Great article! It's funny to finally see ad blockers go "mainstream".
My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.
Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to "stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and "stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels inevitable!
My dystopian-future fear is that that Web Assembly will be the end of ad blocking (and the end of a web of connected web sites). Big sites will eventually convert to essentially "a web browser inside a web browser" so they have total control over the content and how it's displayed.
Then ad blocking (and other customization) will be limited to "the analog hole" - trying to image detect or OCR things.
I hope I'm wrong, but I've also been asked countless times over the years to "stop people copy/pasting our text" and "stop people seeing our code" and "stop people downloading our images"... the browser-in-a-browser feels inevitable!