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I’m warning Google that Google Chrome may soon be disabled on my devices.
It already is on mine, no trace of chromium or it’s forks.
Discord, slack, bitwarden, steam, Microsoft teams, visual studio code, balena etcher . Anyone else know of any electron apps or heavily modified version of chrome?😄
Teams has switched to Microsoft’s own edition of the same concept, “Edge WebView2”. Now that Edge is just being Chrome wearing a rubber Scooby Doo mask, I don’t expect the differences are vast.
Another fun iteration is Plex’s desktop client, which uses QtWebEngine… however surprise! still the Chromium engine underneath.
Signal’s desktop app is plain old Electron though.
Of the ones on your list, worth noting that Discord and Slack work fine with FirefoxPWA.
Holy shit I had not heard of Firefox PWA but I will use the shit out of this
I use the shit out of Firefox PWA. I just wish Mozilla would get off their asses and make it work out of the box vs having to install a third party app.
I do wish there were more native apps but alternatives to electron is always a good thing in my book.
Except for Microsoft, Microsoft can stop pretending their solution is demonstrably different from electron and chromium.
Discord bitwarden steam and teams all work fine for me in ff, i don’t use the others
https://github.com/gamingdoom/datcord
Works like a charm.
Neat!
What pisses me off is how many websites don’t work right with Firefox now. There’s been several times where I’ve had issues with a site functioning on Firefox and had to switch to a chromium browser.
I see this FUD all the time but nobody ever gives examples. Can you point to some specific sites that don’t work with Firefox?
Costco Travel login page never loads for me in Firefox. Specific sites my kids use for school don’t work either. I wouldn’t say it happens regularly, but often enough to be annoying.
It’s not FUD but there’s usually more to it than just “Firefox”. Usually has something to do with security plugins. There are sites that do not work properly with Ublock or Noscript installed, even when you turn them off for the site. I’ve experienced it many, many times. It happens to me most often ordering food, because a lot of local restaurants sites are janky as fuck, but I’ve also had issues with more well known sites. Southwest airlines has been problematic for a couple years now. My credit union also had issues with parts of their online banking app, but that thankfully got fixed after a year or two.
TL;DR - it’s a real thing.
Walmart.com didn’t work for me on FF for about a week, and it did work on edge and chrome (still broken on FF when I disabled all my add ons). However, they fixed it and it works now. I think it was just a problem with the build of the website, and wasn’t intentional because it definitely works now.
I think that’s what’s more likely - temp problems that could affect any browser until their web dev fixes it. Not anything malicious like intentionally blocking a browser.
And then, it’s just Walmart. It’s nothing that really mattered.
The payment provider my local council uses doesn’t work on Firefox, or Safari. I have to use shitty chrome on my phone. I refuse to install it on my computer.
Report it on https://webcompat.com/
I was worried about this when I originally switched from Chrome to Firefox earlier this year but I can honestly say I haven’t found a single site that I personally use that I had to go back to Chrome for. Any issues I had with any site were related to ad blocking using uBlock or DNS based blocking I also do.
I have issues with twitch. Given I only watch every 3 months for the POE announcement live stream, I just open brave for that one site. I have not tried to figure out if it’s my setup or not
I’ve been watching Twitch on Firefox for years without an issue, so it’s very likely that the problem is on your end.
It happens to me with some payments stores. Always need to go back to chromium based pos browser
Microsoft teams
Pizza hut
Most of my utilities online sites
dialog boxes will just fuck off. I’ve never gotten webRTC to work properly, though that might be configuration skill issues, and or webRTC implementation skill issues, since it seems to only work on browser, not across two different ones.
I’ve seen sites just load asinine layouts, borked kerning, completely fucked text handling. Just goofy shit.
In some cases i’ve seen sites have no download buttons on firefox. I don’t know why, it’s confused me a few times though.
The local Uber eats clone here has the submit order button off screen. Reuters on Android sometimes has the top bar of the webpage shift down over the content. A video conferencing site used by my medical provider won’t connect the video. The 3rd party comment section on our local news site sometimes lays out the controls off screen. The Lemmy PWA on Android used to crash on startup (recently fixed yay!!)
FF is my daily driver and 99% of things work fine, but I’ve definitely found a few sites where they clearly didn’t test it. I still have Chrome installed for those rare occasions I need it.
And I don’t even necessarily blame Firefox for this. I used to do web dev back in the day and I remember making my shit work across multiple browsers. Maybe Firefox is doing it right and Chrome is doing it wrong, but everybody targeted Chrome because it has a zillion percent of the market.
Bambulab store
Duolingo
TradingView
I use this every day with Firefox and Librefox with no issues.
Firefox has been, and still is, my primary browser since before Chrome even existed so, definitely not FUD. Also, it’s generally not Firefox’s fault either, but instead the developers of websites that don’t work in Firefox are usually doing something that isn’t standards compliant.
First to come to mind is that I can’t log into the account management part of the pet boarding company I use when in Firefox. Another scenario is that a lot of movie streaming sites won’t give Firefox video higher than 720p so in that case, Edge is often the only browser that can receive 1080p video. From my understanding the movie studios are the ones to blame for this.
I use firefox and keep Chrome on my PC for this reason. Off the top of my head:
I can’t use Siyuan correctly, my main editor, in Firefox. It only registers the initial backspace key press.
I do telehealth, and the voice/video will not work in firefox no matter what I try.
Live-reloading for Ruby on Rails projects doesn’t seem to work on firefox.
Apple Podcasts for me
T-mobile would be the last specific one. I couldn’t navigate to certain pages within to make plan adjustments.
Something I’ve been on recently. Microsoft Teams maybe?
Dev tools were borked on FF for me. Entire tab was blank
Start page
I read that most sites work just fine if you spoof your user agent to windows and standard chrome
That’s what I do and I haven’t had a problem since.
This breaks any site that uses CloudFlare’s Turnstile for me. It will loop forever and never let me through if my user agent is set to Chrome.
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The point was that some sites neglect to develop for Firefox, and simply tell Firefox users to get chrome instead. Meanwhile Firefox works in most cases perfectly fine without any doing on the website’s part if it is simply duped into believing that the firefox user is just a plain old chrome user as expected. Doesn’t work for everything, but almost.
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This happens very rarely, but it does happen from time to time. When a website starts acting weird out of nowhere I keep a copy of Chrome installed just for that use and then promptly return to Firefox.
My insurance site (MyCigna) started working a couple months ago, but for years it failed to log in. It’s those types of contracted apps that seem to fail the most for me, like apps you’d see on a company intranet.
I didn’t ever have trouble with that site and always used it in ff
I have a friend who sends me tiktoks that refuse to load with firefox on my phone. I consider it a blessing
Libredirect extension will redirect to public proxitok instances so you could watch them without going to tiktoks site directly
proxitok is such a good name holy shit
I only have Chrome installed for the rare occasion where a site doesn’t work in Firefox. I feel like we’ve gone a bit backwards as of lately in building websites that are browser agnostic.
Such as?
The only problem I run into is sites that use Bluetooth or USB APIs to talk to a local device. Both Firefox and Safari don’t implement them due to security concerns.
Ohh yeah, VIA for QMK keyboards is guilty of that shit
T mobiles website is the most recent I had issues with. Navigating to certain pages within t mobiles site would cause “something went wrong” or just a redirect loop.
I just read about this extension today. Seems interesting. The description says It’s supposedly doing more than just switching the UA.
I was recently trying to add tickets from ticketbastard to Google wallet to be able to use them offline. I have chrome disabled on my phone. Surprise surprise it doesn’t work with any other browser except chrome. The ticketbastard app just throws an error and nothing happens. Took me a lot of searching to realize it was because chrome was disabled.
Does this happen in you work environment or on your private managed system? I raise this question because I started to realize that governing firefox apparently is a hard task. Never did I experience a faulty site on my private desktop devices but on my work stations. Im currently running firefox 115.13.0esr.
My home system. I’m not doing any extra security on it, either.
You shouldn’t be required to do so. You also neglected my presumption. Thank you for replying.
Until you do more than warn they don’t care.
Linux Phones and Degoogled Phones surge in response.
Unfortunately for work I may have no choice:-(. Several of our daily work products I’ve tried on Firefox without success. Those also don’t have ads.
I wish there were better alternatives. I may try out LibreWolf but I could not imagine it somehow being easier, though with enough effort put in the end result may be all that matters. Until the first update (possibly forced on the server end even if I don’t on mine) that breaks everything and I cannot do my work for the day, in which case I will absolutely go crawling back to Chrome, bc they have us by the short hairs there.:-(
Use chrome only where you need it.
Prexactly:-)
My company just plain old won’t install Firefox without a good reason.
I’m stuck using chrome or edge. Once the ad block stops working on chrome, I move over.
I really hate the corporate IT.
I was at a job that was slowly transitioning from a medium sized company to a larger one, initially we were allowed just install and use whatever on our machines, but gradually IT started implementing policies where if we wanted to add something it had to go through a request system and usually it would be denied.
As a software developer this was just infuriating, it would hold up work, force us to use shitty software (like Chrome and Edge) and there would often be fuck ups where installing a new version of software would require removal of the old one and installation of a new one - which would trigger the approval process again.
Like - I get it - some people can’t be trusted, but we were some of the key devs for the companies product, we know what we’re doing.
I was rather happy to leave that part of the company behind when I left.
My company just plain old won’t install Firefox without a good reason.
If you have other potential employers in mind, the IT environment at your current employer and other potential employers is maybe one factor to keep in mind in making decisions as to where to work.
There are some IT policies that are no-gos for me at potential employers. I ask during the interview process.
On my work computer I don’t have admin rights but still I could install Firefox with no problems. It installed itself for local user only.
Yeesh… I would reconsider working there if possible, but being able to (checks notes) pay rent and afford food and medical care may just make up for it.:-| Hopefully you don’t need to surf the web much at work.
I went through the same thing with MSIE. Corporate mandates and stuff. Businesses are sometimes wrong.
No, they are always right! (Especially when they are wrong…)
Firefox my beloved.
Saying this about any corporation’s product is guaranteed not to age well.
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Chromium (Google Chrome’s base) is also open source.
And yet, we’re still at a corporation’s mercy as to whether everything Chromium-based gets ruined by Google’s fuck-what-the-users-want policies. Like with Manifest V3. And JXL support. And extensions on mobile.
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Except now you have to maintain a branch that’s missing everything after that release upstream.
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Yeah you can probably do periodic merge or rebase etc. But then you have the fun of merge conflicts
Users do want MV3. The people complaining about it are in the minority.
Users don’t know what the fuck Manifest is period. They just click the internet button. And for the longest time that meant the E with a loop around it. Now that means the multicolored circle.
Users know that they want more security. MV3 makes a major of users that use Chrome safer from malicious extensions.
I get what you’re saying, but the average person has no idea what it is, why they should care, or anything about it. All they see is Google making their extensions stop working. And when that includes some of the most popular extensions, that directly affect Googles revenue, they’re going to think that’s the reason.
The overwhelming majority of users get their extensions from the Chrome Web Store… Which Google has full control over. Users expect them to be blocking almost all malicious extensions before they’re even available to download.
Why the hell would a user want MV3?
Because it makes a majority of users that use Chrome much safer. Do you do any basic research? Do you need me to point you to the getting started guide?
It doesn’t though. An adblocker is your VERY most important tool in a good security posture. Googles playing any users who ask for MV3 for fools
the minority of people complaining about it are the only ones who know what it even is
So is Android. So is Chromium. So is React, and Flutter. So is Java.
Open source doesn’t mean FOSS.
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Open source does mean FOSS. It doesn’t mean community-oriented.
No it doesn’t. Different licenses dictate what you can and can’t do with open source software. Some are more restrictive than others. Open source simply means that the source code is freely available.
It absolutely does. Open source is not simply source-available, it means that it follows the open source definition. https://opensource.org/osd
I’m grateful for FF, but they also annoy me at times. Just little stuff probably not worth bitching about in detail. But also a peek at the potential for problems that you’re talking about.
So of course I’ll bitch about it.
I call it the “stop whatever you think you’d rather do right now and pay attention to our product” type shit.
Imagine you have a combination wrench and whenever you take it out of the toolbox it starts yammering at you about how great of a wrench it is and all if its shiny features. Fucking ridiculous, right?
So why do we tolerate software that does that?
Way too much software does this pushy shit. Just stay outta my face and do your actual job, software.
Because people have the attention span of a goldfish and if you aren’t reminding them every 5 seconds of the features they have available they’ll forget they do in fact use them and then complain to support because they can’t spend 5 seconds on the help page.
I say this, not in defense of mozilla, but in frustration at having to deal daily with these kinds of issues. You can put giant screen-size arrows on where to go / what single “do the thing” button to press and people will still forget 5 seconds later.
Good point. That’s true, there is definitely that side of it. I think what you’re talking about is less obnoxious than the stuff that feels forced and make-the-boss-happy promotional. Push notifcations for no reason, etc. It’s a spectrum from necessary to uneccessary, and there’s too much of the latter IMO.
We’re so fucking used to ads we don’t even always realize we’re getting pushed propaganda
Mmm mmm mmm, Bill Cosby tells me to love my puddin’ pops!
…i feel sleepy…
Firefox is a foundation, not a corporation. And I’m already using Fennec instead of the official release.
No. Firefox is a product. Mozilla is a corporation AND a foundation.
Yeah, it’s strange just how readily the blinders go up wherever Mozilla is concerned. They’re a corp, just like any other; if they had the money and leverage, they’d be just as aggressive as Google. Have people already forgotten that time they laid off 200+ employees and then gave all the execs bonuses?
E: Apparently y’all have forgotten. In 2021, Mozilla laid off a few hundred employees. CEO’s salary doubled that year. Fuck Mozilla, they’re no more your friends than Google or Microsoft; they’re the same evil, just smaller-scaled evil, is all.
But they haven’t threatened to undercut ad blocking yet, so as a comparison they are better.
Absolutely, but Mozilla is pretty much owned by Google anyway, and falling in love with these companies as wide eyed fanboys never looks good when they eventually turn.
It’s okay to like them while they do good and then change your mind when they turn evil.
I wouldn’t say “owned”, but the rest… yeah:-(
Who provides the majority of their funding?
You forgot to also mention that they are a cult where you get attacked if you say anything negative about Mozilla.
You forgot to not shill for an actual corporation
I’m not shilling for anyone. If you want to discuss actual technical details I’m happy to do so. If you’re here just to share your feelings absent facts then I don’t care what you have to say.
“this is way safer for users” may as well be feelings. It’s not backed up by anything but a clear boner for Google
It is literally explained in the first part of the uBOL GitHub page:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home#description
It’s like you haven’t even done the most basic research that anyone with anything useful to say would do. Why?
Looking around, I don’t think that’s true. Lots of bad things are freely said about Mozilla and the people running it.
Librewolf, my beloved.
This is the first I’ve heard of LibreWolf. Is it compatible with Windows 7? And also, why is it good?
You really shouldn’t connect windows 7 to the internet.
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A summary from its site and known technical details:
- no telemetry by default
- includes uBlock Origin
- has sane privacy-respecting defaults
- prepackages arkenfox user.js
- relatively well-maintained fork of Firefox that keeps up with upstream
- No major controversies AFAIK
As for Windows 7, nobody should really need to install Librewolf anyway on such a device. No device running Windows 7 should have access to the internet at this point. If you are asking about compatibility intending this use case, you have bigger problems to worry about than your choice of browser. If you just need to view HTML files graphically, even Internet Explorer or an older firefox ESR will do.
Looks like it should run on Windows.
Edit: sorry, didn’t read far down enough. It’s only built for Windows 10, but they recommend this?
Main features: … Continued support for NPAPI plugins like Silverlight, Adobe Flash and Java
Picture this in your minds eye: a Windows 7 machine running a browser with still working Flash and Java plugins, connected to the internet in 2024.
what do you see?
i see a flourishing ecosystem of worms, viruses and rootkits, all trying to be the one species to get to be the one who does the most damage to the prey species, the common user.
Sounds like an interesting experience to me. Admittedly I hadn’t looked that far into it. If Win 7 is a must I’d say just go with latest Firefox.
❤
You’re overreacting. Firefox knows their users. I am a huge “stan” for Firefox, but I will delete it like a time traveller if they make it impossible to ignore ads. I will salt the earth and poop on Firefox’s grave and actively avoid it everywhere… However. If I’m wrong, there will be a Next Thing…
Yeah I’m using Fennec, which doesn’t have that. But as long as it’s a flick of a switch to disable, I don’t really mind. Still a million times better than manifest v3.
If you use a DNS solutions you can block all the telemetry shit. Frankly FF has been phoning home in a lot of undesirable ways for many years even before this, like most browsers.
Firefox is no longer an adversary to Google for the browser market, if it ever was. FF has become a vassal of Google that with its tyranny is dictating the course of the internet, such as WEI that as far as I know it was abandoned at least for now.
🧐
At least link the full article and not just the headline… smh. Here is also the follow-up article with comments from Firefox’s CTO. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Firefox-defends-itself-Everything-done-right-just-poorly-communicated-9802546.html
Not entirely true.
Anyone else been having issues of not being able to load YouTube videos past the first few seconds on Firefox using ublock? I couldn’t find any recent information online. I don’t know if this is part of the war on ad blockers, or unrelated.
It’s been a side effect of the server side ads apparently, but reloading the page fixes it for me.
Yeah, yesterday. I just kept refreshing. FF + unlock + not signed in, seems to trigger it
I watched several videos today on Firefox with ublock origin and no issues. Haven’t run into issues with ads yet.
Haven’t had that issue, nope
Besides the fact that Mozilla sucks, Firefox is an amazing piece of software. It’s PITA that it’s about to be enshittified.
meanwhile firefox lists it as recommended and also lets you use it on firefox mobile.
Almost as if a browser company that’s not also an advertising company has no reason to fight ad blockers.
I’ve got some bad news for you. Mozilla bought an ad company.
i mean they bought a privacy preserving ad company to offer an alternative for companies to google, which is what they should be doing.
because like it or not people depend on ads for their sites.
Wait until people find out you can make the government ban ads - https://www.euronews.com/2014/11/26/grenoble-europe-s-first-ad-free-city/
I like their future (so far).
Ban billboards. Very different. And are there ones owned by the city.
Honestly, not a huge win.
Banning billboards is actually pretty huge. I live in Maine where billboards are banned and the mental break from being constantly forcibly advertised to is so nice. Every time I travel anywhere else I realize what a huge difference it makes.
Sadly that news isn’t how it is right now. Picking a random spot in Grenoble using Google maps and searching for the first tram station, I find 6+ billboards.
You can always fork firefox. People used to use website not requiring javascript at all and it worked well. Some people still use even w3m f.e. when graphics card driver goes bad after update and they need to watch some docs on the internet. Most current browser have most features you would ever need
You can always fork firefox
You could fork Chromium too.
Forking is indeed the way forward when Mozilla loses its way a little more. For myself, I switched to Librewolf about 6 months ago, along with replacing Thunderbird with Betterbird after using it since the Phoenix days.
I cannot remember what prompted the move to Librewolf, it may have been the AI stuff they were pushing at the time, or possibly the update that forced the tabs into my titlebar without having to go into about:config to fix it. Or the fact that Firefox was constantly pushing me to sign up for an account. There were quite a few gripes that added up over time lol
Betterbird restored some removed things I liked pre-supernova as well as a native systray icon under Linux and that was enough motivation to make the switch.
It is time for a new browser to enter the market. Either Ladybird or something built with Servo seems likely.
And my nerd bros try to get me to donate
It has made mobile browsing usable again for me.
Same. Firefox Mobile had been a laggy mess when I used it a few years ago, but a combination of some really aggressive advertising and the announcement of manifest v3 caused me to give it another shot about a year ago. It’s a dramatic improvement in phone browsing.
Google needs to be broken up by government.
It saddens me to agree with this. Who knew Google would become as oppressive as fucking MICROSOFT?
« Don’t be evil »
😬😬😬😬
They ditched that in 2018. It was long overdue. At least somewhat honest about themselves.
Most smart people who understood capitalism did.
I hear the term ‘broken up’ a lot in media and discourse, but it’s never explained. In your eyes, what actually happens when a government ‘breaks up’ a corporation? I mean, what are the steps, objectives, and outcomes?
Not being adversarial, I’m just curious.
Not the person you’re asking, but my general understanding is that different products would be required to be their own companies, so advertising, Android, and Chrome would all be separate businesses.
I envision it like AT&T’s break-up, where the singular Google is broken up into regional companies that will (hopefully) have to compete with each other.
It really wouldn’t change anything in the long run. Any company that creates a browser is gonna need some form of income and people aren’t willing to pay for a browser. What would be their incentive to continue to work on the browser when they aren’t being paid?
Same as Firefox. Let search engines (including google) pay them a fair market rate to make them the default browser.
IT guys will stop using it…
Which means they’ll stop deploying it as the default browser on some large enterprises, it won’t ship as defaults in pre-baked images going forward.
Average joes and janes will use Safari and Edge depending on OS.
Where is their growth going to come from after this change? Chromebooks? lol.
I hope they do it, it will hurt them in the long run.
You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.
Thank you Google I hope shitty moves like this drives enough people away to better browsers like Firefox. It desperately needs a bigger market share.
So, what they’re saying is: Chrome will have severely decreased functionality and users will no longer be able to protect themselves from sketchy ads that contain scams, malware, and other nefarious bullshit (often hosted on Google’s own ad networks)?
What are you expecting, a corp to… ah… uh… not be evil, or something? :-P
Thank you very much for summoning Jeff Goldblum’s voice into my head.
I… uh, found a way:-D.
Google is primarily an ad company
It did not always used to be this way, though it was always headed here.
Users can still use ad blockers. Users will be safer from malicious extensions sending all your web traffic to an untrusted party.
Whew, kinda weird to find a Google employee on lemmy. I would have thought there were rules against that in the would employee handbook.
I don’t work for Google. Are you in a cult or an anti-opensource PR firm? Why would that be your first instinct in response to facts? Go read the beginners guide to MV3. Maybe you could learn a thing or two before talking about feelings.
You gave no facts, just opinions.
And if you aren’t aware, astroturfing is a thing.
Of course they’re aware, they’re doing it right now.
I gave you facts about MV3. It is also explained at the beginning of the uBOL GitHub page which even acknowledges MV3 adds protections to users with some filtering tradeoffs. Those tradeoffs can be implemented in other ways but it is more work and would require other software. I am not here saying Google is perfect or that MV3 is perfect, but it does make installing extensions more secure for the average user. If you don’t agree then be specific. This vagueness that you keep utilizing without providing any details at all to try to make a point is a clear sign that you honestly have no clue what you’re talking about.
Yeah, that’s not even how Ublock Origin fucking works, what a hilariously ignorant take.
Did I say that the author of uBlock Origin actually reads your traffic? No I didn’t, so stop the bad faith arguments. I said that MV2 exposed users to malicious extensions that were able to do that. Most features of uBO work fine with uBOL. Not everything does though, and I do acknowledge that. I’m just saying MV3 does make a majority of users safer overall.
Nope
Yep. Facts.
You seem to be struggling with the term “facts”
Is your feelings facts to you? Which fact specifically am I struggling with? Do you have anything concrete to say at all or are you just going to keep being vague because of feelings?
Seeing all your traffic is required for an ad blocker to function correctly.
An ad blocker doesn’t need to see your traffic to function. That is the point of the declarative APIs. It is supposed to help protect users from malicious extensions and some forms of malicious software.
Yes, it absolutely does.
An adblocker has unconditional complete control of my browser because I want it to have unconditional complete control of my browser, because it cannot do what I want it to any other way. Taking that control away from me is malicious by definition. It’s more malicious when every single person on the planet with a shred of tech knowledge knows with certainty that it’s for the sole purpose of boosting Google’s ad revenue at the expense of their users.
Yeah, we saw this coming. When Manifest v3 first talked about.
Google an ad company are killing ad blockers. Yeah, that sounds right.
Google an ad company are killing
ab blockersChrome browsers. Yeah, that sounds right.FTFY
I wish, but I don’t see it happening. Most people are just content with seeing ads absolutely everywhere, I just don’t get it.
I wouldn’t mind the basic shit like a banner here or a side bar there. But the fucking obnoxious mid page ads, auto playing videos, scam link shit can go die in a hole.
I used to not mind them, now I do. They over did it and I can’t go back. I will block ads untill I can’t and then I’ll probably climb a clock tower with an Uzi.
I won’t really climb a clock tower with an Uzi.
I wouldn’t mind the basic shit like a banner here or a side bar there.
Since those are semi-regularly vectors for malware now, even those are not safe to allow.
It’s things like this that keep me using an ad blocker. I was researching when sunflowers develop their seeds, for crying out loud.
Edit: this was on Opera. It’s… fine.
killing ab blockers
I might finally get a six-pack!
MV3 doesn’t kill ad blockers. uBOL (uBlock Origin Lite) blocks ads, is by the same author and uses MV3. The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.
Some of these “features” that classic uBO used are available in MV3 but requires different permissions. Some of them could also be implemented with native messaging. The main uBO author though feels slighted by Google and went on a trash talking campaign against Google, and to be fair had a few good points. Anyway, most people on social media now care more about how Chromium and Firefox makes them feel now irregardless of facts. They think their emotions somehow are the same as facts.
The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.
Then allow a savvy user to choose to keep MV2 mode via an opt-in control instead of depreciating years of hard work by non-malicious extension authors. uBlock Origin is, in fact, the ONLY browser extension I use in Chrome, as Firefox is my main browser.
I agree they should have tried to find more ways to keep the old behavior. MV3 rollout has already been delayed for a long time, and now users merely get a message. I’m not sure that the community (mostly Google contributors) won’t give in or try to find a way to keep MV2. However, what was done with MV2 can now be done with MV3 with native messaging or other network tools… I think the concern is that allowing an exception makes it much easier for a malicious extension or software to get users to agree not realizing what they’re agreeing to. Furthermore, the declarative approach is actually preferable by many. You get most of the same features without exposing all your traffic to an extension.
From my understanding, MV3 kills vital features of ad-blockers in that
- Some filtering rules do rely on the ability to read the content of the webpage, which can’t be migrated, per the FAQ linked in the article
- The declarative API means an update to the rules requires an update to the plugin itself, which might get delayed by the reviewing process, causing the blocker to lag behind the tracker. It might not be able to recover as quickly as uBO in the recent YouTube catch-up round.
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uBOL GitHub does a pretty good job of explaining some challenges, and some of them are better tracked in the issues.
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Your second point isn’t accurate though and MV3 does support dynamic rules.
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And yet the likelihood of Google publishing a malicious extension is quite low. Not sure why you’re so adamant about defending their shitty anti-adblock actions, making excuses for a mega corporation.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Steam, Arch Linux, NixOS, Flathub, etc. all end up publishing malicious software in their stores and package managers. It is inevitable. If you’re not worried about sandboxing then you might as well proxy all your traffic using third party software.
The fact that something is possible does not make it frequent or likely.
. Some of them could also be implemented with native messaging.
Some? Or all?
uBlockOrigin would still loose some of its features and capabilities nonetheless, even if a sub-set of them could be implemented in other ways. Not?
Adblockers are the largest consumer boycott in history.
Google isn’t just disabling an extension, they’re attacking a boycott comprised of 200,000,000+ people, all around the globe, standing up to forced manipulation of our beliefs and habits by profit-hungry corporations.
That’s a funny way to say “you should uninstall chrome rather than leaving it unused” but I hear you Google. 🫡
Sadly I’m far more attached to ad blocking than I am to a browser.
Sounds like another reason not to use Chrome.
…Oh, no! Anyway. Just giving people one more reason to finally make the switch to Firefox or something different.
Google Chrome warns about disabling uBlock Origin. I warn Google Chrome that they’re being a little bitch & they’re going to lose users.
Could turn out to be a good thing. All power users will dump Chrome practically overnight, a huge boon to the alternatives, that could actually give them enough momentum to compete with Google for a change. I’m sure they’ve considered this, probably an empty treat.
The modern Internet is completely unusable without an ad blocker. Way to remake ie6, Google!
