It won't stay at 2% if it's the only browser with a working adblocker.
Unfortunately said browser is dependent on Google financing Mozilla.
Obviously there a people in charge now who will never understand the Streisand effect. They could have kept it quiet and just... allow... the technical adept users to do their thing. Now, they are the laughing stock and get unwanted attention. Also, from my layman understanding, this shit won't fly in the EU at all.
Or, to say it differently: This is the best thing to happen to Mozilla in quite a long time and I'm a fan.
I'm out of the loop. What happened? Did someone decompile their code and find definitive proof of a throttle for Firefox?
some explanation
To be fair, they used setTimeout() and not thread.sleep() because the latter isn't possible out of the box in JS ^^
Yeah let me turn off the adblocker just for having an even more suboptimal viewing due to ads. They're lunatics.
Thanks for the explainer! Also, Google's response is such a crock of shit.
JavaScript is an interpreted language, so no decompilation is necessary, although this is repeatable by using a Firefox user agent.
You can build a virtual machine in JavaScript and execute compiled code on it
Just because you can...
Oh yeah, you shouldn't. But people do this for fingerprinting, bot detection, and other "adversarial" scenarios where you really don't like the person executing your code. It's somewhat plausible Google would use this technique to do something scummy like this (although that is not the case).
Relevant article and a great read: https://www.nullpt.rs/reverse-engineering-tiktok-vm-1
Neat
I'm guessing that it's a way for them to test if ads have been loaded after initial scripts have run, but I'm not going to dig into the code.
Honestly, the whole ads thing is missing the point. If you desired a public video hosting platform, that needs to be a tax-funded commons. Video hosting and streaming is very expensive. Similarly, users should be donating to keep Lemmy going:
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
https://patreon.com/mastodonworld