Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

328 pointschristophilus339 comments

It seems the day has arrived. Merry Christmas from the folks at Google, I guess.

There has to be google engineers here. Does this just fall on deaf ears? I realize it’s a massive corp but imagine high ranking staff have a say and input. Maybe they don’t and Sundar isn’t worried about that. Or they do a simple cost analysis and short-term they see the benefit and are willing to to risk long term erosion that maybe be minimal.

Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.

If only Stalin knew!

Google is an advertising agency. It's a miracle blockers lasted this long.

by now they have made tons of user-hostile changes, just to see the line keep going up, they know that there is a loud vocal minority, but most users are totally fine with MV3 if they even notice a change at all.

Google is deliberately doing this to break ad blocking for Google ads while still allowing ad blockers to work for non Google ads. Most users probably won’t care enough to change browsers or many won’t really notice

> Google is deliberately doing this to break ad blocking for Google ads

If so, they are doing a crap job of it because uBlock Origin Lite successfully blocks all of the search ads on google.com

They were pretty much forced to do this slowly and gradually. There was a large amount of external pushback and some internal too (though money controls here).

> Google is deliberately doing this to break ad blocking for Google ads while still allowing ad blockers to work for non Google ads.

That's the best way to get antitrust breathing down your neck.

So, with talks of Google monopoly ramping up, either this is extremely shortsighted and reckless, or they will choose to not throw oil on the fire and will not go down that road.

Believe it or not, the DOJ (and EU) have almost entirely ignored AdSense and it's integration as a monopoly force. They consider Chrome and Google Search to be the primary source of harms - the war against adblock is perfectly legal even if client-side modding should always be morally correct.

There are two different trials in the USA, one focused on search as a product (which Google lost, and plans to appeal after remedies are determined), and another antitrust trial about advertising (of which the trial happened, but no ruling yet).

I don't know much at all about the ads ecosystem so I have no idea how may adsense should be playing in either trial though.

FAANG engineers in general are remarkably well informed as to who is buttering their bread. You may assume that Google engineers are excruciatingly aware (particularly after several rounds of layoffs) that their continued paychecks and stock grant value depend on continuing to firehose advertising into the face of the general public from every possible angle.

The entire internet runs on ads unfortunately.

I ditched YouTube entirely since this year because I got fed up with the commercial breaks but I am 41 I no longer need to know about the memes and trends.

You don't have to ditch YouTube to avoid annoying commercial breaks. Any decent ad-blocker will skip the ads in YouTube videos, or you can even use an alternative viewer like SmartTube.

Or pay for it and support the people who's content you're watching and the company who's infrastructure is providing it.

Or don't pay for it and you get even a better treatment with hiding ads (SponsorBlock). the free solution is way better than the paid one if we are talking about Youtube.

Unfortunately paying for these services to avoid ads will never work. It was first promised by cable TV when they first scaled out coaxial around the country. You paid for TV in part to not have ads. That worked great until the advertisers increased their bid. It was tried when VHS kicked off but eventually even tapes rented from Blockbuster had ads once the advertisers increased their bid. And now it is happening to streaming services. For over a decade I paid Netflix specifically to avoid the ads but as more people do that it decreases the supply of passive attention, which prompts advertisers to increase their bid again, and now it's almost impossible to continue paying to avoid ads. Now I have to pay a fee and watch ads. I would gladly pay YouTube to avoid watching ads but it just won't work. They will start taking my money each month and then they will also push ads at me after I pay them consistently for a long time. We're well beyond "fool me twice" territory.

You're on to something.

I'm signed into my TV and whenever friends cast a video Google mysteriously forgets that it's not allowed to show me ads.

>and whenever friends cast a video Google mysteriously forgets that it's not allowed to show me ads.

That's because it's using their credentials when they cast, not yours.

Then why do I have it the other way where when I cast from a yt premium phone it still shows ads.

Agreed, but the subscription is generally month to month, so I take advantage until that happens and then cancel, like I did with the other crummy streaming services that have done this (Netflix, Prime, etc).

That said, while I find those services pretty scummy for what they've done, I've fled back to spending a lot more time with books. There's plenty of them to read before I die and it's unlikely they'll be similarly molested.

One of the nice things about TV/movies that you don't get with books is a "shared experience": you can't read a book with your girlfriend or your family, but sitting on the couch with your girlfriend and watching a movie is totally normal and enjoyable.

This is not true about cable TV at all.

Cable TV was first a means to get over the air stations to places where they couldn’t receive it. These stations always had ads

Next, cable started delivering the “Superstations” like the local Atlanta station TBS and Chicago’s WGN which had ads from day one.

The only channels that didn’t have ads from day one were the premium channels like HBO that still don’t have ads.

I've been using Google premium to not see ads for years now. It's great and apparently the video makers earn more too. I don't love Google's domination and some of their practices but this is pretty reasonable.

Or refuse to give in to extortion and don't.

What’s the extortion?

I hate bait and switch done on me when they were giving free stuff out. I was there when creators were purely about having fun, trying stuff out and sharing it with the world.

But for kids these days it mostly is fair game - you want to watch funny cat videos, pay up or watch ads.

You can always have fun with friends from over the world and send each other videos no one is forcing you to post it on YT.

Because the videos in YouTube premium still have ads. But because the ads are built-in to the videos by the "content creators" themselves, they call them "sponsor segments". YouTube Premium doesn't include SponsorBlock.

It does in a limited capacity now [1]. No, it doesn't auto-skip for you and it's not nearly as quickly updated as SponsorBlock itself is, but it works fine enough on the iOS app.

[1] - https://9to5google.com/2024/05/05/youtube-premium-jump-ahead...

>Or pay for it and support the people who's content you're watching and the company who's infrastructure is providing it.

This, it's well worth the price for 'free' youtube and music. I'm not a fan of ads or paying for much either, but it's really surprising how many people here are so against paying for the things they use.

There are still plenty of advertisements placed by the channels themselves. Almost all the big ones I follow do so unfortunately. It's a bit of a shame.

Sincerely,

An otherwise happy youtube premium family customer

Paying for their annoying algorithm and deaf ears features.

It is, unfortunately, not really a workable value proposition if you watch a single-digit number of youtube videos per month.

Most other media streaming services have reasonable non-subscription options - e.g. you can buy individual albums/movies/TV seasons from Apple, etc.

"The entire internet runs on ads unfortunately."

I believe this is a hyperbolic statement, not a serious one. If so, pay no mind. If not, I can attest, with supporting evidence, that "the entire internet" does not "run on ads".

I know people am who are still paying fees for internet service. They have not been provided a choice to select a free internet subscription supported by ads.

You know you can pay to have the ads go away?

Everyone who has an addiction to food and shelter and who needs to exchange labor for money needs to be aware of who is “buttering the bread”.

Why do you think in the anti-trust lawsuit they're desperate to avoid Chrome divestment? A project that on the surface surely must be a massive cost center for them that doesn't benefit their advertising arm one bit. No sir, made out of the goodness of their hearts and given away for free for nothing other than promoting the open web.

> A project that on the surface surely must be a massive cost center for them that doesn't benefit their advertising arm one bit. No sir, made out of the goodness of their hearts and given away for free for nothing other than promoting the open web.

I don't think they ever claimed it was out of the goodness of their hearts. From the horse's mouth:

"Our business does well if people are using the Web a lot and are able to use it easily and quickly," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/why-google-c...

It's a giant corporation. Everyone who had a managerial role in one of these mega corporations should know how such decisions are made. Sundar sees finance numbers, numbers go up if we do strategy x (block adblockers) , someone gets a promotion for turning these numbers up. It's simple as that. Those people have no clue and don't care about how you hackers here use chrome.

I'd say that a >=300k/y USD compensation is higher priority for most than arguing with your bosses boss that manifest V3 is a mistake.

> There has to be google engineers here. Does this just fall on deaf ears?

Yes. Extension that blocks Google from making money from ads? It's a no-brainer to upgrade the browser infrastructure to make it obsolete.

So there are multiple factors here - I used to work on browsers so have some experience here :D

First off, there are legitimate security concerns with the kind of functionality required for effective ad blocking given the immense work the ad industry (i.e google) have put into preventing purely static filters is also very powerful for exploitation. Those powers can (and have been) abused: the recent news about "Honey" replacing affiliate links so that they are getting paid for ads on peoples page, but also there have been numerous examples over the last year of extensions being sold and then having the extensions getting malware, crypto miners, etc.

Second, there are real performance problems - the non-JS filter rules are vastly more efficient, for memory usage, cpu usage, and load time (I recall people doing benchmarks a while ago, showing ad blocker extensions that actually slowed down page loads).

So those are the engineering arguments for not supporting this model of extension.

However, the engineers on the chrome team are not stupid, or malicious, and understand that the trade offs are something users want. But those engineers work for Google, and google is an advertising company.

So it does not matter what those engineers want, or think is better, if the company management says "you cannot block our revenue model" they do not have a choice. Well, they could quit, but that's basically it.

Does MV3 do anything to stop the behaviour of Honey?

Please show me a real-world page that performs worse on Chrome with no extensions than on Chrome with Unlock Origin.

That would be really easy (though it probably wouldn't be perceptible by humans, but you'd certainly see it if you look at actual CPU and memory usage): just look at some simple webpage that's only static HTML. uBO uses resources, so of course it's going to perform worse not having it there at all. And going through tens of thousands of filter rules isn't exactly a trivial task.

However, at some point, the resources saved (by blocking ads running JS) will outweigh the resources used by the ad-blocker. In typical modern web pages, that bar is probably pretty low, because there's SO much BS advertising and tracking.

What about for any non-trivial example? Ultimately the user has a choice, if ublock's performance is a concern the user can disable it for a page or simply not use the extension. Alternatively chrome could work on implementing a good resource monitor for extensions etc. Maybe it's already possible to benchmark with dev tools. In any case, completely breaking it never makes sense.

Hard disagree. I've been using ublock across the board with Chrome and with absolutely no problems with malicious nonsense or even performance. These are real risks in a general sense, to be sure, but many extensions are run well enough to be relatively safe.

In any case, if such were Google's logic, they'd do more, or other things to mitigate said threats, which can also be extrapolated to any number of other widely used and permitted extensions, not conveniently remove a specific, well-run and widely trusted extension that conspicuously works at removing the firehose of utter garbage that they push at you through various parts of their platforms and on YouTube.

There are some ways to abuse solely the ability to stop an inflight web request, and being able to see what url it was for.

But, that did require a specific permission.

And the permission/ability to inject arbitrary JavaScript into any page is still there. As are other abilities that can be abused.

Meaning, the security argument for removing blocking onBeforeRequest was always a diversion. It is not nearly the highest risk thing in the api.

> First off, there are legitimate security concerns with the kind of functionality required for effective ad blocking given the immense work the ad industry (i.e google) have put into preventing purely static filters is also very powerful for exploitation. Those powers can (and have been) abused: the recent news about "Honey" replacing affiliate links so that they are getting paid for ads on peoples page, but also there have been numerous examples over the last year of extensions being sold and then having the extensions getting malware, crypto miners, etc.

Who controls the accounts and the distribution for all chrome plugins? Who allows automatic updates with no security screening to all chrome plugins? Who charges developers a fee to participate in the chrome extensions store?

It’s just big-corp tone deafness, eg Google engineers have pointed out that you can use

defaults write com.google.Chrome URLBlocklist -array-add https://example.com

to block sites without understanding that this is fundamentally different from adding this to browser UX.

A lot of Google engineers struggle with the conflict of interest where the world’s #1 advertising network — by far — is making it more difficult to block ads in the world’s #1 browser, which they just happen to own. Good job guys. /s

> Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.

I fear that Firefox’s days are probably numbered at this point, as it’s (imo) too late to turn the ship.

Firefox/Mozilla gets something in the region of 80% of its revenue from a single source, Google, for the default search engine placement. But with the court finding Google being a Monopoly those payments will probably come to an end.

Apple will be able to tank the loss, sure it will sting, but it’s not like those payments from Google where its main revenue stream.

Firefox/Mozilla on the other hand… It’s one of the reasons they have been other paid for offerings. But once the Google money goes away, who is going to step in to replace it? Bing probably, but without having to compete with Google, you can be sure Bings offer won’t be anywhere near that of Googles.

And that’s even before going into any of the other “happenings” going on.

(I say this as a long term Firefox user, I just fear that its days are numbered at this point, so while I’ll welcome you aboard, and we are not sinking yet, I have worries about that large looking iceberg we seem to be heading for.)

I recently made Safari my default browser for this reason. If Firefox’s days are numbered, I figured I’d get ahead of it than be forced. Ublock origin isn’t available for safari, but I was able to use the same content blocker that I use on iOS and it seems to be doing the job.

Why not just use firefox and ublock origin while it works instead of a sub par experience just because you decided to impose it on yourself?

IMO We have at least a year of runway with FF. The decision from the judge on what Google will have to do is not expected until mid-2025, and surely Google will appeal the judgement. So I don't want to give the impression that FF is right on the brink of death, just that as a user of FF, I am pretty worried about the road ahead for FF/Moz.

Which is why personally I'll probably stick with FF until the bitter end.

I just hope that Moz/FF can pull a rabbit out of the hat, because (imo) atm things ain't looking good for the long term future.

I find I am enjoying the syncing features of Safari (and iOS), and it's much less resource intensive on my 2019 MacBook Pro. Also, Safari seems to be the most fiddly when it comes to websites (either because it's stricter in some cases or has strange bugs in others), so I find I am catching more issues for web dev by using it.

Right on with safari not being used by webdevs. Safari is still my browser of choice when I want to hand someone my laptop for some purpose (like ordering food) and not have them complain about my tree style tabs. Some websites they clearly don’t test at all with safari. Big client websites too like tacobell.com, no safari testing at all. Menu images rendered with extra inch wide margins for some reason along with the usual broken fonts.

Weird, next week will complete 21 years of my exclusively using Safari on the desktop, and I’ve yet to notice anything like this. Admittedly I’m not ordering from Taco Bell, but sites being unusably broken is simply a non-issue for me.

I think losing the Google money will be the only thing that could save Firefox... although it'll be a tough year or two while all the execs flee and side projects get axed.

Maybe people could start actually using internet like it supposed to be used instead?

Like we all should move to IPv6 and if someone wants to share videos with friends and family they could do without big corporations. If they want to serve their content for profit that should also be easy.

But we got what we have it sucks but seems either pay up or don’t use what big corps provide.

In case of IPv6, ISPs'd go out of their way to block p2p by whitelisting allowed sender and receivers through DPI and routing limits.

Google engineers have nothing to do with this decision. They are just employees.

The change was mostly procedural, removing apis that were old and replacing them with more modern variants. Gorhill decided to take the opportunity to make a political stand against chrome. Good for him I guess. Given the popular sentiment against google, there was no serious pushback against his stand, including from the independent media and so on. But a google engineer would presumably know the "both sides" take on the subject, and hence not see it as reflecting especially poorly on google.

Whereas a normal extension maintainer would transparently update their extension to a new API, removing any features that could no longer be supported, gorhill elected to let the old extension go out of support, and replace it with a similarly named extension under the same organization. The features in the old extension removed in the new one were minor to non-existent. The main worry was originally that they wouldn't be able to cram all the network filtering rules they needed into the limited number that were permitted. However I believe this issue was mostly worked around.

The rest of the issues raised were a masterstroke of politiking on gorhill's part. Basically, google's justification for this removing of apis business was in part to increase privacy/security. Such improvement of course could only arrive if extensions didn't demand broad permission to see all the data on every page a user visits. So gorhill designed the new "ublock origin lite" around not needing to demand this permission. Of course, such an extension necessarily must have much more limited features than the original "ublock origin". Gorhill then presented this loss in functionality as somehow a necessary casualty of the "Mv3" upgrade.

Of course, the original uB0 extension demanded the same broad permission, so this loss in functionality wasn't really a casualty of the new manifest version. Rather, it was an accusation by gorhill against google that their justification for bumping the version was false. The new uB0l extension incidentally supports a mode that demands this broad permission, so in fact the total amount of lost functionality is practically non-existent. The result is that everyone has the opportunity to flame google for their seeming anti-user behaviour. However, to a google engineer this would presumably come across as unfair, and they would presumably feel as if they were being targeted.

Only thing i miss from chrome, is ... compatibility. a lot of sites made in the past 15 years are focused on chrome-support. especially the government-websites i use (not US) but i just use another chrome-based browser for that. Firefox is my main-boy!

I hear that often, but I have maybe found two websites that have a bad experience on Firefox. Out of thousands.

That definitely shows why Google isn't abusing its monopoly powers, and why it shouldn't be broken up.

It’s so weird to observe how Alphabet doesn’t seem to even try to keep its parts separated.

Amazon at least tries keeps its companies separated from each other. AWS account teams doesn’t know what Amazon teams do and vice versa.

While Google Cloud account team constantly gets involved with Workspaces, Ads and Google Play related stuff.

If I remember right just few years ago Google was told to stop giving cheaper prices on Google Cloud based on customers Ads and Google Play revenue.

> While Google Cloud account team constantly gets involved with Workspaces, Ads and Google Play related stuff.

Not sure what you mean. Do you have a couple of concrete examples of that?

> If I remember right just few years ago Google was told to stop giving cheaper prices on Google Cloud based on customers Ads and Google Play revenue.

This one you've definitely just made up.

I see offers (or “ads”) for Google Ads inside of the Google Cloud Platform Dashboard all the time.

> This one you've definitely just made up.

It was called "Project Hug". Based on the different sources it contained credits for all the google offerings such as Ads, Youtube and Google Cloud in exchange for keeping apps on the Google Play platform.

Different repots on this: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/google-reportedly-paid-activis... https://gizmodo.com/google-denies-its-project-hug-bribed-20-... https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...

That doesn't match your original description at all.

> If I remember right just few years ago Google was told to stop giving cheaper prices on Google Cloud based on customers Ads and Google Play revenue.

None of your links describe them giving cheaper Cloud prices based on Ads or Play revenue.

I stand by the claim that you made it up.

>It’s so weird to observe how Alphabet doesn’t seem to even try to keep its parts separated.

"Your Honour, it's simply impossible to break up our company into separate entities. Everything is just too entangled together! Can we get a fine instead?"

Everyone that is shipping Electron garbage, and has focused on Chrome as The Best Experience, is to blame.

Situation: People are getting fat from choosing to eat too much bacon

"Pitiful, though with a thankfully straightforward cure. We arrest all pig farmers, meat packers and delivery drivers while inspecting all refrigerated cargo at checkpoints. We shall demolish any restaurant serving pork, blame each person who has ever eaten a slice regardless of their health, and demonize every salty and fatty food."

"Yes, my stance is drastic. But once we remove the burden of choice from our citizens, they will be empowered to make new, more valuable decisions with their life. Bacon will never be a problem again."

New situation: People have quit bacon and started smoking cigarettes

In fact, governments do step in to fix behaviours when their citizens go overboard.

I don't ship any Electron app at $dayjob so while I could afford to sit on a high horse I don't think it's warranted. Electron really isn't an issue, it doesn't really help Chrome's position as a browser in any meaningful way. It doesn't drive people to use the Chrome "chrome" which is where the money is.

It's why despite Edge being built on Chrome they're pushing it hard because owning the space around the browser window is the goal.

Anything that pushes chrome helps Chrome gain market share.

Ironically the only thing I use Chrome for is when I have to have a telecon with Microsoft Teams (which, at least last time I tried, had a nonfunctional Linux client and worked terribly in Firefox). Fortunately it's only when I have a call with NASA people that I have to use Teamms.

You dropped this:

I find this whole thing frustrating.

Chrome is going full on user hostile. But, most people use it, so webpages "just work." It's also reasonably good on battery use and memory (as of late 2024 - it's come a long way).

Safari is resource efficient but has very few browser extensions, and sometimes webpages just don't work correctly with it.

Firefox has uBlock but has noticeably worse battery life, and does not honor the host OS UI conventions (right click, look up... is something I use all the time sigh).

None of them make me a happy user.

Is there any benchmarking of Firefox vs Chrome?I have not seen any hard data, only anecdotal evidence. I use it on android with no noticeable difference.

I use Firefox everywhere, haven't had a problem.

On macOS, I've seen a few attempts like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/12n7162/part_3_fin...

but it ends up being very user-workload-specific. Every webpage is different - e.x. Pintrest may be more battery efficient on Safari, but if I never go there, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

For my workflow, Safari and Chrome seem about the same, Firefox seems to land me 10-20% lower on battery after 4 hours or so of use. Unfortunately, I don't have any more scientific data than that.

Ad-blocking, etc, are too important to me personally to delegate to just an extension, hence I use NextDNS, but naturally it can’t manipulate the DOM to tidy up the page.

Luckily I have long-preferred Firefox but I recognize that it’s not for everyone, or hardly anyone for that matter.

Maybe a local pi-hole would do the job properly.

DNS solutions like PiHole don’t work for YT ads because those ads are served from the same domain as YT.

What do you mean by "just an extension"? It does the job very, very well. NextDNS is great, but especially with embedded ads you get a lot of 404s, which the extension can remove without any trace.

You pulled three words completely out of context and misrepresented them. But to be clear, and put another way, (ad) filtering is too important to be left to an extension alone, especially as browsers can no longer be relied upon, and creating layers of filtering like defence in depth is better to avoid single points of failure.

For me Firefox with uBlock works just fine. It boggles my mind that so many people are willing to put up with all these ads. Unfortunately, most people don't even know that ad blockers are a thing. I cringe everytime I see a friend of mine opening a youtube video and wait until they can skip the ad. I aleays tell them about Firefox + uBlock Origin, but they typically just shrug it off... Never underestimate the power of inertia.

~$ cat /etc/chromium/policies/managed/ubo-policies.json { "ExtensionManifestV2Availability": 2 }

Will save you for another year.

If I recall correctly only till June 2025, did they change the date?

I'm not sure but a lot of people hypothesize that they will have to keep this feature for enterprise customers (not for UBO but other custom enterprise extensions that use manifest v2)

they can easily just blacklist ubo if they really wanted to remove it. And they can make it plausibly deniable - by blacklisting the extension id of anything that is in the chrome extension store that originally had manifestV2 (which will have some collateral damage, but obviously google doesn't care).

But that would also harm companies that actually intend to switch to a v3 based replacement but need a bit of time to complete the development.

That's what the registry entry for the manifestV2 time extension is for - this was actually known for several years already, and 2025 june is meant to have been the deadline for that development.

In windows start regedit as administrator and navigate to/create HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome.

Under the Chrome key, create a DWORD value named "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" with hex value 2.

Restart Chrome. If successful, you'll notice the ExtensionManifestV2Availability entry with value 2 in chrome://policy and the settings page will mention "managed by your organization".

The removal can be bypassed until June 2025: https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1d49ud1/manif...

Bypass Chrome altogether. Use Firefox.

If only Mozilla (the parent organization) wasn’t horrible.

Can’t a non-crazy nonprofit make a browser?

What's so horrible about it? I don't like how they're pampering to the ad industry now but other than that I think they're pretty decent.

If I donate to your project I hope the money goes towards your project. If you spend it on beer or buy Jacuzzi I'm happy too. If you chose to spend it on other projects ill be excited to learn what they are.

https://future.mozilla.org/projects/

Do you use any of that? Is there anything there I should be using? (honest question) It seems premature to donate to things I don't know.

> Solo helps entrepreneurs expand their web presence with a suite of AI-backed tools for building websites, optimizing for SEO, and showcasing your best work.

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I'm very biased no doubt, it reads like I donate to progress the commercial web, more canned template websites, product SEO and to promote the use of google analytics. I'm sure it is awesome to some people, to me it is the opposite, I'm sure it is a project that should exist some place but I don't want to pay for it.

The web browser can still be infinitely improved.

Clicked the future projects link. Thought the DidThis project sounded interesting. Aaaannnddd it's already a dead project as of 2 months ago.

I mean Llamafile is great and is built on fantastic tech, but no I definitely want my Mozilla money to go to Firefox, not what Thing is currently in vogue by Mozilla execs.

> If I donate to your project I hope the money goes towards your project.

Firefox is not a project of the Mozilla Foundation, but the Mozilla Corporation, so you just can't donate to Firefox at all; in fact, the money flows the opposite direction between them. I know it's frustrating but this argument is misleading yet keeps showing up in every thread.

Fascinating, thanks for the explanation/correction, it makes it even worse than I thought.

I don't know about their other expenses, but SEO/advertising is probably one of their better uses of money even if we don't like it. It's hard to gain market share against a browser that is pitched each time you do a Google search no matter how good the product is.

They also fired a whole bunch of software engineers (including everyone working on Servo), and then massively boosted their executives' salaries, so that was certainly something.

As a criticism that applies equally to Google.

Google lays off engineers: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034124/google-layoffs-e...

Google boosts their executive's compensation: https://www.businessinsider.com/alphabet-google-executive-pa...

IMO it’s a matter of principle. Mozilla is supposed to be a non-profit that exists to support the development of a FOSS browser and its related projects. Over the years it seems like they’ve strayed from this mission, behaving more and more like the big corporations they claim not to be like

> IMO it’s a matter of principle.

Eh? So Chrome should be used because Google has no principles?

Here's the Mozilla Manifesto:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/

They explicitly state that they want the internet to benefit the public good as well as commercial use.

Principle number 9 is: "Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical."

Mozilla clearly strikes that balance better than Google does.

No, I never said anywhere that chrome should be used. As a matter of fact, I use Firefox myself. My original observation was that Mozilla presents itself as a benevolent non-profit yet behaves like soulless for-profit tech company, abandoning valuable FOSS initiatives and carelessly laying off employees, all while increasing executive pay

Mozilla can't be worse than google (or brave/opera etc)

Mozilla let's me use ublock origin, Google doesn't.

I think you need to be a little bit crazy to enter the browser space. It's not for the feint of heart.

*faint of heart

> Can’t a non-crazy nonprofit make a browser?

Here’s to hoping LadyBird remains non crazy and can be relevant by the time of their planned alpha release in 2026.

To be honest it needs a different name if it’s going to hit critical mass adoption with the average consumer.

What's wrong with ladybird?

Netscape, Edge, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, All have a pop appeal to them (the names)

"Ladybug" makes a reference to a bug. And not a thrilling one.

It's bird though, not bug.

Ladybird is the UK term for what Americans call Ladybugs

Then it is going to be adopted everywhere fine except the UK.

I don't see why it wouldn't. Ladybird Books has been around for 157 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_Books

huh? of all the bugs in the world, ladybugs are among the most popular, the majority of them are harmless and prey on agricultural pests. at least where i come from the association with "ladybug" is "cute".

Ladyfeature

>What's wrong with ladybird?

Honestly all of these x/y names just imply that they are knockoffs of firefox. Which is fine if you want your browser to just be firefox±some feature firefox doesn't include, but not so great if you're wanting to stand on your own branding wise.

Plus ladybird is the less popular name of the ladybug and if you aren't aware of that, it just seems like some weird needlessly gendered name, which doesn't make sense for a browser to have. Plus a bunch of ladybug type branding with red and black dots and such seems cringey.

Just a complete all around fail to consider branding.

With the average English-speaking consumer. You forgot the other 7 billion people, which isn't your fault as it happens here all the time.

You might want to read back through the history of its creator

I have, and it's honestly none of my business and of no consequence to me [0].

[0] e.g. https://text.tchncs.de/latenightblog/ladybird-browser-and-dr...

What are your qualms with Brave Browser?

I'm not convinced that it's much more than a Chrome skin with an integrated crypto scam.

You don't have to use the crypto features.

when the defense of a project is that you can turn off the bad features, you aren't really making a chase better than say chrome or anything else.

A product built on trust, shouldn't involve having to go turn off untrustworthy elements.

The crypto part isn’t something you turn off. It’s buried in a menu somewhere. For all intents and purposes, it’s a pretty elegant UX.

You don't need to "turn off the bad features" because they are opt-in to begin with.

I shouldn't need to opt into or out of features that shouldn't exist in the first place, much less in a browser.

You're scraping the paint off with how far you're dragging the goalposts.

Brave has a weird crypto thing, it's on not by default, it's not pushed on you, I don't even know how to turn it on.

Firefox right now today has ads in the URL bar. I'm using Waterfox to avoid all Mozilla's garbage but Brave is up near the top of least shitty.

Up near the top? It literally had a controversies section on Wikipedia due to all these shady things it did, with cryptocurrency and others, I am not sure how worse it can get [0]. I'll take URL ads any day of the week compared to the kinds of things Brave pulled over the years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brave_(web_browse...

The list for Firefox over the years would warrant a whole page on Wikipedia. Browser choices are a who's who of who's debased themselves the fewest number of times trying to squeeze money out of a free product. The current state of Brave is better than the current state of Firefox right now.

I simply don't understand how you could think that about Brave yet in the same breath say that Firefox is worse, what exactly is worse about Firefox than hiding a literally cryptocurrency scam token in the browser itself?

Brave today: Here's a free browser with no ads, built-in adblock and user-respecting defaults. If you want there's also this crypto thing you can try. No pressure, most people don't. We also have an ad supported search engine as our default.

Firefox today: Here's a free browser with ads on the new tab page, ads in the url bar, ads in Pocket, ads for our VPN service, and we let advertisers collect your data same as Chrome with "privacy preservation ad measurement" and you have to turn all of that off. We have an ad supported search engine by default. We also redirect your DNS queries to a third party "for your privacy."

I think people want Firefox to be better than it is in practice because of the historical good will they've built up over the years. I wish they were better too.

Personally I'd much rather have a non-Chromium browser with some unintrusive ads than one with cryptocurrency, perhaps that is where our differences lie. And anyway, with Chromium being upstream with Manifest v3, who knows how long Brave can keep up its adblocking capabilities?

You don't need to turn off "bad features". Just don't use them. Just like the rest of the browser features you don't use, which there are many of.

> when the defense of a project is that you can turn off the bad features, you aren't really making a chase better than say chrome or anything else.

> A product built on trust, shouldn't involve having to go turn off untrustworthy elements.

This is very misleading! You don't "turn off" bad features in Brave. You have to explicitly turn them on. By default it's off.

Just like how you don't have to visit dodgy sites in Chrome; you have to take action to visit dodgy sites.

Same with Brave - you don't have to do any crypto stuff; you have to put in extra work and effort to do the crypto stuff.

I've used Brave for years. Never used any of the crypto features. It is just a solid, privacy-based, chromium-based browser.

At the very least, I do not trust a browser that was putting affiliate links to unsuspecting users' urls [0]. Plus I tbh I am really sick of everything tending to be chromium-derivatives nowadays and I think it is good to have greater diversity, to exactly avoid situation susch as the one here.

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10134

If you research all the controversies around Brave, I think they pretty much amount to nothing. Just some people holding grudges.

But the complaint that it's a reskinned Chrome and will be forced to eventually adopt most of Chrome's user-hostile changes is a real concern.

> If only Mozilla (the parent organization) wasn’t horrible.

Well, they're not getting any of my money, and they're not selling my eyeballs to any advertisers. For a while I used a filesystem written by a convicted murderer. I'm not sure at what point I'm supposed to avoid software because of who wrote it.

Firefox on ChromeOS sucks though. Just went through this, tried Canary, etc. Went back to Chrome.

Bypass ChromeOS alltogether. Use a different Linux distro.

I do. But I have a chromebook too.

Just ChromeOS? Firefox on Mac sucks.

Here is one example: Firefox's tracking of the mouse cursor is broken, and often (yes, it's inconsistent) applies a vector translation so when trying to click something like a button or menu, the cursor needs to be about 100 x-y pixels away from the target. Only Firefox native UI is affected. These are My_First_Program.app tier bugs that should not exist in mature, 20 year old software.

Phoenix 0.1 didn't have this many beginner bugs. Mozilla has lost its way and only continues to exist because Google funds them to be a paper tiger competitor. Opera sold out to the Chinese. Microsoft gave up and now simps Google. Apple only supports their own platform. What is left?

I’ve been using Firefox on OS X since forever (never jumped to chrome and back) and I’ve never experienced this. Is there a bug report? Surely this would get a lot of attention.

> Here is one example: Firefox's tracking of the mouse cursor is broken, and often (yes, it's inconsistent) applies a vector translation so when trying to click something like a button or menu, the cursor needs to be about 100 x-y pixels away from the target. Only Firefox native UI is affected. These are My_First_Program.app tier bugs that should not exist in mature, 20 year old software.

While I've not noticed that myself, just yesterday I noticed something similarly weird.

I had a Safari window that was persistently half the screen width and height away from where the mouse was. As in: click to drag, and the whole window jumped half the screen down and to the right, so I couldn't get it to any other quadrant of any screen. Fixed on restarting the app.

I don't know if that was an app bug or an OS bug, but in either case it's Apple's fault.

How did we get to this?

Been using Firefox as my browser since 0.2 (Minefield, Phoenix was later) on Mac since around 10.3 and I don’t recognise what you’re seeing at all?

Can you provide a link to a bug report? I've been using FF on macOS for years and haven't noticed that. Maybe it's just a bug on a random site?

Maybe I wasn't clear - this bug affects me personally, it's not some random tale I read in a forum. No, it doesn't affect the site or page rendering at all. Only the Firefox-native dialogs - like the bookmarks dialog and the hamburger menu - are affected. The bug is likely in XUL. Unfortunately I am too busy to dig through Bugzilla, make an account, etc. only for the bug to be ignored for years like the others...

> Unfortunately I am too busy to dig through Bugzilla, make an account, etc. only for the bug to be ignored for years like the others...

So, if no one reports the bug, how do you expect the bug to get fixed? Instead, you just keep harking back on that unfixed bug whenever Firefox conversations come up and you can be like "but this bug has been around and no one has fixed it"

Are you kidding?

Firefox is notorious for having bugs open in core features for over a decade! I’ve found outright broken code, narrowed it down to the specific line, included documentation references, repro steps, etc… only to be totally ignored by the devs. I did get comments from several thousand other frustrated users, but never a Mozilla employee other than the occasional generic or automated housekeeping message.

Sadly the Mozilla Foundation has been overrun by special interest groups that simply want to suckle at the teat of Google funding. Millions of dollars are allocated to outright corruption, but very nearly zero to development of Firefox itself.

It’s a slow but certain road from here to a sad end.

Why would I or anyone else pretend otherwise? At the expense of our own time and effort no less?

Link to your bug report?

> So, if no one reports the bug, how do you expect the bug to get fixed?

Maybe they should learn how to test software properly instead of squandering their money on nonsense features nobody asked for.

FWIW I used to experience the same thing sporadically on Mac, about 10 years ago. Not just you - but a rare bug.

For me, the scroll randomly breaks and stops work all together for a minute.

I've seen the exact same problem on my mother's Mac and it's making her crazy. Haven't found a corresponding bug report, but it's sort of reassuring she's not alone with that annoying bug

Thanks for confirming I'm not crazy.

So one inconsistent bug, that only happens for a small subset and there’s no bug report filed makes FF suck on Macs.

Hyperbole much?

No, it's one example of an otherwise broken and lacklustre browser. It's the only browser that has issues with website functionality.

Get a real computer.

I have like 8 running right now lol. 3 linux, 4 windows, 1 chromeos.

A decent alternative to ChromeOS would be a great thing

pour one out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

I don't know if this qualifies for your definition of alternative, but ChromiumOS does exist https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/

How can I swap ^W and ^D in Firefox? For Chrome I found an extension that works (…worked?) fine, the only thing for Firefox I found would be compiling it myself, which I find a much worse experience than compiling Chromium myself (neither of which I like doing)

What do those do?

^w is delete word in vim/bash/everywhere else. It’s terrible whenever I accidentally type this in the browser and the window closes. I typically close terminal windows with ctrl-d so I have this mapped in my browser as well. It’s really muscle memory and I do not want to change it

By that same logic, ^w is used as close window everywhere else

Not for me, I hardly use anything GUI apart from my browser. Can’t actually think of anything right now apart from some niche tools. Either way, the fact that I can customise it that easily in Chrome but not in Firefox is a huge factor why I don’t like using Firefox

Not in Windows (pun unintended) where it works only in Explorer.

Patch localization/en-US/browser/browserSets.ftl in your browser/omni.ja (a .zip with a weird file extension), it contains stuff like: close-shortcut = .key = W

See: https://github.com/SebastianSimon/firefox-omni-tweaks how it can be done.

I do this myself as ctrl-n has to be new tab for me, forever, and firefox broke the old keyconfig extension years and years ago. (I had ctrl-n create tabs with an external window manager back in netscape 4 times and opera (pre-chrome-fork one) after that.)

Amazing, thank you!

This is just kicking the can down the road.

The bigger question is how the Chromium forks are going to respond long-term. I suspect the APIs enabling ad blocking are only going to get more clamped down requiring additional work for forks.

Policy-installed extensions can continue to use the WebRequest blocking APIs on Manifest V3 [1], so I would expect that the underlying code for the API would remain available for forks to use.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w...

Brave has committed to do what they can as long as they can. But unsure how long and what that really turns out to be. https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

Like I said before, Brave even has a better solution because it has a uBlock compatible ad blocker _built in straight into its core_ (but its disabled by default). Same block lists, same safety assurances.

Although I still use Firefox with uBlock as my daily driver at home, Brave with block lists and Shields is right next to it (and I use it as my daily driver at work). It works pretty damn well!

That is easy talking from Brave as long as it is still a config flag, then after a compile-time flag. Once the internal APIs for MV2 or where MV2 get removed or changed it becomes very difficult to maintain. Never mind the possible security issues you introduce, but won’t get so quickly discovered, because Brave is a smaller target.

I mean this isn't rocket surgery, carrying a patch set isn't as hard as this thread is making it out to be. Your Linux distro right now is carrying thousands.

Maybe you have inside info, but last we knew, Google needs internals for webRequest for its enterprise Chrome customers. I think this is not the dire situation your words convey.

and its really easy on MacOS, you just have to run

  defaults write com.google.Chrome.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

Another case where windows makes simple things unnecessarily cumbersome

You can’t edit config files on Windows from the terminal?

Not really an expert but PowerShell always seemed kind of more “powerful” and/or complex than bash

These are the instructions for Windows from OP's reddit post: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29...

So much more complicated.

It's a one liner in Powershell

New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome" -Name "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" -Value 2 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

>So much more complicated.

Are you one of those guys[1] who doesn't understand files and folders?

Seriously, the only thing you're exhibiting is your abject ignorance of Windows and possibly computers in general which are not something you should be proud of.

[1]: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/27/2032200/students-do...

Its not even that. They say its more complicated but it's basically the exact same thing. Registry entry's are arguably the windows equivalent of a Mac os plist.

Powershell is more equivalent to Python than BASH TBH

Come join the Firefox revolution!

It really is amazing how things have come full circle from the point where chrome positioned itself as a "Libre" alternative to the IE near-monopoly

There was a point between IE and chrome when Mozilla was always in the near-foreground offering alternatives to every internet hegemony, right around web 2.0, kinda makes me optimistic for the internet to see a resurgence of recommendations

Huh, I don't remember that narrative at all...

From how I remember it, we started with Netscape, IE outcompeted that by adding new features until they had enough share to strangle the competition. By that time IE became mandatory because of their extensions. Windows systems couldn't get updates without opening IE.

Eventually it (IE) fossilized and Firefox became the better browser with more features (remember that debugging extension?) but was still pretty slow.

Then came chrome. Way way faster, sleek and modern UI, removing the search and tool-bars. Hiding bookmarks by default and putting everything into the Omni bar. Really, that was what everyone I know of cared about: responsiveness/speed and that sleek UI.

Finally Firefox improved its resource usage/speed and adjusted it's UI, taking inspiration from chrome... But by that time, it's popularity had already dropped massively.

> remember that debugging extension?

Firebug was a godsend.

> IE outcompeted that by adding new features until they had enough share to strangle the competition.

ie won because it wasn't an utter piece of shit. Netscape 3 crashed if you looked at it crosseyed, and ie3 was significantly more stable and performant. I worked at one of the first companies to ship a serious app targeting a browser and, at one point, 1/3 of our front-end code was fingerprinting various netscape versions and working around their browser bugs. The world rushed to ie3/4 because it wasn't garbage.

I'm not saying Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly position or compete in underhanded and illegal ways, but they originally won purely on quality. People shipping serious web apps begged their users to get off netscape.

>from the point where chrome positioned itself as a "Libre" alternative to the IE near-monopoly

you're misremembering history. chrome was always just faster and had newer features that people liked.

Try Firefox Nightly for the native sidebar vertical tabs. That and native tab containers make Firefox work really well for me.

If you want vertical tabs, built-in adblocker, and more generally are looking for a lightweight and free (as in free speech and as in free beer) browser, you may look at https://www.falkon.org/ (made with QTwebengine i.e. Blink)

Uh, YT on FF is unusable now. They'll show the "adblockers not allowed" message if you have Ghostery enabled. Even if you disable that, they will add tons of artificial lag on things like key input, clicks and screen draw speed. I know it's artificial because it worked fine for years and then one day....

I’ve had zero issues or ads lately using Firefox + uBlock origin. For a while I had to update the Adblock lists manually sometimes, but for months now it’s been flawless for me.

Just wait a day and uBlock will update its filters. That's what happened to me initially. In the meantime I had a yt-dlp script for videos I wanted to watch. Tubular on mobile also works fine.

This is a youtube vs ad-blockers issue afaik, not a firefox one. Still not enough for me to ditch UB-O but prob enough to waste less time on youtube

Disable ublock origin on Youtube, or pay for Youtube.

As for artificial lag, I suspect it is because it using the web standard version of Youtube. Had this issue with Google Sheets where paste did not work correctly (forget exactly what it is) and it did work on Chrome. Google uses non-standard things to optimize the experience.

It is not acceptable, but it is also an issue that will go away once more people go back to the fox.

I consider myself grandfathered into their 2006 plan.

I pay for premium because I watch a lot of youtube and it's not worth my time to fight their anti-adblock stance.

I use Firefox with uBlock and I don't see any slowdowns or breakages. Just another data point.

Works fine for me (FF + uBO on Linux).

YT on Firefox + uBlock Origin works just fine for me, both on desktop and mobile!

Try out Zen browser, built on Firefox but closer to Arc.

It took a while to get used to vertical tabs but once that took, I have moved completely to Zen. It was good to see it move from alpha to beta recently.

Too bad they removed the ability to open the vertical tabs side bar on hover, that was a critical feature that caused me to go back to Firefox proper. I'll go back to Zen once they add it but to be honest, I'm not too sure what extra value Zen would bring me.

it's still here the 'left bar on hoover feature', it's just with another name

I am talking about this feature [0], it should have the option to show all the tab icons and expand on hover, not hide the side bar entirely. The creator said this was being dropped due to maintenance concerns, and I haven't seen a community solution like they said yet.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/zen_browser/s/FaQ8Ro6d8r

Well, that feature seems to be showcased on their marketing landing page, so they may want to address that.

I was disappointed that they removed that from the settings menu, but it is still available as a 'zen mod'.

Yeah if you want the same fate in about a year

Have you got any source for that?

Just in case: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manif...

> Support for Event pages, along with support for blocking webRequest, is a divergence from Chrome that enables use cases that are not covered by Chrome’s MV3 implementation.

> Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future.

The entire history of firefox since version 4 when they first copied chrome

I was never able to leave the Firefox revolution. Chrome kept syncing my bookmarks out of order. I have never had it happen on Firefox.

I used Chrome for like 15 years now? (since it came out) and I finally switched to Firefox over this.

Joined the revolution 20 years ago and never looked back!

BTW, Firefox still has over 10% market share in German speaking countries, compared to 3% worldwide. To the rest of the world: stop being lazy and try other browsers!

You could also use Vivaldi which has a built-in ad blocker

so many folk here on HN inexplicably are stuck on using Google Chrome which I honestly just do not understand at all…

Both Brave & Opera have built in adblockers that are not dependent on Manifest to run. I haven't played with Opera too much, but Brave lets you add custom lists and works quite well. Combine that with a DNS based adblocker such as HaGeZi [1] or OISD from free DNS providers like ControlD or NextDNS and you'll be golden.

[1] https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists?tab=readme-ov-file#...

I'm using Brave and have no idea why you got downvoted. People are talking like Chrome and FF are the only two things on Earth.

The silent downvote curse spreads.

Can someone kindly speak up and explain?

What's wrong with talking about Brave?

I downvote comments that disregard the hn guidelines.

“Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.”

They don't like the politics of Brenden Eich.

As Lenin would say, "Who? Whom?"

Yeah plus Brave on iPhone auto blocks ads. No extensions or configuration needed. Not sure if Firefox does that.

No, and it shouldn't. Firefox is a general purpose browser, so it should display web pages as the author intends. Security/anti-malware is expected, but changes in content are outside its scope. That's what extensions are for.

If you're installing Brave or Opera, you're not interested in a general purpose browser. Adblock is part of their advertised feature set.

Technically, software for browsing the internet without Adblock is not general purpose. I would consider it to be shopping software.

My point is, this is a No True Scotsman fallacy.

Discussion (119 points, 79 days ago, 62 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757178

Chrome is trash, download Firefox and never look back.

Totally agree.

Just avoid chrome and all those chrome-derived malware and use firefox.

Happened to me a couple of days ago. I installed Ublock Lite and it seems “good enough”.

It doesn’t do content blocking unfortunately.

What do you mean?

I highly doubt most people use content blocking so it will work fine for the average person.

For the vast majority of users Lite does the job just fine.

Clickable link to uBlock Origin Lite: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

I installed it a few days ago. It works fine.

So far no issue with Vivaldi as it runs these extensions. Have avoided Chrome for years and no regrets. Others might still work too, like brave?

I guess Vivaldi awaits the same fate.

I don’t want to switch from it, especially to Firefox, so much. It’s in little things like context menus, gestures (don’t tell me about that “crx” extension crapware), tab order/cycle behaviors, downloads ux, bookmarks ux, customization, etc etc.

These “default” browsers always feel like Crysis 3 gameplay wrapped into a primitive text adventure interface.

Ublock origin lite still works. Had to uninstall and reinstall but ads are still blocked on everything including YouTube.

That's the crappy manifest V3 best effort knockoff of uBlock

Using ungoogled chromium for now. Ublock works without hassle.

Note that it's MORE complicated to setup ungoogled chromium because it doesn't contain any basic syncing service and update service. You need to do the first time setup manually as said in its FAQ. You also need to setup your own or use existing account / bookmark syncing service as well as software update service for convenience, e.g., vaultwarden server and bitwarden extension for account syncing.

not trying to convince you to switch, but is there a reason you need to use chrome and jump through a bunch of hoops instead of just using a browser like firefox?

>but is there a reason you need to use chrome and jump through a bunch of hoops instead of just using a browser like firefox?

Not the other guy, but chrome is just feels so much better to use. Sure you can use something else and eventually get used to it, but a lot of things just feel off in firefox. I used firefox years ago and the switch the chrome immediately felt better, anytime I've tried to go back the switch immediately worse. I don't begrudge anyone not wanting to do that.

Does this phenomenon have a name — things get progressively worse but people find ways to make do in the short term, and are relatively content with the state of affairs; then the ways to make do break under continued pressure, and people are worse off than if they didn’t make do and fight the worsening conditions initially?

In this case, it’s the enshittification of the internet — a technological wonder exploited, commodified and destroyed for commercial gain. A network built for science and then for human connection, turned into a cesspit of corporate spyware, addiction, and behavior manipulation. If we rejected this earlier, we would all be better off — less spied on, less addicted, less manipulated, probably more connected and happier. But we found ways to make do like ad blockers that have grown into essential privacy protectors. That will now gradually stop working.

But it’s a broader phenomenon. It can be seen in tech, healthcare, politics, economics climate change, corporate management — everywhere.

It’s like a proverbial cousin of the boiling frog. In this case, the frog is aware of slowly boiling water and makes itself content by temporary means. Then, of course, it boils, but rather suddenly and painfully compared to the usual boiling frog tale.

It has something to do with basic american arrogance. E.g. many western cities americans came to and saw the mexican populations living on the hills instead of on the flats. What fools, the americans thought, until inevitably for most of these towns they experienced some 100 year deluge that absolutely wiped out stick frame mainstreet while those foolish homes upland were untouched. This pattern would continue for some towns in the american west until the army corps of engineers channelized local waterways to force the main street on the lowland location to work… right up until we finally got storms that exceeded even those flood water estimates. The hubris of the American is rather unique thanks to some of the Manifest Destiny tenets that still persist in our culture to this day.

This is nothing but the best of news. People will finally leave the Chrome trap

Brave seems to work well with its privacy shield and a button to turn scripts off as-needed.

People only focus on Firefox as an alternative. Am I missing something?

Brave CEO once said some mild hurty words about a fragile group, and so the lefty hive must not publicly support his endeavours (whilst using his JavaScript all day long lol).

I haven't the first clue about the politics but I'm guessing the response is more toxic than the original message.

IIRC, the guy donated some money to some anti-LGBT groups back when he was CEO of Mozilla Corp. People associated it with Mozilla in general (even though they were personal donations, not from Mozilla) and he ended up having to resign. He then founded Brave.

Honesty I feel more antipathy for him (and Andreesen) for saddling us with Javascript, but I understand why people don't want to use his products.

That's fine, and a reasonable reason to dislike and boycott usage. What's weird about the HN response is the silent down voting instead of calm explanation like you just did. The topic turned into moving from Chrome, and only Firefox was essentially mentioned.

As far as I know he didn't even say hurtful words. He made a personal monetary donation to a California amendment that passed.

If you want a Chromium based browser Brave has a uBlock-esque blocker built right into its core but it's disabled by default because "Brave Shields is enough protection" (it isn't, given the stats I see when enabled). Anyway, you can turn it on and it uses the same blocklists uBlock uses aswell.

Any reference or instructions on how to do that?

> "if you want a Chromium based browser'

There is also Vivaldi:

https://help.vivaldi.com

Alas, it crashes every time I try to import my Chrome profile.

Vivaldi would not stop offering to sign me into google automatically on sites that support it, it kept re-enabling it somehow. How this is enabled on a privacy-aware browser is beyond me. Brave is pretty good once you disable all the crypto stuff.

Wait, really? There's something other than the default "shields" thing? Where is this and how do I enable it? Been using Brave for years with all the "aggressive" boxes checked and I've never seen such an option anywhere.

brave://settings/shields/filters

Reminder: uBlock and uBlock Origin are different extensions from different developers.

Additionally, Ublock Origin is the one you probably want.

I have been using Arc browser intermittently for a while and like it. I mainly use Chrome. I am a pragmatist rather than a purist, but if I start seeing ads in Chrome I will migrate everything and uninstall it.

> Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.

Never left Firefox, never had much of a reason. The Node.js debugger integration stuff brings me to Chrome every once in a while but I don't use for my daily browsing.

Wipr for the win, Chrome nevermore.

The irony is it isn't for the win(dows)

Last time I tried Wipr+Safari, it didn't match the power of uBO+Chrome.

I have been using Wipr v2, which achieves a 100% block rate in tests. In comparison, uBlock Origin (uBO) typically reaches 98–99% on the same tests.

The fact that Chrome has nerfed ad blockers prompted me to switch. I have used Chrome consistently since its early alpha versions around 2008.

However, ad blockers are absolutely essential to me. The web is not safe without them.

Better than 1Blocker?

I have never tried this one.

There's some chrome attestation stuff I've been starting to see for implementing security related services. The support for that is probably bundled with this manifest v3 thing? Or is the device attestation separate? If they are bundled, Firefox will disappear even more in corporate and probably at home too.

I already stopped using Chrome about 6 months ago, for this very reason. Firefox works great and it was really easy to migrate and not look back.

ChromeOS also went downhill. I am slowly migrating older family devices over to Lubuntu or maybe another lightweight distro.

Google needs Chrome and Android freed from their sticky fingers.

I'm superlatively surprised Google has followed through on what it has promised to do over and over again.

"I'm surprised they did what they said they would do" will be the anthem of 2025 unfortunately

Could someone explain in simple terms, what’s so tricky about spinning off a v2-compatible chromium fork?

Forget about forking, just offering a build of Chromium for a single platform and architecture that gets the security updates in time is a lot of work.

People who remove v2, own ad networks, develop chrome and write standards are the same people. It’s new age mafia, cancer of the internet and they do everything for you to not be able to just spin off a fork.

So what would they do?

Already done: used lying tactics to make their browser and ad networks dominate, bloated the standard to make browser development unsustainable.

Right now: rooting out the entire possibility of running full adblock-capable extensions from the sources, so that even chrome-based browsers could not support it back.

Chromium is maintained by the largest ad company in the world.

google can weaponize structural changes to make any v2 maintainer's life a living hell, the code base is massive.

It’ll drift apart over time and become ever harder to track the upstream without engineering effort

I think you can find the plugin and click "fix", and you can still use it, I was in same boat, and using it now, no idea what happened though...

Yes it's because uBlock works best with manifest v2 and Chrome now requires v3. You can use skipvids.com for youtube

I don't know if they actually broke it yet, you can click through a bunch of options and re-enable it still.

What can uBlock Origin do that one couldn't do with a sufficiently sophisticated SSL-terminating forward proxy?

Remove elements added dynamically without entirely blocking the script that produces them.

Yeah, this seems like the blocker here. Thanks for thinking this through more effectively than I did.

Using a proxy to do DNS blocking has significant failures modes. They wont work on youtube because youtube uses the same endpoint to serve the videos and ads for starters.

No, not DNS blocking; content parsing and editing before it arrives in the browser. I agree DNS blocking is mostly trash. It's not just youtube/google, but anything that uses Akamai will be pretty hosed too.

Then the problem is you have to wait for the ping to your proxy/emulator every time you want to run some JS because it needs to run whatever blocking script youve got on the output.

provide a UI within the browser chrome

True. Good point.

Are there any OSS Chromium based browsers that don’t have crypto and VPN bloatware that people recommend?

When will you upgrade away from a Google controlled operating system? Your wife deserves better.

Just install ublock lite and continue on with the same experience as before

I just use Safari and 1Blocker and everything works fine for me :D

I've switched to Vivaldi. Most productive browser so far.

pihole + adblocker apps and you'll basically never see ads

- there's a YouTube specific one I like

- rethink (phone)

- adguard (computer)

ublock was nice but there are more comprehensive solutions

Time to extend the browser without google...

Time for a reminder that pretty good ad-blocking can be done with no software at all, just a customised hosts file - https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts :-)

Lame.

Try using NextDNS to block ads entirely instead of just in Chrome.

Also, duck.com has a browser extension that can do this. You could also just use their browser instead.

DNS-level blocking is more or less what Chrome's more limited API allows you to do. Full-fat adblockers can do a lot more.

Ideally both.

I’ve found that dns still ends up catching requests even with v2 manifest ublock

There are many types of ads that cannot be blocked by dns-based blockers. Just like there are ads that can’t be blocked by the new “ublock lite” that is allowed in manifest v3.

uBlock origin can do more complex ad detection and removal, and is the most thorough approach for anything in the browser.

Seriously, what is a good alternative to Chrome's password management? For lazy end users.

1password if you are willing to pay for it. If you’re not, Bitwarden is just as good and it’s free / open source.

Thank you all for the suggestions.

I set up Bitwarden for my dad who keeps forgetting his passwords. It seems to work well on his PC and Android phone.

I have always found Bitwarden to be the best one after trying many alternatives. One thing that stood out is how its phone app works seamlessly with FaceID/Fingerprint. From logged out to login is as smooth as allowing your phone to use biometrics.

Bitwarden seems to be getting updates often as well which I value in a security conscious product.

A real password manager

I use proton pass

Firefox sync?

Brave. It's Chrime with builtin ad blocking.

Migrated from Brave, didn't like it in the end, never now what's the deal wih their crypto token, seemed a nuisance.

We make crypto opt-in, so I'm curious what was a nuisance. Was it something in the UX you couldn't turn off? Or sponsored images in new tab pages? Both possible, genuine q.

use brave

Edge to msft

Replace Chrome with Firefox. Reinstall uBlock Origin. Problem solved.

Just use Firefox ffs.

Oh no! That's really disappointing!

yeah same... but then i got an ad for Pie, which i guess works to block youtube ads

Friends don't let friends use Chrome. Use Firefox. uBlock Origin works best with Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Unfortunately Firefox is slower than chromium and the devtools are worse. I used Firefox for years because I hate google. I eventually gave up, that’s how bad ff is.

I think that Firefox dev tools are better

Yeah, I'm used to the Firefox ones and whenever I use the chrome ones they seem fine, worse in some ways but better in others (device emulation) while being a little unfamiliar.

The webextension dev tools are better too, imo.

My average friend doesn't care about devtools, only if they can watch YouTube in silence

FF actually uses hardware acceleration on my machine and chrome won't for some reason, so FF is actually faster for some!

Yeah, I don't get all this fuss. I mean, if you block ads then do you think Chrome will also stop reporting to the mothership? Of course not. Use Firefox and simple be done with all this hoohah.

> I mean, if you block ads then do you think Chrome will also stop reporting to the mothership?

I'm mostly interested in improving my browsing experience. Viewing the web without an adblocker is a nightmare, it makes some websites nigh-unusable.

The privacy issue is an issue, but it's not one that actively prevents me from reading things online.

> The privacy issue is an issue, but it's not one that actively prevents me from reading things online.

Yet.

Blocking malvertisements is a matter of safety, I personally find the privacy aspect secondary to that.

For me primarily a matter of convenience: I don't want to be inconvenienced by ads. Secondly and thirdly safety and privacy.

yes I switched from Chrome to FF for this exact reason but my oh my is FF so slow and laggy!

Sorry until Firefox wakes up and fixes bugs breaking the internet like this one https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195654

I can sadly never recommend it

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