uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en

by non- • 1 year ago

1972 982 1 year ago

chromewebstore.google.com

Jalad• 1 year ago

The last Chrome update also disabled it for me because it's a manifest v2 extension. I use firefox on my personal computers, but might need to switch on my work PCs as well

whitepoplar• 1 year ago

uBlock Origin Lite is still available, thankfully.

ssgao• 1 year ago

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

armada651• 1 year ago

But for how long? I'm sure Google is hard at work on Manifest V4.

colordrops2• 1 year ago

What is lost by going to this version?

p_ing2• 1 year ago

The wiki outlines the differences.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

desdenova2• 1 year ago

dignity

chrisweekly2• 1 year ago

custom filters / block lists

whstl3• 1 year ago

If it’s anything like Safari’s declarative blocklists:

Ad blocking on Youtube.

Youtube-blocking Safari extensions “solve” Youtube blocking by using non-declarative APIs that need full access to Youtube. Apple seems ok with that so far, but the APIs are not as goods, so their success rate is limited.

Whether Google will allow new extensions that block Youtube remains to be seen.

bearjaws3• 1 year ago

Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...

I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy, a joke coming from Google. Then the excuse was "well it improves performance", which they could easily do by marking extensions as low performance.

If Google wanted to improve this they have an entire search engine where they could re-rank sites based on privacy and performance.

It was never about improving peoples web experience.

colordrops2• 1 year ago

People have come to accept dishonesty and sociopathy from corporations as normal and even acceptable unfortunately.

iAMkenough• 1 year ago

I view it as a symptom of the broader effort to villify the fourth estate and condition people to act(vote) on their emotions rather than a rational look at verifiable facts.

jstummbillig2• 1 year ago

They had the market position and option to do that for years now. "Told you so" whenever a patterns matches, and ignoring the times when it does not instead of providing a good model that encompasses both, is a fairly lame way to reason about the world.

smt88• 1 year ago

"They didn't immediately abuse their market power!"

Great. Very few companies do. What difference does it make?

We don't give bankrobbers credit for all the days they could've robbed a bank but didn't.

zanellato193• 1 year ago

The position is always, Google's position is so strong they can do whatever they want even if it isn't beneficial to users, this confirms that. I'm not sure the "they could have abused this sooner" defense is a good one.

BiteCode_dev• 1 year ago

I've never killed anyone, should I get your gratitude for it?

TZubiri3• 1 year ago

"Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit..."

That's some fatalistic wording. How about:

Company that publishes a free product and business model relies on ads, stops distributing app that piggybacks on their free product while circumventing ads.

klabb32• 1 year ago

Also true. But it’s a charitable way of putting a fundamentally broken contract on the open web since it was invented: you are in control of your browser. If you want reading mode, large text, anti-fingerprinting, disable autoplaying video, heck even banning popups, the browser is your tool and does what you tell it to. If Google or any other company comes between you and your browser then one part of the open web is discarded. I think extensions are gonna get nerfed even more in the future, for whatever reason large commercial interests have.

oa834j5o• 1 year ago

It was never free. The revenue streams are just hidden. It has always collected and sold huge amounts of data about every user.

And regardless, using their ownership of the browser to shut down competitors is the very definition of "anti-competitive" "monopolistic" behavior.

akaij• 1 year ago

To me it’s just another decision rooted in greed, to take away more Agency from the User Agent.

ndriscoll• 1 year ago

Right, and that's why ad and spying funded products should be illegal. They don't just distort but destroy markets. It's an extremely unfair business practice.

That people claim it's impossible for a browser to survive without Google's funding demonstrates how broken the market is by ad money: of course people would pay for something like a web browser if it were illegal to make money by selling your users. The web is obviously valuable to people.

whalesalad3• 1 year ago

100% agree with you. Unfortunately Chrome is damn near a requirement if you are interacting with the Google Cloud console. Try to use BigQuery studio in any other browser and you are in for a world of hurt.

Have we seen this movie before?

dewey3• 1 year ago

Exactly the reason why I use https://choosy.app to always redirect everything Google Cloud to Chrome, but everything else to Firefox.

That way if I click on some random GCP link in Slack it opens the link in Chrome, but everything else stays in Firefox. I don't need ad blocking for GCP so that works fine.

Sucks, but better than using Chrome full time.

layer82• 1 year ago

Other Chromium-based browsers don’t work?

That would at least save you from stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942252.

muizelaar• 1 year ago

I use BigQuery studio often in Firefox and haven’t noticed anything being worse than Chrome. What problems do you see?

kazinator6• 1 year ago

Yes; the movie where running genuine Microsoft Windows is damn near a requirement if you want to interact with Windows applications.

Using Firefox and whatever for the Google cloud is kinda like running Windos applications in Wine or ReactOS.

sneak5• 1 year ago

The issue I have is not that they did it; it’s that they lied about why.

Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it. People can use a different browser if they wish (I do).

This whole “better for users” bullshit is why I don’t respect Google as a company. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.

zanellato193• 1 year ago

Their engineers genuinely believe that shit too, which is just absurd bullshit.

mort96• 1 year ago

Actually I have a problem is both. Chrome/Chromium is Google's product and it's theirs to do with what they please, but if they do user-hostile things with it, that's enough to criticise them for me, even if they're honest about it.

Of course lying about why makes it worse, but I don't think it would've been that much more okay if Google was honest and said "users' ability to install highly effective ad blockers hurts our bottom line so we're removing them".

pca006132• 1 year ago

And I don't understand what is the benefit of lying as well - everyone on the internet knows what this is about, at least if they used ad blockers. A lot of people don't, but they will not be affected anyway.

princevegeta89• 1 year ago

Where I live, Google rented out a huge Billboard to advertise Chrome, and it cites Chrome as "the world's most trusted browser"

I LOL every time I see it. Imagine the lengths they have to go to, to try to make people trust a product they have.

marricks3• 1 year ago

Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it.

Google has a long history of "accidentally" breaking gmail on firefox and funneling users to Chrome back in the day. It's beyond stupid to argue they should be able to do whatever they want with their vertically integrated monopoly.

Like, if you want to dig holes in your own driveway sure whatever, but if you own all the roads in Detroit and you want to dig holes in them, then make a killing selling new tires and suspension repair a fair society wouldn't move out of Detroit, they'd fucking run you out of town.

SpicyLemonZest3• 1 year ago

I don’t work for Google and genuinely think it’s better for users. It’s always bugged me that ad blockers request arbitrary read write permissions for all websites I visit, and it didn’t seem like that was ever going to change until Chrome forced the issue.

makeitdouble4• 1 year ago

Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it.

They shouldn't be free to use all the money in the world to corner a market, rope in the conpetition and then abuse that position.

It only works because nobody can touch them, it's otherwise straight illegal in most markets.

blockme69• 1 year ago

Well hopefully Google will pay the price for their greed soon enough.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-...

internetter3• 1 year ago

They won't under the trump admin

winwang2• 1 year ago

As much as I dislike their Chrome practices, I am rather against the idea of forcing them to sell Chrome.

For one, they simply have had a better product, at least in the past. Part of their large monopoly is due to just being better outright for a large portion of users (presumably). Are we to punish making overly-good products?

For another, sell to whom? And why would they be a good steward?

And yet another, there's literally Chromium, which other browsers (built by other corps) use, e.g. Edge, Brave, etc.

Did Google have to open Chromium? No.

Disclaimer: I hold these opinions weakly and would love to learn more about why they might be ill-premised.

arwhatever• 1 year ago

"Where there's a will, there's a way."

ehecatl42• 1 year ago

Emacs Web Wowser for the most part, for me, and it basically works... except when it fucking does not.

The modern web, as we all know, is all kinds of shit. Anybody here compile Firefox recently?

6SixTy3• 1 year ago

Gentoo user here: all the time. Worst part is that Firefox depends on NodeJS which takes a good day to compile on my 2c/4t 3250U.

voytec2• 1 year ago

Why would you? Firefox is a spyware nowadays.

gruez14• 1 year ago

Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...

Doesn't Safari have the same restriction, also ostensibly for "security/privacy" reasons? The only difference is that Apple doesn't have a web advertising presence, so you can't make the accusation that they're "abuse its market position to their own benefit".

AstralSerenity7• 1 year ago

Firefox and its derivatives remain the only true alternative at this point.

judge2020• 1 year ago

And ublock origin lite works just fine for me

EA-3167• 1 year ago

That's a BIG difference though, and makes the claim about security more believable, especially since it isn't a sole restriction. There are also a number of ad blockers available for Safari, although personally I'll stick with Firefox either way.

Google is an ad company restriction use of the primary ad-blocker on its browser, it's blatant.

zamalek6• 1 year ago

This is coming from an Apple antagonist, but don't the Apple OSs have adblocking at a system level (implying Safari)? This does vindicate Apple (but doesn't help in the other legitimate scenarios that this API is needed, which I have been told do exist).

echelon2• 1 year ago

It's time for a Google breakup from the DOJ / FTC.

They've gone well beyond what Microsoft did in the 2000s.

Google owns so many panes of glass and funnels them all through its search and advertising funnel. They've distorted how the web (and mobile) work to accomplish this massive market distortion.

Search, Ads, and Android should be broken up into separate units. Chrome shouldn't be placed with any of those units.

While we're cutting, YouTube should be its own entity and stand on its own legs too.

Apple, Amazon, and Meta need the same scrutiny. Grocery stores and primary care doctors should not be movie studios and core internet infrastructure. Especially when those units are wholly subsidized by other unrelated business units, and their under pricing the market is used to strangle out the incumbents and buy them up on the cheap.

Fluorescence• 1 year ago

People scratch their heads about how "just a default setting" can be worth an annual $20 billion payment from Google. It makes more sense if it's actually for a raft of wildly illegal under-the-table measures this.

Imagine what it would cost Google's bottom line if Apple was truly user-focused and enabled ad-blocking on desktop, mobile and embedded safari views by default. Someone do the napkin math please!

bearjaws3• 1 year ago

Alright? Split iOS off from Apple, then split Apple Music off too?

I hate these arguments where people point to some other shitty thing a company is doing as some sort of gotcha.

fmajid2• 1 year ago

Apple is totally an advertising company. Have you missed the part about their stalling phone, tablet and laptop revenues, that they hope to compensate with "services" revenue, i.e. App Store 30% racketeering and App Store search ads?

F7F7F7• 1 year ago

Whataboutism is so lazy.

cma• 1 year ago

Apple gets Google revenue for being their default search, and that is worth much less if the search ads pay less if Safari users were able to browse other sites untracked.

edgarischatting• 1 year ago

Honest question here: Could someone explain to me how Apple and Safari relate to what Google is doing?

I currently use Adguard as a content blocker for Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Does this mean that Safari will also start restricting access to these ad blockers?

voytec2• 1 year ago

It was never about improving peoples web experience.

I kinda appreciate that you still apply some benefit of the doubt.

yard20103• 1 year ago

It's funny how this behavior resembles the Chinese Party.

labster• 1 year ago

The CCP is much better organized with its “Do nothing. Win.” strategy. If Trump did nothing as well as they do, America would still be a superpower.

lo_zamoyski• 1 year ago

I'm surprised anyone expected anything different. Why would an ad company support something that assaults its main source of profit?

johnsillings• 1 year ago

I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy

What are you using instead?

sfblah• 1 year ago

This is the most important question. What's the best practice? Firefox? Something else?

andrei_says_• 1 year ago

It is the gaslighting that is so annoying and insulting. An entity of such power and reach resorting to manipulation is disconcerting.

Everyone will call them on it. Why not be straight with their intentions?

An advertising company optimizing their technology to better support their business while improving security.

justmarc• 1 year ago

Improving the security of their income stream :)

HumblyTossed• 1 year ago

Please don't forget the part developers played in this by enabling Chrome/Google to become so very dominant.

culi17• 1 year ago

And developers can play a part in reversing that. It seems like it might already be happening:

  | month   | Chrome | Firefox | Safari |
  | --      | --     | --      | --     |
  | Jan '25 | -1.29  | +0.07   | +0.84  |
  | Feb '25 | -0.75  | +0.08   | +0.03  |

Note: Edge is also gaining. They use Chromium but their stance on Manifest v3 is unclear to me. So far they don't seem to have any plans to deprecate v2 support

I know these numbers seem tiny, but if these trends were to continue, Chrome could be under 50% marketshare by June 2026 and overtaken by the end of 2027

spankalee3• 1 year ago

There was a time in Chrome when it didn't support extensions at all. If Google had release an extension API like manifest v3 then, would that have been abuse of market position?

The reason why Chrome waited for so long to add extensions was the danger they posed to users. I was at Google when Sergey often worried about what extensions would do to non technical and older users who get tricked into installing them, then I saw first hand that danger with my own grandparents. They had extensions intercepting every network request, redirecting certain sites to fake sites, and injecting code into pages. It was horrifying, and they were lucky that they didn't have significant money or identity theft.

jayd16• 1 year ago

It wouldn't have been a bait and switch then.

rurp• 1 year ago

If it's really that big of a problem this can be addressed by locking extensions by default and hiding the on switch where casual users won't look. But come on, this is obviously a pretext. You expect people to believe that the most prolific adertising and surveilance company in history is crippling the ability to block ads and trackers for altruistic reasons?!

mvnuweucxqokii• 1 year ago

Yes, "abuse of market position" is path dependent.

Offering something then taking it away is materially different from never having offered it at all.

nirvdrum• 1 year ago

Before the introduction of extensions, Chrome supported NPAPI. I can't readily verify whether that was present in the first Chrome release, but it was present in very early releases. Browser Extensions was the alternative Google came up with to have a blessed API and sandboxed execution.

Abuse of extensions was certainly a problem with IE. But, Google was also happy to use IE controls for Google Toolbar and other functionality. It irks me when a company/tool makes use of another's more permissive policies/APIs in order to gain a foothold and then restricts others from doing the same with its products. It feels like pulling the ladder up behind you.

yanis_t• 1 year ago

A company optimises for profit. Real shocker.

timmytokyo• 1 year ago

s/company/monopoly/

mihaaly• 1 year ago

People's web experience is in degradation for long time.

No point using 99% of the web due to the hostile, fraudolent, abusive approaches on top of the hollow (yeh, very very gentle world for the thing what it is) content. No point searching for advice, products, job, as crap is poured at you while your actions are registered, your profile is sold, just to pour dedicated crap on you by the highest bidder.

I have mail and 5 (7 with weather) pages I check regularly, and that's it. That's my online life. More like a hermit goes into town for tools and cans kind of digital solitary. Clicking on links only after reconsidering five times, if I am really interested in the possible content. Mostly here. So, so far away from the extremely curious me 20 or so years ago spending hours to the limit of my thirst and bladder, navigating all that is out there.

It is very sad what humanity made out of the Internet. It does not even hurt anymore. It is numb blob where the feeling about the rich common knowledge source this was and could have been should be.

bambax• 1 year ago

I don't think killing actual, effective ad-blocking was the sole motivation of moving to Manifest V3, but it was certainly a nice side effect that was hard to resist.

spearman• 1 year ago

Pretty sure they do rank sites based on performance: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/page-ex...

ethan_smith2• 1 year ago

Been using uBlock Origin for so long I forgot what the raw internet actually looks like. Spent 3 minutes without an ad blocker last week when setting up a new machine and nearly lost my mind. Google knows exactly what they're taking away from us - a usable web. They've just decided that our sanity is less valuable than their ad revenue.

https://programmerhumor.io/programming-memes/browsing-withou...

I feel really bad for less tech-savvy users who'll be stuck with this nightmare version of the internet.

mrgoldenbrown• 1 year ago

You linked to a crappy copy of an XKCD comic. Here's the orginal. https://xkcd.com/624/

justsid• 1 year ago

What boggles my mind is the fact that surely people working for Google also use Chrome. Are they not up in arms internally because of how awful the web is without ad blocker?

I have the same experience as you, every time I set up a new machine or watch friends/relatives browse the web, it just blows my mind how bad the unfiltered internet is.

radicalriddler• 1 year ago

Yep. It isn't just a less usable web, it's a less safe web. But anything for those sweet ad dollars.

Sparkyte• 1 year ago

Makes you feel naked. I am running Firefox now, but there is a debacle on that now.

dumbledoren• 1 year ago

They've just decided that our sanity is less valuable than their ad revenue.

Precisely why it should be broken up.

tux• 1 year ago

Let’s hope it still works at least on ungoogled chromium with manual setup. As soon as this stops working i’m back to only using firefox for good.

jjav• 1 year ago

Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...

What makes me sad is that if we go back a handful of years here in HN comments, there were tons of posts assuredly stating google would never do anything like this.

Even though it should have been obvious that a company who lives and dies by ad revenue will of course do everything to protect ad revenue and block users freedom.

JodieBenitez• 1 year ago

Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...

Thanks, now I have coffee on my keyboard.

blankx32• 1 year ago

Goodbye Chrome, good night

lifeisgood99• 1 year ago

Chrome is no longer available on my machine. It hasn't been for some years now but still.

perihelions• 1 year ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43262531 ("uBlock Origin forcefully disabled by Chrome", 5 days ago, 204 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43099417 ("uBlock Origin Has Been Disabled", 19 days ago, 40 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299886 ("The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome", 2 days ago, 663 comments)

fpg693• 1 year ago

[flagged]

jonwinstanley2• 1 year ago

It was the pre-roll youtube ad that made me realise ublock was dead :-(

dowager_dan997• 1 year ago

seeing your first YT ad in a decade is quite the shock!

seattle_spring• 1 year ago

It is absolutely bonkers how many ads are in YouTube now. Nearly unusable without an ad blocker.

nickelpro2• 1 year ago

You are still allowed and able to block advertisements with extensions.

ivewonyoung• 1 year ago

Does this mean it won't be able to get updates to extension code(not block lists) anymore?

I am getting high CPU usage with uBO since yesterday but I do have a lot of tabs so I was wondering if thats a bug that will get fixed.

nickelpro2• 1 year ago

Switch to UBL, the manifest v3 successor to UBO, to continue to get updates, the performance is better too.

stainablesteel2• 1 year ago

just another reason to break up the monopoly

desdenova2• 1 year ago

Chrome will now be sold to TotallyNotGoogle, we're saved.

stainablesteel2• 1 year ago

that's how it works, there are legal ramifications otherwise

freedomben4• 1 year ago

I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions, unlike the locked-down and hobbled Chromium ecosystem. I suspect they do realize this because they've been really leaning into extensions recently, but over the years I've worried that Mozilla's committment to Firefox isn't as serious as I would like.

Regardless, I'd love to see this give FF a big bounce in the stats. Something to reinforce that there are people out here that really want manifest v2, badly enough to switch!

ToDougie• 1 year ago

Firefox has some weird slowness with DNS that I have troubleshot to death. I still use it for almost everything, but sometimes I'll have an entire day of 30s page loading times.

recursive• 1 year ago

Apologies if this is elementary, but have you tried turning off DoH?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/dns-over-https#w_off

Yeul4• 1 year ago

I wonder how much time not experiencing advertising on the internet saves?

Whenever someone says how fast Chrome is I think about this.

guappa• 1 year ago

Disable DNS over HTTPS I guess.

Underphil• 1 year ago

Same here. Tends to be pretty inconsistent. DNS-over-HTTP(s) definitely disabled. 30s is a lot more than I've experienced, but there are times where it clearly struggles to look things up.

bdcravens• 1 year ago

Part of what the DOJ is seeking against Google would severely impact Mozilla financially however, as they want to ban them from paying to be the default search engine.

bad_user9• 1 year ago

Which is why Mozilla are getting desperate to diversify their revenue.

MYEUHD• 1 year ago

That would be a good thing. If Firefox is funded by donations, rather than by Google, it ensures there is no enshittification in the future. And yes, donations can fund a big project, as evidenced by Thunderbird and Ladybird.

tomrod5• 1 year ago

Indeed. Kagi proves users are willing to pay for search (me included, recently).

iteratethis• 1 year ago

This to me is the ultimate sign that Mozilla has zero values or principles.

They've long advocated that Big Tech is a problem, but as soon as somebody tries to actually address it and this coincidentally impacting Mozilla, they abandon any and all principles.

drdec• 1 year ago

My problem with extensions is it's another development team to trust and monitor. I need to know if the extension has been sold, taken over by a new lead, etc.

ar_lan• 1 year ago

After the Great Suspender debacle, I feel the same. I try to limit plugins/extensions to as many minimal use cases as possible.

freedomben4• 1 year ago

Yeah that's definitely fair, I have the same concern. Currently I've reduced my extensions to just a few that I either trust (like gorhill's) or that I wrote myself. But I think it would be huge if Mozilla built out the tooling needed to keep a better monitor on them. It's an extremely hard problem to be sure though.

lotsofpulp2• 1 year ago

This is why I prefer Safari's content blockers. As far as I understand, there is no risk of content blockers sending out information.

nikisweeting• 1 year ago

Luckily there's an extension for that: [Under New Management | Chrome Web Store](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/under-new-managemen...)

jesuslop• 1 year ago

Yep while this manifest v3 ugly thing is putting me on the brink of jumping ship (I compromise by having two browsers), as for your concern I found that Chrome is going to allow blacklisting extensions for sites, so now I can turn them off for the few sites that I really worry to grant extension read access.

chrome://flags, "Extensions Menu Access Control" flag. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/new-extensions-menu-testin...

badgersnake• 1 year ago

Google will just slip in a few more “improvements” to Gmeet, Gmail and YouTube that happen to not work or perform very poorly on Firefox.

bravoetch• 1 year ago

It would be enough if Apple realized the same thing. They're in a position to have the best browser, and coast along ignoring the opportunity.

freedomben4• 1 year ago

Unfortunately this would only be helpful to Apple customers, which itself comes with significant downsides IMHO. I'd much prefer a cross-platform solution

jordanb4• 1 year ago

I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions,

The problem is that Mozilla's customers are not Firefox's users. Mozilla's customer is Google. They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.

I think it's pretty clear that the TOS change basically coincided with the removal of manifest v2 change in chrome.

AstralSerenity7• 1 year ago

My understanding is Mozilla contracted its footprint substantially to remain sustainable in a future without Google's monetary contribution.

AceJohnny22• 1 year ago

They pay Mozilla to exist

Do they? I thought Google significantly reduced their payments to Mozilla a few years back, which started Mozilla current random-walk.

Edit: As of 2023, they were as high as ever at 85% of Mozilla's finances coming from Google [1] . However the DoJ antitrust case against Google targets Google's payments to various entities (Mozilla, Apple) to make themselves the default search engine, thus threatening Mozilla's income. I did not immediately find sources for Mozilla's 2024 finances, but I can imagine they see the existential threat.

and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.

That's just conspiracy-thinking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

hipsterstal1n2• 1 year ago

They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.

Come on, that is just crazy talk. I get that Mozilla has made some boneheaded decisions but this is baseless conjecture.

Alifatisk• 1 year ago

They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.

I am trying to understand how this works? If they pay Mozilla to exist, yet their intention is to destroy their competitor, why even pay for them to begin with?

JasserInicide• 1 year ago

I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions

Don't worry, they won't. They have more important endeavors like funding some new bullshit virtue signalling campaign and paying huge CEO bonuses.

glenstein19• 1 year ago

It's like a never-ending horde of zombies that comes in and makes this cheap shot over and over. My understanding is the CEO makes slightly more than 1% of their revenues. And it's actually low compared to the typical tech CEO.

But what's the story of cause and effect here such that if they'd invested 1% of their revenue differently, they would jump from 3% market share back to 30% or wherever they were previously? Once you ask these questions out loud, it's clear that people aren't thinking through the steps of the argument.

Aerroon• 1 year ago

Can you install your own personal extensions without getting permission from Mozilla yet? Or are they still banning that? Because that change drove me away from Firefox.

efilife• 1 year ago

You mean inatalling from local files? This isn't ever going away, we have to test what we develop somehow

downrightmike2• 1 year ago

FF is supporting V2 and V3 on purpose, so they are doing what you want

bigtimesink• 1 year ago

If this doesn't give FF a noticeable bounce, FF really is a lost cause.

xnx4• 1 year ago

Truly the best angle Firefox could take would be to be stronger pro user: block ads, resist fingerprinting, hide annoyances, etc.

klysm• 1 year ago

The shareholders will be grateful! A great victory for google!

freedomben4• 1 year ago

I blacklisted Chrome in dnf (the Fedora system update manager) once we hit near the last version to allow manifest v2, but apparently it wasn't enough. They reached in to my system and deactivated/deleted my manifest v2 extensions anyway regardless, even though my version still "supports" them. I'm quite displeased to say the least. Ultimately it's probably for the best though as now my "slow fade" plan has to be accelerated. Time to rip the bandaid off.

tomrod5• 1 year ago

Proton and Kagi have most of the services I've personally needed to de-Google. GCP is nicer than AWS, so will probably keep that around as a paying customer. Only thing I haven't found a great replacement yet for Google Docs (MS office is abysmal, but also lack of testing of alternatives so far :) ).

haarolean4• 1 year ago

I love Kagi's Orion but it's still not good enough yet to switch off chrome completely. You realize this once you delve deeper, install extensions, and use it as your daily driver.

zelphirkalt2• 1 year ago

Spyware doing malware things. I guess it is unexpected in this case, but in hindsight just confirming its malware character.

darkhorse222• 1 year ago

I've been using Firefox for years now after being an avid chrome user and I do not miss it at all.

chrisweekly2• 1 year ago

Hoping someone can point me to a Chrome browser extension that supports custom block rules. My strange situ involves an IT-managed laptop / browser that can't access certain websites because of their embedded resources (eg fonts) hosted on 3rd-party domains; firewall rules block the embedded content, breaking the (allowed) main site I'm trying to visit. uBlock Origin was perfect: I'd craft custom rules to disallow problematic embedded resources, problem solved.

subarctic• 1 year ago

Isn't there a lite version of ublock origin that works with manifest v3?

dowager_dan997• 1 year ago

only gets updated when published and doesn't support custom rules or element picking :(

dowager_dan997• 1 year ago

I have a similar situation, though for more personal, first-world problems. I used custom rules for things like YT shorts, Jira's giant bar for emoji-responses in comments, etc. I'm not sure there's a good substitute on Chrome because Google's primary intent was to destroy the efficacy of this tooling.

ge962• 1 year ago

Is it actually gone? I thought they just put that warning.

I just re-enabled the one already installed on my devices.

Once it's legit gone gone though yeah I'm going to Firefox or use Edge for web dev stuff

Edit: I will say I am a hypocrite though I am trying to build a following by posting on YouTube... I don't control the ads on there, maybe you do when you are monetizable but yeah sucks I feel bad for the viewers. At the same time... I'll spend weeks/months on a project and no one cares so idk.

dowager_dan997• 1 year ago

gone for some... many... most.

garciasn• 1 year ago

I re-enabled it last week but they forced removed it again days later. I re-enabled it by force and it's still working, but it won't be for much longer, I'm certain.

https://www.neowin.net/guides/google-turned-off-ublock-in-ch...

This URL, shared elsewhere in this thread, seems to tell you how to get it back up and running if you cannot do it easily; that said, I'll be moving to FF if they continue their shenanigans.

ge962• 1 year ago

what does sock I've written a few of my own extensions and they're manifest v2 ugh... but thankfully I was able to turn them back on

vivzkestrel• 1 year ago

what ll it take to convert 80% of the world wide web users from chrome to firefox. can we write a super duper complicated migrator of sorts that literally installs firefox on behalf of the user, migrates all their data, migrates all extensions from chrome to firefox, even suggests alternative extensions for the ones that are not available and market the hell out of this migrator across x, bluesky, reddit etc?, One click migration from chrome to firefox, 0 tinkering

toomuchtodo2• 1 year ago

The largest web properties pushing Firefox to users, or perhaps social media campaigns. It's an outreach effort, the technical details are already solved. Make the Google/Chrome brand toxic.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/how-to-switch-f...

joshuaissac• 1 year ago

This is how Internet Explorer (via Windows), Chrome (via Google Search and YouTube) and Safari (via iOS) gained significant market share. Through another platform or service that they owned, that they could use to promote their browser.

But large Web properties do not gain anything by promoting Firefox. Many are ad-supported, so getting rid of uBlock Origin is a good thing for them. Only having to test on Google Chrome (and maybe Safari) is cheaper for them. There has to be something in it for them to promote Firefox or an alternative browser.

jonwinstanley2• 1 year ago

Opening FF with my existing 3 windows and 100 open tabs would be all it took :-)

maxglute2• 1 year ago

I'm just hoping for AI coding to get competent enough in next few years to throw in deprecated chrome extensions code and get it converted to firefox.

OkayPhysicist3• 1 year ago

The vast majority of Chrome extensions work on Firefox. Up until Manifest V2 being deprecated, the reverse was true, too.

rendang2• 1 year ago

What's keeping me from moving away from Chrome is the password storage & autofilling. Is Firefox's password manager just as good?

toomuchtodo2• 1 year ago

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-your-logins-fire...

OkayPhysicist3• 1 year ago

Yup. Sync across all devices, auto fill works a exactly as expected, and it's a couple click process to port over all your saved info from Chrome.

SirMaster• 1 year ago

Why not use an agnostic one like LastPass or one of the others?

freefaler• 1 year ago

To migrate, the average user will need to see the problem first. Most people wouldn't care enough about it even if they magically could press a button and migrate.

In the attention economy the browser and the mobile OS (and soon your LLM/Perplexity agent) are the most important points to control the aggregate user data. So it's a lost battle.

For a sub 0.01% of the nerds there would be alternatives for the non-DRM content, but this wouldn't change the big picture.

It's like the junk food business. Yes it's bad for people, but it's so addictive...

stevetron• 1 year ago

The source code is available for Chrome. Suppose one downloads the source code, and then re-enables the Manifest v2? A bit of work, particularly when you have to do other things that probably allow it to co-exist with Manifest v3, and Manifest v4 when it comes. And prevent updates from taking it all out again. While working on it, flip the compiler's command-line switch that allows the executable to run on Windows 7.

How long after the announced Windows 10 end of life will it be before all the software companies say 'Windows 11 is the minimum' like was seen with Windows 7?

fpg693• 1 year ago

The source code is available for Chromium, not Chrome. You can always maintain a fork, but it's a lot of work, and it's not a great solution to the problem of "world's largest surveillance company makes world's most popular browser".

p_ing2• 1 year ago

Keeping MV2 going is a massive and unrealistic effort for a small dev group while continuing to incorporate upstream changes. You cannot leave a browser without those upstream changes as they include security patches.

dgacmu2• 1 year ago

I've been running firefox on my laptop for the last year, with Chrome on my desktop, as a way to head-to-head them. For folks contemplating the switch, it hasn't been bad at all. Some better, some worse, but overall I rarely notice major differences except for a very small handful of sites that won't work with FF.

And I still have all of my uBlock origin happiness. :)

theteapot2• 1 year ago

What sites don't work with FF?

kingnothing3• 1 year ago

I've been daily driving Firefox for several years. Everything I use on a daily basis works fine on FF, but every now and then you come across some random site that doesn't load or loads poorly.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

Certainly no major site.

mrec2• 1 year ago

Amazon properties (the storefront, Prime) have been quite flaky for a long time now, but that may just be me.

dgacmu2• 1 year ago

I can't login to the work-paid-for version of Microsoft Copilot with Firefox, for some reason. I've had one or two others - I think they were internal CMU website tools. And even more niche: My kids took a ski lesson last year at Snowbird and the website with their report card rejected anything that didn't identify as Chrome. It _worked_ with mobile FF, but it popped up a "YOU SHOULD USE CHROME" banner and wouldn't let me past.

So, small stuff. Maybe Copilot isn't working because of ublock, though.

weberer3• 1 year ago

The Teams web app doesn't work (I refuse to install the OS level app)

venusenvy47• 1 year ago

Expedia doesn't render properly in Firefox - some of the sections are missing, but it's not immediately obvious what is missing. It took me a while to figure out why my wife kept having problems with that site, and I had to move her to Chrome to allow her to use it.

I continue to use Firefox because I know when to suspect a website problem might be the browser, but she doesn't have the ability to analyze a situation like this. I have this conundrum with other family members that I support. I want them to use Firefox, but I hate to have them run into an issue because of the browser I recommended.

clintfred• 1 year ago

I can't get ticketmaster to work reliably on Firefox. I guess it thinks I'm a bot. I can use Chrome on the same computer and book tickets just fine.

One crap product forcing me to use another crap product! ;)

lelandbatey3• 1 year ago

Bizzarely, Microsoft Word on web seems to be the only thing I've encountered which has FireFox problems, specifically it'll periodically "save" the document I'm typing and then delete the last sentence or two that I changed while it was saving. I think it's some kind of broken state management on the MS side (leave it to MS). That's the only site I've used though, and I've been a daily driver of FF for 10 years.

froddd• 1 year ago

Sticky desktop notifications don’t work on macOS on FF, which means event notifications from calendar apps disappear within a few seconds, leaving no time to snooze them or act on them in any other way. Queue missed meetings.

knight_47• 1 year ago

My biggest complaints with my switch is 1) no Chromecast functionality on Youtube and many other supported video platforms, 2) Very minimal page/text translation services (Arabic is missing), and 3) no search or translate from image (google lens) which I have gotten pretty used to. Oh and also, seeking videos is weird on FF, the mouse goes way past the scrubber when fast-forwarding or rewinding, just seems weird..

AstralSerenity7• 1 year ago

Add-on replacements: - Linguist for translations. - Search by Image for reverse image search (there are others that just use Google Lens directly, but I use this one).

Cast is a bit more cumbersome. There is fx_cast on GitHub, but it requires a companion app. Firefox seems to want to add cast based on a flag you used to be able to enable, but I'm guessing there are some restrictions from Google's end they ran into.

Vinnl2• 1 year ago

Be sure to use "Report broken site" in the main menu on that handful of sites. Often there are things folks can do to fix it for you, if many people are running into it - but only if it's known.

More info: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1de7bu1/were_the_f...

apeace2• 1 year ago

I was confused by "main menu" so I took a look and it is in the Help menu, for those wondering (I'm on Mac).

I didn't know this existed but will totally use it now! Thanks!

prophesi• 1 year ago

The adblock I use[0] (based on uBlock) hasn't been available on the Chrome store nearly since day 1.

[0] https://adnauseam.io/

phito• 1 year ago

I hear so many people IRL complaining about this. I tell them to switch to firefox, that the adblockers still work there, and they still won't switch to it because they are "used to chrome". I really feel like google won this battle. People will through a lot of abuse just to maintain their habits.

inertiatic• 1 year ago

I use Firefox as my main browser and it's not a viable alternative to Chrome if you have the very common usage pattern of keeping tens of tabs open.

theteapot2• 1 year ago

What? Why? That's me, I use FF.

dewey3• 1 year ago

I use Firefox as my main browser and having "tens of tabs open" is something I do and there's zero issues with that.

lawn• 1 year ago

I constantly have way more than that open. On mobile it's also over 100 tabs.

Ringz• 1 year ago

I have no problem with hundreds of tabs on Firefox.

kingnothing3• 1 year ago

Firefox works great with dozens of open tabs. The only thing Chrome has going for it is tab groups. Firefox has Tab Style Tree, which is a decent substitute.

tombert2• 1 year ago

I was using Firefox exclusively for years, but when I sold my Macbook and bought a Thinkpad and installed Linux on it, I grew pretty annoyed by Firefox.

Specifically, I couldn't view my 360 videos or photos on Google Images or Immich at anywhere near acceptable performance. The videos, recorded at 30fps, would get maybe 5fps. This was weird, because I have a fairly beefy laptop, it should be able to handle these videos just fine (especially since my iPhone handled it just fine).

After a bit of debugging, it appears that there's a bug in how it's writing for the shader cache, and as such there was no hardware acceleration. I found a bug filed about my issue [1], and I didn't really feel like trying to fix it, because I didn't want to mess with Mesa drivers. I just installed Chromium and that's what I'm using right now, and it worked with my 360 videos and photos absolutely fine.

I want Firefox to succeed, but that really left a bad taste in my mouth; it's not like it's weird to want my browser to be hardware accelerated.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1921742 Looks like it might be fixed now, or at least they figured out it was an issue with Mesa

Coffeewine• 1 year ago

Surely this is hyperbole? I usually have hundreds of tabs open on firefox.

porker2• 1 year ago

751 tabs open right now and growing.

Firefox copes fine. Me? Not so much (:

asadotzler• 1 year ago

1,740 tabs open right now on my wife's Firefox and it seems to be operating just fine. Sounds like something's wrong with your Firefox. I recommend a refresh which can be found under about:support

chillingeffect• 1 year ago

I keep 100s of tabs open for months in Firefox. Chromium regulaly crashes after about 10-20.

Spivak5• 1 year ago

I've been telling my IRL non-technical friends to use Brave. By far the easiest migration path, literally is Chrome, but with with a good built-in ad blocker and uBlock Origin. I've long since understood that any browser that I would use should be treated as an anti-recommendation for normal folks. I can already see the "but the crypto thing" and yeah, I don't love it but it's so out of the way that I don't even know how to turn it on in Brave if I wanted. Getting people weened off of Google Chrome (tm) is better than trying, and failing, to get them on the "ideal" browser.

Edit: Instead of downvoting actually try convincing a normal person to switch to Firefox and see how well it goes. I've been recommending it for 10+ years and they're all still on Chrome. But in two days I have 4 new Brave users.

Analemma_• 1 year ago

If one of my friends kept pitching cryptoscam shit to me I’d stop talking to them in short order. I suspect your IRL non-technical friends feel similarly.

hnpolicestate4• 1 year ago

You have to take the CEO's philosophy into account when choosing technology tools unfortunately.

I personally dmd Eich on Twitter during 2019-2021 ish. He's opposed to censorship, tracking, government lockdowns during COVID, and authoritarianism.

That is exactly who you want running your browser and search company if you wish to use an open Internet. It's anti chat control, anti governments choosing which apps it's citizens can install, it's free speech for all, including "hate speech". Open and free wild West Internet culture.

topspin• 1 year ago

But in two days I have 4 new Brave users.

What happens when adtech decides this is a problem because the hoi polloi have arrived? Have you thought about that as you're cluing in normies?

soundnote2• 1 year ago

Running uBO and Shields at the same time isn't a good idea, generally speaking. Pick one and go with it.

noman-land2• 1 year ago

It's learned helplessness, laziness, bordering on cowardice.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

People didn't switch from IE to Chrome because it was better.

They switched because it was MUCH, MUCH better.

(And was part of the ecosystem, profiles, bookmarks, passwords, etc.)

---

For better or worse, no such disparity exists currently.

IshKebab5• 1 year ago

Well said. It also wasn't worse in any way. It was strictly better.

Firefox is definitely better than Chrome in some ways, but it is also worse in others. Notably performance and integration with Google's password manager.

marcosdumay• 1 year ago

They switched because Google bundled invisible Chrome installers in other software that would not only make its browser the default, but also invisibly steal IE clicks.

A move that was widely celebrated at the time.

al_borland• 1 year ago

I remember it being IE -> Firefox -> Chrome.

From where I was sitting, Firefox grew from word of mouth. Friends old friends, or simply installed it for them and said “trust me”. And people were shamed for using IE.

Over time Firefox started to feel more bloated, and Chrome was new, lean, and fast.

Chrome then went through its own bloat phase, and now this.

Browser monopolies have toppled before, through various means. I see no reason why it can’t happen again. Currently Apple is pretty much single handedly keeping Google from having total control, by only allowing WebKit on iOS.

I have a feeling people would be more likely to switch to a new player than to run back to an old one they left once before.

crazygringo17• 1 year ago

The adblockers still work on Chrome though.

Pretty sure people are figuring out to switch to uBlock Origin Lite and ads -- including on YouTube -- are still being blocked just fine.

TingPing• 1 year ago

For now. Advertisers now know ways to bypass all blockers for Chrome.

unicornporn• 1 year ago

They "work", but not well.

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

zelphirkalt2• 1 year ago

Until those things don't work any longer. Slowly the frog is boiled here.

culi17• 1 year ago

They can still block elements from appearing on your browser but in the background the network calls are still being made. That means you are no longer being protected from tracking and your internet is once again being slowed down by the loading of ads

grayhatter• 1 year ago

Right, google knows not to turn up the temp too fast, else the frog might jump out!

stackedinserter• 1 year ago

What's in Chrome that they are so used to? I use Vivaldi, Chrome, Firefox on every day basis, and can barely see a difference.

nkrebs13• 1 year ago

Bookmarks, history, generally historical reliability, and (biggest reason for me) password manager.

I rarely have to type/remember passwords anymore on Android or web and it "just works". I know there are password managers out there that ostensibly handle the password-saving thing and are browser-agnostic but when I tried it in the past I had issues on some sites and, when it did work, it felt clunkier.

kypro• 1 year ago

People say similar things about Google Search, and a few times I've tried not use Google Search but every time I've tried it's become clear that the reason I use Google Search isn't just habit, but that it's the best search engine for most queries I perform.

I've had a very different experience with browsers though... I switch browsers pretty often and with ease. I genuinely can't get my head around why someone would continue to use Google Chrome if they're unhappy with how they're treating their users. The UI between browsers is 99% identical. The most annoying thing about switching browser is just having to spend 10 minutes setting things up, but that isn't going to exceed the annoyance of having to see ads constantly for months or years.

There's really no good reason not to switch browsers. Your habits are not going to change between browsers. Unless you're a Chrome power user and using some very niche features in Chrome there is very, very little difference between Firefox and Chrome for the vast majority of tasks.

iforgotpassword2• 1 year ago

Well, today mostly yes. But at the same time, I've been an Opera user (if not fanboy) for a good decade, until they ditched their own engine and basically started from scratch with chrome as a base. It lost 99% of its features overnight.

I really struggled to switch to anything else. Firefox was definitely the most customizable, but finding extensions to replicate every feature of Opera, and properly at that, was a never-ending nightmare.

Only at that point did I realize how vital a browser has become for everyday tasks, and as a power user, how much you get accustomed to it. Maybe not if you're just running stock Chrome or Firefox with two extensions, but Opera was so feature-rich that I didn't ever install a single extension but needed about a dozen on Firefox to try and mimic it. In the end I just stayed on Opera 12 until it wasn't even funny anymore. It must've been about two years. Eventually so many sites broke that I just switched to Firefox and only installed uBO and greasemonkey. It hurt but over time I just gradually forgot what using opera was like. Sometimes I think back and really miss it. Some of it is just nostalgia by now, but the struggle switching was real.

vvpan• 1 year ago

Wanted to note that uBlock works on Firefox mobile browser too - it is excellent.

6SixTy3• 1 year ago

Only the Android version has uBlock just fyi. Also, I've never been able to watch movies on a plane with Firefox mobile.

JoeOfTexas• 1 year ago

Debugging on Firefox has always been awkward with sourcemaps. The sourcemaps load late, so breakpointing is hard at load time.

jeroenhd2• 1 year ago

While JS debugging seems to be a bit slower, I find their HTML/CSS debugging tools far superior to Chrome's. Neither browser engine is great for the whole package, but overall I really prefer Firefox when it comes to dev tools.

jeroenhd2• 1 year ago

In the end sighing and going "stupid Google" is a lot easier than changing even the smallest of habits.

People also seem to think switching over is some kind of involved process for some reason.

megadata• 1 year ago

The Stockholm Syndrome.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

pndy2• 1 year ago

Not only google seems to won this battle but ad industry as a whole. Youngest generation is nowadays so much conditioned to advertising disguised as content or being the content they won't oppose it.

makeitdouble4• 1 year ago

Posting this from firefox: most enterprise tools are only tested under Chrome, and many will break with no recourse when used on firefox.

And it's worse with extensions. For instance right now the OneLogin extension is dead on firefox, and while it's a crappy service, it's cheap and enterprise friendly...so employees in the contracting companies will only be able to log to corporate resources through Chrome.

It's not as hellish as the IE6 situation was, but boy we're pretty quickly approaching it.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

It's not so much 'Chrome won' as 'Firefox lost'

I still have no idea why Firefox/Mozilla think they need to compete with the other browsers. None of their '10 Principals' is "win the browser wars"

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

OrangeMusic• 1 year ago

I tried to switch to Firefox - but it lacks one feature that's particularly important to me: the ability to use a site as if it was its own app (so, not inside a tab, but with its own window and own icon in the dock).

I went back to Chrome, re-enabled uBlock for now, and will probably switch to the lite mode when it is completely removed.

chpatrick• 1 year ago

This made me go back to Firefox after 15 years of using Chrome personally.

misantroop• 1 year ago

Zen is a much better fork.

k0stas• 1 year ago

There is still a DOM hack to allow installation by re-enabling the "Add to Chrome" button on the linked page. See "Download and install uBlock Origin in Chrome" on this page: https://www.neowin.net/guides/google-turned-off-ublock-in-ch...

After the install, Chrome will disable the extension on the next restart but it can be re-enabled .. for now.

AJRF• 1 year ago

I am coming from a place of ignorance, but could uBlock have worked on Manifest v3?

It seems like it would have worked, but the danger was over time Google report less and less information to the extension, but as it is today, the extension would have worked the same on v3 as v2?

As I say - I am ignorant sorry, its hard to search for an answer to this specific question

Edit: Sorry the answer is here: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

Dylan16807• 1 year ago

The ability to run code to decide if a request should be blocked was removed in v3.

If it could work in v3 it would have been updated. There are some alternate v3 versions that don't work as well.

sergiotapia• 1 year ago

if you are in tech do your friends and family a favor:

Download and setup Brave browser on their device. I haven't seen an ad in years.

https://brave.com/

dewey3• 1 year ago

Still the same engine as Chrome, so it doesn't do anything against the monoculture of Chromium. Firefox works just as well, admittedly they'd have to install an extension instead of ad blocking being there by default.

agosta4• 1 year ago

This post is about UBlock being blocked on CHROME. Naturally, the folks interested in this development are likely interested in a chromium based browser that does allow blocking ads. Brave is a solid solution here.

agosta4• 1 year ago

It's funny people try to avoid Brave because of the crypto stuff init - like you can totally ignore that (it's not even enabled by default). So in daily usage, it behaves as if uBlock was a browser (rather than a Browser extension). It's great.

kemono_tigris• 1 year ago

Since Chrome discontinued support for Manifest V2 extensions, I’ve switched to Mullvad Browser for browsing ad-heavy websites. It comes with uBlock Origin pre-installed, is open source, and is developed by a reputable company.

Stagnant• 1 year ago

For now you can still bring back manifest v2 support (which re-enables ublock origin if you haven't removed it) by making registry changes. Obviously only a temporary solution, might buy you a few months.

Powershell commands to set them:

1. New-Item -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome" -Force

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

alok-g• 1 year ago

Thanks! Good to know.

charliea0• 1 year ago

Is there any justification for this beyond increasing Google's ad revenue?

djpr• 1 year ago

Funny thing is: It’s to prepare for when Chrome is spun off from Google, due to increasing US government pressure.

See: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/08/new-doj-proposal-still-cal...

crazygringo17• 1 year ago

Performance. For faster page loads.

uBlock Origin Lite still blocks ads on Chrome, but it's faster than uBlock Origin.

I don't expect Google's ad revenue has changed meaningfully at all, assuming people switch to uBlock Origin Lite.

gkbrk2• 1 year ago

It blocks less ads, it's not surprising that it's faster.

zamalek6• 1 year ago

The difference is negligible: https://nitter.net/gorhill/status/1792648742752981086 (uBOL appears as adblox).

FergusArgyll2• 1 year ago

The quiet part which none of us are saying out loud (bec. we love UBO) is that it's insane to allow extensions to have that much power.

uBlock Origin is obv a great great extension and I'm considering switching to FF just for that one extension, but consider what some newfangled AI extension developed by a random dude can do to the webpage you're viewing - anything UBO can do! So I think they have a decent case but I wish there was a carveout for UBO

Havoc• 1 year ago

The banner at the top is really selling it

Switch to Chrome to install extensions and themes

jmuguy• 1 year ago

Related if anyone is switching over. I like to run Firefox Developer Edition[0] as my "work" browser, with work related bookmarks, etc. and then regular Firefox for nonwork. This makes it really easy to keep the two separate. I know there's a lot of ways to segment within the same browser but this works well for me.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

noman-land2• 1 year ago

FYI developer edition has a ton of additional data collection that I don't believe can be disabled, if that matters to you.

eNV25• 1 year ago

Isn't Developer Edition just a rebranded Firefox Beta that uses a different profile by default?

bangaladore• 1 year ago

Chromium has a concept of "user data directories" which in theory keep all data isolated to a single folder. You can use a launch parameter to specify what the user data directory you want to use is (so a shortcut). I'm pretty sure Firefox must have an equivalent.

n_plus_1_acc• 1 year ago

It does, it's just called profiles. And they have a setting to always launch sthe profile selector on start.

regularjack• 1 year ago

Containers are firefox's killer feature, highly encourage you to try them. I wish Mozilla would invest more in developing that feature.

dpz• 1 year ago

You can also just use Firefox containers. Or if you don't want to send all the data with dev use a fork of firefox

Noumenon72• 1 year ago

Thanks. I didn't use uBlock but I will be switching due to Chrome removing support for non-subsituting keywords (search engines with no %s), which I used heavily as basically aliases for web addresses.

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/397720842?pli=1

RamRodification3• 1 year ago

You can achieve the same (or similar) thing with Firefox profiles. Just launch with "-p" and it'll give you a profile picker. You can have a work profile with separate extensions, bookmarks, settings, etc.

555watch• 1 year ago

Can't believe I never heard about this. This is a life saver, I specifically installed ton of different browsers to emulate this....

EasyMark3• 1 year ago

I just use multicontainers extension for that sort of thing. It keeps them siloed off from each other. Great for having multiple accounts on sites like bsky and reddit as well.

aeblyve• 1 year ago

If you do not interfere in politics, eventually politics will interfere with you.

pton_xd• 1 year ago

Thanks for keeping me safe, Google! You know better than me what software I should be running on my computer.

ta12436• 1 year ago

What goes around...

We had mainframes and dumb terminals where the work was done in a remote data centre you connected to

Then we had the personal computer revolution where the work was done on the box you owned and controlled on your desk

Then we moved to the cloud where work is done in a remote data centre you connect to

portaouflop• 1 year ago

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/releases

uBlockOrigin “Lite” is a good(?) replacement afaict

jeffbee• 1 year ago

It's faster and safer and blocks pretty much everything.

submeta3• 1 year ago

Abandoned Chrome years ago. Am using Firefox and never looked back. Same with other Google products: Replaced Gmail with Fastmail, Google Docs with Office365 (yeah, I know, Microsoft).

fiatjaf• 1 year ago

The hardest thing to replace was always search to me, because the usually alternatives (DuckDuckGo, Ecosia etc) always suck.

But Kagi made that part so easy it's unbelievable.

submeta3• 1 year ago

Ever looked into Perplexity? Will check out Kagi.

alluro22• 1 year ago

I'm genuinely curious about why you find DDG sucking compared to Google Search? I've switched ~2 years ago, when I found DDG better in terms of less clutter and not showing ads as results - also, if there are no good results, it didn't push nonsense. But maybe GS improved in the meantime on the quality of results and I'm missing out?

submeta3• 1 year ago

Wow, Kagi is just extremely good. Found old friends I couldn’t reach, found product infos where Google would pollute me with ads and garbage. This is awesome. Thanks for mentioning.

dartharva• 1 year ago

Curiously, it is still working in Chrome on my laptop (running Linux Mint) right now.

harrytang• 1 year ago

It is a good ad blocker!

crazygringo17• 1 year ago

Fortunately, at least so far, uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine on Chrome.

I know people have made a lot of arguments as to why it might not be as good in theory, or why things might change in the future. But so far, ever since I was forced to switch, I have seen exactly zero difference. Lists are updated often enough that I haven't seen anything get through. Adblocking works on YouTube. If anything, pages seem to load even a little faster. I've had no complaints.

creato3• 1 year ago

It's also great to not give basically unlimited permissions to an extension.

pmdr13• 1 year ago

I think people should be able to do whatever they want on their own machine. If the setting is there, then let me use it for whatever extension I see fit. Sure, make it harder to do so, but don't treat users like children. I can't even screenshot banking apps on my own damn Android phone now.

culi17• 1 year ago

You can choose the permissions on v2 as well.

The change in v3 is that uBlock cannot even ask for more permissions any more

makeitdouble4• 1 year ago

This is becoming more and more complex I think.

To put it in the flatest way, it's not a given that users trust the platform owner more than some extension providers.

In theory that shouldn't be the case, and not trusting a platform that runs natively and has potential acccess to everything we do sounds crazy. But in practice there's only so many platforms, and depending on one's work or environement, not using Chrome isn't even an option.

In that context, extensions are the most direct tools the users have to get back some control.

fsflover• 1 year ago

How about giving unlimited permissions to Google on the web and your computer?

redox99• 1 year ago

It's just a matter of time. Now that anti adblocks are way more effective, they'll become common.

jbverschoor• 1 year ago

LLM/AI had perfect timing

naet• 1 year ago

I saw significant difference using the Lite version, enough that I switched to Firefox with Origin instead. I expected it to be good enough and was surprised to see the difference.

duffyjp2• 1 year ago

Same. I use the element picker tool all the time to rid the web of crap I don't care about. Example:

   whatever_class:has-text(/YouTube Shorts/)

On Android you can even do this on your phone in Firefox. The UI is a bit tricky on such a small device, but it's so worth it. I went so far as to uninstall Chrome (well, disable it) on my Android.

MattSayar2• 1 year ago

My YouTube ad-blocking experience with uOL looks like a black/muted screen for 30s until the real video starts playing. No "Skip" button appears. I disabled the extension for YouTube so I can at least skip the video after 5s. Is it better for everyone else?

crazygringo17• 1 year ago

Are you using the "complete" filtering mode?

For certain sites, you need to click the extension and change it from "basic" to "complete". This seems to be a performance thing, so it's not doing slower more complete adblocking on sites that don't need it. I've only had to do it on a couple of sites.

culi17• 1 year ago

If you have fast internet you will probably not really notice the difference

The difference between v2 and v3 is that v3 will no longer allow uBlock to modify network calls. Previously one of the big savings of a adblocker is they can stop the calls from being made AT ALL. That means less tracking AND less of your internet bandwidth being used

Both v2 and v3 can block the actual elements from your screen so you will probably still not see most of the ads. But you will still be able to be tracked and your data will still be used in the background

wraptile• 1 year ago

it's easy to see how people might say v3 is an adtech conspiracy. Ads are always served to the user now, expect a noticeable revenue increase by almost every adtech company.

crazygringo17• 1 year ago

That's wrong.

V3 doesn't allow network calls to be modified, for privacy reasons. It still allows them to be blocked, which is how the adblocking works in the first place.

Contrary to what you say, v3 does block the tracking in the ad request as well as the bandwidth.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...

haswell2• 1 year ago

After 10+ years as a primary browser, I've been 100% off of Chrome for about 1.5 years now as part of a broader effort to de-Google my life, and things have been going well.

It's interesting to notice how much my internal feelings have shifted over the years. There have been a few rare occasions where I had to use a Chromium-based browser, and I felt the same "ick" I used to feel when forced to use Internet Explorer for some reason.

Come to the Firefox (and variant) side. The water is warm.

BuckRogers3• 1 year ago

The water is warm.

Mostly because they're peeing in the pool. Mozilla deleted their promise to never sell its users' personal data.

haswell2• 1 year ago

This is why I mentioned (and variants). While I’m unhappy with the Mozilla situation, Firefox is still a significantly better option than Chrome at this point, and the various forks address any concerns with their privacy policy.

One can even self-host their own sync server if so inclined.

CivBase2• 1 year ago

And Google never made that promise to being with. Hell, it's their primary business!

Mozilla has done plenty of bad things and they rightly deserve criticism, but options in the browser space are few and Mozilla is considerably less bad than Google. And other Chromium browsers perpetuate Google's control over the web. If you're going to complain about Mozilla when someone recommends Firefox, at least offer a non-Chromium alternative like LibreWolf (or maybe Ladybird someday).

alluro22• 1 year ago

You've voiced my sentiment exactly. I really wish Firefox was more at the forefront of innovation and development, and there's a lot to criticise Mozilla for, but I wouldn't change it back for Chromium for anything.

I have a completely custom minimal layout with address bar and tabs at the bottom, all the extensions I need, and I don't notice the performance or compatibility differences almost ever, with few rare exceptions. I feel it much more as "mine", and it's a joy to use.

Iwan-Zotow• 1 year ago

but I wouldn't change it back for Chromium for anything.

Not sure I understand the statement - what are you using?

dankwizard• 1 year ago

"And as I opened Chrome - Well, a substitute but still powered by Chromium - I felt my stomach churn as my vision started to blur. I feel both disgusting and disgusted at what I had done. As an act of repetenance I hastily jot down 'Come to Firefox, we have bacon!'"

It's a browser.

jessyco• 1 year ago

I've done this around the same time and agree. Now google is used as a service (Firebase for example). The only thing I haven't been able to effectively shake off is their Calendar. I know lots of other options are available the issue is connectivity with others.

eYrKEC2• 1 year ago

Brave, fork of Chrome. https://brave.com/

Ignore the crypto; enjoy the integrated ad-blocking.

Most seamless ad-blocking I've ever experienced.

phytographer• 1 year ago

Amen

haarolean4• 1 year ago

Yeah, ignore the crypto and tons of other stuff about phoning home or doing malicious 'oopsies' things.

mubou• 1 year ago

For the unaware: https://old.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...

e44858• 1 year ago

How were they phoning home?

system2• 1 year ago

If I owned Mozilla I'd be blasting commercials full-force about this until all my marketing budget runs out.

MattTheRealOne2• 1 year ago

Instead, they create a Terms of Use giving them rights to your data and remove the promise not to sell personal data. I love Firefox, but Mozilla either does not understand their users or just loves shooting themselves in the foot. Every time I think they have learned their lesson, they make another stupid decision.

busymom0• 1 year ago

It's funny how on Safari, the webstore link shows a message:

Switch to Chrome to install extensions and themes

imroot• 1 year ago

I've eliminated Chrome from my personal systems when uBO stopped working. Blocking v2 manifests also broke a few extensions that were being developed for my day job: they've spent the last few weeks working on Firefox extensions and are almost at the point where they're getting ready to wipe Chrome from our corporate machines.

caminante3• 1 year ago

Try uBO Lite [0]

[0] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

caseyy2• 1 year ago

The new uBlock Origin Lite is compatible with Manifest v3 and has the featured flag on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

croes2• 1 year ago

But is less capable than uBlock origin.

caminante3• 1 year ago

Not really.

90% of users won't notice a difference.

Here's the feature diff. [0]

[0] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

AstralSerenity7• 1 year ago

Capable enough for most users, however I made the jump as it no longer fit my needs.

noname1202• 1 year ago

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

creato3• 1 year ago

And also requires far less intrusive permissions.

mrkramer2• 1 year ago

Lite version works for me the same as the original. Blocks majority of ads.

antisthenes• 1 year ago

Slippery slope corporate apologism.

It's like a corporation shrinking the package size of your food by 10%, keeping the price the same and then claiming you still get the "majority" of the food.

culi17• 1 year ago

This is a trap. Extensions can still block elements in v3. If you use Lite you probably won't notice much of a difference. But in the background, it will no longer be able to modify network calls. That means you are no longer being protected from tracking AND your web browsing experience is once again being slowed down by the loading of ads (even if you don't see those ads)

vachina2• 1 year ago

The difference isn’t just in the network calls, it’s the relinquishing of the blocking to Chrome itself. The Lite extension is essentially reduced to just providing a blocklist to Chrome, and hopes that Chrome will honor the blocklist.

Google is surgically trying to dismantle adblocking, first by removing all the tools from the users under the guise of “it’s dangerous”, and then shutting it down by rendering them so ineffective they’re useless.

lofaszvanitt2• 1 year ago

and its a resource hog, sadly

ltbarcly3• 1 year ago

I switched to firefox a few months ago because of this. However, I just switched back last week. Overall firefox is a better browser. The ability to screenshot in the browser is so useful and I used it 10x per day, not having it in chrome is a real pain.

But.. nobody tests on it anymore I think. Lots of popular sites are very slow and laggy with it, including sites I need for work. I don't think this is because of inferior technology, I think I just think nobody spends the time to make sure things work well on firefox. I could split-brain and use chrome for github and some other stuff but that is such a pain when clicking links.

The other issue is I think firefox support will only get worse. Their market share is back to where it was in IE6 days and dropping.

hintymad• 1 year ago

Will uBlock Origin Lite[1] a good alternative to uBlock Origin? It is one of the alternatives recommended by the uBlock Origin tea.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

hsuduebc2• 1 year ago

"Don't be evil"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

whatamidoingyo• 1 year ago

[flagged]

vlod• 1 year ago

Invitation to come join the Firefox side. We have cookies!

wistlo• 1 year ago

When I click the link for this story, Edge (stop laughing. Please.) pops up "uBlock Origin works on Microsoft Edge." (It's already there, Edge, but thank you).

Edge is based on Chromium, so would that mean this breakage will eventually apply to Edge as the Manifest changes, uhm, manifest to Chromium-based products? Or is this just a Google Chrome thing?

FWIW I keep Firefox around but I have to admit I like Edge's smooth sync of bookmarks and settings across machines and even different platforms. I switched about two years ago when Edge was clearly faster and lighter. It's no longer as lightweight and there are slowly accumulating annoyances coming mostly from some Microsoft Clippy-esque attempts to make some tasks "easier" (mostly via Copilot) but I still prefer it to Firefox. My former employer/retiree benefits site, for example, won't open at all in Firefox. I've considered other Chromium based browsers like Brave but haven't (yet) been sufficiently motivated to switch. (Give Microsoft some time, I expect they'll eshit Edge eventually).

MattTheRealOne2• 1 year ago

Many Chromium-based browsers will keep Manifest v2 support for a while. But eventually the upstream Chromium codebase will diverge enough that it becomes too much work to keep it and they will be forced to drop it as well.

agosta4• 1 year ago

The manifest situation simply doesn't apply to Brave in relation to adblockers specifically. That is, Brave will function like uBlock without having to install uBlock as an extension - that's kinda the whole point of Brave (blocking ads / making them opt in only). That said, it is true extensions one may use that are affected by the manifest version change may be affected in Brave.

fortran77• 1 year ago

It's still working on edge, but I wonder how long that will last.

rednafi• 1 year ago

Firefox sucks and doesn’t work for me. Maybe I will give Brave with ublock a try.

agosta4• 1 year ago

You don't need uBlock installed on Brave. Brave basically is uBlock (if uBlock where a browser).

NoahZuniga• 1 year ago

It's been like this for quite a while already

vemv• 1 year ago

What's the best next choice if I don't want to move away from a Chrome-like experience?

(Old habits die hard)

There's https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium - is it a sound choice nowadays?

zamalek6• 1 year ago

After the enterprise grace period the code will be deleted from the project. You can expect a fork to appear that patches it back in (I doubt ungoogled chromium would be where that is done), but eventually that will become a nontrivial process. You have a year, maybe two. There are many chromium-based browsers that have built-in blocking.

The Firefox UI is honestly very close to chrome.

egurns• 1 year ago

At the time of writing this comment, 53 minutes after OP, I am able to install- and use- uBlock Origin from the Chrome Web Store. What am I missing?

gloosx• 1 year ago

I've been personally enjoying Ghostery extension for the past year, block all ads, youtube, any HTML5 player, banners, popups – really clean and tidy browsing experience.

It didn't even catch any hype regarding this manifest support issue uBlock origin has, and it keeps silently working good without any interruptions, I wonder why is that?

noname1202• 1 year ago

Because Ghostery belongs to an analytics company that sells your data so they are working round the clock to keep it running

yard20103• 1 year ago

Honest question - let's say you can't physically experience ads. Why do you care about your data being sold? This is a problem only if you can see ads, but remember, you can't.

DeathArrow• 1 year ago

Do no evil!

byearthithatius• 1 year ago

This is why I run Firefox and will continue to do so. Google Chrome sucks I only have to to test stuff.

jmyeet• 1 year ago

What's frustrating to me is how predictable all this is if you analyze the world with a materialist understanding.

To boil it down, the most dominant philosophy, whether peole know it or not, is idealism. In idealism, people, nations, corporations, etc have some inherent quality beyond their physical make up. It's almost spiritual in that way. Even the concept of a soul is an idealist position. It's largely a circular argument that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

So, the USA on the world stage is the good guy because we are the good guys, regardless of our actions or the consequences thereof. So an awful lot of effort is spent to label certain actors as "good" or "bad" to suit some objective. Superhero movies and a perfect example of idealism and it's no coincidence that they've had a renaissance since 9/11.

Materialism is simply the view that the physical world is all there is. The consequence of this is that we affect the material world and it affects us. There are no inherent qualities like being "good" or "bad". Instead, those are simply labels you apply to the actions of an entity.

My point here is that for years Google pushed this good guy narrative (ie "don't be evil") but any materialist understands that Google is a corporation so ultimately will act like any other corporation.

Google makes money selling ads. Ad blockers affect Google's bottom line. The relentless pursuit of increasing profits means fighting ad blockers was always an inevitability. Nobody should be surprised by that.

Now some will point to Google's control of Chrome as an antitrust issue and it probably is but that misses the point. A corporation that solely owns Chrome will ultimately act in a user-hostile way too because that's what corporations do.

The only long-term successful model for something like Chrome is to be something like the Wikimedia Foundation. The profit motive will always ultimately destroy it otherwise. If you can even find a business model for a browser, which I have serious doubts about.

A materialist knows all this because of how the workers relate to the means of production. A collective (which Wikimedia Foundation is, basically) is where the workers own the means of production. A corporation introduces capital owners whose interests are in direct opposition to that of the users.

Animats• 1 year ago

Surprising to see that happen just as Google is entering an antitrust breakup.

zamalek6• 1 year ago

Get it in while they still can, I guess?

telotortium• 1 year ago

Yep, in a negotiation, it usually helps to establish a status quo favorable to you if possible.

rmoriz• 1 year ago

Switched to Firefox a year ago, no regrets. Only flashing devices via webserial (Meshtastic etc) is missing for me.

dbg31415• 1 year ago

uBlock Origin still works in Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

And you can, I believe, still just modify your hosts table to block out ads in Chrome. https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Or your router's DNS using something like NextDNS. https://nextdns.io/

Ads suck. Support content where you can, but even when you pay they still serve ads / tracking scripts. So fuck 'em. Block all the ads.

vezycash• 1 year ago

Major DOJ Antitrust Cases

1. United States v. Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (1911)

   - Duration: 7 years (1904–1911)  

   - Outcome: Standard Oil was ruled an illegal monopoly and broken up into 34 companies.

2. United States v. Microsoft Corp. (1998)

   - Duration: 4 years (1998–2002) 
 
   - Outcome: Initially ordered to split, but after appeals, Microsoft avoided a breakup and instead agreed to business restrictions.

3. United States v. AT&T (Bell System) (1982)

   - Duration: 8 years (1974–1982)  

   - Outcome: AT&T agreed to a settlement, leading to the 1984 breakup into seven "Baby Bells" to increase competition.

downrightmike2• 1 year ago

And the DOJ is still holding that Google must break up

hnben2• 1 year ago

does google have a good relationship to the current administration?

I am not aware of a google-lobbyist being as close to trump as Zuckerberg and Musk are, and I definitely see the possibility of these two manipulating the administration against google.

odieldomanie• 1 year ago

On Firefox, I use a uBlock Origin script to block Twitch ads. (Normal filters don't work on Twitch.) Is it possible to block Twitch ads with uBO-Lite as well?

intermerda• 1 year ago

Do you mind sharing which uBlock Origin script you use for blocking ads on Twitch? I tried one a while ago but didn't get it to work.

BuckRogers3• 1 year ago

I moved to Adguard years ago when I found that uBlock Origin Lite doesn't support custom filter lists. If Adguard can support that on MV3 then uBlock Origin is artificially gimping uBOL on Edge/Chrome.

XzetaU83• 1 year ago

Re Custom filter lists

https://adguard.info/en/blog/review-issues-in-chrome-web-sto...

BuckRogers3• 1 year ago

That's interesting. I'm using the Adguard from the Edge store, so I still have custom filters enabled. Seems only people using the Chrome store version have been updated with that change. Also sounds like Adguard is purposefully not pushing the latest version to the Edge store to avoid issues like this.

They did say they'll get the issue resolved in time. I use another extension that requires a filter list or things start to go haywire. I'd probably give up that problematic extension before going back to Firefox.

Reading that, I am still sticking with Adguard over uBO because it does sound like they are at least trying to implement these things. uBO is just pointing people towards FF.

bradgessler• 1 year ago

Stop using Chrome.

lousken• 1 year ago

This was to be expected, however I am curious if Vivaldi, Brave and others will make their own webstore which will have plugins like ublock origin, and how long till Mozilla follows suit.

indrora• 1 year ago

Google aggressively makes it hard for Chromium derivatives to not conform to Google's engineering choices.

They could try and keep manifestv2 support for a while, but they will have an increasingly large and hard to support patch se to make manifestv2 work still.

IvanAchlaqullah• 1 year ago

Indeed. When I tried to add LibRedirect (another extensions that are not possible under Manifest v3) to Vivaldi, DNS over HTTPS suddenly stopped working.

After checking the settings page, the settings to turn it on are completely disabled. Turn out this is one of few trap in all Chromioum browser that are hardcoded by Google.

Well after searching, you need to edit registry (yikes!) and add "DnsOverHttpsMode" and set it to "safe". Problem solved, right?

NO!!! Do that and suddenly your browser wouldn't load any page at all! Turn out you also need to set "DnsOverHttpsTemplates" too.

It just so happen, somehow, there is no documentation that mention this in "....Mode" help page.

Surely Google is not being evil in here, right? Right?

johnisgood3• 1 year ago

Time to reply to https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/91160/vivaldi-s-own-extensio... or something.

johnisgood3• 1 year ago

Same with uMatrix: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjalg...

catigula• 1 year ago

We have to put some of this on Firefox for failing to remain competitive in the engineering arena.

If it's too expensive to develop a viable alternative to chromium, just say that.

The Firefox that has been trundling along for years is really just an excuse to keep the chromium monopoly afloat.

dmead• 1 year ago

Makes me happy I never used chrome.

zfg• 1 year ago

uBlock Origin always worked best in Firefox anyhow:

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

tech234a• 1 year ago

This removal can be bypassed until June (edit: or possibly even August) by changing some flags or setting enterprise policies: https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1itw1bz/end_o...

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 1 year ago

How long do you reckon before firefox/mozilla follow suit? Weeks? Months? Years? A year is my guess.

kingstoned• 1 year ago

Meanwhile scam cookie stuffing extensions like Honey are 'featured'

deadbabe• 1 year ago

Use Brave, it’s been many years and people have few complaints.

bigbuppo• 1 year ago

Monopolists gonna use every anti-competitive tactic in the book to protect their racket.

JimmaDaRustla• 1 year ago

How long until other chromium browsers follow suit? I'm currently using Edge.

I also wonder when someone one will "hack" chromium to run whatever extensions they want - I could build my own extension, or build uBlock Origin from the source (if available) and execute the extension regardless of the store.

pmdr13• 1 year ago

A lot of Chromium browsers use Google's extension store, so even if they're not as strict about it now, you won't be able to install it anyway.

Deprogrammer9• 1 year ago

sideload it! mine is working fine still.

buyucu• 1 year ago

the internet is unusable without uBlock origin. I would never use a browser that did not support uBlock.

sorenKaram• 1 year ago

This happened to me so I just switched over to Adblock Plus. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adblock-plus-free-a...

AddBlock is still available. I was wondering if there is some issue with the extension itself that it got flagged? Maybe an update to the codebase would make the extension installe-able again?

the_af2• 1 year ago

Wasn't Adblock Plus the plugin to be shunned because they allowed certain ads as long as the advertisers paid them money? I remember a scandal like that a few years ago, but I might be mistaken since there are many similarly named plugins.

uBlock Origin didn't have this problem, which is why it got recommended so much.

Chaosvex• 1 year ago

You're not mistaken. They had a default enabled whitelist of advertisers that were paying them to be there. Basically a racket.

m4rtink• 1 year ago

So they really want to get broken up due to shady advertising deals. :-)

pete1302• 1 year ago

I was here, I saw the crime

pmdr13• 1 year ago

The crime has been years in the making, this is just burning the body.

kenanfyi• 1 year ago

As a person who switched constantly between browsers (except Chrome, never used it after 2015) in the past 10+ years, I can confirm that realigning the habits are not that difficult. Learn to use the web, not the tool to browse it.

So, switch to something which has privacy respecting attitude or at least tries to have it and ditch everything who does not. It is not just the browser itself, but also the services and tools that you use to do your job: browsing. After some time, you will realize how horrible browsing the web with Chrome was in this respect and how easy it is to just browse the web without a bloated piece of advertising machine.

loughnane• 1 year ago

I desperately want to pay for a browser that caters to me

phendrenad22• 1 year ago

Google is betting hundreds of billions of dollars against you being able to do that.

atum472• 1 year ago

On kinda related news: Firefox don't allow you to set the default homepage. What's up with that?

atum472• 1 year ago

I've moved from chrome to ff because of ublock extension, but I also have an app that remembers of stuff set as my default homepage, the other day I realized that ff don't allow for a custom home page. That why I left the comment above, I think they are somewhat related

ac294• 1 year ago

Works fine for me. Settings > Home > Homepage > Custom URL

nine_zeros• 1 year ago

Use Brave browser - both on phones and laptops. The ad-free experience will change your perspective on what internet looks like. You won't miss Google.

phendrenad22• 1 year ago

It's amazing that every post about Brave gets downvoted. I wish the downvoters would explain why they're doing this, but I guess they aren't very... brave.

aerhardt2• 1 year ago

I have it installed on Arc and it still works, I guess that's expected but it will degrade soon? I love Arc but I'd better not see an ad or that will be reason to jump ship. I pay for quite a few web services I like (eg, Youtube) but I'd drop a bollock if I saw a display ad on the open web.

fraXis• 1 year ago

If you like Arc, I suggest trying Zen Browser. It looks and behaves just like Arc, but it has the benefit of upgrades and support. Arc Browser has almost been abandoned because they are working on a new product.

https://zen-browser.app

aerhardt2• 1 year ago

I'll keep it in mind thanks.

bryanhogan• 1 year ago

I have moved to Firefox since the announcements that Chrome won't allow must have extensions such as uBlock. That Firefox allows extensions both on desktop and mobile is great.

But there are some things that I miss from Chrome, especially for web development. In Chrome it is possible to adjust the CSS of grid and flex containers within the developer window, which can be helpful. Firefox and Firefox Developer Edition don't have this. Firefox also seems to sometimes have problems with reloading a page when it is changed during development, whereas in Chrome this always was instant. Then there are some small feature and UI differences, like the reading-mode on Firefox is nice, but the UI of Chrome feels just a bit nicer.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 1 year ago

Now you are a real developer.

moritonal2• 1 year ago

I have Firefox for normal use and then Chrome for Web development. Simple enough.

anjel2• 1 year ago

Just curious, has google solved the ads-as-malware-vector of infection?

ein0p• 1 year ago

Uh, do Brave users need to sideload now? What about updates? Any official guidance from Brave on this?

antonok5• 1 year ago

uBlock Origin is available from brave://settings/extensions/v2; see https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

nilslindemann3• 1 year ago

For the moment I can still see the "Add to Chrome"-Button on that page in Ungoogled Chromium :)

cratermoon• 1 year ago

But hey! We got command and commandfor in HTML! Progress, amirite?

throw7• 1 year ago

The only chrome browser I'm using is on a cheap chromebook I bought.

It looks like I could turn on the linux vm and run firefox, but it "only" has a 16GB ssd of which like 12GB is "system space" (ridiculous) and I only have 1GB left which isn't enough to enable the linux dev environment.

I could look into seeing if I can get native linux on the hardware, but it's probably not worth the time and trouble for it.

grimblee2• 1 year ago

Just stop using chrome, fight the monopoly, don't be a sheep. It's inconvenient ? Convenience is a trap, stop giving away your freedom and agency for convenience.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 1 year ago

This. The fact that so called "hackers" would be using Chrome is the reason why the world is shit and tech is stagnant. They keep using Chrome and writing Javascript.

simpaticoder• 1 year ago

This sentiment precludes discussion of incentives, the individual's relationship to the group, and the practical limits of agency. If you said the same about smartphones, you would be locked out of many services, including governmental ones. You unthinkingly, tacitly shift the onus onto the individual, which is naive. There is a reason the 5-day work-week, fire codes, and so-forth had to be legislated, because "just find a better job" wasn't going to make a dent in the problem. "Just find a better browser" is similarly ineffectual.

superkuh• 1 year ago

Being the change you want to see in the world is not a bad thing and should always be the first step before bringing up coercive force for others. There are better browsers and there are other options and not changing your own behavior first due to ignorance and acceptance of the status quo is not cool.

I feel the same way about smartphones, by the by, and it is very possible to live without them. I don't even carry a dumb phone with me. It's not impossible for me. It may be infeasible for you and your life situation. But I'm sure there's plenty of me's out there.

grimblee2• 1 year ago

I do not deny that the system need to change but I disagree with saying "we have no agency", I think that like everything in life it's a balance of the two and you definitively can, as an individual, decide to use less convenient options like waterfox or librewolf that respect your privacy and do not try to enforce propaganda (or ads) unto you. And I think in this case, with one of the most powerful company in human history being the perpetrator, you can wait a long time for the system to change.

raajg• 1 year ago

Time to set up Pi-Hole on my Rapsberry Pi 4

https://pi-hole.net/

bhrlady• 1 year ago

There are only two business models on the web: either you pay for your browser, or someone else does. This is why Orion is entirely user-funded, and can continue serving users by prioritizing privacy, control, and features like powerful, built-in ad-blocking. Not third party deals, ads, or any other incentive to corrupt the user experience and overall quality.

(Disclosure, I work for Kagi, creator of the Orion browser.)

kccqzy• 1 year ago

There are only two business models on the web: either you pay for your content, or someone else does. And that someone is usually advertisers. Blocking ads while consuming content upsets that business model. That's why Brave Browser's BAT is a fundamentally good idea marred by terrible execution. On the other hand I do not believe built-in ad-blocking in the browser can ever become mainstream for that same reason.

dredmorbius3• 1 year ago

An interesting day on which to impose this restriction, given:

"DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next"

<https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-...>

HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43323485>

m4r1k• 1 year ago

Today marks my last day as a Chrome user. And fellas I encourage y’all to switch away from Chrome

codedokode• 1 year ago

Note that Google Chrome contains features that allow sharing your interests with advertisers and "measuring" ads performance. It looks more and more as ad browsing client rather than a web browser: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/13355898

ur-whale• 1 year ago

If are unfortunate enough to still use Chrome, please read:

https://contrachrome.com/

exiguus• 1 year ago

Consider discontinuing the use of Google, AWS/Amazon, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and ChatGPT if you value freedom. There are numerous excellent alternatives available.

mulakosag• 1 year ago

Good luck with AWS. You need to stop using the internet. Are you going to check IP address of each website's web server you visit?

isaachinman• 1 year ago

Out of the loop. What's the story with WhatsApp? Backdoors?

pndy2• 1 year ago

Some say it's enough it landed in meta hands few years ago.

benkaiser2• 1 year ago

As a developer, the one feature I really love in Chrome is PWAs. But Firefox abandoned PWA support years ago, and seems to have no appetite for adding PWAs back[1]. Maybe I'll just have to split my usage across PWAs in Chrome (since I trust those apps/websites anyway) and Firefox for general browsing.

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-pwa-progress...

dahpu• 1 year ago

They seem on bringing it back one way or another [1] and there is also a workaround utility [2].

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/how-can-firefox-c...

[2] https://pwasforfirefox.filips.si/

benkaiser2• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing, I wasn't aware of that blog post. That said, their approach sounds kind of disheartening. I love being able to use extensions within my PWAs (primarily uBlock Origin, obviously), and some Android Chrome forks (Kiwi/Mises) let me do this, while still letting me feel like I'm in a dedicated app (i.e. no browser chrome at all). The firefox team really seem to stress here that they want to keep the chrome around the app (albeit different), which really feels like it goes against the grain of what I expect a PWA to be in the first place (a chromeless website).

leke• 1 year ago

How is it still running on Brave then?

antonok5• 1 year ago

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

firebot• 1 year ago

works fine here, though it says it "may soon no longer be supported"

Edge store doesn't even mention that, in fact it's featured.

I switched to edge canary on my phone because the dev options allow you to install extensions by id/crx, which I've used to get ublock origin, though it crashes sometimes, and doesn't work when you reload the whole browser, until you refresh the page or manually reactivate the extension....

xnx4• 1 year ago

Kiwi browser is also good for adblocking on Android.

XzetaU83• 1 year ago

Kiwi Browser is officially discontinued

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1i86ybn/kiwi_brows...

5etho• 1 year ago

how about vivaldi? original developers from Opera? I totally forgot about it in last 5 years, ayone using it?

sotix6• 1 year ago

This is the death of the hacker. We have allowed new heights of power and unchecked control decide they know better than us. We are no longer allowed or trusted to make choices in our best interests. Many practice apologetics for why this is necessary, pointing to Apple and Mozilla, as if that doesn’t make this change any less devastating. It was a great run.

The silver lining is it can be the birth of a new generation of hackers. This generation’s version of the printer inspiring those who refuse to accept the hostile hand they’ve been dealt. Tech doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to accept these changes. Rebel! Start hacking away. Don’t join these companies. Found new ones that prioritize valuing users first forever. It’s a difficult task. But all difficult tasks we’ve solved were.

pmdr13• 1 year ago

Many practice apologetics for why this is necessary

Sadly, on HN, of all places...

timmg6• 1 year ago

We are no longer allowed or trusted to make choices in our best interests.

Ironically (or not) this is the Apple side of the Android/iOS debate. And most people are happier with iOS. (And use Macs over Linux, FWIW.)

[I probably shouldn't mention that I personally think adblockers are unethical :) ]

sotix6• 1 year ago

And most people are happier with iOS.

Source?

And use Macs over Linux, FWIW.

This could be explained by marketing.

I personally think adblockers are unethical

Do you think ads are ethical? For a relevant example, how about an Apple ad that successfully uses emotion to convince you to buy a Mac instead of a Linux computer that would better suit your needs at a better price hypothetically?

adamsilkey• 1 year ago

[I probably shouldn't mention that I personally think adblockers are unethical :) ]

Okay, I’ll bite. How are adblockers unethical?

mortos2• 1 year ago

(And use Macs over Linux, FWIW.)

Interestingly, ChromeOS (Linux) has a higher market share than MacOS.

Being forced to run random code and be tracked is unethical. But I should probably mention I'm a big supporter of the small web.

Funes-• 1 year ago

Just use Brave if you can't be bothered to use some extremely ethical alternative that's harder to set up. It blocks everything out of the box. Now, if you do worry about supporting more ethical browsers, try qutebrowser (with some greasemonkey scripts added in).

niedzielski• 1 year ago

Brave has a history of very concerning behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers....

ripped_britches• 1 year ago

Wouldn’t trust those folks at all TBH. Too much sketchy sketch

theLegionWithin• 1 year ago

just run a pihole. superior to a browser plugin in every way

bashy• 1 year ago

Until you want to allow a site.

baud147258• 1 year ago

When Google nuked the (manifest V2) extensions I had on Chrome, without letting me export their settings (custom filters for ublock origin, RSS reader feeds), I bit the bullet and switched to Firefox.

djtriptych• 1 year ago

Yup they finally got me to switch to Firefox

h14h• 1 year ago

Is there anything preventing the creation of an independent marketplace for chromium extensions?

I haven't used Chrome itself in years, but have had a hard time giving up Chromium-based browsers due to the rendering performance. It's always felt weird that the only way of getting extensions on these browsers was via the Chrome Web Store.

If there are viable alternatives I've not heard of, I hope folks let me know.

01jonny01• 1 year ago

I use skipvids.com now. No ads and background playback

vachina2• 1 year ago

And that is precisely the moment I migrated to Firefox, together with my entire family.

Chrome is dead. Long live Firefox.

Cub3• 1 year ago

Why not swap to dns blocking with NextDNS or something similar? Take it out of the browsers hands?

qwerpy• 1 year ago

That’s not enough. Many sites serve ads from the same domains that they serve content from. Google, meta, etc. You need to have extensions that can parse the DOM and remove content from it.

dogzandcatz2• 1 year ago

Idea/Question/Possibility

If uBlock Origin uses filters, would it not be possible to build a program that acts as a "proxy" for Linux/macOS/Windows, etc., that uses the same or similarly crafted filters to do something akin to what some of us did back in the Flash LSO supercookie days? I was a Linux user then and I recall creating a symlink from .macromedia and .adobe to /dev/null. The cookies were written to their folders but went into the event horizon of /dev/null and I never had to worry about them, but the websites worked like a charm.

Maybe I'm wrong, but would it not be possible to use filters similar, or even different than uBlocks, to "symlink" the addresses to /dev/null or other bit bucket like NULL on other OSes? I write automation code, so I don't have the chops to develop such a program/project, but I can see it in my head "how it might work". Thoughts, ideas, criticisms welcome.

I've also taken to using Violent Monkey and scripts to block quite a bit of nonsense on the web. Violent Monkey and the iFrame blockers work well with YouTube. I suppose it's also a matter of time before things like Violent Monkey are removed as well. There has to be a way to proxy the traffic through a filter list and /dev/null the offending objects.

ajolly• 1 year ago

AdGuard does this

hit8run• 1 year ago

How fitting: I am also no longer available for Chrome.

Safari on the Mac and Firefox on Linux and Windows it is for me.

bsdice• 1 year ago

The future and maximum freedom lies in open source, where a team of dedicated users or developers actively de-enshittifies products.

If you are on Arch Linux, try ungoogled-chromium:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ungoogled-chromium or precompiled https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ungoogled-chromium-bin possibly with https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store and possibly using a .config/chromium-flags.conf like this:

--extension-mime-request-handling=always-prompt-for-install --enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL --wm-window-animations-disabled --animation-duration-scale=0

Timely updates, team defending manifest V2, no user data stealing or background scanning b/s, browser as it should be. Got a 10 year old machine with Intel iGPU and even video acceleration in the browser works.

darepublic• 1 year ago

Chrome has been randomly turning off my ublock origin and I've had to manually turn it back on. Don't you take away my adblock or you'll get the boot! I am willing to escalate this indefinitely, to the point of just not going on to any part of the internet with ads.

doright• 1 year ago

I'd like to know some statistics from before and after this event. Change in browser share if such a thing is recordable (unsure if ungoogled-chromium has a different user agent), received download counts of different uBlock versions (Origin and Lite), difference in Google's revenue as a result of wiping uBlock Origin.

MinimalAction• 1 year ago

I have been using Brave and that has in-built adblocker, I suppose. I have not faced any huge problem yet, and the browsing has been super smooth.

rayiner• 1 year ago

What happened to web standards? Why are we all slaves to Google and Chrome anyway?

sunaookami• 1 year ago

At least uBO can be replaced with AdGuard or uBO Lite but there are a LOT of extensions (over half of mine!) that are still not compatible with MV3. "Imagus Mod" for example or script managers like Violentmonkey. Which is why I switched to Firefox last summer.

ZetsuBouKyo• 1 year ago

The US Department of Justice has a proposal that Google sell off Chrome to prevent a monopoly. This might be a great approach to solve the problem.

tap-snap-or-nap• 1 year ago

Without ad blockers, I will not even browse the internet.

baxuz• 1 year ago

I've been a happy user of Adguard for over 5 years, on all my devices, so I am luckily unaffected by this.

So far it seems to be the only general solution that can inject cosmetic filters into network requests while blocking on a request (not dns-only) level.

https://adguard.com/en/blog/mv2-extensions-no-longer-alterna...

almd• 1 year ago

My dumb theory is that they’re trying to break up the “monopoly” allegations. But, I’m not sure what the stats are for how many people use ad block blockers like ublock, and are willing to migrate to a different browser because of its loss. On top of that, like others say there are still ad blockers available.

Terrible sample size: I moved to FF as soon as I couldn’t use a cookie cleaner for web dev work, and ublock origin.

pcdoodle• 1 year ago

Time to try Brave. Out of the box, it's very nice.

enigma101• 1 year ago

There are other browsers you know Brave and such? It really saves you money from all the blocked ads traffic and is not a backdoor/spyware

dogzandcatz2• 1 year ago

https://mitmproxy.org/

Either Python or PowerShell would work for the scripting.

Beermotor• 1 year ago

Coincidentally Google Chrome is no longer available on a single computing device I own.

xedrac• 1 year ago

Firefox is the way. Chrome may as well be Edge.

lofaszvanitt2• 1 year ago

DOJ, time to act.

xyzabc098123• 1 year ago

Im genuinely curious, with all these bashing going around. How is it the fault of ads vendors when website/webapp publishers are the ones that put ads on them?

Like one day Wikipedia inserts ads on their pages to keep the lights on. We bash Google for blocking uBlock?

I feel like I'm missing out on something. Please help me understand.

southernplaces7• 1 year ago

Odd this. I have ublock on my chrome browser right now and it's running fine.

LoveMortuus• 1 year ago

Meanwhile Microsoft Edge ships with an Ad Blocker both on desktop and on mobile!

rohanashik• 1 year ago

If there is a uBlock origin VPN that blocks ad traffic from PC level it will be a good solution. No need to rely on browser plugin. Also it can work on mobile and iPads.

est• 1 year ago

We should have third-party .dll injection plugins.

Microsoft missed a lot by not keeping ManifestV2 in Edge.

uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

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