Google’s Web Bundles: The end of the web as we know it?
Google Web Bundles is a Google-backed web specification for bundling all the files that make up a website into a single file with a .wbn extension. That file then can be shared or delivered by a delivery network rather than distant web servers – which is how the web currently works.
Google Web Bundles is just one several proposed for packaging websites and making ads – and other content – unblockable. Web Bundles would also render URLs (website addresses) meaningless.
Brave browser’s Senior Privacy Researcher Peter Snyder wrote in a Brave blog post:
In a Nutshell…
Google is proposing a new standard called WebBundles. This standard allows websites to “bundle” resources together, and will make it impossible for browsers to reason about sub-resources by URL. This threatens to change the Web from a hyperlinked collection of resources (that can be audited, selectively fetched, or even replaced), to opaque all-or-nothing “blobs” (like PDFs or SWFs). Organizations, users, researchers and regulators who believe in an open, user-serving, transparent Web should oppose this standard.
While we appreciate the problems the WebBundles and related proposals aim to solve, we believe there are other, better ways of achieving the same ends without compromising the open, transparent, user-first nature of the Web. One potential alternative is to use signed commitments over independently-fetched subresources. These alternatives would fill a separate post, and some have already been shared with spec authors.
The Web Is Uniquely Open, and URLs Are Why
The Web is valuable because it’s user-centric, user-controllable, user-editable. Users, with only a small amount of expertise, can see what web-resources a page includes, and decide which, if any, their browser should load; and non-expert users can take advantage of this knowledge by installing extensions or privacy protecting tools…
Read the entire blog post here.
Web Bundles — and other similar specifications — sound like a bad deal for all of us who use the web, except, of course, for those multi-billion-dollar companies who continue to look for more ways to make more money while offering less control, less safety, and less privacy to those who use it.
When will the people that the people who make the web what is, matter?
The Brave browser
Until now, we’ve not been very enthusiastic about the Brave browser (a privacy browser based on Chromium), but after reading this Brave’s blog post we’re highly motivated to take another look at it. In the meantime, you can read more about and/or download and try the Brave browser by visiting this page.
Oh boy…… Whatever happened to the fun we used to have so many years ago with computers? It’s gotten to the point that using a computer safely is like arming the human body against viruses, ultra violet rays from the sun, cancer, Lyme’s disease, blah, blah, blah, etc….. It’s a never ending chore.
While we are all enjoying having fun with Google’s little offerings through their operating system and browser, I do believe that their ultimate goal is to be able to control all forms of modern communication.
Google is Big Brother in the making.
And no, I am not paranoid.
Yes, I am in total agreement here. It is already a pain in the rear on the “net. Ever try searching anymore? It’s all a pile of nothing. Takes forever to get an answer to something you have been researching! Save us!!
Just another metod to make the rich richer and to control whatever they want you to read and interact with. Wake-up people.
I looked at the Brave link you provided. Please let us know when you have inspected it further and give your opinion on its safety. I don’t do anything immoral or illegal on the web but I would like to avoid all the ads based on every site I ever look at.
We’ve tested Brave and found nothing wrong with it. It’s free and it’s another in long list of privacy browsers. It’s based on Chromium -like Chrome. You can download it from https://brave.com/. If you don’t like it, just uninstall it.
Visiting a “web-bundled” site will be a bit like “buying a pig in a poke” and it appears to me, if I’m understanding what I’ve read, that the single web-user will be the big loser. 😒
Please let us know an update about the browser “Brave” and if it is as it says it is. I trust using something you have checked out before I use it. Thanks