Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

https://0x44.xyz/blog/web-request-blocking/

by deryilz • 1 year ago

1044 872 1 year ago

daft_pink• 1 year ago

So what’s the conclusion? Can we use a different Chrome based browser and avoid MV3? What’s the decision for privacy after this has happened?

j4510• 1 year ago

The little I've read bout this says that maintaining MV2 might be something as well.

If other chromium based browsers didn't have this issue, that would be great, but likely in time Youtube won't support browsers that don't have MV3. Probably still have some time though.

SSchick• 1 year ago

Switched to Firefox yesterday, I suggest you do the same.

shakna• 1 year ago

Google using YouTube to block non-MV3 browsers, would be Google picking a fight with Firefox - who they use in court documents to say that they're not a monopoly. Their legal team will have a few words to say about it.

perching_aix• 1 year ago

This blogpost covers a workaround they discovered that would have let MV3 extensions access important functionality that was not normally available, only in MV2.

This workaround was fixed the same year in 2023 and yielded a $0 payout, on the basis that Google did not consider it a security vulnerability.

The conclusion then is that uBO (MV2) stopped working for me today after restarting my computer, I suppose.

smileybarry• 1 year ago

Microsoft supposedly aligned with deprecating MV2 back when Google announced it but they've indefinitely postponed it. The KB about it still says "TBD", and there's zero mention of it around the actual browser. IMO it's a good alternative, if you trust Microsoft (I do).

paulryanrogers12• 1 year ago

I would interpret that "TBD" to mean the moment Microsoft pulls in Chromium 139 changes. Anything else would be to costly for a small amount of goodwill from a niche community.

Aurornis2• 1 year ago

Try installing uBlock Origin Lite and see if it works for your needs.

krackers4• 1 year ago

They decided it wasn't a security issue, and honestly, I agree, because it didn't give extensions access to data they didn't already have.

So they admit that MV3 isn't actually any more secure than MV2?

Neywiny• 1 year ago

I'd be shocked if anyone actually believes them. This article starts with the obvious conflict of interest. Of course letting an extension know what websites you visit and what requests are made is an insecure lifestyle. But I still do it because I trust uBO more than I trust the ad companies and their data harvesters.

matheusmoreira13• 1 year ago

I believe them. The restrictions are reasonable and appropriate for nearly everyone. Extensions are untrusted code that should have as little access as possible. If restrictions can be bypassed, that's a security bug that should be fixed because it directly affects users.

I also think uBlock Origin is so important and trusted it should not only be an exception to the whole thing but should also be given even more access in order to let it block things more effectively. It shouldn't even be a mere extension to begin with, it should be literally built into the browser as a core feature. The massive conflicts of interest are the only thing that prevent that. Can't trust ad companies to mantain ad blockers.

Barbing6• 1 year ago

I wish I could browse the web kinda like this but minus the human:

Make Signal video call to someone in front of a laptop, provide verbal instructions on what to click on, read to my liking, and hang up to be connected with someone else next time.

(EFF’s Cover Your Tracks seems to suggest fresh private tabs w/iCloud Private Relay & AdGuard is ineffective. VMs/Cloud Desktops exist but there are apparently telltale signs when those are used, though not sure how easily linkable back to acting user. Human-in-the-loop proxy via encrypted video calls seems to solve _most_ things, except it’s stupid and would be really annoying even with an enthusiastic pool of volunteers. VM + TOR/I2P should be fine for almost anybody though I guess, just frustrated the simple commercial stuff is ostensibly partially privacy theater.)

krackers4• 1 year ago

One of the main goals of MV3 seems to be nullifying protection against tracking URLs. Most of the discussion about adblocking technically "still working" under MV3 misses this point. It doesn't matter if you're actually served ads or not, when when your underlying habits can still easily be collected from the combination of fingerprints and tracking URLs.

https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/302

frollogaston• 1 year ago

I've started assuming bad intent after WEI, even though it was dropped.

qwertox2• 1 year ago

What I don't understand is why Google doesn't offer users the ability to add some extension ids into some whitelist to allow them using very sensitive permissions.

Force those extensions to have an prominent icon on the UI with a clear tooltip asking "did you install this yourself [No]" for easy removal, in case someone else did install it without you knowing.

There are so many ways to make this work, but they have zero interest in it.

amluto• 1 year ago

No, MV3 really isn’t more secure. MV3 still allows extensions to inspect your requests — it just doesn’t allow extensions to block them.

It’s almost comical how weak the security/privacy argument for MV3 is. Chrome could have developed a sandboxed web request inspection framework to prevent data exfiltration, but they didn’t even try. Instead they nerfed ad blockers without adding any security.

bapak• 1 year ago

The only security change is a policy one that did not need to be bundled with the rest: you can't load external code and run it in a privileged context like the background worker. However you can still load it into a frame and communicate with it.

yard20105• 1 year ago

This comment reads as if those villains have to provide explanations. Bitch they are Google they ask the questions. If they want they can pirate everything then sell it to make some cash, the stupid laws that we have to follow don't apply to them.

IMO those organizations should pay the taxes for all the people in the country they're being used at. This will create the best incentive for them to succeed.

jacquesm7• 1 year ago

It's less secure.

labrador2• 1 year ago

I'd gladly pay for YouTube without ads if I trusted that it would remain ad free, but the track record from various companies on this is not good.

iLoveOncall3• 1 year ago

So pay now and stop paying if they introduce ads? It's not like it's a lifetime subscription.

I've been paying for it for a year+ for my girlfriend who was watching more ads than content and we've never seen ads since.

labrador2• 1 year ago

That's good to know. I was hoping for a reply like yours. I will subscribe. YouTube is an amazing resource for human kind and I agree those of us who can afford it should pay to support it.

j4510• 1 year ago

Totally, there's not a lot of places to vote with your dollars to get rid of interruptions like Ads, and also get back a lot of time of your life.

naikrovek• 1 year ago

I pay for YouTube premium for my family and there haven’t been any injected ads at all. Only the ones that the video themselves have in, which are also very annoying.

I can’t speak for the future, but I’ve had this for probably 5 years and I haven’t seen a single ad, only the videos that I’ve asked to see.

j4510• 1 year ago

Same experience.

The family plan is nice to share with family to reduce how much everyone's exposed to ads.

In-Video sponsorships are a pain, sometimes they are chaptered out enough and can be skipped.

If I could pay for an ad-free google search I probably would. Off the shelf, not doing API calls.

dexterdog2• 1 year ago

That's what sponsorblock is for

Karsteski• 1 year ago

I tried paying for YouTube premium then they fucked around by not giving me all the features I paid for when I was visiting another country. There's no winning with these people.

dandellion2• 1 year ago

I paid premium a few months, then they added shorts and there was no way to block them, so I installed a blocker and stopped paying for it.

jklas2hjdsdk3• 1 year ago

Yes me too, and they fucked me.

ProllyInfamous• 1 year ago

If you simply add a `-` (en-dash) between the `t` & 2nd `u` in the URL, your viewing experience automatically skips all external ads, without login/premium.

Syntax: www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w

This also works for playlists, and auto-repeats.

edit: is this getting downvoted because it works and people are worried this service might disappear should this bypass become too popular..? Just curious.

j4510• 1 year ago

Youtube premium has remained adfree as far as I know.

Best to try it out yourself. I can't watch Youtube with Ads ever anymore.

If a 100% Ad-free youtube premium at the current price point ever went away, something would have to change about the ads.

lpcvoid• 1 year ago

Nah, Firefox with ublock origin is better than giving money to google.

theoreticalmal2• 1 year ago

I get an ad-free YouTube experience for $0 with software. Why do you pay for it?

matheusmoreira13• 1 year ago

Paying to avoid ads just makes your attention even more valuable to them. Always block them unconditionally and without any payment.

Ads are a violation of the sanctity of our minds. They are not entitled to our attention. It's not currency to pay for services with.

luoc• 1 year ago

Can you elaborate a bit? Why would that make my attention more valuable than other's?

theoreticalmal2• 1 year ago

That’s quite a stretch. I loathe ads as much as anyone else here, but I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind (is my mind even sacrosanct, such that it could be violated?) it’s just something I don’t like.

And yes, attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things. Like any other voluntary transaction, no one is entitled to my attention unless we both voluntarily agree to it.

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

The point is most people will never pay. That makes the Adblock/anti-adblock war inevitable for them. If you can afford it, you sidestep it. If you can’t or won’t, you don’t. Pretending there is some point where those folks would pay is a little delusional in my view.

ThunderSizzle2• 1 year ago

Or rather, don't use YouTube without paying.

Youtube isn't free, and unlike a simple blog, requires tons of infrastructure and content creation. None of that is free, and people wanting that to be free is why we're in adscape hell.

Edit: I'd love for a competitor to youtube, but there isn't. Rumble isn't a real competitor, and none of my favorite channels place their content there either.

I wish there was a youtube alternative that was more of a federation, but every attempt I've seen of federations have been mess.

yard20105• 1 year ago

Ads are social cancer that's spreading without any attention nor control from the authorities. Just like cigarettes 30 years ago.

jamesfmilne• 1 year ago

I've been paying for YouTube premium for probably 2 years now. Never had any inserted ads. Only the "this video is sponsored by" stuff, which you can just skip over.

I can't possibly go back to non-Premium YouTube, and if they mess around with Premium I'll probably be moving on from YouTube.

stefan_• 1 year ago

They rolled out the Chrome "kill adblockers" update globally then unleashed the new wave of YouTube "anti-adblock" a month later. While in a literal losing court case thats suggesting Chrome be split out from Google as a whole. They must be so confident nothing can touch them.

raincole3• 1 year ago

Youtube premium has been ad-free for 10 years. What kind of track record do you need? 20 years? 100 years?

vinyl7• 1 year ago

Netflix and other streaming sites have ads on some paid subscriptions. First they start with ad free subs, then introduce ads and introduce a higher priced tier to get rid of ads

eviks10• 1 year ago

It has never been ad-free, sponsored segments have always existed

izzydata• 1 year ago

Youtube premium is still an ad driven business model. They are the ones making the problem worse so they can sell you the solution. The more you pay for Youtube Premium the more incentive they have to make ads worse.

jorvi2• 1 year ago

Don't let everyone responding gaslight you. YouTube Premium is absolutely stuffed with ads[0] (sorry, 'promoted content' / 'sponsorship'). The only probable explanation I have for this is that Google has successfully boiled the frog and people mentally don't even register these things as ads anymore.

And that's not to mention pretty much every single creator stuffing sponsored sections into their videos now. We have Sponsorblock for now, but I imagine Google will try to introduce random offsets at some point which will render Sponsorblock mute. Maybe an AI blocker will rise up in the future?

At any rate, fight fire with fire. Just use every bit of adblocking on desktop, Revanced on Android and hope that Revanced or Youtube++ comes to iOS 3rd party stores at some point.

[0]https://imgur.com/a/3emEhsF

Edit: since people are too lazy to click on the link and instead ram the downvote button in blind rage, image 1 and 4 contain straight up ads, unconnected to creators.

jowea3• 1 year ago

I think people just decided it doesn't count as ads when it's the creator doing it. And it feels more tolerable since the money is going to the creator that they probably like instead of megacorp Google.

imiric• 1 year ago

I'm honestly baffled why anyone who objects to ads would still want to use any of the official YouTube clients. Whether or not they show ads to you on YouTube, they still track your every move and use it to improve their profile of you so that they can show you ads on any of their other platforms, sell your data, or whatever other shady business they do behind the scenes to extract value from it.

Adtech cannot be trusted. I refuse to support their empire whether that's financially or with my data and attention.

userbinator7• 1 year ago

And that's not to mention pretty much every single creator stuffing sponsored sections into their videos now.

Fortunately I mainly watch the videos which are not made by "creators" looking for $$$ but just people sharing something interesting and useful; the ones which have no annoying intros or outros, "like share and subscribe" drivel, and are often not much more than raw unedited content. They still exist on YouTube.

npteljes• 1 year ago

I just pay them until it works, and I'll reconsider once it changes. Don't worry about track record, you can stop paying anytime.

throwaway73945• 1 year ago

So OP got Google to patch a harmless "issue" that could've been used by addon devs to bypass MV3 restrictions. Hope it was worth the $0.

antisthenes• 1 year ago

Yeah, that was my take as well. OP did some free work for a megacorp and made the web a little bit worse, because "security, I guess" ?

Good job.

deryilz9• 1 year ago

Sometimes you get $0, sometimes you get more. I would like to mention this stuff on my college applications, and even if I tried to gatekeep it, it'd eventually be patched. Not sure what your argument is here.

busymom0• 1 year ago

Google would have found this bug if any extensions tried to rely on it and patched it instantly anyway.

mertd• 1 year ago

The author claims to be 8 years old in 2015. So that makes them still a teenager. It is pretty cool IMO.

9dev• 1 year ago

Are you guys honestly arguing like the zero day industry would, for a vector that couldn’t be used by any ad blocking extension since Google has them under an electron microscope 24/7? To pick on a very young, enthusiastic programmer? What the hell??

StrLght3• 1 year ago

I don't agree with this conclusion. Google is fully responsible for MV3 and its' restrictions. There's no reason to shift blame away from them.

Let's do a thought experiment: if OP hasn't reported it, what do you think would happen then? Even if different ad blockers would find it later and use it, Google would have still removed this. Maybe they'd even remove extensions that have (ab)used it from Chrome Web Store.

Barbing6• 1 year ago

Indeed.

Perhaps a hobbyist would code “MV2-capable” MV3 adblocker for the fun of it, forking UBO or something, as a proof-of-concept. How much time would anyone spend on its development and who would install it when the max runway’s a few days, weeks, or months?

Hizonner• 1 year ago

Maybe they'd even remove extensions that have (ab)used it from Chrome Web Store.

So now it's abuse to make the user's browser do what the user wants, for the user's benefit, to protect the user from, you know, actual abuse.

wongarsu2• 1 year ago

Google isn't any less responsible just because somebody else also did something bad. Blame is not a zero-sum game

If we think your line of argument to the logical extreme, then being upset at at somebody who ratted out a Jewish hideout to Nazis would shift blame away from Hitler. That's obviously absurd. Both are bad people, and one being bad doesn't make the other less bad. And if one enables the other being more bad then that makes both of them worse, it doesn't magically shift blame from one to the other

raincole3• 1 year ago

Really? You think Google is that dumb? As soon as any ad blocker that people actually use implements it, it'll be patched. It's not something you can exploit once and benefit from it forever.

BomberFish• 1 year ago

Said bypass would exist for maybe a day max before getting nuked from orbit by Google. If anything, there was a non-zero chance OP would've gotten paid and he took it. I don't blame him.

beeflet• 1 year ago

They do it for free

orliesaurus• 1 year ago

I honestly thought reading this blog post was quite refreshing and I had a little smirk at the caption of the photo. Thank you for sharing!

deryilz9• 1 year ago

Author here, thank you! A lot of the comments here are more general arguments about MV3 and Google (which I kinda expected) but I'm glad see someone who liked my post :)

SuperShibe• 1 year ago

[flagged]

4gotunameagain• 1 year ago

Well, in his defense it would have been patched immediately after the first adblocker used it, and he would have gotten nothing at all out of it.

Oh wait he got nothing at all anyway ;)

_feus• 1 year ago

Not really, this sort of fame farming is what makes candidates stand out in infosec interviews. A bug in Google systems is good for his future career.

m4rtink• 1 year ago

Would be quite different if they patched it and broke important extensions, possibly facing serieous outcry and bad publicity.

WD-42• 1 year ago

The exact wording was:

But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023.

So why not go to someone that does know how to make a blocker? Nice snitch.

Aurornis2• 1 year ago

If a major adblocker used a bug or security vulnerability to work around restrictions, it would have been patched away immediately.

The uBlock team was never going to ship code that depended on a bug to work.

r4indeer• 1 year ago

I fully agree. The original comment and the other replies to it are bewildering. There was nothing to gain here, yet people are throwing ad hominem attacks left and right.

romanovcode• 1 year ago

He was hoping to be a good boy and receive some cash from Google, as per article.

ujkhsjkdhf2342• 1 year ago

No judgement but I would love to hear from Google employees who worked on this. Do they believe they are improving the internet in any way?

stackedinserter• 1 year ago

"Job's shit but pays a lot"

lucb1e13• 1 year ago

There is also an argument to be made that adblocking is immoral. I think the idea is pervasive enough to fill a team of willing people, especially if you pay them 100k/year to at least go along with it for the time being

I haven't made up my own mind about it yet, just that this might be a factor in why one would move the facilitating technology backwards in this way (and forwards in other ways, apparently: some people in the thread are reporting that uBlock Lite is faster. Not that I can tell the difference between a clean Firefox without add-ons (I regularly use that for work reasons) and a Firefox with uBlock Origin (my daily driver) except if the page is bogged down from all the ads)

ujkhsjkdhf2342• 1 year ago

I don't think ads are immoral but I think the way FAANG does ads and tracking is immoral. Google does not do enough to vet ads for malicious activity such as scams and viruses. The FBI in recent years has started recommending an adblocker for that reason.

yard20105• 1 year ago

Lol. Treating cancer is immoral. Miss me with this shit!

userbinator7• 1 year ago

They are being paid to think what they're told to think.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 year ago

https://getfirefox.org

Even ignoring the adblock issues, Chrome isn't worth it... Google themselves spy on you with it. Cockblocking adblock just puts extra emphasis on what you should have already known.

victor9000• 1 year ago

And FF + UBO also works great on Android

pnw3• 1 year ago

Haven't missed Chrome once since switching to https://brave.com/

Etheryte4• 1 year ago

Of all the browsers you could be using, giving your data away to sketchy crypto bros should really not be at the top of the list.

Supermancho4• 1 year ago

It's the top of the list because it works so well. I forget it's a different browser most of the time. I was able to turn off everything extraneous that I was concerned about. Brave is also Open Sourced.

bung2• 1 year ago

Might as well edit and add some suggestions

bigstrat20032• 1 year ago

I really don't care about crypto stuff. If you do, I can understand why that's a dealbreaker for you. But for me, it doesn't matter at all. I just turn the crypto features off and continue on my way.

esskay9• 1 year ago

The crypto part is an optional thing, which takes a split second to turn off - thats it. Once its off you are basically running chrome without the google call home, and with a built in adblocker unaffected by manifest v3.

It's also opensource so it's not like theres anything being hidden here.

Supermancho4• 1 year ago

Not being able to run Twitch on it has me switch for brief periods.

bung2• 1 year ago

You're personally unable to look at twitch on it?

sundarurfriend• 1 year ago

Heh, funny, Twitch was the primary reason I installed Brave because it was being glitchy on Firefox (at the time years ago - no longer the case). I've never had trouble with Twitch on Brave.

deryilz9• 1 year ago

From my experience (as a Brave user), using a User-Agent switching extension and setting it to Firefox for twitch.tv gets around that :)

rollcat3• 1 year ago

It's the same Blink engine underneath. Talk about lipstick.

I'm not aware of a Blink-based browser that isn't dropping manifest V2. That would be a soft fork, and wouldn't survive long.

CharlesW2• 1 year ago

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

bigstrat20032• 1 year ago

The point is you don't need to worry about manifest v3 interfering with ad blockers, because Brave has an ad blocker built into the browser. Also makes it a good Chromium-based option for mobile, since you can't install extensions on Chrome mobile at all.

CharlesW2• 1 year ago

In the "cons" column, Brave is still a for-profit and has a bunch of features that continue to give some people the ick. In the "pros" column, there's a bunch of "how to debloat Brave" content showing how to improve the default kitchen-sink confifguration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6cKFliWW6Q

pnw3• 1 year ago

I do turn off the wallet, VPN, AI and other bloat, but it's a minor inconvenience for a better browser.

nh43215rgb• 1 year ago

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

swat535• 1 year ago

Brave runs of Chromium, it's the same thing as Chrome.. Manifest V3 will eventually be implemented.

deanc• 1 year ago

Chrome full on blocked uBlock Origin (and others) this week. There is still four flags [1] you can play with that will allow you to re-enable it again, but this is a losing battle of course. The inevitable is coming.

Nothing comes close to Safari battery life on MacOS, followed by chrome, followed by firefox in last place (with all its other issues - those claiming otherwise have stockholm syndrome). I've tried taking Orion for a spin which should offer the battery life of Safari with the flexibility of running FF and chrome extensions - but it hasn't stuck yet. As much as I'd like to use FF, I really don't want to shave 10-20% (?) off a battery charge cycle when I spend 90% of my day in the browser.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1lx59m0/resto...

echelon3• 1 year ago

This should lead to a full-on antitrust breakup of Google. Period.

They own the web.

I can build my business brand, own my own dot com, but then have to pay Google ad extortion money to not have my competitors by ads well above my domain name. And of course the address bar now does search instead of going to the appropriate place.

Google is a scourge.

Brian_K_White3• 1 year ago

And I value FF way more than an hour of battery.

All day every day my computer works fine.

That difference in battery, if it exists, doesn't actually materially manifest anywhere. But the difference between FF and anything else matters basically every minute all day.

On top of that, even if I ever did actually run into the difference, needing to plug in before I would have anyway, it's an annoyance vs a necessity. The ability to control my own browser is frankly just not negotiable. It doesn't actually matter if it were less convenient in some other way, it's simply a base level requirement and anything that doesn't provide that doesn't matter what other qualities it might have.

You might say "a computer that's dead doesn't work at all" but that never actually happens. I'd need an 8 hour bus ride with no seat power to get to the point where that last missing hour would actually leave me with no computer for an hour, and that would need to be a commute that happens twice every day for it to even matter.

For me that's just not the reasonable priority.

rstat13• 1 year ago

>with all its other issues - those claiming otherwise have stockholm syndrome

What issues? Works just as well as Chrome ever did (before they started blocking extensions at least) for me.

crazygringo4• 1 year ago

Adblockers basically need webRequestBlocking to function properly. Pretty convenient (cough cough) for a company that makes most of its revenue from ads to be removing that.

Why does this keep getting repeated? It's not true.

Anyone can use uBlock Origin Lite with Chrome, and manifest v3. It doesn't just work fine, it works great. I can't tell any difference from the old uBlock Origin in terms of blocking, but it's faster because now all the filtering is being done in C++ rather than JavaScript. Works on YouTube and everything.

I know there are some limits in place now with the max number of rules, but the limits seem to be plenty so far.

zwaps• 1 year ago

It is true though. Like, literally. Why do you think it is called Lite?

crazygringo4• 1 year ago

It is true though. Like, literally.

Doesn't seem true to me. If it's true, then why is uBlock Origin Lite functioning properly as an adblocker for me?

Why do you think it is called Lite?

Because it's simpler and uses less resources. And they had to call it something different to distinguish it from uBlock Origin.

tredre3• 1 year ago

The statement was: "Adblockers basically need webRequestBlocking to function properly. "

This is demonstrably false, ublock lite proves that adblockers can work without it.

Whether or not ublock lite is missing functionalities because of MV3 is irrelevant to the original statement that adblockers need webRequestBlocking.

consumer4512• 1 year ago

I believe that another change is that ad blockers cannot update as quickly now? If that is true, since ad blocking is a cat and mouse game, doesn't that make ad blocking with a delay less functional?

charcircuit4• 1 year ago

No, that's not true either. Updating rules is allowed. The restriction is about updating code.

sgentle• 1 year ago

It depends on how you interpret the word "properly". There are ads and adblocker-detection techniques that can't be blocked by MV3-style static filtering.

If "properly" means "can block all ads" then you're wrong. If it means "can block some ads" then you're right. If it means "can block most ads" then you're currently right, but likely to become wrong as adtech evolves around the new state of play.

Don't forget Chrome launched with built-in popup blocking. Now we just have popunders, in-page popups, back-button hijacking etc. Ads, uh... find a way.

krade• 1 year ago

UBO Lite doesn't support cosmetic filters or custom rules.

al_borland5• 1 year ago

Even if bigs exists to work around what Google is doing, that isn’t the right way forward. If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers). Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.

high_priest• 1 year ago

Its not happening

Etheryte4• 1 year ago

I don't know, I switched to Safari and it was painful for like two hours and then I stopped thinking about it. The only thing I somewhat miss is the built-in page translate, but I don't need it often enough to be bothered much.

lytedev• 1 year ago

It definitely is, buy I think the silent majority just don't care all that much. Is that what you're referring to?

agile-gift0262• 1 year ago

I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier. It's only been a couple of months, but I can't imagine going back to a browser without multi-account containers.

al_borland5• 1 year ago

It happened before, multiple times.

phendrenad24• 1 year ago

A lot of people seem to believe that switching to a de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough. I think that's a psyop promoted by Google themselves. Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome. Brave, custom Chromium builds, Vivaldi, etc. are all very similar to Google Chrome, they just don't have Google spy features.

The argument that "Google still controls Chromium so it's not good enough" is exactly the kind of FUD I'd expect to back up this kind of psyop, too.

poly2it• 1 year ago

Isn't that the exact argument behind the Serenity project? I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers. Control over virtually all media consumption mustn't be in the hands of a corporation.

sensanaty5• 1 year ago

Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome

I find this notion completely baffling. I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari more or less daily cause I test in all 3, and other than Safari feeling clunkier and in general less power-user friendly, I can barely tell the difference between the 3, especially between chrome and FF (well, other than uBlock working better in FF anyways).

Phemist2• 1 year ago

I once made a comment along these lines (de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough, as it supports the browser monoculture and inevitably makes Chrome as a browser better) and got a reply from from Brendan Eichner himself.

His point was that there isn't enough time to again develop Firefox (or ladybird) as a competitive browser capable of breaking the Chrome "monopoly". I don't know if I really agree.

Evidently, Google feels like the time is right to make these kinds of aggressive moves, limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers.

The internet without ad blockers is a hot steaming mess. Limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers makes people associate your browser (Chrome in this case) with this hot steaming mess. It is difficult to dissociate the Chrome software from the websites rendered in Chrome by a technical lay person. So Chrome will be viewed as a hot steaming mess.

I guess we will soon see if people will stay on Chrome or accept the small initial pain and take the leap to a different browser with proper support for ad blockers. In any case the time is now for a aggressive marketing campaign on the side of mozilla etc.

I am in no way affiliated with Google. So if you still think this is a PsyOp, please consider Hanlon's Razor:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Although, please also consider that Hanlon's Razor itself was coined by a Robert J. Hanlon, who suspiciously shares a name with a CIA operative also from Pennsylvania. It is not unimaginable that Hanlon's Razor it in itself a PsyOp. ;)

thayne4• 1 year ago

Has any chromium based browser committed to continue supporting MV2 or building an alternative API for ad-blockers to intercept web requests in MV3 even after the code for MV2 is removed from upstream chromium?

If not, then no, switching to another chromium based browser is not enough.

And fwiw my experience trying Brave was that the user experience was actually more different from chrome than Firefox.

eviks10• 1 year ago

Google still controls Chromium so it's not good enough" is exactly the kind of FUD

Ok, so which of the forks plan to support MV2?

pjmlp10• 1 year ago

A monopoly achieved thanks to everyone that forgot about IE lesson, and instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application.

bayindirh2• 1 year ago

Chrome was made to fracture, and everything started with the aptly named “Atom” editor (they “invented” Electron).

Everybody choose convenience over efficiency and standards, because apparently nobody understood what “being lazy” actually is.

brookst2• 1 year ago

Consumers never really pick products for ideological reasons, no matter how galling that is to ideologues

echelon3• 1 year ago

The answer is antitrust.

The FTC / DOJ should strip Google of Chrome.

Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:

- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"

- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)

- Google search is the default search

- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search

- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser

- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services

- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising

- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android

- Made Google accounts the default

- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer

- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google

- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)

- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues

- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results

- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise

- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android

... and that's just scratching the surface.

Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.

userbinator7• 1 year ago

IE was far less user-hostile than Chrome.

8n4vidtmkvmk2• 1 year ago

Excuse me. If it's on MDN, I'm going to use it if it's useful for my app. Not my fault if not all browsers can keep up! Half JK. If I get user complaints I'll patch them for other browsers but I'm only one person so it's hard and I rely on user feedback. (Submit bug reports y'all)

azangru• 1 year ago

instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application

I am confused.

- The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article.

- The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps instead of learning web standards; but react apps work equally well (or poorly) in all major browsers.

- Finally, how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.

isaacremuant• 1 year ago

Not everyone. Some of us used Firefox all along and didn't just go with the "default" invasive thing.

genman• 1 year ago

The main wrong lesson learned was to promote Chrome instead of Firefox (also in what many HN readers have been guilty of).

Ygg23• 1 year ago

That's fundamentally a mischaracterization.

Everyone focused on short term gains. Optimizing for browser with 30% market share, backed by Google makes more sense than a browser with 20%. Repeat with 40% and 20% respectively. And so on, and so on.

There isn't a lesson to learn. It's just short term thinking.

Now Google has enough power and lacks scruples that would prevent it from exploiting.

xg153• 1 year ago

Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.

Because that has worked so well so far...

janalsncm2• 1 year ago

“Sorry, we don’t support any browsers other than Chrome”

I agree exploiting a bug isn’t a sustainable solution. But it’s also unrealistic to think switching is viable.

oehpr• 1 year ago

Keep chrome installed and fall back iff forced to. That way the majority of usage statistics show up as other browsers so when developers are making guesses at which browser to support, those statistics will push them away from chrome.

Additionally: you would be surprised how infrequently you have to switch to chrome

tankenmate• 1 year ago

By that logic attempting to change anything at all is not viable; e pur si muove.

bayindirh2• 1 year ago

For me “switching” is to start using something else rather than Firefox, so switching from Chrome is viable.

slenk3• 1 year ago

Most sites let you ignore that, but just keep like Ungoogled Chromium around as a backup

userbinator7• 1 year ago

Find who is responsible for such sites and send them strongly-worded emails. If it's a commerce site, tell them they just lost a potential customer. In my experience it's usually the trendchasing web developers who have drunk the Goog-Aid and are trying to convince the others in the organisation to use "modern" (read: controlled by Google) features and waste time implementing these changes --- instead of the "deprecated" feature that's been there for decades and will work in just about any browser, and the management is usually more driven by $$$ so anything that affects the bottom line is going to get their attention. I've even offered to "fix" their site for free to make it more accessible.

yard20105• 1 year ago

"This site requires Internet Explorer 6 to work"

Wowfunhappy3• 1 year ago

This wasn't really the point of the article, which in fact says the workaround was patched in Chrome 118.

irrational• 1 year ago

Because the author reported it. Personally I would have told the ublock origin developers instead of google.

autobodie3• 1 year ago

the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome

History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another. The only few examples of ostensible outcomes were critically meaningless and necessitate zero-friction alternatives, like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently — wow, really showed them!!

There's no detour for politics.

worik6• 1 year ago

History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another

The South African apartheid regime was brought down by boycotts.

The Israeli genocide regime will suffer the same fate if there is any justice left in the world.

Boycotts are very powerful. Users boycotting ads is dismantling the surveillance web.

codeguro• 1 year ago

like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently

But that was the whole point. They were marketing to children. They still haven't recovered from that backlash. Anheuser-Busch took a pretty damning financial hit and it sent a message to all the other companies not to pull this kind of stunt because it's bad for business. Changing their behavior was the entire point.

miohtama• 1 year ago

Most complainers are hypocrites who are complaining for the sake of complaining, too lazy to do anything and just come up with excuses to avoid this.

greatbit• 1 year ago

Ditching Chromium for Firefox isn’t much better since Firefox sells user data.

Next would be Safari.

paulryanrogers12• 1 year ago

Firefox only shares anonymized data with partners. Is there evidence OHTTP can be deanonymized?

matthewaveryusa• 1 year ago

Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome. I've done the pure firefox forray recently but after 6 months it gets tiresome to have 2 browsers and 3 weeks ago Ive admitted defeat for the second time and went full chrome. Who am I lying to -- market cornered, ggwp. It's like trying to eat food without paying a cent to cargill.

elyobo• 1 year ago

Really? I've been FF only for years and everything works reliably, including banking sites (Australia & New Zealand).

worik6• 1 year ago

Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome.

What countries banks?

I am in New Zealand and have not had that problem in years.

15 years ago I had to edit my user agent string to look like IE (IIRC) for the University of Otago's website (PricewaterhouseCoopers getting lots of money for doing a really bad job)

Makes me wonder have you tried that trick? Less tiresome than switching browsers....

eikenberry• 1 year ago

Why not switch banks or move to a credit union?

homebrewer5• 1 year ago

Treat it as isolating banking from the rest of your browsing, there are enough CVEs coming out for Chromium in spite of (or maybe because of) Google pouring billions into it.

Lio• 1 year ago

Really? Which ones are broken? Every banking website I use works in Firefox.

I can’t imagine voluntarily using a browser without working ad blocking.

mattigames• 1 year ago

Hit then where it hurts would be political action, not individuals switching to Firefox, that does nothing.

toofy• 1 year ago

like most solutions to complex societal/economic issues:

it’s almost certainly going to take both of your ideas, more diversity in the browser space and political actions. and then other actions as well.

the collective We have fallen into a trap where we consistently talk down other important ideas because we think ours is important too (and it is.) i definitely catch myself doing this far too often.

i just hope We can get back to a place where We recognize that different ideas from our own are also important and will need to be used in our effort to solve some of our issues. because so many of these cracks we’re facing will require many many many levers being pushed and pulled, not one magic silver bullet.

wrasee2• 1 year ago

In a democracy it’s actually the other way around, over time at least. Politicians follow votes.

hulitu• 1 year ago

only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome

There is more Chrome than Chrome: Edge, Chromium and all their forks.

hnlmorg• 1 year ago

I think you’re missing the point of the article.

Isn’t really about bypassing it to support the development of new extensions. It’s more just a blog about a new bug that the author found during their security research.

It’s really more a fluff piece promoting themselves than it is anything else. And to be honest, I’m fine with that.

My bigger takeaway from that article was how impressive this individual already is. They’re still a student and already finding and reporting several bugs in major platforms. Kudos to them.

tonyedgecombe• 1 year ago

Also if you don’t like advertising then hit the back button on advertising heavy sites.

amelius2• 1 year ago

We need webmasters to nudge people away from Chrome. E.g. show an annoying popup on opening the page or add a small delay.

al_borland5• 1 year ago

We also need Google to stop showing annoying pop-ups every time someone goes to their homepage, Gmail, or any other site they own. They also need to stop promoting users on mobile to open links in Chrome, when the user doesn’t even have Chrome installed, and has chosen the “default browser” option 100 times already.

I’m so fed up with these nudges.

amelius2• 1 year ago

Better yet, include some piece of code in your webpage that is dynamically loaded from e.g. EFF.org or mozilla.org.

That way, you give these organizations the power to nuke Chrome, one day.

This can also be seen as a kind of mutually assured destruction approach, to keep Google in check.

p_j_w• 1 year ago

Webmasters who make their money on ads seem like the group least likely to do this.

SarahC_• 1 year ago

PROXOMITRON!

Local proxy filter that is like a Pi-hole, but locally!

It's OLD, and became obsolete when browser plugins were invented, but now more relevant than ever!

Because it's between the server and the client - it can do what it wants!

belter2• 1 year ago

A gift to reduce global CO2 search emissions...

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

https://www.proxomitron.info/

driverdan• 1 year ago

Wow, that brings me back. I used to use Proxomitron before plugin ad blockers were a thing.

belter2• 1 year ago

It's 2025.

Here is a list of great browsers committed to MV2 support. If anybody from Google tries to gaslight you with "but security..." review this:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=gmail.com

and ask them why do they still support connection with so many insecure tls suites ;-)

Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/download/

Brave: https://brave.com/download/

Waterfox: https://www.waterfox.net/download/

LibreWolf: https://librewolf.net/installation/

Pale Moon: https://www.palemoon.org/download.shtml

Thorium: https://thorium.rocks/

Ungoogled Chromium: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...

Floorp: https://floorp.app/en-US/download

throw123xz3• 1 year ago

There's essentially 2 browsers in that long list: Firefox and Chromium.

Everyone using Chromium as base committed to MV2 support, but that's while Chromium itself still supports MV2. What will happen when Google changes things enough that the small browsers can't merge updates in a day or two while maintaining MV2 support? I doubt Vivaldi and Brave have the resources to actually fork Chromium... not even going to mention small projects like Thorium or Ungoogle Chromium.

And the Firefox-based browsers are in a similar position. The 2 or 3 students working on Floorp can't do much if Mozilla decides to drop support and then introduces changes that breaks compatibility with old code.

Of course those browsers can decide to stop merging upstream code, but then you get a Pale Moon... even if we ignore security flaws (which are a problem for you and your machine), a visit to their forum tells me that it struggles with a few websites.

konart• 1 year ago

This should also mention Orion: https://kagi.com/orion/

ajnaiz• 1 year ago

brave dont work, same message when I try to watch any video. Why none repporting that?

bitlax• 1 year ago

What browser would you suggest? Firefox is a privacy nightmare as well.

qoez• 1 year ago

I just tried firefox because of this update but I had to switch back because it's so slow. Sacrificing competitive advantage stings too much to much just for this.

paulluuk• 1 year ago

Interesting, I also just installed Firefox because of OPs comment, and I'm amazed at how much faster it is then Chrome.

bornfreddy4• 1 year ago

Yeah, it's not Firefox that is slow, it is Google properties that are slow on Firefox. Otherwise FF is fast, or at least Chrome is just as slow or slower (judging by seeing others use it).

I mostly avoid Google websites, but when I can't, I always use Brave/Edge/Chromium on those. E.g. Google Earth is especially useless outside of Chrome-land.

Firefox (with uBO) also probably wins any realistic speed comparison simply because it still supports MV2. I really don't care how fast the ads are loaded, I prefer blocking them. Especially the most privacy invading ones (i.e. by Google).

ErrorNoBrain• 1 year ago

Let's not forget, you'll have to ditch Chromium based applications too, like discord, VScode, spotify, and whatever else is basically a chrome browser.

querez• 1 year ago

Why? I fail to see how using chromium as basis for other apps has impact on who has the power to innovate in the browser space?

internet20003• 1 year ago

Don't put this on the users. The blame is 50% on web developers, 25% on Mozilla for screwing the pooch, 25% on Google themselves for advertising it so strongly across their properties.

account428• 1 year ago

I think we should also assign some blame to the market regulators that have failed to do their job and to the voters that let them get away with that.

ForHackernews• 1 year ago

"yeah the free internet, sure, but have you considered Firefox Pocket and also woke?"

^ Every single time this comes up on HackerNews for the past decade

godelski4• 1 year ago

  > ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers).

People should do this for many reasons. Monopolies are not good for anyone, including Google[0].

For most people, that means installing Firefox or using Safari. There are others, but the space is small. Don't listen to people, Firefox is perfectly good and most people wont see major differences.

Truth is we like to complain. It's good to push things forward and find issues that need to be fixed, not nothing is perfect. For every complaint about Firefox there's another for Chrome. You can't just switch to Brave, Edge, Opera or some other color of Chrome. Things will feel different, but really it's easy to make mountains out of molehills. So what do you care more about?

[0] short term, yes. Long term no. Classic monopoly gets lazy and rests upon its laurels

physPop• 1 year ago

Safari is also not adblocker friendly. Lots of other entrants to try though. Brave in particular is great!

healsdata• 1 year ago

Don't listen to people, Firefox is perfectly good and most people wont see major differences.

I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. I used Firefox exclusively for about a year and had a website not work about once a month. This included my state's unemployment portal and a small business store.

When it happens, there's no indication of why. It's only because I'm technical I thought too try it in Chrome. My non-technical family isn't going navigate that.

throw10920• 1 year ago

If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers).

I disagree, on two fronts.

First, I think that the underlying root cause is a level lower - it's the fact that so much content on the web is funded via privacy-invasive and malware-laden advertisements, rather than direct payment.

Second, there are multiple valid things that you can do - you don't just have to pick one.

You can work on Manifest V2 bypasses and you can boycott Chrom{e,ium} and you can contact your representatives to ask them to craft regulation against this and you can promote/use financial models where you pay for stuff with money instead of eyeballs. All are useful! (especially because regulation is incredibly difficult to get write and takes a long time to build political will, draft, pass, and implement)

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year ago

"If people don't agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers)."

Is it OK to use non-Chromium browsers that send search query data or other behavioural data to Google by default

"Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web."

Let's say, hypothetically, the company behind a particular non-Chromium browser is Google's business partner and dependent on Google for its continued existence

And that Google can effectively pull the plug on this non-Chromium browser at any time for any reason

Would choosing this particular browser be a correct course of action to "hit them where it hurts"

turok• 1 year ago

Firefox is very nice these days, and will prompt you to import all your Chrome data if you haven't opened it in a while. It's a very easy thing to do, and U-block origin works on it.

toobulkeh• 1 year ago

Why ditch Chromium browsers? Forks can still get away from the Chrome specialities. (Eg Brave)

Beijinger2• 1 year ago

I did not even realize my ublock origin was turned off. My HOST FILE script did the same service: https://expatcircle.com/cms/privacy-advanced-ublock-origin-w...

More concerning is that social fixer was turned off: https://socialfixer.com/

MFGA Make Facebook Great again ;-)

Beijinger2• 1 year ago

Why the downvote?

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

Google is here

kingo55• 1 year ago

Changing your hosts file helps but it would only block hostnames primarily used for ads and trackers - it wouldn't address those trackers and ads loaded from hostnames shared with actual content. The more sophisticated sites will proxy their tracking and ads through their main app:

E.g. www.cnn.com/ads.js

I prefer having multiple layers just in case anything drops off:

1. VPN DNS / AdGuard local cached DNS 2. uBlock Origin

It's like wearing two condoms (but it feels better than natural).

RevEng3• 1 year ago

Hosts alone won't solve many ads. Plenty of companies include their own annoying content from their own domains. uBlock lets you get far more fine grained, blocking specific paths.

crinkly3• 1 year ago

Signed up to complain about this. YT is no longer worth watching ads for. Anything that is worth paying for, the money needs to go via Patreon so the publisher isn't demonetized at a whim. The rest is brain-rot, utter shit and a lot of damaging misinformation. I hope it dies. While it remains easy to do so, I will "steal" with yt-dlp and proudly watch it ad-free on VLC on my computer. If they break that then I'm no longer interested.

When this became adversarial, which was a battle that lasted the last year of inconvenience I ended up dumping every Google thing I have. So the Pixel is GrapheneOS now with no Google crap. Browser is Firefox. Email has moved from Gmail to Fastmail with a domain.

My Google account is closed after 20 years. The relationship is dead. They can do what they want. I don't care any more.

hengheng• 1 year ago

You didn't really mention what aggravated you.

crinkly3• 1 year ago

Initially the increase in frequency of the advertising on Android youtube app. Followed by uBlock being broken in Chrome. Followed by uBlock being tarpitted in Firefox. Followed by FreeTube client getting 403 IP forbidden requests and DRM content shovelled down which could not be rendered.

They just did everything to make sure I watched the ads and burn all my bandwidth, which can be somewhat limited and expensive as I travel a lot.

urda• 1 year ago

You bypass it by installing Firefox.

qustrolabe• 1 year ago

Firefox is awful. Both as a browser itself and as a base for other browsers. Such a shame that Zen didn't use Chromium :(

dangraper23• 1 year ago

Weird, Firefox blows Chrome out of the water. What do you smoke?

bluehatbrit• 1 year ago

Your comment is pretty meaningless without more specifics.

I switched to Firefox again back in 2017, I have 0 issues with it. If anything it's faster and less resources hungry than chrome in my usage. The extension ecosystem is now arguably better with MV3 being rolled out to chrome.

Probably the only annoying thing was learning where the buttons are in the devtools. They're all still there, just laid out differently. It took about a week to get to grips with that.

What exactly makes you say it's an awful browser?

srcoder• 1 year ago

I use Zen everyday and a love it! I am glad they chose Firefox as a base, otherwise I would have skipped it. Firefox is stable, I open it when I boot my PC which runs for weeks and never think anything about it. On topic of ad blocking, I think that there are more ways to anoy users using ad blockers today despite of which browser someone uses, with ad block detection and blocking access. If your browser is build by a ad company, expect these changes. For this reason I won't use these browsers

bradgessler• 1 year ago

Try Safari, Firefox, or any other non-Chrome browser.

heraldgeezer4• 1 year ago

Just use Firefox with ublock origin. On Android too. Nightly has tabs on tablet.

At work I use Edge (MS integration w SSO and all). Edge has some nice features like vertical tabs and copilot. (yes, email writing with AI is nice)

We are allowed Chrome and FF so have those too with ublock on FF. Chrome is 3rd choice if a site really needs it and for testing.

OlivOnTech• 1 year ago

Firefox has had vertical tabs (and tabs groups) for few months now

heraldgeezer4• 1 year ago

Indeed. I love the FF vertical tabs too, I should say.

Too bad the work one is still locked to 128 ESR :(

fracus• 1 year ago

But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023. It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions usin

Well, thanks for nothing?

deryilz9• 1 year ago

Author here, sorry. I don't think any open-source extension (especially large adblockers with millions of users) could actually get away with using this bug, because Google is paying close attention to them. It would've been patched immediately either way.

physicles• 1 year ago

You’re right, and good on you for paying attention to the human/business context behind the code.

breve2• 1 year ago

The best bypass is to use Firefox. uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

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

Aperocky2• 1 year ago

Never realized anything was happening as I was on Firefox, until I saw ads as my wife was browsing youtube despite installing ublock for her years ago.

thaumasiotes3• 1 year ago

YouTube recently started showing ads through uBO in Firefox.

madaxe_again• 1 year ago

My wife was pissed when I installed an adblocker for her - turns out she likes the ads.

bloudermilk• 1 year ago

Switched (back) to Firefox from Chrome years ago and haven’t looked back. Between uBlock and Privacy Badger my web experience is pretty good despite the endless assault on end users.

aziaziazi2• 1 year ago

I can’t help seeing ad blockers as fairless content consumption, like choosing to download films, musics and books without paying the creator and the distributor (VOD, MOD, concerts, libraries…). Sounds great for you but how would that work if everyone would do the same?

Although we all be happy to se more competition, using an ad blocker on Google sites (and G-add financed-sites) have no positive effect for the competitors.

Don’t take me wrong, I hate Ads and Google methods but we can’t all rob the same store and hope there will be infinite food on the shelves and that the next store will benefit from that.

chgs2• 1 year ago

Almost all content I consume is not funded by adverts, it’s funded by passion or subscription or donation.

Adverts have no positive effects for anyone other than the advertising firm. They cost the viewer more than the provide the advertiser

mercantile• 1 year ago

I sincerely hope that having produced a comment like that, you are not using ad blockers of any kind in any browser, including the reduced functionality Chrome uBlock Origin on manifest V3.

For me, ads broke the informal social contract between provider and end user years ago. Small, unobtrusive advertisements might've been okay, but ads eating an inordinate amount of my time and bandwidth, which exfiltrate my personal information, and which are served to me via SEO tricks and dark patterns are not okay. If sites want to ban me for not viewing their ads, fine. In the meantime, I won't lose any sleep over using my adblocker.

For you, if you are lecturing us on the moral imperative of viewing ads, then you better be viewing those ads yourself rather than only espousing cheap rhetoric.

breve2• 1 year ago

Google doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not written in the stars that Google must succeed. If Google's business model doesn't meet web users expectations then it's perfectly alright for Google to fail as a business. Businesses fail all the time.

Google is not special or different. Google can adapt or die.

Remember also that as Google has grown and captured more of the available attention and advertising dollars, other businesses that rely on attention and advertising such as free-to-air TV or print media have contracted and even failed. Google has shed no tears for them and, correspondingly, there's no need to shed tears for Google.

throwaway773852• 1 year ago

I principally agree with you. But in reality, the ad-funded model has failed. It failed a long time ago.

There were never any restrictions placed on it, so it became a self-sustaining downward spiral to the current state of things. When I see the internet without an ad-blocker it is completely unusable. Quite frankly, I would most likely stop using most of the internet altogether if I couldn't block ads.

So what is the alternative? Same as always: paid services. A service / platform can either work out a pricing model that works for people, or it shouldn't / can't exist in that form.

Some people will argue that they'd rather have ads and also content for free and that's fine. Maybe some people can tolerate them. I cannot. I find them to be as close to experiencing physical pain as possible. It's like pure mind-poison and I will bend over backwards to avoid ads.

I am waiting for the age of smart-glasses to begin so that I can filter out ads in real-life as well. I simply never, ever, under any circumstances want to see any advertising ever.

If I want a product or service, I'll go search for it. I don't need anything to be suggested to me. And this is just my battle-hardened mind. I daren't think of what ads do to un-developed, children's minds.

It should be the government's responsibility to severely restrict advertising until it nearly doesn't exist. But that's not the world we live in, so I have taken matters into my own hands.

zelphirkalt3• 1 year ago

This is a comical view. If protection of downloadable material that someone wants you to pay for, is removed by an ad blocker, then that is broken by design. Make a website that is suitable to sell things, is the solution.

pyrale3• 1 year ago

Sounds great for you but how would that work if everyone would do the same?

I guess we would be free from companies such as Meta and Google? Where do I sign up?

You also seem to think that advertisement has no impact on alternative distribution methods. The fact that other viable options are scarce currently only shows that ad companies have a stranglehold on creative industries through their monopoly.

aetimmes• 1 year ago

Running ad blockers for me is a matter of principle. The amount of tracking and telemetry that exists on the Internet is 1. massively invasive from a privacy perspective and 2. massively wasteful from an energy, bandwidth and time perspective.

If you have something worth selling, then sell it.

gpvos2• 1 year ago

I wouldn't mind if Google et al. went bankrupt. Only Youtube would be somewhat of a loss.

BolexNOLA3• 1 year ago

It seems to me that adblocking adoption increases the more companies actively fight it/ramp up their advertising and drown us in it. I mean you have Microsoft injecting ads straight into their OS last I heard (correct me if I’m wrong) and they even charge for windows.

People clearly will live with ads but there is a point where it becomes way too much and some people simply won’t tolerate it at that point.

doctorpangloss3• 1 year ago

Most people are not thinking deeply about the nuances. But it seems fair: Google take away thing, for fake reason, Google bad.

norskeld2• 1 year ago

Speaking of 'works best in Firefox'... I mainly use Chrome (kinda have to), and it's practically impossible to use it for reviewing big GitHub PRs with many files changed (UI just freezes), but everything's perfectly fine in Firefox!

zelphirkalt3• 1 year ago

Could this be a subjective experience? Is it reproducible on multiple machines? And have you tried it with a new profile?

abustamam• 1 year ago

Our CTO was giving a hybrid presentation in a conference room on zoom, and his M3 Mac kept complaining of high memory usage. Chrome was rated at taking 60GB of memory.

No single consumer application should be taking over 60gb of memory.

gavinray• 1 year ago

I use Edge on both Win + Android, and uBlock Origin works perfectly on both.

throw123xz3• 1 year ago

Last time I used Edge (early this year), it asked me if I allowed to track me (the usual cookies message) when I opened a new tab, so while they still support Mv2, I'm not sure if it's the browser to use if you want some privacy and block ads.

znpy3• 1 year ago

Somebody should probably fork chromium.

I remember when Firefox was getting traction, it had a killer feature: speed.

A chromium fork could come with a simple killer feature: bringing back the possibility of blocking requests.

I’m pretty sure it would quickly gain traction.

slig• 1 year ago

That's Brave, a fork with native AdBlock.

jklas2hjdsdk3• 1 year ago

Exactly... brave is the de facto choice for cryptobros. The copying of UBOs work is a nice addition too.

znpy3• 1 year ago

Ah nice, I’m installing that then

raspasov• 1 year ago

I use Safari.

delduca• 1 year ago

Safari + Wipr2 FTW!

ltbarcly3• 1 year ago

I was able to bypass the chrome changes by installing firefox. Honestly it's better than I thought it would be, and I have no serious complaints, or broken sites. Yay web standards.

loloquwowndueo• 1 year ago

Luckily I only need to use chrome on my work laptop, I use Firefox everywhere else. Still sad to see uBlock origin stop working which was useful to keep a cleaner experience when browsing the web for work reasons (research, documentation, etc).

akomtu• 1 year ago

Google is running an experiment: how much ads crap users are willing to tolerate before they switch supplier.

rasz4• 1 year ago

It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions using opt_webViewInstanceId actually had WebView permissions

soo will this still just work if we give uBo webview permission?

deryilz9• 1 year ago

Unfortunately extensions can't have webview perms :(

rasz4• 1 year ago

"'webview' is only allowed for packaged apps, but this is a extension."

:( but maybe Vivaldi and Brave could remove this check just for fun.

unstatusthequo• 1 year ago

I’ve been happy with Orion on macOS. I get it’s WebKit but at least it’s not Chrome. Brave was also good if you must have chromium.

RockstarSprain• 1 year ago

Would love to give Firefox a chance but one thing that stops me (apart from occasional website loading bugs) is inability to install PWAs. Not sure why it’s not implemented like it has been for a long time in Chrome and all its forks.

I have found a 3rd party extension that claims to facilitate this (0) but still feel uncomfortable to use this for privacy reasons.

(0) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire...

rs1862• 1 year ago

If you really care, it's ok to just Firefox for the majority of your web browsing activities but use Chrome or a fork for PWA.

Although using Firefox increasingly means a worse experience, including:

* infinite loop of Cloudflare verification * inferior performance compared to Chrome (page loading, large page scrolling) * subtle bugs (e.g. audio handling) * WebUSB support

I have personally run into all of them. Some are under Firefox's control but others are not. I do still use Firefox for most websites unless it's technically not possible, but unfortunately the exception is happening more and more.

paulryanrogers12• 1 year ago

I don't run into CAPTCHA loops with Firefox. Have you tried changing your user agent to pretend to be Firefox on Windows or Mac? I've heard Linux users are more likely to be interpreted as bots.

acdha2• 1 year ago

* infinite loop of Cloudflare verification * inferior performance compared to Chrome (page loading, large page scrolling) * subtle bugs (e.g. audio handling)

The first two are likely due to extensions rather than the core Firefox. I find at least as many cases where it’s faster, and it usually uses less memory. The third one has high variability - I’ve reported enough bugs against all of the major browsers not to trust any of them but these days there are a lot of web developers who only test on Chrome and half of the time I find what appears to be a bug in Safari or Firefox it’s really an unnecessary reliance on something Chrome specific.

bagacrap• 1 year ago

Probably wants to share state though (cookie jar, history, password manager, etc)

The bottom line is that Google invests more in Chrome than Mozilla can afford to invest in Ff, so the latter will likely never catch up in features or performance.

alex1138• 1 year ago

1) A lot of ads are terribly overdone and even sometimes actively malicious (malware or tracking). It makes no sense to aggressively try to stamp it out like Google is doing

2) Aside from the Page/Brin stealing tech salaries thing (yeah it really did happen) what happened to Google? They've always been a bit incompetent but their behavior (ie Chrome and increasing censorship on Google/Youtube the last few years) has been really bad, I thought they were basically founded off idealism

jacquesm7• 1 year ago

and even sometimes actively malicious

Most of the times. In fact, the situations where they are not actively tracking are exceedingly rare.

acdha2• 1 year ago

Aside from the Page/Brin stealing tech salaries thing (yeah it really did happen) what happened to Google?

They bought DoubleClick in 2009, with an outcome similar to the way Boeing bought McDonnell-Douglas but their management culture was taken over by acquired company. They haven’t launched a popular product since and their preexisting products have clearly been shifting to an “ads justify the means” mentality over time.

RevEng3• 1 year ago

Idealism does with capitalism. Executives and shareholders don't care about ideals: they want money. All of the questionable things Google has done have been in pursuit of ever larger profits.

froderick• 1 year ago

As an exclusive Firefox user, with really great ad blocking features, I didn’t notice that Chrome got worse on this front. I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps it’s time for a change. Best of luck.

CommenterPerson• 1 year ago

Why not use DuckDuckGo?

andxor• 1 year ago

Just use uBlock Origin Lite.

sciencesama• 1 year ago

Using ebpf to block ads would be fun !! Need a way to translate rules into blocking rules for ebpf

paulryanrogers12• 1 year ago

How would that work? Isn't having all the browser and doc context what makes UBO (MV2) the most robust blocker?

Would the browser be talking to the kernel through some back channel?

est2• 1 year ago

I got downvoted for commenting this, why can't we make a ManifestV2-like framework using .DLLs ? This can enable network control for ad blockers and Google can do nothing about it.

deryilz9• 1 year ago

I think the trouble is that certain adblocking features (like skipping ads on YouTube, Twitch, etc) require modifying the page you're viewing in your browser; just filtering network requests isn't enough. So right now a browser extension is the most natural choice for an adblocker, but honestly that might change if browsers keep being so hostile towards them.

est2• 1 year ago

expose DOM and JSON to external .DLL then

browsers should have open Web standards as well as open local runtime.

zulban5• 1 year ago

I don't "bypass" Chrome when they want to melt my brain with their business model, I use Firefox. I don't "bypass" Windows when they want to melt my brain with their business model, I use Linux. No idea why so many "hackers" doing "bypasses" can't instead take action that is simpler, long lasting, and easier. Do people need to jerked around 50 times for 20 years before realizing it will keep happening and their "bypasses" are just temporary bandaids?

arcfour• 1 year ago

You should read the article before commenting; your comment is a non-sequitur.

doctorpangloss3• 1 year ago

I don’t know. Eventually you read enough of this stuff and you would rather the next breath be, take leadership on a real solution. To me it’s a “sequitur” to say, the biggest fuck you is to convince people to stop using Chrome, not to fix bugs for their extremely highly paid engineers for free.

zulban5• 1 year ago

Right back at you. If you think my comment is a non-sequitur, maybe you didn't read the article?

bravesoul2• 1 year ago

It's a oui-sequitur for sure.

pharrington• 1 year ago

Billions of non-programmers, who have no idea what an extension manifest even is, use Chrome.

mrcsharp2• 1 year ago

No idea why so many "hackers" doing "bypasses" ....

Because that's what it means to be a hacker. Yes, installing Firefox is simpler (and I'm a Firefox user) but I respect the effort to overcome Google's measures in disallowing certain addons.

whatshisface• 1 year ago

But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023. It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions using opt_webViewInstanceId actually had WebView permissions. For the report, I netted a massive reward of $0. They decided it wasn't a security issue, and honestly, I agree, because it didn't give extensions access to data they didn't already have.

The effort to overcome the community's chance at discovering the workaround?

zulban5• 1 year ago

"Because that's what it means to be a hacker."

Sure. But to me "hacking" this cat and mouse game is not very compelling. I feel like I've seen a thousand articles exactly like this over the years. This won't work in 4 months.

"It was patched in Chrome 118 by ..."

Or already?

owebmaster2• 1 year ago

I'm with you with this idea but relying on firefox is not much better. I use PWAs a lot and Firefox decided that PWAs are not worth implementing or maintaining their past implementation.

I still use firefox 70% of the time but this is wrong and go against what the users want.

hannofcart• 1 year ago

+1 to this. This is probably the only thing that keeps me from ditching Chrome/Brave and going back to Firefox.

JohnFen• 1 year ago

It's more about the challenge of it than practicality.

Workaccount2• 1 year ago

People like the service/product, but don't like cost.

So the solution is mental acrobatics while using a backdoor for access.

eviks10• 1 year ago

for 20 years ... just temporary bandaids

Using superior software for two decades is a very good bandaid

fooker• 1 year ago

Great, except firefox is pretty bad nowadays.

Not their fault of course, with people not testing websites on non chrome derived browsers.

WarOnPrivacy4• 1 year ago

except firefox is pretty bad nowadays.

Pretty bad as in that isn't true?

Firefox is the option that doesn't intentionally leave users vulnerable to hostile adtech. Firefox is the option with containers. Past that it is performant and reliable under a wide variety of user loads and platforms.

or Pretty bad as in Firefox+forks are better than the alternatives?

It is true that some unfortunate default options were recently added to Firefox configs.

Those options are unfortunate because they are variants of anti-user options baked into Chromium - options created to keep Chromium users susceptible to big-tech's worst intentions.

snowram• 1 year ago

I browse the web daily, and the number of website that ever gave me trouble on Firefox can be counted on a single hand. The website compatibility issue is vastly overblown.

weregiraffe• 1 year ago

No, firefox is great nowadays.

ulrikrasmussen2• 1 year ago

How? Seriously, I keep seeing this argument against using Firefox, but as a long time user I fail to see any glaring issues with it.

The only websites that break for me are those I broke on purpose by using ad-block.

ozim• 1 year ago

FF is my daily driver and I don’t see any issues. Do you have examples?

AlchemistCamp• 1 year ago

Firefox has been my main browser for almost 10 years and I haven't encountered any challenges other than availability of plugins, but even that has been a very rare issue.

johnnyanmac5• 1 year ago

I've switched to Firefox 3 years ago now after using Chrome for a decade. The list of things I missed from chrome:

- Tab grouping, now added in Firefox as of a few months ago

- built-in translation services. Firefox is slowly introducing this, but its missing many languages. In the meantime, a translation extension works fine.

- Google products operating better... but the issue here is obvious and outside of Firefox's control.

- various micro quirks from random sites I might find during research. Nothing functionality breaking, just clear examples where there was likely hard coded chrome user agent business.

- the occasional extension on Chrome that didn't have a Firefox port. This happened maybe 4 times total.

so, 2 things that are fixed (or close to), one anti-competitive measure, and the 2 smallest nitpicks I could imagine. I don't know what the fuss is that justifies Firefox being considered vastly inferior to Chrome these days. Even thsoe small issues are far offset by the ability to have proper adblock. Using Adblock on Chrome for my work computer is miserable.

mumbisChungo• 1 year ago

What makes firefox better than brave?

Sunspark2• 1 year ago

For me, I like being able to set a default font/size/colour for all websites as an override. Chromium browsers don't do that out of the box.

I like that it quarantines most of Facebook's shenanigans with cookies and the like.

I can't compare Brave's adblock to uBlock Origin, but it's probably good enough.

vachina2• 1 year ago

Firefox is not a Chromium fork

Kwpolska3• 1 year ago

It doesn't do crypto bullshit, for example.

swinglock• 1 year ago

It supports keeping long term history so you can find a page you visited years ago from the history search in the address bar. Chrome/Google likes when you have to search for it and Brave has inherited that.

Retr0id• 1 year ago

The article is clearly not intended as an ad-blocking tutorial, it is an article about security research and API weirdness.

Sure, it inspires ad blocking meta-discussion, but if you're complaining that the author has a strategically suboptimal approach to blocking ads then you have missed the point.

billmcneale• 1 year ago

Not everyone has your luxury of being able to choose their tools.

john01dav• 1 year ago

Another advantage of this approach is that collectively it applies pressure against such toxic business models. This pressure can have an outsized impact for the number of people that do it because it skews towards technical people who will naturally influence their area of expertise more than the same number of lay users.

dheera3• 1 year ago

Firefox still doesn't work.

1 - Google Meet consumes 40%-100% of my CPU on Firefox, and my laptop becomes a space heater

2 - My Yubikeys don't work. Touching them doesn't get into any of the websites I use that use 2FA.

So, no Firefox.

paffdragon• 1 year ago

Is this on Linux? Do you have an example of a website where Yubikey does not work? I'm curious, because I use Firefox on Linux for years, also for work, and never hit a site where my Yubikeys would not work. (I'm also using Google Meet regularly for work from Firefox without problems)

anthk2• 1 year ago

about:config

Search for accel, look up the 'layout...' key, set it to true.

Also, set the webgl force enabled... key to true too.

DANmode• 1 year ago

They finally enabled per site isolation by default after years of Chromium having it - still not in mobile though.

Wonder what else I'm not aware of that they're slack on.

flufluflufluffy• 1 year ago

Bro it’s for the fun and interest of figuring it out. That’s what hackers do. The writer obviously knew it’s a “temporary bandaid” — they notified Google about it themself.

johnnyanmac5• 1 year ago

I switched to Firefox, but I'm unfortunately stuck to Windows for professional work. I need several high profile software to get proper Linux support before I can make that jump.

When I eventually go indie, though: I am 100% making use of a Linux workflow.

Do people need to jerked around 50 times for 20 years before realizing it will keep happening and their "bypasses" are just temporary bandaids?

Sadly, yes. The networkign effect is extremely strong. Twitter was complained about even before musk, but it still too 3 years before people really started considering the move. emphasis on "consider": because twitter still has a lot of foot traffic for what it is in 2025.

chii• 1 year ago

use Linux

except that for a majority of users, windows is where their applications are at - such as gaming, word processing, or some other thing. Sure there are replacements (somewhat) for each of those categories, but they are not direct replacements, and require a cost of some kind (retraining, or a substitute quality). This is esp. true for gaming, and it's only recent that gaming has made some inroads via the steam deck (steamOS), which isn't available to a general PC (only handheld PCs with AMD processors iirc).

People who say "just switch" to linux hasn't done it for their family/friends.

ronjakoi• 1 year ago

Proton is available for desktop Steam as well, just pick your distro and go.

debugnik• 1 year ago

(steamOS), which isn't available to a general PC

Most of its secret sauce is either in Proton or upstreamed into Wine, DXVK, SDL, etc. All available to a general PC.

Unless your focus is competitive online games, which often come with Windows-only anti-cheats, you've got a huge catalogue of great games playable on Linux distros. I did the switch about four months ago and I'm not missing Windows, the only pain point has been Nvidia drivers and I'll be solving that by switching vendors.

0points6• 1 year ago

except that for a majority of users, windows is where their applications are at - such as gaming, word processing, or some other thing.

Until you switch to linux you won't understand how inferior your windows setup always was.

It's hard for us to tell you what you are missing out on, you simply need to experience it.

I mostly game in a Windows 10 VM running on my Linux desktop computer. Single keypress to switch to Linux workspace.

This is not because Linux gaming is horrible broken, but rather it gives me a fully separate leisure desktop, and my main Linux desktop is work only.

It also gives me 100% compatibility, unlike wine.

People who say "just switch" to linux hasn't done it for their family/friends.

When we say so here, we are telling you to switch.

Nobody should be forcing anything on friends/family.

I always suggest MacOS for friends/family for ease of support. I would never recommend Windows to anyone.

atoav• 1 year ago

Fallout 4 is running better on Linux than on Windows these days.

ezst• 1 year ago

That's so much less true nowadays,

Web has become the default platform, where most people run most of their app/spend most of their time. Even Microsoft has had no choice but to embrace it, and Outlook (as in, the one from Microsoft office) is now a web first app (normal outlook is rebranded "classic" and we all know where this is heading, for better or worse). In a way, that makes switching OS much easier.

If you add to that that Windows itself is getting major visual overhauls from version to version (sometimes even within) it's not like sticking with it protects you from having to learn different UX paradigms and habits.

And regarding gaming, well, linux with Proton runs games faster than Windows nowadays, that's how little Microsoft cares about gamers/how good Valve is (depending on how you look at it), but the fact of the matter remains.

begueradj• 1 year ago

The day Linux will be used more than Windows, it will be in more trouble than Windows will.

Threat actors are attracted by the most used system.

anthk2• 1 year ago

Fedora Bazzite it's Steam OS. And with Flatpak and Lutris you can have that setup everywhere, but some distros optimize the setings and compilations for the desktop better than Others:

- Solus OS

- Fedora Bazzite

- Catchy OS

Takennickname• 1 year ago

I disagree that that's the majority of users.

The majority of users either use only web applications, or web applications and Microsoft Office.

The true majority of users are on mobile.

Windows is only unreplaceable for gamers. Which is fine, because Windows is a toy anyway.

zulban5• 1 year ago

You can always tell how much someone has tried Linux based on how they talk about it.

sky22242• 1 year ago

I get what you're saying, but the problem is the software does 90% of what I want really well and I like that they do that 90% super well and I want to keep that.

In your Windows vs. Linux example, Linux just doesn't do a lot of things very well on the UI/UX side of things (e.g., window management, driver support, an out of the box experience). Knock Windows all you want, but it honestly does quite a few pretty important things very well.

So that's why I'll spend some time to resist the negative changes.

ObscureScience• 1 year ago

In your Windows vs. Linux example, Linux just doesn't do a lot of things very well on the UI/UX side of things (e.g., window management, driver support, an out of the box experience).

That judgement confuses me a lot. Window management, drivers and out of the box experience has been much better in Linux for the last 10 years in my experience. Sure, there are some companies that don't ship drivers for Linux or the configuration software is not fully fledged. Window management has almost always been better in Linux, but of course depends on the WM. Windows innovated one nice feature in Vista (aero snap) which most desktop environments has implemented since.

If you install Fedora, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, what are you lacking from that out of the box experience? Generally no driver installation needed, and no cleaning up of bloatware.

patrec• 1 year ago

And using Google Firefox instead of Google Chrome is more than a temporary bag aid?

Waraqa• 1 year ago

If you are using Chromebook, switching the browser is not an option

temporallobe• 1 year ago

I get it, and mostly agree, but sometimes consumers don’t have much choice with browsers and OSs; moreover, most consumers are simply technologically ignorant or agnostic of those things. Many users don’t even know exactly what a browser or OS is, and they just want to live their lives scrolling through tiktok or getting work done.

zulban5• 1 year ago

I wasn't writing about consumers though. I was writing about "hackers" who might read this article and try this hack.

ivanjermakov• 1 year ago

No idea why so many "hackers" doing "bypasses" can't instead take action that is simpler

Because hacking is about solving hard and unnecessary problems

atlintots• 1 year ago

I bypass Google's big anti-adblock updates by using Firefox

pogue• 1 year ago

Why couldn't someone just compile Chromium and strip out webRequestBlocking from the code?

sneak• 1 year ago

So theoretically Chrome is open source.

Open source is supposed to prevent issues like this, as it is possible to fork Chrome pre-MV3 and preserve this functionality.

However, this appears to have not happened.

Perhaps we need a better definition of “open source”, or well-funded organizations that are adversarial in nature to the maintainers of open source commercial software.

Lots of f/oss has malware and misfeatures in it, hiding behind the guise of “open source”. It doesn’t count unless there are non-corporate interests at work in the project that are willing and able to fork.

yard20105• 1 year ago

Chrome is open source just like Russia and Iran are democratic dictatorships. Just in the naming.

arccy2• 1 year ago

open source only means you can use and fork it without too many restrictions. it doesn't mean open governance or did the greater good.

scotty792• 1 year ago

I switched away from Chrome years ago. Not because of their weird anit-adblock moves. Just because the quality of their software dropped. Because of various UI bugs of their tabs that didn't get fixed with updates. I remembers that when Chrome came out it was rock solid and fast so it's a huge disappointment.

I tried out Firefox again and nowadays it is as fast and as solid as Chrome used to be. Never looked back. I still keep Chrome for cases when somebody YOLOed their website, but I use it the way I used to use IE, briefly and with distaste. With the next upgrade I might just start using builtin Edge for that and not bother to install Chrome at all.

qwertox2• 1 year ago

For the report, I netted a massive reward of $0.

Sure, not a security issue. But given how much Google hates Ad Blockers, they could have easily given him some USD 50,000.

raydenvm• 1 year ago

I suppose that switching to Brave will be one of the best solutions after all. They have already comment this in June: https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3

moffkalast4• 1 year ago

What makes Brave trustworthy enough for us to run our entire life through it? For me it's irreparably forever tainted by crypto grifting.

pixxel• 1 year ago

Your favourite corporations commit all sorts of crimes (ethical and actual). But let’s remember that questionable thing Brave did for eternity.

esskay9• 1 year ago

The 'crypto grifting' is something you can turn off completely, it's there as a way to make the browser sustainable without accepting payments from Google to make it the default search engine.

I'd argue its far more trustworthy than modern day Firefox/Mozilla, they're not exactly the second coming these days.

What makes Firefox more trustworthy?

barryvan• 1 year ago

Or Firefox, which isn't just a reskinned Chrome...

esskay9• 1 year ago

If you think Braves just 'reskinned chrome' you've clearly not used it.

wejick• 1 year ago

For just another chromium skin, I prefer vivaldi as it has more traditional offerings than brave. While having more customizable ui.

closetkantian• 1 year ago

Would it be possible to create a web browser where different tabs are running other browsers? Like I could have chrome in one tab and Firefox in another? Almost like a VM?

Doxin• 1 year ago

You used to have an activeX plugin for internet explorer that would selectively render certain sites using google chrome

bgnn• 1 year ago

Reading the comments, I see a lot of hate for Firefox. What is the explanation for this (other than people not trying Firefox and assuming it's inferior)?

jacquesm7• 1 year ago

I love Firefox, I've bee using it for as long as it exists and Netscape before that. It's Mozilla I have a problem with. Mozilla has allowed itself to become controlled opposition rather than the aggressive underdog that it should be. Lots of the money they take in that could go to improving Firefox is spent on stuff I could not care less about. There is no way to earmark funds sent to Mozilla as 'browser only'.

WhrRTheBaboons• 1 year ago

Ultimately the issue is allowing Google to skirt around anti-monopoly rules by throwing money at Mozilla. Can't really blame the latter for cashing in when the rules fail at enforcing a competitive environment.

Hate the game, not the player, basically.

hashstring• 1 year ago

Also their browser security always seems to lag behind…

haloboy777• 1 year ago

I love using firefox. Mozilla has lost all the trust I had in them. The biggest blow for me was them shutting down pocket.

qilo• 1 year ago

Mozilla sells user data to third parties. Their statement:

The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

Anamon• 1 year ago

I wouldn't say that this implies they really are selling user data. By that definiton of sale, I can understand why their lawyers would consider it almost impossible to fully comply with.

I totally understand why the Act would use such vague wording and cast such a wide net, considering the underhanded actions of ad companies. But I also understand no longer feeling comfortable guaranteeing that nothing that could reasonably be argued to fall under this definiton would ever happen. Heck, I think some lawyers might argue that even just sending an anonymous GET request to any web server would qualify (disclosing personal information to a third party). Seems like the only way to stay fully compliant is to ship a browser with only an offline mode, haha.

jacquesm7• 1 year ago

An adblocker is a firewall for your brain. Google should have no say over what I consume and when and with for instance youtube being pretty much unavoidable their monopoly position is abused by forcing you to pay for it. Doubly so because of the bait-and-switch, I'm fine with platforms that start off being ad supported, I'm not fine with platforms that become huge on piracy that are free to use by everybody and not an ad in sight and then when bought out suddenly you end up as a captive lemon to be squeezed.

paulryanrogers12• 1 year ago

Switching costs for consumers are pretty low. Though I'd agree that for producers, it is hard to compete anywhere else.

jacquesm7• 1 year ago

That's not really true. Youtube is the de-facto means through which a lot of companies and even governments communicate important information to the general public. It took the place of a lot of public broadcasting and documents supplied in paper form. This is highly annoying but hardly a choice on the part of the recipients.

bborud2• 1 year ago

I remember back in the day, one of the big selling points for Google’s search engine used to be that the advertising didn’t get in the way. Imagine that.

le-mark• 1 year ago

I stopped saying this because no one remembers. Or the people I was talking to were to young. It’s way worse now than askjeeves ever was!

RevEng3• 1 year ago

The big reason for me was that it "just worked". Altavista was the biggest player at the time but you had to learn a while query language to get good results. Google's search engine took plain English keywords and have relevant results.

Garvi• 1 year ago

I notice people being very reserved on their criticisms of Google, knowing Google can end their careers in an instant if it chooses to.

kldg2• 1 year ago

Just for anyone here switching: Don't get firefox; get firefox developer edition. It's firefox but you don't need to pay Mozilla $20 and go through verification to local-load browser extensions you write for yourself. (you can do this on non-DE firefox but you have to reload extensions every time you restart browser)

I've been off Chrome for a while after using it for about a decade. Firefox is nice to have around, but ngl, it's behind on standards and some of its implementations are wack. Its performance on video is poor, and its memory management relatively awful, especially if you're the kind of person who leaves your computer on for months at a time; be prepared to open a new tab and copy-paste any "HUD" tab URLs you leave open (e.g. CNBC for the top ticker). I feel like the kind of person who buys an Intel GPU, and I have some thoughts about Nvidia for pushing me here.

paulryanrogers12• 1 year ago

Does DE really persist local add-ons? Last time I tried, it still unloaded them on browser restarts.

kldg2• 1 year ago

yeah; I don't recall if I had to mess around with it at all to get it that way, but I have a couple addons I wrote which stay loaded after browser restarts and PC reboots. Edit: in about:config set xpinstall.signatures.required to false

(also sorry for going so aggro on FF in earlier comment; I guess I was hungry or something)

john_alan• 1 year ago

who uses browser level Adblockers anymore?

Just use Pihole.

Traveling? VPN home then Pihole

paulryanrogers12• 1 year ago

Apparently a lot of folks, at least judging by UBO user numbers. Pihole doesn't look trivial to setup.

exabrial• 1 year ago

Google hijacked the Internet by dominating web standards and abusing their market position. We could vote on a new RFC and Google gets the veto vote merely if they don’t want to put it in Chrome.

baxuz• 1 year ago

Just get AdGuard as it's a superior solution anyway.

And I mean the actual app that can modify responses, not a simple DNS filter.

jambutters• 1 year ago

I thought it was just a DNS filter. I have it running on my pi

diebillionaires• 1 year ago

People shouldn’t be using chrome anymore. Not even the technologically illiterate. I’d go so far as to say even safari is possibly more private.

moffkalast4• 1 year ago

I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023.
It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions using opt_webViewInstanceId actually had WebView permissions.
For the report, I netted a massive reward of $0.

Snitches get stitches, not rewards.

FWIW, on Windows Google relies on the registry to determine weather to use V2 or V3, and it can be reenabled: https://gist.github.com/MuTLY/71849b71e6391c51cd93bdea36137d...

deryilz9• 1 year ago

No adblocking extension would ever rely on a clear bug to function. Google reviews extension code and would immediately patch the bug, and maybe use it as an excuse to kick the extension off the web store. I don't buy the idea that there was a viable second option here.

yyhhooq• 1 year ago

Good

BeautifulOrb• 1 year ago

finally switched to firefox. no regrets

ck2• 1 year ago

     Supermium

https://github.com/win32ss/supermium

https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/

macinjosh• 1 year ago

i never made chrome my daily driver. firefox and safari are wonderful browsers.

coppa• 1 year ago

For work I need various profiles, The feature is so bad on Firefox…. Please community just fix that…

nomendos• 1 year ago

Stop using Chrome. (i.e. as main browser I use Firefox which with containers is unmatched and Brave for any websites that I used Chrome in the past mainly for faster JS, while speed is +/- per bench) This could not have much effect on Google in the beginning (technically informed users first), but at some point it can (and I predict will, as technical literacy and privacy awareness is increasing, plus greed and productization of user data does have limits..) be avalanche moment. It will take variable time due to many variables, but is inevitability (i.e. universe law of "optimal path"). In my opinion, Google has miscalculated with the move to obsolete MV2 (masking it as "security" adds to dishonesty and consequent distrust, which is the opposite from the original Google's founding principles)

replyifuagree• 1 year ago

(Shown above: my earnings from this bug.)

I lol'd!

RS-2322• 1 year ago

I really wish Apple revived Safari for Windows.

In my opinion, it's the only browser that nicely balances performance, privacy, and security.

cbolton• 1 year ago

Doesn't Safari have basically the same limitations as Chrome with Manifest v3?

throw123xz3• 1 year ago

Safari isn't the solution in this case as they were actually the first ones to heavily restrict adblocking. Manifest v3 is inspired by what they did.

McAlpine5892• 1 year ago

Safari does have heavy restrictions on extensions but I still rarely see ads with 1Blocker (Safari extension) and NextDNS. So rarely it feels like never.

It’s also opened up somewhat in recent years. While I personally stick with Safari’s Content Blocking feature for performance reasons, 1Blocker and others do have a JavaScript-based option these days.

shitonU2• 1 year ago

Being neither an expert nor illiterate I've been blocked, very recently, from websites vital to me. Whether caused by Microsoft (most likely) or Google (less so) I've never had problems like this before. Usually, a little patience and they resolve the issue in short order. I hope this is the case now. Long ago I used IE, then Firefox and finally settled on Chrome. These current issues, if they persist, will be enough to make me move.

Cyclone_• 1 year ago

This seems to make a good case for the brave browser

nemomarx• 1 year ago

I do hope they continue to support it, but any chromium fork is going to struggle if Google changes the base engine more on them. I think a different engine is ultimately safer.

znort_• 1 year ago

But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023. (...) For the report, I netted a massive reward of $0

rome doesn't pay traitors.

brianzelip• 1 year ago

Stop using chrome

maxglute• 1 year ago

If only I weren't 8 years old back then [bug discovery]... maybe I could have cashed in.

Impressive and feels bad man.

kylehotchkiss• 1 year ago

My solution is easier: just use Safari. 1Blocker has been nearly bulletproof for me for years, and I enable some ads filtering on my router.

korse• 1 year ago

I keep hearing that no-one gives a shit about Firefox but I've used it since I was a kid in the mid-2000's (including on mobile) and never had an issue.

The one exception is that I do allot of reading/web surfing using lynx with a couple of flags set but aside from this, I've never seen the need for other browsers.

Why is Firefox 'dead' and why does anyone care what Apple/Google does with their proprietary bullshit?

Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

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