Not asking for tech support here, just wondering if in theory it would be possible to create a plug-in or even a complete browser that blocks ads in a way that’s impossible to detect. One model that comes to mind is a quarantined / containerized non-blocking virtual browser which queries the web server directly, then the UX filters the content from that container and presents it to the user ad-free. As far as the web server can tell, the containerized browser is just vanilla Chromium.
It doesn’t matter how good your browser is when you can only access content through an app.
That’s the way things are headed, I’m afraid. In a few years you won’t be able to load Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, or Twitter(formally X) from a browser.
An ad-blocking DNS server on your local network should work for apps too, right? (As long as the ads are hosted on known ad servers.)
They do still have to cater to desktop users, so I imagine accessible websites for those platforms will exist for many years to come.
Bleak but probably true. Cabin in the woods with a good book is my future.
What do you mean all the woods are “gone”?
i think greasemonkey could do this with scripts like load ads into a 0 pixel window or something maybe
Theoretically, an air-gapped system that is worn on the head, rather than installed to the device would be undetectable.
An AR vision headset that detected known-ad-signatures and could blank or replace ads in realtime, with targetted noise-cancelling to ‘mute’ specific ad audio, could surgically remove ads from any media(billboard, magazine, video, radio, webpage).
Kind of like reverse-Snowcrash augmentation.
uBlock Origin already does
I wouldn’t say that it’d be strictly impossible, however if it can be done then it would come at a considerable cost to useability, versatility, etc.
One adjacent concept that comes to mind is the use of the :visited CSS tag to extract a user’s browsing habits. I remember seeing a demonstration of this where an “are you human” captcha was shown but the choice of image in each box was controlled by the :visited tag. I can’t find that post, but this medium article demonstrates a similer concept. There are mitigations to this luckily, but a fullproof solution would be to remove the tag’s functionality altogether, which would make certain websites (like the one we’re on right now!) much more inconvenient to use.
It seems trivial to me for a website to detect user behaviors that indicate the use of an adblocker. For example, if a request for a page is immediately followed by a request for a video on that page, rather than after 5-60 seconds, then they’re likey using an adblocker. If there is an ad placed between two paragaphs in an article, but two distant paragraphs are visible at the same time, it is more likely (although not guaranteed) that they are using an adblocker. If a user triggers an abnormal amount of those heuristics then they get flagged as an adblocking user.
What you’re saying makes sense about detection. I think my theoretical model might work around some of those, but then there are the user behaviors you’re talking about that could still give it away.
I’m having trouble finding it again, but I remember seeing some articles a few weeks / months ago that Google wants to start using some kind of “3rd party authentication” service to make sure you are using an approved and unmodified browser. They want to roll this thing out to as many sites as they can. Of course they will pretend it’s for your security / protection but it’s really to block add-ons / extensions that they don’t like.
