Yet another Hacker News

Vivaldi 8.3 for Desktop: make bad ads sad

19 points speckx 2 hours ago 14 comments

kayart_dev 34 minutes ago | parent

It's better than nothing but it's still far behind uBlock Origin or even the Brave's built-in ad blocker. Their decision to stop supporting uBlock Origin made me drop it as my alternative browser.

andyfilms1 30 minutes ago | parent

I have a question. My ISP, allegedly, knows what websites I go to. So why can't I pay my ISP an optional $20 a month that gets evenly distributed directly to those websites, in exchange for an ad-free web experience?

Surely I'm not creating much more than $20 in ad revenue in total per month, right? Can't we just cut out the middleman and all walk away happy?

conception 28 minutes ago | parent

How many websites do you go to a month? Hundreds? Thousands? And you want the ISP to handle the payment processing out to them? Many probably international? And each ISP doing this on their own?

pwagland 27 minutes ago | parent

Well, your ISP likely _doesn't_ know which sites you are going to.

In the old days, they'd run proxies, but with SSL, they no longer know where they are going, only that they are, for example, going to an AWS or GCP site.

saagarjha 25 minutes ago | parent

SSL (and most DNS queries) expose the hostname

AlotOfReading 11 minutes ago | parent

Unless ECH and DoH are enabled, which I believe has been the default on Chrome and Firefox for a few years now.

rpastuszak 24 minutes ago | parent

Speaking as someone who managed to get uncle Murdoch to sponsor writing an adblocker/payment tool similar to yours (while I was working at an adtech business), but then got stalled by the publishers (who on avg. hated ads), specifically the direct supply sales people (who tend to have louder voices in those companies, have mortgages to pay) -- the issue is systemic.

ISPs are already selling your data to a bunch of data brokers, I don't think ad spend is the only goal there.

WarmWash 20 minutes ago | parent

People have been trying stuff like this for almost 20 years now.

The core problem is that while people hold up that ads are the problem, the actual problem is that people like free stuff with no strings attached, i.e. have your cake (the content) and eat it too (nothing traded for it).

So when you present people an alternate way to compensate creators directly, they overwhelmingly just stick with ad blocking. There is a long case file of fools taking the internet at their word that "I want to give but the ads are so bad I can't!". They don't want to give lol

functionmouse 12 minutes ago | parent

I don't think that's the case. I think the problem is that the sort of market behavior that would drive a company to run invasive ads in the first place betrays its fundamental lack of respect for its users. I want to pay for stuff. And I have tried. Even in doing so, I've found piracy is still often the superior service to using what I'm actually paying for.

mminer237 18 minutes ago | parent

Calculating shares is basically impossible from DNS records and easily abusable.

That is basically the whole premise of the Brave browser though.

bastawhiz 4 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure why your ISP should be involved. Ideally they don't know what sites you're visiting. Your browser knows, though. And what you're describing is kind of what Brave tried to do with BAT (and kind of failed at).

skeledrew 23 minutes ago | parent

This reminds me I have to see what's up with my install. Tried running earlier and got a message that it's secure store is busted, and have options to switch profile or continue and lose data, and all profiles are similarly broken. Luckily I don't keep much in it beyond sites like GMail and anything else not very Firefox friendly. Hoping this doesn't mean I lose access to my Google account as it's only logged in there.

toddmorey 6 minutes ago | parent

I’ve had a really good experience with Vivaldi as a replacement for the Arc browser.

It really is nice to have a browser from a company whose incentives seem to be for the actual users.