It doesn't matter if that person was good at his job (which btw from whatever his peers say about him, he most definitely was) - everybody deserves a right to at least be told that they are fired and no longer working at the job.
If you're looking at it that way, then we should apply even more scrutiny over native apps we install on our machine and not single out extensions.
Also, not all extensions run on every single site. Also, some extensions actually help in blocking malware, crypto-trackers etc so the potential upsides are also great.
No, GP said to only trust these two extensions and no other extensions. While they are entitled to their opinion, IMO that is such ridiculous. There are many many extensions which provide value which don't do shady things.
Also, there is nothing wrong in advertising as a concept. Advertising has existed as long as products have existed. The problem is tracking and data collection/exploitation about some very granular aspects of users.
Also, even if you take away advertising, the problem remains of addictive apps and 'persuasive' design which will still remain. To tackle that is a whole different discussion altogether.
>The industry is a fundamental conflict of interest, designed to convince people in most cases to buy things that they may not need
Thats a bold assumption. If I have a business then I will advertise my product in the hope that people will see it and make a decision by themselves on if they need or want it, and make an informed choice to buy it.
Besides, its not about needs, but also about wants. Humans are driven by not just strict needs, but also aspirational desires, ambitions and tastes. For e.g, nowdays you don't really need a wrist watch anymore since you can tell the time from your mobile phone which most people already have, still the demand for such watches is there because it seems to fulfill some other desire that there is no longer any strict 'need' for. There are various ways you can make such watches (different price points, aesthetics, quality of materials, after sales service etc) which also appeals to different sets of humans. Ads help in getting the word out on your brand of your wrist watch in the hopes that some people out there will find it appealing enough to buy it.
> We can use advertising to create a demand for plenty of things that are not useful.
Who decides whats useful for not? Pretty much every company making anything thinks they are useful and they want to tell people how or why in order for people to buy them. They would need some way to tell that at scale, and ads are a way to do it.
>Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play),
Thats not entirely fair. The WHATWG is also pay-to-play in a way - the browser makers have disproportionally higher power, even more so than the w3c model where there is at least some form of consensus forming among a group of people with more international representation. Now technically anyone in the world can open a github issue (w3c also does it though now), but thats about what anyone can do to oppose something in the spec that the browser makers have their hearts set on.
Okay, so they have added more people there than the last time I looked (which was pretty much all google except for 1 mozilla person). Thanks for pointing towards that link.
Still seems a pretty small group to control something so important, but I hope they keep improving and adding more people there from other companies and countries.
>You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too.
Yes, but (and you can disagree with me here) the W3C has much better international participation and say in standards. I know you can just file github comments, but none of the world has any real way to oppose any development that the whatwg makers have proposed. There doesn't seem to be any consensus forming or way to really oppose any development apart from filing a github issue. All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially.
You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc). The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it.
>And the W3C had stalled progress so much in the 00s and 10s
Not the 10s, just the early part of 00s, due to the xhtml vs html5 thing.
>On the other hand, the W3C always was kind of a toothless tiger
Not really, it was, and still is, a neutral ground for people to discuss and build consensus on what technical standards should be on the web. CSS, ARIA, WCAG and many other stuff are working in the W3C pretty well.
>Advertisements appear by default, but if a given site annoys you enough, you can go into your ad blocker's preferences and add it to your blacklist, and then you'll never see any ads on that site again.
Thats literally what ABP has. Ads which have meet the acceptable ads criteria appear by default, and the rest are blocked by default. Users can however go and disable that setting so that all ads are hidden by default.
>Companys have turned keeping those settings you want into a chore, constantly updating away the users work, pushing in a war of attrition their preferred settings - and sometimes even just outright ignoring the done settings altogether.
Is it a chore though in ABP? It's front and center in the settings.