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by matheusmoreira·6y ago·view on hn ↗
> I as a user have pretty much lost all control over my browser.

> It’s just been handed over to the web site publisher

This is an illusion. It is a fact that the evolution of the web as a medium empowered publishers with more control. However, the browser is running on our computers. The truth is we let them have control. We trusted the publishers and allowed execution of foreign code on our machines.

We gave them that power. We can take it away. It began with popup blockers. Then people created ad and script blockers. Now we have general content blockers. I bet one day people are going to make GPL'd custom clients for popular websites.

2 comments
"I bet one day people are going to make GPL'd custom clients for popular websites."

People do, it's just hard to do so against any website that has an incentive to prevent you from creating a third-party custom clients, which is every site that serves advertising, which is... uhh... basically the internet.

But, see Hacker News: https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/cluster?clp=gg... (At least, I hope that link sends you to a search on "Hacker News" on the Google Play Store. If not, well... search for "Hacker News".)

If people can build and maintain huge ad blocking databases, I don't see why custom clients and APIs for sites would be out of reach. For example, youtube-dl has handlers for specific sites, gets constantly updated to deal with changes and has a generic video scraper it falls back on.

I posted about this idea on reddit and someone showed me this:

https://weboob.org/

Something like this could change the web.

Except this time around, browsers are on the side of the publishers[0]. They keep removing useful functionality that gave users control, while adding more and more ways for publishers to impose their will on people. And every now and then you get blatant attempts at neutering the users' decisions, like e.g. Chrome's recent extension API changes.

[0] - Except maybe Firefox, but it has to follow Chrome on most things to stay relevant.