Firefox

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Mozilla warns Germany could soon declare ad blockers illegal (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 4 days ago by KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

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[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

yeah, website code editing is not needed, blocking of resource loading and browser API editing is what is done, and of course attaching additional stylesheets. sometimes HTML "code" editing happens too, but that's probably not that important.

also browsers are called user agents for a reason. they should be an agent of the user, not of website owners, for the purpose of communicating with the website on the behalf of the user

You could argue the browser is NOT showing your code the way you intended (e.g. "Btw hello World" being rendered though I'm not sure if spaces would be there or not).

and that shouldn't be legally required either. for one the web standards were not developed as laws of a government, but there's also software bugs and unspecified behaviors, website owners should never be able to sue browser makers for not showing their website exactly as they expected.

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

They are also including the "CSSOM" and "rendering tree" as part of what they consider subject to "unlawful reproduction and modification".

So, according to them, the rendering tree is also part of their IP.. which is bonkers, since it's the browser the one who implements this and even different browsers (or different versions of the same browser) might actually have different rendering strategies, different trees.. different CSS extensions (or omisions/deprecations), etc. You basically would be potentially violating their IP if you used any browser different than what they specifically might have had in mind (which we don't even have a way to know for sure unless they clearly state it...).

It's like a painter suing someone for using glasses and altering the lightwaves coming from their painting..

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

You basically would be potentially violating their IP if you used any browser different than what they specifically might have had in mind

also if you update the browser and the update uses new rendering code that does things differently, that would also result in a copyright violation.

simply, these things are intermediate "products" of the web browser, not of the web developer.