Content Performance Policy – Draft spec “defines a set of directives that can be used by authors in order to opt-out of the user-agents’ slow path and apply self-imposed interventions on their sites, in order to make sure that they are as fast as they can be, and that the user experience is not harmed by either first or third party content.”
At SynergyFest Mobile World Congress, I was asked a number of times whether Opera is looking at Ad Blockers and my general opinion of Ads. Here’s what I replied (with the BIG FAT DISCLAIMER that this is my personal opinion, and not that of Opera).
Firstly, yes; Opera is looking at Ad Blocking, and has been for quite a while (you’ll find lots of popular adblockers in our desktop extensions store). We know that Ads slow down the Web, and for many users, they’re expensive: the New York Times reported
Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.
Many Opera users in emerging economies pay much more of their income for web access than I do in the UK, and we want to make the web more affordable for those people.
(The fact that we’re looking at it shouldn’t be taken as a commitment to anything, by the way. We look at everything our consumers demand and our competitors implement, of course.)
But let’s talk about ads themselves. “Ads are evil” isn’t an mature argument; we need to be more nuanced than that.
For example, the other day I was reading a serious political article. Underneath it was a “related article” – just some clickbait nonsense about “The Best Breasts of 2015”, designed to sell advertising, and paginating excessively in order to maximise “hits” (whatever that means) and worsening the user experience. Now, I’ve got nothing against breasts (in fact, I’m at the age when I’m growing my own) but this is preposterous crap and deserves to die in a fire.
Later, I was reading a blog post about a band I like, and in it was a text ad, telling me that the band were playing near me the week later. I didn’t know that, so clicked through and bought a ticket – and the gig was very good.
Both were ads; one was stupid, the other was very useful. What’s the difference? To me, it was intrusiveness and (related to that) contextuality. An ad about a band next to an article about the band is highly contextual, and thus less intrusive. That it was a text ad, so light to download, made it less intrusive too, because it didn’t delay the page loading or make the screen reformat. Neither did it autoplay a heavy video, make noise or obscure the content.
So the challenge for Ad blocking is to block the crap and allow the good. I don’t know if anyone knows how to do that infallibly.
There’s also the question of revenues. We’ve been trained to expect “free” content on the web, and that’s largely paid for by ads. Before I joined Opera and became an Internet Tycoon/ over-promoted gobshite (delete as you see fit), I had a reasonably popular blog. (This very one! And still the same 2003 design!)
Because it was reasonably popular, I paid a fair amount of money for server costs etc. As sole breadwinner with two young children, those costs were a burden, so I ran ads which paid my hosting and bought me a few pints. I don’t know that I would have pulled the plug without those ads (I like the sound of my own voice too much) but other people in my situation might, and it would be a huge loss to the Web – and therefore to consumers – if independent content producers’ voices disappeared as a result of advertising revenues drying up.
So, Ad-blocking is a must, I think. But it needs to be done intelligently, and (probably) over a few iterations before we (Opera, and the wider web ecosystem) get it right. And if that encourages the advertising industry to do their work with less intrusive, bandwidth-hogging nonsense, and therefore more utility (to consumers and to their clients), we’ll all gain.
Update
Since I wrote this, Opera released a developer build of our desktop browser, with a built-in ad blocker that makes sites about 50% faster, and some 90% faster.
This led to good conversations about ads, publishers’ revenue and how the industry is changing:
Sweden’s publishers are joining forces to simultaneously block ad-block users – “people with blockers installed won’t be able to view content unless they disable their ad blocker. They’ll also be given the choice of paying small one-off payments to access the content or viewing the content at lower quality.”
Font Metrics API – explainer for the (very nascent) Font Metrics API in CSS/ Houdini. anything missing? Raise an issue, do. We need real developer input.
Why I love working with the web by Remy Sharp. “If you sit back for a moment, and think about just how many lives you can touch simply by publishing something, anything, to the web, it’s utterly mind blowing. That’s why I love working with the web”
Snoopers scolded UK parliamentary committee “blasts government surveillance plans” calling them ‘incomprehensible”, too sweeping and needing justifying
Literally trillions* of people asked me “Bruce, how do Smart Alerts in Opera Max work?”. So I blew Opera’s video budget on this 2 min explainer, featuring an eggbox and a Where The Wild Things Are puppet.
I’ve had a few tweets, DMs and emails asking about the proposed buy-out of Opera by a Chinese consortium. Here are some answers to your questions (none of this is new; it’s publicly available in Lars’ statements to the press and Opera’s consumer blogs, but I know that many of you are techies who won’t necessarily read those). I apologise for not getting back to you earlier; the news broke on my last day of a press tour of India and I only got back yesterday.
Firstly, it’s not a done deal. An offer has been made, and Opera’s board has recommended that shareholders accept it. But shareholders need to vote and governments need to be consulted.
If the deal goes through, the shareholders change (because current shareholders would sell their shares to the Chinese consortium) but, as Nuno Sitima (Opera’s Lord of Mobile Stuff) wrote,
the people behind Opera remain the same. The same teams will be developing and delivering the [products].
Many of you asked why we’re doing this. It gives Opera access to 500 million Chinese customers of the consortium, and investment to grow bigger. I am not a Biz Guy so I’ll just quote the press release:
The transaction would give Opera access to the extensive internet user base of Kunlun and Qihoo in China as well as the financing and other support of the Consortium that would allow for the full potential of the Company to be realized.
Lastly, and most importantly, I’ve had Opera customers ask about the security and privacy of their data. The answer is simple, and reassuring (I hope):
Assuming the deal goes through (see first point above), Opera plans to continue operating as a stand-alone company (see Nuno’s quote above). We are a Norwegian company subject to Norwegian (EU/EEA) privacy laws. Our shareholders may change but our legal obligations in this respect will not. All data will continue to be handled in accordance with our Norwegian legal obligations — nothing changes in this respect.
(And, yes, I remain employed; thanks to all of you who asked after me personally and offered me other jobs. But, honestly, despite still looking great in a mankini, my pole-dancing days are behind me.)
Subgrids Considered Essential – Eric Meyer on CSS Grids: “If grid layout is released without subgrid support, we’re risking shoving subgrids into the back of the author-practices cupboard for a long time to come. And along with it, potentially, grids themselves.”
Gyrophone: Recognizing Speech From Gyroscope Signals – ” Since iOS and Android require no special permissions to access the gyro, our results show that apps and active web content that cannot access the microphone can nevertheless eavesdrop on speech in the vicinity of the phone.”
My Experience With the Great Firewall of China – “as an InfoSec professional I was very curious to finally be able to poke at the Great Firewall of China with my own hands to see how it works and how easy it is evade”
Video corner: The Future of the Web Platform: Does It Have One? – Google’s sinister mastermind, Alex Russell, “discusses the impact of new standards-track technologies like Service Workers, Web Manifests, and Web Push which are landing in browsers” (48 mins)
Audio corner: Working Draft – Revision 250: Achtung Baby! – “we managed to get our greedy hands on no one less than Bruce Lawson from Opera. Having barely returned from a trip to Asia and still dizzy from his jetlag, we managed to extract a whole bunch of classified information on CSS Houdini out of him (also thanks to our German interview style)”
China’s Millennials Infographic – There are 318 million Chinese millennials (15-29 year olds). 48% are female. >90% own smartphones. >90 million are graduates. They’re 50% of China’s international travellers. 74% feel they have more in common with global millennials than their Chinese elders. Each expects to spend $4362 on luxury goods this year. 66% choose western brands over Asian brands.
TL;DR, I’m moving from Developer Relations to become Opera’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer. Or maybe Deputy Technology Officer, because “Deputy Chief” is almost oxymoronic. Anyway, call me “Bruce”; it’s more polite than what you usually call me.
Co-father of CSS Håkon Wium Lie continues to be CTO, and I’ll be working with him, the Communications Team, the product teams, and my lovely colleagues in devrel, to continue connecting the unconnected across the world.
In some ways, this is simply an evolution of what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. In a more profound way it’s a return to basics.
My first real exposure to the Web came about working in Thailand in 1999, when I was convalescing after my diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. Because M.S. is very rare in Asia, I could find no English language information to tell me how quickly or painfully I would die.
But I’d read about this new-fangled Web thing, and there was an Internet Café near my apartment, so I typed in “Multiple Sclerosis” into Alta Vista and found something extraordinary: a community of people around the world supporting each other through their shared diagnosis on something called a “website” – and I could participate, too, from a café in Pratunam, Bangkok. All strangers, across the globe, coming together around a common theme and helping each other.
I knew immediately that I’d stumbled upon something amazing, something revolutionary, an undreamed of way to communicate. As an English Literature graduate and ex-programmer, I was fascinated, by both the communicative potential and also the tech that drove it. By 2002, I was Brand Manager for a UK book company publishing on books for web professionals, and our first, flagship book was on Web Accessibility.
From accessibility, I began to advocate the general concept of open web standards on my blog and with various employers, so that everyone could access the web. Then, after being invited to join Opera in 2008, I started advocating HTML5, so people could connect to an open web that could compete with the proprietary silos of Flash and iOS. After that, I began beating the drum for Media Queries and Responsive Design so that the people in developing nations (like I was in ’99), using affordable hand-held devices, could connect and enjoy the full web. Then I proposed the <picture> element (more accurately: a very naive precursor to it) so that people with limited funds for bandwidth could connect economically, too. Then I agitated, inside Opera and outside, for Progressive Web Apps, so people could have a great experience on the open web, not those pesky walled gardens.
The common thread is people and getting them connected to each other. This matters to me because that happened to me, 17 years ago (spoiler: and I didn’t die).
A third of a billion people use Opera’s products to get them online, fast and affordably. I want to be part of making that half a billion, then a billion, then more; not by stealing customers from competitors, but by opening up the web to people and places that currently have no access. That’s a lot of people; there’s a lot to be done. It’s a big job. I’m a n00b and I’m gonna fuck up from time-to-time.
Const & Immutable Objects – “The goal of this blog post is to go into detail about const and cover some ways ES6 handles immutability” by Ada Rose Edwards
Firefox OS is not helping the web – “As we have learned time and again, the way to change the web is through evolution, not revolution.” by Anne Van Kesteren (of Mozilla)
The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment “It has failed because the community has failed… controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse.” – fascinating article by a Bitcoin developer of 5 years (and Metafilter comments)
A survey about money – Rachel Andrew writes “If you mostly work for yourself and work on the web I’d love it if you could fill this in”
The Ad Blocking Industry: Global, Large, Threatening – lots of interesting stuff here, including “at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit, where Google gathered a couple of hundreds of its advertising partners, 23% of the audience admitted using an ad blocker.”
Opera Mini 13 tames downloads; set them to wait for wifi (if you want) and set number of concurret downloads. Also, search categories.
iOS browser update corner: Real-time news and notifications from your iOS browser – Opera Mini squishes pages and videos down so you get more for your data plan, get fewer Buffering Spinners of Ohfuckit™ and pages download quicker. Opera Coast, on the other hand, simply keeps out of your way and shows pages full-screen with gestural controls (swipe to go back, pull to refresh).
Mobile App Developers are Suffering – “It’s just too saturated. The barriers to adoption and therefore monetization are too high. It’s easier on the web.”
What Web Can Do Today – “An overview of the device integration HTML5 APIs” with code examples
Metadata markup – Jeremy Keith on redundancy and competing “standards” to get post previews to appear on Facebook, Twitter and Slack. (In A Little Less Metacrap, Peter Gasston slims down Jeremy’s example somewhat, but his point still stands.)
Flexbox Grid Finesse by Heydon Pickering. Thanks to this article, I also learned about the TV programme “Sex Box”
flexbox froggy – learn flexbox by positioning frogs onto their lily pads. Brilliant lunchtime learning, by Thomas H. Park
Flexbox’s Best-Kept Secret “Using auto margins with Flexbox is an effective way to get all of the flexibility of css floats, without the nastiness of breaking elements out of the document’s normal flow.”
The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think It Is – “Mobile and social media platforms have pulled us away from the openness of the worldwide web and into walled gardens, squeezing the avenues of distribution for porn” (images SFW)
From the department of taking credit for other peoples’ work, here’s a list of geek admin calendars running from today (December 1st) to Xmas day, compiled from tweets by Rachel Andrew and Andy Davies.