Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Asa,

I've actually given this a lot of thought previously, and I think Firefox should have the ability to block ads... but in terms of overall content blocking. First, a bit of background. There are three types of ads online.

The first is the unobtrusive ads. These are the static, silent ads. They're similar to their offline counterparts. Like ads in a newspaper or magazine. They don't get in the way of being able to read content. Standard text ads fall into this category. As do non-animated banner, box and skyscraper ads.

The second is the animated ads. These blink and move. If they're flash, sometimes they make noise ("Congratulations, you have been selected to receive 2 free iPod Nanos.."). Or grow. Or cover content. Or float around the screen. These are horrible in terms of usability. They get in the way of content.

The third are integrated text ads. Things like intellitext. That change the color of random words in stories and double-underline them. They often have odd flyouts if you happen to mouse over them. These get in the way of content and usability, too.

So, getting back to it... what do I mean in terms of blocking? Well, a user should be able to right-click anything on a webpage and be able to block it and block similar things. This applies to images. This applies to flash applets. This applies to javascript manipulations into text-based links. When a user right-clicks on a given thing they want to block, they should get the standard array of right-click options. One of those should be block with a sub-menu.

So, let's say a user right-clicks on a banner ad that it's an image. And that image is served from adserver1.exampleadcompany.com. When the user right clicks, they'll see View image, Copy Image, etc as usual. The last option would be "Block" and it would have a submenu. The submenu would contain these options:

all images from adserver1.exampleadcompany.com
all images from *.exampleadcompany.com
-------------------
all content from adserver1.exampleadcompany.com
all content from *.exampleadcompany.com

That way, a user can easily block images or everything with a single click.

A similar menu should be available for Flash. Why should right-clicks be handled entirely by the plugin?

One final option would be to make anything that generates audio require user permission. The same way popups at first generate a flyout message bar at the top, pages that produce audio can do the same. That allows users to browse without random loud ads starting to play music but still lets people easily allow audio for sites where they want it (like youtube.com or ytmnd.com).

I've got a lot more on this topic, but I think that's good for now.

Regards,
John

Asa,
I would sugest the Tab Mix Plus add-on to be implemented. However, in my opinion, blocking and saving browser content are priority. Also, "search as you type" as a active feature wouldn't be bad!

Asa, you raise excellent points as to why AdBlock Plus and Video Downloader are excellent user experiences. I love them both. I would not be able to stand some websites on the web if it weren't for AdBlock Plus, and though I haven't used Video Downloader in a while, it's always there at my disposal.

However, the issue at hand is whether this stuff qualifies as core Firefox functionality.

I think AdBlock is a great extension, and I agree that it would do very well as a core functionality for the browser. However, I also think that the user should be in control of where the experience of the web differs from intention, so I don't believe that there should be any default blocked list. I also think that, as stated, it invites scrutiny. IANAL, so I won't comment on the legality issue, but what I do know is that bulletproof is always better than sorry.

Video Downloader is a different beast altogether. I don't think that a core browser experience involves the saving of videos. This is functionality beyond the core browser paradigm of HTTPDownload->Render->Save if desired. But greater than that the technical challenge of it is simply far, far too immense. Any resulting solution can't possibly be categorized outside of "bloat."

And my main point all along has simply been that I completely fail to see how AdBlock or Video Download are more core to the browsing experience than Page Source or Info.

Also, I feel the need to point out that

"6) Website owners should be in control of the user experience, not the users."

seems to be a mis-statement of one of my points; website owners should be in control of the user experience, not the browser. Users have the final say via extended functionality of the browser, via extensions.

First of all, thanks for using this post to redirect and clarify the discussion.

With regards to moving add-on functionality into the browser, it's worth considering that Firefox should serve as a core. Keep the functionality that's necessary and valuable for most people in the browser, and leave the rest as add-ons, even if they're released as "official" Mozilla packages. Come to think of it, Facebook is following this model pretty well with their Platform.

I definitely sympathize with your desire to improve the overall web experience. It wasn't clear that you're talking about an entirely new implementation of content blocking, especially after you made this comment... After reading that, I wrote up this post, which outlines your reasons 1, 2, and 4 for not blocking content.

The benefits you claim with blocking content are increased usability, which might come with blocking overlay or intellitext ads, as John mentions above; performance gains, which aren't present with the current implementation, as I believe AdBlock just sets the css to display:none for blacklisted items; and control, which is an intriguing point.

With reason 6 listed above, you make it sound as if the opposition is claiming that users shouldn't have any control in their experience. A better phrasing would be that publishers should have the opportunity to present content in the way they want to. Users should have tools available to modify that experience, whether it be to disable intellitext ads or apply some form of parental protection/censorship to displayed images.

Given that, I think it's time to get a better idea of possible implementations, and see a sound analysis disproving the importance of the 6 "against" reasons you've listed above. Those should provide justification for inclusion in Firefox on their own.

First of all, thanks for using this post to redirect and clarify the discussion.

With regards to moving add-on functionality into the browser, it's worth considering that Firefox should serve as a core. Keep the functionality that's necessary and valuable for most people in the browser, and leave the rest as add-ons, even if they're released as "official" Mozilla packages. Come to think of it, Facebook is following this model pretty well with their Platform.

I definitely sympathize with your desire to improve the overall web experience. It wasn't clear that you're talking about an entirely new implementation of content blocking, especially after you made this comment... After reading that, I wrote up this post, which outlines your reasons 1, 2, and 4 for not blocking content.

The benefits you claim with blocking content are increased usability, which might come with blocking overlay or intellitext ads, as John mentions above; performance gains, which aren't present with the current implementation, as I believe AdBlock just sets the css to display:none for blacklisted items; and control, which is an intriguing point.

With reason 6 listed above, you make it sound as if the opposition is claiming that users shouldn't have any control in their experience. A better phrasing would be that publishers should have the opportunity to present content in the way they want to. Users should have tools available to modify that experience, whether it be to disable intellitext ads or apply some form of parental protection/censorship to displayed images.

Given that, I think it's time to get a better idea of possible implementations, and see a sound analysis disproving the importance of the 6 "against" reasons you've listed above. Those should provide justification for inclusion in Firefox on their own.

Shouldn't we be worried that blocking ads on ~20% of the Web could literally slow down the global economy? Europe would be hit particularly hard.

Totally agree with you on video downloading.

Camino already has a built-in option to "Block web advertising", which seems to do exactly that. I'm not exactly sure how it is implemented, but it's probably worth taking a look at...but I agree that it's probably not the best idea to block specific ad companies out of the box.

Ditto John's comments. :) I'm not sure how technologically feasible some of his ideas are, but I'd like to see all of what he suggested. The only addition I'd make is a "delete this" option in the right click menu. All that option would do is temporarily remove that particular item. I might not want to permanently remove ALL ads from a particular network, but I might want to remove one offensive ad everytime I see it.

I am fairly tolerant of ads, and others will probably disagree with the above option. But I have an extension installed right now for such a purpose. If a nearly naked lady shows up on a site, and I am at work, I don't want to get fired if my boss walks by. So I just delete it and go back to reading the article.

Opera's model for blocking content works pretty well, and they are not getting sued, so I think it would be fine if Firefox had something similar.

@Asher Gabara
Opera won't be sued for pop-up blocking, because they have a neglectable market share.

@Asa
I know that ad blocking extensions are very popular, and that it seems like a "good fit". But IF Firefox EVER planned to incorporate some kind of ad blocking/content blocking technology, let the web developers know. Whatever - change the user agent, do whatever you think is the right thing to do.
Because I would have to block these users from using my projects, because a part of the monetization stream goes away.

Usually, 95% of the people I talk to _immediately_ understand why ads are important. But the remaining 5% shouldn't waste my traffic and money. That's for sure.

Asa, I think implementing (better) content blocking in the browser is possible. The condition is that Firefox doesn't block anything by default but only allows users to add their filters (ideally in some way that still has the flexibility of Adblock Plus but doesn't require too much knowledge at the same time). Downloading and updating pre-made filter lists could be left to extensions. Now to your points:

> 1) most ads aren't a security threat like pop-ups were.

I don't understand this point. Ads are a huge security threat - one compromised ad server can make thousands (or even millions for large ad servers) of web sites serve malware. See http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130129-pg,1/article.html

> 2) ads today aren't as much of a usability/annoyance as pop-up ads.

Some of them are. There are quite a few web sites out there that are almost unusable without an ad blocker.

> 3) pop-ups are not ad or ad-network specific so blocking them is fundamentally different from blocking other ad content.

Right, implementing the popup blocker was certainly simpler. In case of ads you have to leave the choice to the user. But this is a technical problem IMO.

> 4) it would lead to the end of free/subsidized content on the web or the Web would come to an end.

Only if all ads are blocked by default - which they shouldn't be.

> 5) Mozilla would get sued.

Same as above - Firefox already has a content blocker and nobody got sued. As long as there are no default filters, there is no danger for Mozilla.

> 6) Website owners should be in control of the user experience, not the users.

That's non-sense. The user can decide what should happen on his computer. I mean, he is also permitted to switch away on TV advertisements - should the TV channel be in control of the user experience? If we agree with this world view, we will have to throw out the option to switch off images, force-install Flash on each computer and make using Lynx punishable by law.

Asa,

Just think of the users, not the website owners.

All the users agree that advert blocking in the browser is OK, so long as they can choose to use it or not.

The same with saving video and music. The use can choose to save it. It's only the web site owners who moan about it. I think it is up to a site to educate people, they need to put up a warning that goes like this:

"Please do not save this video because we do not give you permission. Even though you have already downloaded it to your PC and Firefox has saved it into the cache, you may not move it from the cache file to your desktop without being sued. Do you understand?"

The same goes with the adverts.

@ Sebastian
> Usually, 95% of the people I talk to _immediately_ understand why ads are
> important. But the remaining 5% shouldn't waste my traffic and money. That's
> for sure.

Why should the development of Firefox stop because it may hurt your stupid business model? Learn to be a plumber, make you money as a plumber and let us get on with the Internet. Cheers. Hey I know how to stop people 'stealing' your bandwidth - turn off you web site.

monk.e.boy

To my opinion, incorporating ad block functionality would not be the right decision.

A great number of web sites exists only owing to advertising. And if significant amount of users will not see that ads by default, then site owners will blame Mozilla definitively. Remember, what reaction was caused, when Microsoft invent Smart Tags and even "not evil" Google adds AutoLink feature on by default. I mean, nobody wants browsers to display modifications in their sites' content without any agreement.

As regards the embedded multimedia downloading, I completely agree with you.

I'm a bit torn on the issue.

On the one hand, it's clear that ads provide the revenue which allows many sites to exist, or provide content at no cost. Would an ad-free internet have icanhascheezburger.com, GMail, YouTube, Facebook, etc? [The web certainly wouldn't cease to exist, but I think it would look a lot different.]

On the other hand, there are clearly some highly annoying ads out there. I even blogged about one particularly egregious ad that nearly gave me a seizure. We blocked "pop ups" because people hated them, blocking seizure ads isn't all that different.

In that sense, I think it might be more palatable to frame the issue as "blocking highly annoying ads". [Or "annoying content", but that probably widens the scope too much.] It's also a more defensable position, and is more aligned with the prescedent that popup-blocking already set.

As an example, the browser could include a basic version of Adblock's subscription filters. The default subscription would be fairly permissive, and only block ad networks / advertisers / ads which have a undisputable history of being problematic [seizure animation, ads for malware, spoofing OS windows, jarring sound, etc]. Creating well-defined criteria that can be fairly applied will take some effort. There are probably existing lessons to learn from in the policies of reputable ad networks and mainstream-media, as well as spam blacklists (which have had their share of problems).

I think now that we've gotten the discussion going and we see most of the arguments, I'd like to see a more specific explanation of how Asa was thinking that these features should be implemented. His implementation may not be as bad as some people think it is. We should give him a chance to give us more info before we write him off.

Asa summarized the arguments against ad blocking, and then pointed out rightly that what really matters is the user experience. But in doing so, it's important to focus not only on short-term benefits for the few and to ignore long-term consequences for the many. It's also important not to brush aside ethical considerations that people have raised.

Clearly, in the short term, blocking ads can be of great benefit to a few individuals. On the other hand, large-scale blocking of ads is likely to choke off revenue and have other negative repercussions. This is not to be undertaken lightly, and it's not clear that this would good for the user experience.

Wladimir Palant claims that this is not a problem unless ads are blocked by default. I think it's far more likely that the decline in revenue will be closely related to the decline in ad responses.

Wladimir Palant made one sensible-sounding point that hasn't already been disposed of: that ads are supposedly responsible for 80% of the security threats on the Web. Really? Is he claiming Firefox is serving malicious content? If so, it must be dealt with immediately as a security threat. Removing ads by a few individuals is not the proper way to do it. It doesn't deal with regular Web content, and it doesn't deal with ads that are not blocked. Remember also that he says that not everyone should do it, or it would end revenue. Is he advocating security for those who happen to block the ad?

Much has been made of other browsers blocking ads. I'm not familiar with all these features, but I do know that Opera allows site-by-site blocking of specific, obnoxious features, like blinking, sound, and banners ads that use up all your CPU time.

There are certain behaviors of certain adverts that are very annoying. I would welcome a Method of blocking these annoying behaviors, but I do not think that a general add blocker would be a good idea.

Here are the two behaviors that I find most annoying.
1) audio that starts when the page is loaded without first asking my permission. This is as often the web page itself as it is an advertisement, and in my opinion is very rude. There is no web developer who knows what is going on in my environment where I might need to keep quiet and have forgotten to mute my speakers(or somebody else used my computer and turned the volume way up -- or worse both). I might want to hear the sound, but it would be better on my terms than on somebody else's.
2) flashing animations. Most animations are not too bad, but there are some that are too irritating to even have on one's display. If I could right click on the animation and tell it to stop, I would be quite satisfied.

Asa, what happened to such features as blocking plugins? CPU use by Flash accounts for a lot of users complaints. Have you rejected this idea or is it just off topic for this discussion?

First of all, it would be stupid to block the ads. It means that Firefox users would bring costs to sites and no revenues. Many sites would block Firefox in that case. If not anyone else, MSN for sure. If that happens (and is very likely) Firefox would keep just geek hard core public, and that even excludes me.

But then, it would be also totally immoral. Every single user that doesn't like web site can use another one. Web site content is private property! Just like you can't enter in some restaurant with short pants. What, should you kill the guard? No, you should just find another restaurant that allows it, or if that one is so great for you should find proper suite! Pop-ups are not comparable. They are touching my own private property (*my* browser window), and I really need protection from web sites in such case.

Yet, there is one catch when I would accept ad blocking. That is advertising overuse. First thing is that many users open sites in background, and while they should be aware that going to unknown site might mean watching some advertisements, they should be protected from downloading above some limit (in KBs, as some of them are even paying for bandwidth). Other thing is that overusing of advertisement (even in the means of screen real estate) is usually connected with some sort of monopoly misuse. And though one can't know whether it is really monopoly misuse, that could be accepted as rule of finger, so you could even block some ads if they take too much of screen real estate. But these thresholds should be defined by some Internet authorities.

Errrh, and video download, I think it would be cool.

And some more. Thinking out of the Internet, I would be very happy if ads are to be banned. Some people try to say that you would pay much more for TV, or sports games in that case. But you wouldn't pay so much for products, as they wouldn't have advertisement cost, and you would have enough money to pay for all TV you are watching now, and probably some more. But if at that point it seems like a waste of money, then it means that you should watch TV much less than you do and do some other things... People wouldn't waste their time on 'free' things, as they would have to pay for everything.

I think adding more advanced content filtering capabilities to Firefox would be a great new feature, as long as it is disabled by default. This, of course, means less knowledgeable users will probably never use it or know about it, but anyone with enough aversion towards ads will find out about it.

Downloading video sounds logical in a way, but it is also very complicated from a technical standpoint. Most web video is rendered using binary plugins (Flash, RealPlayer, Windows Media, etc.) developed by the very corporations that will most likely agree that downloading this content is not right. You would need to work around these plugins to get something that generally works, and even then it sounds pretty hard.

I personally could not live without mouse gestures.

On the business of incorporating current plug-ins, you have to look at the market. If someone is selling an add in, and you incorporate it into Firefox, you essentially have killed that product. If there are more than one products of that type, you have killed the market and the inherent goodness of competition. On the other hand if something is freely available, I think the creator of the plug-in would be proud to have his idea incorporated into Firefox...

my $0.02

>Most web video is rendered using binary plugins (Flash, RealPlayer, Windows Media, etc.) developed by the very corporations
>that will most likely agree that downloading this content is not right.
One of the core features of upcoming RealPlayer 11 is the option to save web videos, see http://www.realnetworks.com/company/press/releases/2007/rp11b107.html
Also QuickTime Pro has Save as source feature and in OS X this can be used to download even Windows Media. Then there is tens of commercial stream ripper apps out there, so apparently there are NO real legal problems at all.

I disagree with the ad/content blocking being built in. The filtering built into Adblock Plus is not simple, and I can't imagine it being easy for most users to manually update a 'clean' starting list, nor could I imagine that Mozilla would be held blameless in maintaining its own list for users. The whitelisting needed for NoScript and FlashBlock require a lot of user maintenance, and can easily cause loads of confusion. I've installed NoScript on some friends' computers, and there were plenty of times where they couldn't figure out why a site wasn't working due to that.

For saving content, absolutely. If the data is held locally and is accessible by the browser (in cache, etc), it should be possible to save it. I always expected to be able to do that from the Media tab in the Page Info dialog, but it rarely worked. If the data isn't held by Firefox (it's delivered straight to the plugin which uses its own cache or whatever), then I don't see it as being as viable, though it may be possible with various tricks. However if you have to use tricks to get at it, it should stay as an extension.

David, I think you're focusing too much on the current implementations. My hope here is that we talk about the user value and the trade-offs, assuming we could implement these features in a way that was simple to use. We shouldn't let the technology determine what it is that we do. We should determine what it is that we want to do and then make the technology to do it.

- A

VanillaMozilla, what do you mean by "blocking plugins"? If you just wish to disable some plug-ins (on every page), this is already done for Firefox 3 (plug-ins got their own tab in the Add-Ons Manager). Now if you mean blocking a specific plug-in on a specific page (or blocking a page from using any plug-ins), I guess you will still need some extension.

There's a lot of talk about blocking ads (as in completely removing them), but I haven't noticed anyone suggest transforming them or otherwise pacifying them. As John T. Haller points out in the first comment, there are three key types of embedded advert:

1) Unobtrusive ads - either image or text based.
2) Animated ads - flash or GIF.
3) Script-based ads - floating boxes, things changing size, etc.

I'd say that a simple option in Firefox could exist to pacify the obtrusive adverts. Something along the lines of:

1) Do nothing. Perhaps strip out any horribly annoying formatting if there's a case for doing so.
2) Third-party embedded flash and third-party GIF images could be stopped by default, with some kind of translucent play button. Another option is falling back to alt text.
3) Third-party JavaScript could be restricted to a higher degree than first-party JavaScript, prohibiting the most annoying kinds of HTML DOM tampering.

By targeting third-party content only, Firefox would mostly hit advertising content with these tougher conditions. Scripts, images and flash hosted off-site would be somewhat crippled, but not unreasonably so, and apart from scripts, legitimate content could be easily switched back on by the user (click the play button).

Firefox could also provide status-bar notification (just as per the popup blocker) which would allow the user to whitelist the current page, or at least restore the page to it's former state for the current browser session.

The heuristics and logic for "annoying advert detection" are probably far too difficult to outline here and would need a lot of thought, but reducing the impact of problem adverts is, in my opinion, better than blocking them outright. The user experience is improved and the advertisement business model isn't destroyed. An added bonus is that more companies would switch to serving user-friendly adverts because going any further would be a waste of their time.

As for downloading video content, I absolutely agree with it and it probably isn't amazingly hard. There have been standalone tools for downloading streamed content for good while now, the complexity can't be insurmountable. File > Save As should save the embedded plugin content. Page Info should provide the ability to save the embedded plugin content. I don't think we need any more context options / UI for the functionality, especially as we have to deal with plugin context menus and such.

With regards to video downloading... This might have already been mentioned, but the problem is: many countries (e.g. the Czech Republic) have separate licensing restrictions (and licensing fees) on "streamed" content vs. "static" (downloadable) content. If the ability to save streamed content was ubiquitous, content providers wouldn't have the ability to pay smaller licensing fees, or to provide "streamed previews" because everything would be "de facto" downloadable (other software like media players has already faced this - winamp had to remove the capability to save radio streams to disk, pandora.com expressly forbids you to download any of the streamed content in the license agreement).

I think that this functionality should best be left to 3rd parties - let them deal with the legal and moral implications. I understand that the ability to save audio/video streams would be "nice", but it would be "nice" in the same way that legally downloading major label mp3s for free would be (instead of having to go to iTunes and actually buy them).

You can't implement such technology in the browser and "let the user decide if he downloads or not", because it really isn't the users' problem. In many countries, you actually are permitted to make copies "for personal use", and it would be the fault of the content provider because it was him who provided a download (which could be a violation of the license he got for distributing the media).

>(quoting Daniel Luz) "what do you mean by "blocking plugins"? ...this is already done for Firefox 3...."

Thanks. That answers the question. I think I knew that already and forgot.

Yeah, the ability to save videos from the browser would be nice. It'd be nicer than having to use a combination of file and grep to find out which of the blobs in the cache folder are video files, anyway.

Letting some critical features to be core functions of Firefox instead of extensions is an approach that has at least one serious disadvantage: as a result, the features are effectively frozen for the public until the next version of Firefox, which means for about a year now. Being extensions, the features have their freedom to be developed and updated more rapidly. There were much more versions of Adblock Plus that versions of Firefox in 2007 and 2006.

For a video downloader the above disadvantage is critical. Imagine the video site intentionally changing its code to 'break' this Firefox core feature, in order to stop Firefox users from downloading videos; the feature then won't work until the next Firefox version comes.

Actually, there will be support for a <video> tag in both Firefox and Opera - saving the content of that tag should be easily possible, the same way that saving an <img> tag is possible.

But, as the above poster said, trying to "rip" video content from arbitrary plug-ins (like flash or Java) would probably be too complicated.

Just a note, comparing Ad-blocking with with Popup-blocking is simply wrong. The majority of ads use functionality specified by various standards (HTML, DOM) which would be intentionally broken by supporting this, while popups use a method thus far not standardized, AFAIK.[1]

[1] It seems HTML5 will specify it, but it allows the UA to choose what it wants to do with it in the given situation.

@monk.e.boy

This "stupid business model" is very common and isn't stupid at all. It saves hundreds of thousands of jobs and works better than most want to see.
Of course - all these jobs could also be paid for through the users. But ... do you really want to pay for every search you do on Google? Do you want to pay for every photo you post to Flickr and Facebook? Do you want to pay for every e-mail you send via free-mail-services?

If you want to, do it!

I doubt you will do that, though. Free without ads AND without paying isn't possible, no matter what you want to do.
Luckily, there is a way to find out if AdBlock Plus is used.