When I wrote about App-pocalypse Now [https://blog.codinghorror.com/app-pocalypse-now/] in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it's also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30. Websites have

This is a screenshot from an NPR article discussing the rising use of ad blockers. The page is 12 megabytes in size in a stock web browser. The same article with basic ad blocking turned on is 1 megabyte.

  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    It would be interesting to correlate this page bloat to carbon emissions. The amount of electricity needed to send 200KB versus 3MB is miniscule, but if you multiply it by a billion people viewing a thousand pages a day it could add up fast.

    Not to mention this locks out a lot of the web to developing nations with limited bandwidth

    • nivenkos@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      The real issue there is that electricity should be carbon-free with nuclear and renewable power.

  • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    I honestly can’t believe the author would go so far as to suggest using pi-hole when mv3 becomes forced (ubo will likely continue to work, but Google will be able to collect filter stats, so still best to avoid). Not only is a pi-hole a project, that only works when you’re at home (or you’re learning more about networking, and it will likely never work right on mobile data), that costs money to set up, DNS blockers are what Google wants you to use, because they serve their ads through the same domains as their content, and if pi-hole ever becomes popular everyone else will too.

    The obvious alternative that is much better in all aspects, respects your privacy, and and is literally free, works everywhere and is not vulnerable to same-domain hosting: firefox. Literally just use firefox. Install ubo, even on mobile, and you’re done. Any qualms you might have about switching to firefox are either false (firefox is now faster than chrome in lighthouse tests) or Google brainwashing you into thinking your workflows are completely static when you could easily adapt to not having the exact extension you so desperately “need” to work. You don’t need it, because you worked fine before the extension, and honestly I’d be surprised if you can’t find a ff extension that does the same semantic thing for you.

    Suggesting to continue using chrome but with a worse adblocker is nonsense and the author has drank the kool-aid.