[HN Gopher] uBlock Origin works best on Firefox
___________________________________________________________________
uBlock Origin works best on Firefox
Author : anonymfus
Score : 1520 points
Date : 2021-04-09 19:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| BigGreenTurtle wrote:
| uBlock Origin helped me get a vaccine appointment despite the
| scheduling system's attempt to make it as hard as possible.
| Thanks!
| danShumway wrote:
| I made this prediction a little over a year ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21506330
|
| > after one year of Manifest V3 actually shipping to users in
| mainline Chrome:
|
| > - Assuming that Manifest V3's declarative API is not
| significantly changed from its current implementation.
|
| > - If you visit each of the top 10 publishers in the US
| (including open publishing platforms like
| Twitter/Facebook/Youtube) [...]
|
| > - Firefox will block more web trackers (65% likelyhood).
|
| > - Firefox will block more visible ads and popups (55%
| likelyhood).
|
| It's debatable whether or not the December rollout of Manifest V3
| "counts" because Manifest V2 is still going to be available for
| about a year, but it's also increasingly looking like it won't
| matter -- the prediction might end up being proven right
| regardless of whether or not Manifest V2 is removed.
|
| I would probably raise these likelihoods if I were to revisit the
| prediction today. I think it's reasonably unlikely that CNAME
| masking is going to go down in popularity, and I think it's
| reasonably unlikely that Chrome is going to put in the effort to
| catch back up. The one thing that gives me pause is that the
| original prediction specified looking at the top 10 publishers,
| and I'm not sure if any of them are using CNAME masking yet.
| Scottn1 wrote:
| I've been a daily user and advocate of Firefox since Opera
| changed to using Chromium. But recently I've grown tired of their
| privacy hypocrisy and company decisions that I've uninstalled it
| and started to try out Edge/Brave/Vivaldi as my daily. It has
| pained me to do this as FF was my last safe haven away from
| Chromium.
|
| If you dig into some settings and follow tech news, I have begun
| to question some of Mozilla's controversial settings, deals with
| 3rd parties and their political blog posts. I also have a problem
| with the CEO making $3m per year yet a continued market share
| decline since she came on.
|
| Just a few of the things off the top of my head that I feel
| betray my trust of Firefox (all of these pertain to default
| Windows install):
|
| 1) Enabled by default all of your website DNS requests going to
| Cloudflare with a "promise" this information is not being used or
| sold. We all know how solid this promise has been for other large
| tech companies. All under the promotion that DoH protects you
| from your own ISP.
|
| 2) Upon install, FF installs a scheduled service that runs daily.
| From what I've found out, that service is sending back to Mozilla
| what your default browser is on YOUR PC (why is that their
| business). This scheduled service remains on your PC even after
| uninstalling Firefox and continues to run daily.
|
| 3) Enabled by default are Browser Studies and testing a clean
| install one is already installed and active called "F100
| Snippets". Studies allow the Firefox team to install stuff right
| to your browser whenever they want, to gather telemetry .
|
| 4) "Recommended extensions" enabled by default. Got a nag for a
| recommended extension after few days of browsing. So FF must be
| scanning your browsing history in order for this to work?
|
| 5) this result: https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-
| network-traff... . While it was from 2019 so needs to be updated,
| but upon first-run I was shocked at the results for FF here.
|
| 6) Firefox on Android has a known tracker embedded and enabled by
| default called Leanplum. From Mozilla's own website they state
| "Leanplum is a mobile marketing vendor"
|
| I'd love to support and use FF solely again, but I think they
| need some serious shaking up, starting with a new CEO (who allows
| this stuff).
| onenite wrote:
| > 5) this result: https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-
| run-network-traff... . While it was from 2019 so needs to be
| updated, but upon first-run I was shocked at the results for FF
| here.
|
| The article states: "Firefox remains one of the chattiest
| browsers during a first run. At 117 requests, it lead the pack
| with individual requests. _It should be noted, however, that
| this isn't the browser itself making all of these calls, but
| another page that is present during startup._ "
|
| So it seems that the initial page is the thing making most of
| the network calls, and not the browser itself. Wouldn't this
| mean that we can simply disable the wi-fi/internet temporarily
| to load the browser initially, closing unnecessary tabs, and
| customizing it as we needed?
|
| In general, this seems like a good practice for opening up apps
| in general, even though it's a minor inconvenience and we
| theoretically shouldn't have to do this. Anyway, I don't mind
| the telemetry if it will help and not be used against us.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Yeah that's all true maybe but the other vendors are far worse
| AFAIK.
| favadi wrote:
| > Upon install, FF installs a scheduled service that runs
| daily. From what I've found out, that service is sending back
| to Mozilla what your default browser is on YOUR PC (why is
| that their business). This scheduled service remains on your
| PC even after uninstalling Firefox and continues to run
| daily.
|
| This is shocking to me. More information, if anyone is not
| aware yet: https://firefox-source-
| docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/mozapps/defa....
|
| > The Default Browser Agent is a Windows-only scheduled task
| which runs in the background to collect and submit data about
| the browser that the user has set as their OS default (that
| is, the browser that will be invoked by the operating system
| to open web links that the user clicks on in other programs).
| onenite wrote:
| Isn't default browser usage potentially useful statistical
| information? What's the worst that will likely happen if
| people have that data?
| krn wrote:
| I have no issues with Brave after disabling all of their
| crypto stuff and widgets. It's safer, smoother, and much
| better at ad-blocking than bare Firefox. I don't care about
| CNAME-uncloaking by uBlock Origin, because that's already
| being taken care of by NextDNS at OS level.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I don't have the background behind all of those and I'm sure
| not everything is rainbows and butterflies (especially Firefox
| for Android has some iffy stuff, I think), but for a couple of
| your points...
|
| > 1) Enabled by default all of your website DNS requests going
| to Cloudflare with a "promise" this information is not being
| used or sold. We all know how solid this promise has been for
| other large tech companies. All under the promotion that DoH
| protects you from your own ISP.
|
| AIUI, this is only in the US, where for practically everybody
| the alternative is indeed that they're going through your ISP,
| with a promise that the information _is_ being used and sold.
| Kind of a rock and a hard place situation.
|
| > 4) "Recommended extensions" enabled by default. Got a nag for
| a recommended extension after few days of browsing. So FF must
| be scanning your browsing history in order for this to work?
|
| To clarify, it's not the extensions themselves that are
| enabled, but the recommendations, right? If so, yes, Firefox is
| analysing your usage, but that is _your local Firefox install_
| , i.e. the thing that already has and uses your full browser
| history. AFAIK the rules for when to recommend what are the
| same for everyone and run just on your computer.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > Chromium-based browsers give precedence to websites over user
| settings when it comes to decide whether pre-fetching is disabled
| or not.
|
| Classic google/chrome "Yeah I know you've got these setting, but
| I'm just going to ignore them because this website wants to do
| it".
| staticassertion wrote:
| Sucks, but I'm pretty locked into Chrome. I use GSuite for
| management, ChromeOS, etc. Maybe it means that uBlock Origin
| can't protect me as well, but it's pretty hard for me to give up
| the benefits from all of those other things.
|
| I don't see Firefox competing. Mozilla doesn't seem to believe
| that monetizing a browser is possible, whereas I pay thousands of
| dollars a year at my company because of Chrome's integrations
| with these other systems.
|
| Until Firefox can compete like that, and maybe they just can't, I
| can't switch.
| lolinder wrote:
| ChromeOS is one thing, but what in GSuite doesn't work on
| Firefox?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not the parent commenter, but I'd assume it's mainly browser
| sync.
|
| Being able to log into any Chromebook and immediately have
| all yours bookmarks/apps/tools/passwords/etc. that you use on
| your desktop and laptop is pretty useful.
|
| As great as Firefox is, if you use Chromebooks then you're
| gonna use, well, Chrome.
| pkulak wrote:
| Eh, I use Chromebooks occasionally. The trick is just to
| not lock things like bookmarks and passwords into you
| browser. 1password and pinboard both work great with
| Chrome.
| lolinder wrote:
| Ah, that does make sense. It doesn't explain why GSuite is
| a factor, but I do get the browser sync.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Just fire up Chrome for Google stuff and picky sites and use FF
| for everything else.
| asdff wrote:
| why not use g suite on firefox? g suite works fine for me.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Yeah, I use G-Suite on FF (with UBO, of course) every single
| day for work and personal use and have never had a single
| issue.
| eikenberry wrote:
| What situation (job or whatever) has led to such vendor lock-
| in? Maybe if you gave more details others could avoid your
| situation.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I think they mean they manage a Google Workplace (formerly G
| Suite) org themselves, given:
|
| > I use GSuite for management
|
| Using FF would break existing MDM/DLP policies that they
| themselves have set up.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Just to give clarification:
|
| a) We're a small tech startup. We use Chromebooks exclusively
| because it makes corpops/corpsec and compliance trivial.
|
| b) Why not Firefox? Maybe Firefox could work, but I'm not
| sure - with GSuite we can manage Chrome extensions via
| policy, we can manage Chrome versions, Context Aware Access,
| etc.
| mastrsushi wrote:
| www works best with Chromium-based browsers
| antattack wrote:
| I would use Firefox + uBlock Origin over other browsers even if
| it was half as fast.
| arendtio wrote:
| I can say, that is not true for me :-/
|
| Since a few weeks I use two 4k displays with my work laptop
| running Windows 10 and I with 4k it seems that Chrome is quite
| a bit faster than Firefox on Windows. With the FullHD
| resolution I used before I never noticed a huge performance
| difference. I don't know what causes it and on my private PC
| (different hardware) running Linux I never experienced
| performance differences of that dimension, but currently I have
| fallen back to using Chrome on the work laptop :-(
| ballballball wrote:
| Preach.
| Youden wrote:
| In what way is Firefox not fast? I typically run it right
| alongside Chrome (Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work)
| and don't notice much of a difference switching between them.
| If anything, Firefox is faster.
| t00ny wrote:
| I see quite a big difference for sites that rely heavily on
| JS, especially on MacOS.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| In benchmarks Chrome is usually slightly faster on average
| than Firefox. Really not something you would notice with
| normal use.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| You'd loose all that performance gain to ads anyway. I'm truly
| shocked how horrible the experience is whenever I see someone
| browsing the web without it.
| errantspark wrote:
| It's absolutely wild, I have Chrome Canary installed w/o any
| addons because of some bleeding edge WebBluetooth stuff I'm
| working on and occasionally I'll forget which browser I'm
| using and visit a site with it. The web without adblock is
| basically unusable, it's legitimately completely insane that
| people will put up with it.
| lazyweb wrote:
| I've said it before, but the entire ad business is a
| cancer. Every minute of the modern human experience is
| exploited for maximizing profits. I've read an interview
| recently with an journalist / documentary film maker
| (forgot his name) where he was talking about "bullshit
| jobs" and for most people, their actual function is to
| consume. That's why ads are penetrating every last part of
| our private lives, greatly accelerated by modern consumer
| electronics. Want me to disable adblock to look at your
| side? Fuck you, I'll never visit again. Youtube video with
| forced ads at the beginning? Instantly closing it, never to
| visit again. All my devices have some kind of adblock
| mechanism, my "smartphone" is rooted, my "smart TV" will
| never have any internet connection, my browser will always
| be the one working best with adblock technologies.
|
| Sorry for the rant.
| errantspark wrote:
| Don't be sorry friend. You are correct and I hear your
| frustration, and while we're at it most SaaS is just as
| vile as advertising. I fear that this is the inevitable
| conclusion of unfettered capitalism and perhaps
| individual refusal to participate is one of the few ways
| we can begin to turn the helm on a world that worships
| unfettered greed.
| mjhagen wrote:
| I think that was Jaron Lanier in The Social Dilemma.
| freebuju wrote:
| People don't put up with ads. They are forced upon them.
| Many of them with no knowledge of how to block them.
|
| To them, ads are part and parcel of "using the internet".
| Some of them hate ads. But not for technical reasons
| though.
|
| Outside of complaining why they hate that annoying ad from
| company X, most people probably won't be motivated enough
| to actually do anything about it. For some, this is just
| how they expect the "internet" to work. An ad-free one
| would _feel_ broken to them.
|
| Ads are not a bother for most casual people.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| They garbage it up more under the pretenses that too many
| people are blocking, denying them ad revenue. If they made
| it less obnoxious then less people would feel the need to
| block ads. The worst ones for me are the fake virus ads
| that basically hijack my browser. If you can't keep those
| out of your ad ecosystem then I'm forced to block it all.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| I remember going to my parents before I set them up with
| ublock, I thought they had some kind of malware before I
| realized "Oh this is just what the internet looks like, now"
| timvisee wrote:
| On Android as well. Quite useful!
| OJFord wrote:
| Such a shame uMatrix was discontinued.
|
| uBlock Origin comes close, and surpasses in some ways (I used
| both for that reason) but lacks separate control of cookies,
| images, scripts, etc. So you can't accept a particular third
| party's images without also accepting its scripts, cookies, etc.
|
| I mention it mainly in the hope that we can popularise its
| maintained fork 'nuTensor'.
|
| After trying uBlock (as in attempting to also cover what I used
| to use uMatrix for) for a few weeks I think it's insufficient and
| nuTensor is the better option for me, but it quickly won't be if
| ~nobody uses it and it falls by the wayside.
|
| Alternatively uBO could support the few details it lacks from uM?
| It seems like the problem basically was difficulty/time
| constraints in supporting both.. but I don't know why they were
| ever separate? There's plenty of overlap. If uBO had uM's
| granularity in 'advanced mode', that'd be perfect.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > but I don't know why they were ever separate?
|
| I also wonder about this. I still run both side by side. (I
| haven't noticed any problems with uMatrix so far ...) All I
| really use uMatrix for is quick coarse grained 2D filtering of
| various content types. I don't understand why that couldn't be
| implemented as an optional "first pass" filtering layer in
| uBlock.
|
| I realize uBlock can mostly already do what uMatrix does,
| honestly I just find the 2D UI to be incredibly convenient and
| intuitive.
| Arnavion wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26284124
| OJFord wrote:
| > except you have to write them by hand
|
| Well yeah, no, I don't want to do that. That's why I always
| ran both, (uBO in 'simple mode' cosmetic blocking only) and
| now nuTensor seems like a better option than diving into uBO
| alone. I gave it a go.
| Demiurge wrote:
| I agree it's a shame, and I hope there is a legit replacement.
| However, it continues to work for me, so far, without issues.
| yborg wrote:
| nuTensor would be a lot more accessible if it were a signed
| extension. Having to sideload it is a non-starter for most
| people.
| birksherty wrote:
| I find ublock much more granular than umatrix. It can block all
| js and allow a particular one, block just a segment of inline
| scripts.
|
| It can block separately a single script, image or any other
| request. I find it much better than umatrix which can't do many
| things that ublock does. If someone wantd to they can just
| install it and forget it also. Much more versatile.
| gxnxcxcx wrote:
| > So you can't accept a particular third party's images without
| also accepting its scripts, cookies, etc.
|
| It's a clunky interface with poor discoverability, but with the
| uBO logger open in a browser tab you can click on any request
| right beside the timestamp and define a new rule with the
| desired granularity. In the URL Rule tab, the unmarked left
| column sets the allow/noop/block behavior.
|
| Edit: Found the wiki page:
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger#creating-f...
| OJFord wrote:
| But this is something I do on a good chunk of websites the
| first time I visit them. (Not all, because my base - allow
| first-party, allow all css, allow all images, block all
| cookies - is also often enough.)
|
| It's just too painful to open a logger, find a request, craft
| something manually, etc. uMatrix is point and click and it's
| right there in the toolbar.
| m463 wrote:
| I too use umatrix, but someone said ubo had an advanced setting
| that was like umatrix, so I was thinking about switching.
|
| Is this true or not?
|
| wait, here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=25920135
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| That comment:
|
| > umatrix is built into ublock origin now, just enable
| advanced mode in ublock.
|
| I have advanced mode enabled and don't see anything remotely
| resembling the uMatrix source vs type grid. There's a couple
| overly cryptic { allow block other } columns with rows
| corresponding to the source and that's it as far as I can
| tell. No { css image frame etc } columns in my UI.
| nathcd wrote:
| On the uBO popup, if you click "More" on the bottom left a
| few times, you eventually get a uMatrix-ish grid on the
| left side of the popup. (Not 100% sure if that's what
| you're looking for.) I agree with other commenters though
| that I don't really understand the uBO grid and found the
| uMatrix grid much more immediately accessible.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| Yeah that's the grid I was referring to. It isn't the
| same as the detailed 2D breakdown that uMatrix gives you.
| Instead it simply has a blanket { green grey red } for
| each source.
|
| (Also I can never seem to remember precisely what each
| unlabeled colored box does. I never have that problem
| with uMatrix.)
| pmontra wrote:
| The uMatrix 2d grid is a vastly superior UI than anything
| uBO offers for the same functionality. I keep using both
| because of that. uBO for blocking ads and hiding
| elements, especially on my phone, and uMatrix to
| selectively block JS and everything else.
| Nerada wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. My main objection to uBO is the cryptic
| UI. I have no idea what the two columns to the right of a
| domain are as there's no column headings, or the two nested
| buttons in each column, one of which is grey (where I'd assume
| there'd be green to counter the red?), or the "+"/"++" that
| sometimes appear over said buttons... Or the green bars that
| creep in from the far left over the domain names, at staggering
| lengths.
|
| The uMatrix UI on the other hand was incredibly intuitive, and
| more granular. Then again, maybe that comes down to me not
| understanding what the hell is going on with uBO's UI.
| ProNeo wrote:
| Having the exact same issues. If someone could clarify that
| would be awesome.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Doesn't that UI only present itself if you declare yourself
| an advanced user?
| lazyweb wrote:
| Yes exactly. If you don't understand the controls, reading
| the linked FAQ is really worth it and doesn't take that
| long.
| wyuyva wrote:
| All your questions can be answered by reading over the
| documentation in the uBo github wiki.
| ooboe wrote:
| With the uMatrix UI, the answers were immediately obvious
| without reading a wiki.
| mrec wrote:
| That panel is described in some detail here [1], though even
| after reading it the click behaviour is very unintuitive.
| It's explicitly an advanced-user thing, though, and only
| shown if you click "More" on the basic popup.
|
| [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Quick-
| guide:-popup-us...
| wtallis wrote:
| That link doesn't seem to actually describe the advanced
| mode panel in any detail at all. The link that does is
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-
| filtering:-qu...
| vietvu wrote:
| Wait, you guys are using other browser than Firefox?
| scaladev wrote:
| I see lots of comments here assuming absolutely everybody uses
| Chromium-based browsers. The Firefox "cult" (which I have been
| a part of since 1.5) is a bubble inside a bubble.
| diragon wrote:
| I have difficulties understanding why everyone's using Chrome-
| based browsers, when it's obvious how bad they are for privacy.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Many people do not really care about privacy or are not
| convinced that Firefox is significantly better.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > Firefox is significantly better
|
| Most people use browsers for facebook, gmail, youtube, and
| things like banking, taxes, etc. It's common that, when
| facing any issue when using Firefox - with banking and
| government sites, you are going to be told to try using
| chrome. So, for the end user, chrome is the better browser,
| as more sites work properly on it.
| depressedpanda wrote:
| People keep saying that web sites don't work in Firefox,
| but it's never happened to me.
|
| Why is that?
| [deleted]
| rchaud wrote:
| Chrome is a product of one of the biggest corporations in the
| world and marketed and distributed as such.
|
| Firefox was big between 2004-2010 if I recall. Chrome came out
| in 2008, and needed a couple of a years to really dominate
| mindshare. The growth of Android helped as well.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I think I've tried migrating away from Chrome like 5 or 6
| times. Always come back because it usability (for me) is not
| there, and things require workarounds[0]. Last time I tried
| firefox I abandoned it again because of these reasons [1]. So,
| for me, using Chrome feels more natural, and Firefox feels like
| a chore and I'm constantly annoyed that things work differently
| than the way I'm used to. Considering most people - not talking
| about HN audience, but general population - absolutely hate any
| kind of change, it's easy to see how people would try firefox,
| and then abandon it because it works differently.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26756575
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26756622
| miralize wrote:
| I'd love to move to Firefox, but I havent committed to fully
| because the Profiles and the corresponding switching mechanism in
| Chrome is just too good.
|
| I don't want to use containers to manage the different
| work/personal profiles I have and the lack of easy way to toggle
| between the two (a keyboard shortcut) has been a deal-breaker
| every time I tried to switch.
|
| The profile manager in Firefox is long overdue a revamp.
| theon144 wrote:
| Honest question, in what ways is switching entire profiles
| better than containers?
| sandeepbhat wrote:
| Really nice post!! I almost got confused with uBlox at the start.
|
| https://www.u-blox.com/en
| nimbius wrote:
| this process, also called cname flattening, is available in many
| dns recursors.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| One of the reasons I still like Firefox for Android is uBlock
| Origin, as well as a few other extensions.
| Sephr wrote:
| > The Firefox version of uBO use LZ4 compression by default to
| store raw filter lists, compiled list data, and memory snapshots
| to disk storage.
|
| This doesn't explain why the Chrome version doesn't use LZ4 or
| better by default. There are native JS implementations of LZ4
| available as well that don't require WebAssembly.
| [deleted]
| apozem wrote:
| I really, really wish Apple would update Safari for uBlock
| Origin. I'm about to publish a Safari extension (a NoScript
| equivalent) and the content blocking APIs are so limited. iOS is
| even worse than the Mac, too. On iOS AFAIK you can't even reload
| the page for the user.
| barrkel wrote:
| The other side of the coin of content filtering is the
| possibility of snooping and data exfiltration.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > The other side of the coin of content filtering is the
| possibility of snooping and data exfiltration.
|
| I am relatively naive in this realm, but this is why I chose
| Firefox Focus as my iOS Safari context blocker.
|
| Firefox Focus also seems like a great browser to have set as
| the default in apps like Apollo.
| newscracker wrote:
| On iOS, the content blocking model has never exposed one's
| browsing history to the blocking extensions. Whether it's
| Firefox Focus or some other content blocker enabled in
| Safari settings (you can enable more than one), the
| extensions can only provide a set of URL patterns that the
| underlying Safari browser engine (used by Firefox Focus and
| every other browser on iOS) will match with requests and
| block. No information --about which URLs were visited or
| matched with the blocking rules or which ones were blocked
| -- is ever known to the content blocker app/extension.
| pouta wrote:
| You should give Insight Browser on iOS a chance. It's literally
| safari + ad-block and some other goodies bundled up under a
| nice to use interface.
| sa1 wrote:
| Literally all browsers in iOS are safari + some other
| goodies. But thanks for the suggestion, it seems to have some
| useful extensions!
| ehsankia wrote:
| The irony is that this is the model the new Chrome API was
| going towards, and Apple has been using it forever, but when
| Google goes to do it, everyone has tinfoil theories about how
| Google is specifically doing it to kill ad-block extensions,
| but when Apple does it, very few people complained.
|
| Realistically, it's probably more security and battery
| efficient. I doubt they'll undo it.
| unicornfinder wrote:
| To be fair the ad-blockers available for Safari are severely
| limited compared to what can be done in Chrome. Things like
| YouTube ads for example aren't blocked reliably in Safari in
| my experience.
| ehsankia wrote:
| That was my point exactly, and no one ever claims Safari's
| model is done for bad reasons, but if Google were to do
| something similar to Safari, they would get a ton of hate.
| newscracker wrote:
| That will never happen. Apple moved several years ago to the
| "content blocking rules" mode on iOS, where all that any
| blocker can provide is a set of rules to match URLs with (to
| put it in simpler terms). Safari would lookup every request
| against the rules and block requests without the extension
| getting any information about which URLs were visited, which
| rules matched, and which ones were blocked. More recently, it
| moved to the same model in desktop Safari too (there's a
| detailed post on the uBlock Origin issues/forum about why there
| will never be a uBlock Origin for Safari even though the
| browser has started supporting WebExtensions).
|
| The way uBlock Origin and similar extensions on desktop
| browsers like Firefox work is by intercepting all requests,
| which means it can exfiltrate your browsing behavior and/or
| sell that. I'm confident that uBlock Origin doesn't exfiltrate
| data, but the same cannot be said of other extensions in this
| space.
|
| Apple, with its already restrictive content blocking model,
| will not allow a way for extensions to look at requests or
| manipulate requests. Chrome's Manifest V3, whenever it's
| adopted on the release version of Google Chrome, will also kill
| uBlock Origin (it allows requests to be seen, but not
| intercepted/modified).
| skrowl wrote:
| Keep in mind that on iOS you have no browser options AT ALL.
| You get Safari or skinned Safari.
|
| Per the Apple app store rules, no one may publish a browser or
| javascript engine and any app that browses the web MUST use
| safari's webkit.
|
| This is by design so that web feels very bad on iOS compared to
| native apps, so you'll keep using native apps and Apple will
| get their 30% of whatever you buy in app.
| mike_d wrote:
| > This is by design so that web feels very bad on iOS
|
| The reason is because the WebKit engine on iOS is heavily
| optimized for battery life and can make use of private APIs
| that further that goal.
|
| Safari and Chrome are essentially the same engine under the
| hood, the web wouldn't "feel" better if you had one over the
| other.
| jamienicol wrote:
| Webkit and blink have diverged significantly
| nuker wrote:
| > The reason is because the WebKit engine on iOS is heavily
| optimized for battery life
|
| I'd add security too here. Also, if they allow native
| Chrome on iOS, Google domination in web standards would be
| complete and irreversible.
| int_19h wrote:
| Why are these APIs private, then?
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Recently Safari on iOS has changed how the back button works
| so pressing back now takes me to the top of the previous page
| rather than the location I was at before I linked away.
|
| More recently Firefox on iOS also behaves this way.
| sjwright wrote:
| > you can't even reload the page for the user
|
| Can you explain why you'd want to do this? At first blush it
| seems like a terrible idea to allow extensions to reload pages.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| On the ublock origin UI you can click a little icon in the
| toolbar pull up the settings for that page. There is a little
| icon you that shows you whether it is enabled or disabled
| both in the toolbar and in this settings page. Clicking it in
| the settings page toggles the state for that page which is
| retained next time you visit.
|
| When you change the state a little refresh icon appears right
| behind the status icon indicating that the state of the page
| as shown doesn't match your setting. Clicking it reloads the
| page.
|
| You could reload it automatically at state change but this
| might break whatever the user is in the middle of doing.
|
| You don't have to have this feature but it is handy that the
| reminder that the page is out of sync is a button to fix this
| and that it is half an inch from your current mouse position.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| I created an extension that flushes all cookies and local
| storage for the current domain; it then reloads the page so
| you appear to be a fresh new visitor.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Name?
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| It's called "Howdy Stranger", it's listed in both Firefox
| and Chrome official add-on stores.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| You just got yourself an install. The VMware partner
| portal is so buggy i need to do temporary containers all
| the time, but this is nice. Thanks mate!
| xoa wrote:
| Wow, what an awesome dive into some of the technical aspects
| behind one of my favorite tools for using the web. And I do think
| of it that way these days, it's fairly stunning on some sites to
| switch off all the block and see how they become genuinely
| unbrowsable. I remember seeing Gorhill discuss a few times over
| the years some of the reqs for uBO during certain times (like why
| it could no longer work with Safari following changes Apple made
| a while back), but so cool to have it all collected in one place.
|
| Having said that I've also been fairly stunned recently to see
| how much difference a simple DNS blacklist system can make too.
| Not because it's a big technical achievement but because it _isn
| 't_ and in principle seems relatively trivial to work around. But
| as I've been switching all my routing from UniFi to OPNsense,
| I've gone ahead and tried out Unbound's basic built-in
| blacklisting. While it's no uBO, it works on every single device
| and browser including in apps and it seems like it really
| shouldn't, that more parties would just be proxying ads through
| their own infra and DNS. Been kind of an interesting illustration
| of technical vs economic influences in an ecosystem. I can see
| how proxying would add complexity and cost to setup so it must
| just be that few enough people do it the ad industry can't be
| bothered.
|
| But should that ever catch on (and it could, Raspberry Pi seems
| fairly well known) I expect uBO to be able to keep up with the
| cat-and-mouse long after DNS has been left behind. This piece
| helps underline how incredibly important maintaining a critical
| level of diversity in the browser ecosystem is. Just shortly ago
| there were a bunch of complaints again about Apple not allowing
| Chrome to be on iOS because it "holds back the web", but what
| "holding back the web" looks like is certainly a matter of
| perspective...
| estaseuropano wrote:
| I guess the issue with proxying is that the ad provider has
| less control/data and can't be sure whether views are genuine.
| chillfox wrote:
| Unless the ad provider proxy the site instead of the ads.
| That way they get more control/data.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before someone develops a wasm
| browser engine that renders to canvas and provides
| "trusted" delivery of ad assets over a websocket.
| jhugo wrote:
| How could that be any more "trusted" than doing it
| without wasm and websocket?
| adrianN wrote:
| As long as the user still has control over their machine
| (i.e. the browser) this approach doesn't work very well.
| You can't really run trusted code on an untrusted
| machine.
| rini17 wrote:
| No, it does work well. When they deliver the website as
| obfuscated binary code, it's much harder for user to
| change its behavior. Notice parent quoted the word
| "trusted" so you disagree with something other than they
| meant.
| collinmanderson wrote:
| like AMP
| jtbayly wrote:
| That's great if you're right, because it means it is a
| fundamental limitation that can't easily be worked around.
| chillfox wrote:
| They will work around it by being your DNS provider and
| proxy for your site.
| throwaway189262 wrote:
| I think the future is machine learning based blocking.
|
| Ads are obvious, they have to be for users to see them. You
| could probably use text classification and object recognition
| to filter ads effectively. And you could do it from the view
| layer where nothing on the page can tell they've been blocked.
|
| This is also my tinfoily theory for why Chrome restricts the
| API's used by ad blockers. It's to prevent more effective
| blockers from being developed.
| Vinnl wrote:
| > Ads are obvious, they have to be for users to see them.
|
| I'm not so sure about that:
| https://static.seattletimes.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/10/g...
|
| (See also: "native ads".)
| Oddskar wrote:
| Not everything has to be done with machine learning you know.
| dbt00 wrote:
| I don't think so. Machine learning is generally poorly suited
| to dealing with an intelligent adaptive adversary capable of
| an unpredictable universe of inputs.
| throwaway189262 wrote:
| Text classification might be very good at identifying ad
| text. There's a popular fake news dataset where models hit
| 85% accuracy https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-
| 3-030-68787-8_...
|
| Ads are highly tuned for click through rates. Even if the
| model isn't 100% accurate, it would force advertisers to
| use less effective ad text to avoid filters.
| lone-commenter wrote:
| > it would force advertisers to use less effective ad
| text to avoid filters.
|
| That seems counterproductive to me. I mean, ads would
| still be annoying. And that's why we block them.
| mrob wrote:
| I decline to accept ads because I don't want professional
| manipulators tricking me into acting against my best
| interests. I consider myself fairly good at resisting
| manipulation, but these are highly skilled experts backed
| by the full power of modern neuroscience, and they aim to
| catch me off guard. Adverts are hazardous to view, and
| you should not do so without utmost mental focus and
| discipline, which is impractical during general browsing.
|
| The avoidance of annoyance is a just bonus.
| ziml77 wrote:
| "Tricked by professional manipulators". I like that
| phrasing over what I've tried to use: "mind control".
| Makes me sound like a conspiracy wacko.
| indymike wrote:
| >This is also my tinfoily theory for why Chrome restricts the
| API's used by ad blockers. It's to prevent more effective
| blockers from being developed.
|
| In general, we've been engineering around bad user software
| install decisions for decades. Windows spyware, toolbars,
| spammy mobile apps, for example. The apis needed by an ad
| blocker are exactly the kinds of APIs that would be coveted
| by and used by nefarious ad products. In fact, the Firefox
| ecosystem took a big hit when Mozilla shut down a bunch of
| APIs that allowed for some pretty amazing ad blocking a few
| years ago. So why did they have to take those APIs out of the
| product?
|
| Nefarious products that used those APIs. For example, on of
| the first things that happened with the original AdBlock was
| it was cloned and used to deliver and rewrite ads by a
| scumware company. All the warnings and pop-up scary messages
| in the world don't stop users from making bad decisions, and
| that at Google scale, may actually be a bigger problem. Ad
| Blockers may simply be collateral damage as the cost of
| dealing with app-drive ad fraud is petty staggering compared
| to the small number of ad blocker users.
|
| That said, I'm on the side of giving users the power, even if
| they occasionally shoot themselves in the foot.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| You should checkout NextDNS
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Funny, I see the possible future differently. I am inclined to
| predict that the option to use ad blockers may come to an end
| because browsers and other software financed with online ad-
| derived revenue have full control over what extensions users
| are allowed to run. They have full control over that system for
| extending the functionality of their software.
|
| Whereas the system for supplying software with IP addresses
| should continue to remain controllable by the user.^1 The
| online ad ecosystem has never had full control over that
| system.
|
| 1. If they so choose to exercise said control. As cited,
| probably most users are not currently exercising that control.
| This allows online ad tech to operate with relative ease, at
| relatively lower cost.
|
| As much as anyone loves their ad blocker (to be clear, I think
| they are great), we really cannot dismiss the role of DNS in ad
| blocking. After all, it is DNS that is being used to bypass uBO
| on browsers other than Firefox. The only reason uBO can achieve
| a 70% success rate^2 blocking CNAME-cloaked ad/tracking on
| Firefox is because Firefox has a "DNS API". As such, uBO can
| check the results of DNS lookups for ad/tracking server
| hostnames/IPs.^3
|
| Of course, a user who blocks ads/tracking outside the browser
| by controlling her own DNS lookups also has access to those
| results. No API needed. (Although I think it's a great project,
| I personally do not use Pi-Hole. I was using DIY DNS (without
| dnsmasq) long before Pi-Hole.)
|
| One solution I can see to a future where ad blocking extensions
| are banned is a user-controlled proxy that performs similar
| operations, but outside the browser.
|
| (I make most HTTP requests for recreational web use outside the
| browser, through a proxy I control. For recreational web use, I
| do not use a major browser to make HTTP requests to the proxy.
| The programs that I use have no financial dependence on online
| advertising/tracking/data collection like the major browsers
| and many mobile apps do.)
|
| 2. According to the paper cited on Github page that comprises
| the OP.
|
| 3. According to some uBO users sometimes the uBO-triggered
| lookups are undesired, e.g., when using proxies/VPNs.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > Funny, I see the possible future differently. I am inclined
| to predict that the option to use ad blockers may come to an
| end because browsers and other software financed with online
| ad-derived revenue have full control over what extensions
| users are allowed to run. They have full control over that
| system for extending the functionality of their software.
|
| They are starting to do that. Therefore, better web browser
| must be written, with the user having full control, and not
| having things that the user cannot override (assume the user
| knows what they are doing; you must have enough ropes to hang
| yourself, and also a few more just in case).
| devit wrote:
| As long as there remain viable open-source browsers there
| will be forks allowing ad-blocking.
|
| The only danger is Google switching Chrome to closed source
| and adding lots of complex extensions that get widely adopted
| faster than they can be reverse engineered, but this seems an
| unlikely scenario.
|
| The other danger would be general purpose computers or
| smartphones no longer available, but that also seems
| unlikely.
|
| The final and most plausible danger is different and it is
| advertisers switching to ads that cannot be reliably
| distinguished from the rest of the page (currently it seems
| they don't do it because that removes any direct access to
| analytics by the advertiser and thus requires them to trust
| websites and they don't trust them).
| dorgo wrote:
| If a browser bans ad-blockers and people start to fiddle with
| DNS, wouldn't it be easy for a browser to use it's own DNS
| system? If a browser turns hostile there is nothing you can
| do.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Yes. Golang actually encourages developers to use their own
| resolver in applications instead of the system one. Google
| itself uses its "Public DNS" cache addreses in software and
| hardware it distributes. Neither decision may have been
| made with the intent of thwarting DNS-based evasion of
| ad/tracking, however, the resulting consequences may well
| be the same.
|
| "... there is nothing you can do."
|
| I am typing this comment through a text-only browser. HTTP
| requests, with a bare minimum of HTTP headers, are being
| sent from a proxy I control, not the browser. Yet the
| comment looks no different than any other comment. It
| works. I have freedom to choose whatever software I want to
| make HTTP requests.
|
| I try to avoid any software (not just browsers) that access
| the internet and bypasses the system DNS settings. The word
| "hostile" is a good choice of words I think to describe
| such programs.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Is any browser written in Golang?
| catbuttes wrote:
| Go's UI tooling is... not great. It's more aimed at
| server side and CLI usage. In those niches it is awesome
| though
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Go 's UI tooling is... not great._
|
| Hopefully https://gioui.org/ quickly fixes that.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Yet the comment looks no different than any other
| comment. It works. I have freedom to choose whatever
| software I want to make HTTP requests. //
|
| I mean, sure there is, some form of DRM is possible. It
| might be circumventable, but it would be a PITA.
| exikyut wrote:
| IIUC that's what DNS-over-HTTPS is trying to do, methinks.
| LilBytes wrote:
| Exactly. Same for the nextdns.io service which I'm
| happily subscribing to.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > I am inclined to predict that the option to use ad blockers
| may come to an end because browsers and other software
| financed with online ad-derived revenue have full control
| over what extensions users are allowed to run. They have full
| control over that system for extending the functionality of
| their software.
|
| I have a feeling that if Chrome (for instance) went that
| route it would quickly become Internet Explorer'd. If you
| recall, IE was the Chrome of its day for a good while until
| it slowly eroded away all its goodwill.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| That worked back then. Ten years ago, browsers were,
| compared to today, ridiculously simple and thus could
| easily be replaced. I wouldn't be surprised if today's
| Chrome had more LoC than Linux in 2010.
|
| Also, the mobile platform might be a good indicator of what
| ordinary people are willing to put up with. Chrome doesn't
| support extensions there, so everybody and their uncle is
| browsing the web with the full ad experience. I've never
| seen a non-tech savvy person use Firefox, or just anything
| but chrome (or the system browser), on an Android device,
| which easily allows to install uBO. Yet on the desktop
| somehow even those people somehow learned to install uBO or
| ABP. It appears that "apparently you cannot do this on your
| phone" is an acceptable answer to most people.
| wjnc wrote:
| Let's get that quantified:
|
| Chromium LoC: 34,900,821 [1]
|
| Linux 2010: about 12 million [2]
|
| It appears that Chromium has more LoC than Linux. (With
| LoC being a bad measure, Linux being GNU/Linux, blah).
| Browsing is hard.
|
| [1] via Google since OpenHub appears down [2] https://com
| mons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lines_of_Code_Linu...
| maccam94 wrote:
| I'm afk so I can't check the current numbers, but as of a
| year ago Linux was up to 27.8M loc: https://www.theregist
| er.com/2020/01/06/linux_2020_kernel_sys...
| xnx wrote:
| It would be hard to write a browser from scratch now that
| had the features of a modern browser, but creating a
| first-class browser is much easier than it has ever been
| because of Chromium and Firefox.
|
| I agree that mobile is the direction many things are
| headed, but currently it's very easy to install any
| number of (sometimes shady) browsers from the Google app
| store that include ad blocking.
| eecc wrote:
| But don't forget Microsoft let IE rot for years and that is
| what drove the interest - and the protest - for
| alternatives and helped Flash thrive.
|
| Today Chrome is a fairly good platform, tons of support for
| all sorts of html extensions, and a very strong commitment
| to security.
|
| It's a really nice product, except for the strings
| attached.
|
| Alphabet should be broken up and Chrome (OS) spun off into
| its own business; the tracking should be made completely
| transparent and optional on a subscription base.
| curiousmindz wrote:
| Interestingly, this type of perspective is only gained in
| hindsight.
|
| For example, I could see a future, say in 10 years, where
| we have a vastly better way to browse the web and then we
| will look back on today and think that Chrome(ium) was
| coasting on its past success and only providing minor new
| features (while ensuring that ads continue to be as
| profitable as possible).
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I definitely remember takes in the genre of "who cares if
| IE is never updated. What else could you possibly do on
| the web?" back when websites were mostly static,
| JavaScript was still a toy, and all the people who could
| imagine better were trying to convince everyone to switch
| to [Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox]. Microsoft had the
| inspiration for XMLHttpRequest _right there_ and couldn
| 't see past its Windows-centric strategy.
|
| There's an alternate timeline where Microsoft leaned on
| anyone implementing it. We never would have gotten as far
| as Sun suing Google over the Java API because _no one_
| crossed Microsoft.
|
| No AJAX. No web 2.0. No SPAs. It would be a different
| world.
| andrepd wrote:
| > No AJAX. No web 2.0. No SPAs. It would be a different
| world.
|
| Is it better this way? I'm not so sure.
| eecc wrote:
| Uh? Did you even remember IE? How are the two scenarios
| even remotely comparable? It was abandon-ware, after
| Netscape was crushed Ballmer couldn't imagine anything
| useful for IE.
| pibechorro wrote:
| Broken up by politicians? Ya, hard no. Just stop using
| it! Stop forcing your choices on people. No one has to
| use chrome, google search, gmail, etc. There are
| alternatives to all your problems, open source ones too.
| teddyh wrote:
| Can you name a few consumer-level boycotts in, say, the
| last 50 years, which actually accomplished their goals?
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| They didn't suggest a boycott. Each individual consumer
| decision makes a difference in aggregate. Every failed
| business in history is a result of consumer decisions
| away from what they have to offer, so I don't
| particularly understand that rationale.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Unfortunately we live in a world were society does need
| to legislate morality. Slavery or child labour weren't
| ended by consumers voting with their wallet.
| kaba0 wrote:
| People are "easy" to manipulate, especially when your
| control reaches basically every aspect of their life.
| Hiding/downplaying few articles here, shoving another
| into my face there with an opaque algorithm will achieve
| basically anything over a long time.
|
| Also, you underestimate the effect of laziness. A company
| really has to do some atrocious thing to result in people
| leaving its services. Like, what would make the average
| person change from Gmail? He/she may not even know that
| 1) it is part of google which should be avoided now 2)
| what are alternative email providers 3) the whole change
| requires quite the technical know how.
|
| It is simply naive to expect that "the market will solve
| it" to work in the general case. Competition only works
| when there are strict rules. Otherwise, the
| strongest/least fair player wins, and that's why
| monopolies have to be broken up.
| ilovepitchdecks wrote:
| I agree that monopolies have to be broken up. I'd start
| with the government.
| ilovepitchdecks wrote:
| I'm going to rephrase my original comment, which got
| flagged: There's inherent hypocrisy in having the biggest
| monopoly of them all regulate smaller monopolies. Because
| they're 'monopolies'. Right.
| teddyh wrote:
| As if "hypocricy" was the worst possible offense. If you
| remove government, who will then stop other monopolies
| from forming in their place? Government is what all
| governed people, in aggregate, decide should be common
| principles. If they are not to your liking, then you can
| either leave or advocate for (often slow and gradual)
| change. It is often said that people get the governent
| they deserve; i.e. the problem (if there is one) is with
| people, not government. I would argue that you _can't_
| really abolish government, any more that you can have a
| structureless organization:
|
| https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
| ilovepitchdecks wrote:
| Yes, but I wasn't advocating for the abolishment of
| anything; I was merely pointing out that there's a double
| standard. To rephrase your words, don't the people get
| the 'monopolies they deserve'? After all, neither the
| CEOs nor the employees of these entities are aliens from
| space.
|
| You can't just leave a government the same way you can
| leave a job (and become unemployed) or a product (become
| a non-customer); you can only switch to another one. Why
| don't you try parking a vessel in the international
| waters and see how long it takes before it's sunk.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Yes, but I wasn 't advocating for the abolishment of
| anything;_
|
| You advocated for the government to be broken up like a
| monopolist would be. I can't really interpret that any
| differently.
|
| > _I was merely pointing out that there 's a double
| standard._
|
| Yes, it's a double standard. Now, _why_ do you imply that
| this is bad? Don't you _have_ to have special rules for
| the top level? Like, the root directory is its own parent
| directory, but nobody complains about "inconsistency" in
| file systems.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I'm fairly sure I have no say in google's politics, but I
| do have a (limited) say in my country's. Also, the two
| don't even play in the same field. The government is more
| like the referee in a sport.
| ilovepitchdecks wrote:
| Oh, but you do have a say: You can work for Google! It's
| the same as moving to a different country and becoming a
| citizen to be eligible to vote.
|
| Referees, in comparison to governments, can be fired for
| doing a poor job.
| kaba0 wrote:
| > You can work for Google
|
| Yeah and I will simultaneously work for google to not fk
| up the open web, for facebook to not disrupt democracy,
| and nestle to not goddamn force breastfeeding mothers on
| their shitty product.
|
| How do you imagine a world without governments? The first
| thing they will do is put cocaine in their special food
| so you get addicted, add cheaper and more unhealthy
| components, even toxic ones, etc. Companies after a quite
| small size becomes the stereotypical paper clip AI, but
| instead of paperclips, it optimizes profit over
| everything else. A well functioning government with
| separation of power and without much corruption is good -
| it protects us from the cancerous outgrowth of companies.
| randalluk wrote:
| There's an unstated premise here that the market doesn't
| force some people's choices on other people. I doubt that
| that's true - especially when competition is limited.
| There are limited alternatives currently, and this
| discussion contains plausible scenarios by which huge
| companies could use their power to limit even further
| those alternatives, and the choice available to us.
| kaba0 wrote:
| The government is chosen by the people and enforced by
| their choice to make decisions. A company without control
| is cancer. Just look at Nestle, Facebook and Google and
| plenty of others abusing their size and that people are
| NOT rational entities en masse. A government should (and
| they are the only thing that can) step up against these
| abuses.
| ilovepitchdecks wrote:
| Products are chosen by 'the people' (consumers) too.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Products are chosen by a weighted sample of the people,
| according to how much money somebody has access to. "Vote
| with your wallet" means that different people have
| different sized votes. "Vote with your wallet" is an
| inherently anti-democratic phrase.
| ilovepitchdecks wrote:
| How much money somebody has access to is directly
| correlated with how much time (of which everybody gets
| the same 24 hours a day) they spend on trying to earn
| money. People who care less about money will earn less
| and that is their own fault.
|
| The same is true in politics. Those who shout the
| loudest, win. A big wallet helps too. Ever heard of
| lobbying?
| MereInterest wrote:
| Factually incorrect. Some people have different hourly
| incomes, by several orders of magnitude. Some people have
| passive income, which no longer requires any time input.
| Some people have inherited wealth, which is entirely
| uncorrelated with their own efforts.
|
| While I can see some benefits to having a proportional
| vote that can be allocated to different issues, money
| isn't such a vote because it isn't equally distributed.
| Between this and your reply to kaba0, I have a very hard
| time believing that you are arguing this in good faith.
| ilovepitchdecks wrote:
| There's no such thing as passive income; there's only
| delayed income. You're not getting paid for nothing;
| you're getting paid for putting in the work ahead of
| time. What's wrong with that?
|
| I never claimed everyone has the same hourly income. Nor
| should they. Some people work hard (on their career - not
| necessarily at their current job!), others take it easy.
| Both are valid options, but there will be consequences
| for the respective groups (both good and bad).
|
| If you're against inherited wealth, I expect you to leave
| none to your own children. Respect if you actually go
| through with this.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Again, incorrect in every way.
|
| > There's no such thing as passive income; there's only
| delayed income.
|
| Wrong. If you have $500k in assets, that yields an
| average of $35k/year, market average over interest. You
| get paid money for already having money. This is not
| additional work. This is additional money as a result of
| having money.
|
| > Some people work hard (on their career - not
| necessarily at their current job!), others take it easy.
| Both are valid options, but there will be consequences
| for the respective groups (both good and bad).
|
| The difficulty of work is absolutely unrelated to the
| amount paid. Many low wage jobs, such as customer
| service, landscaping, or meat packing are absolutely
| ruinous on one's physical and mental health. They are
| high effort, and low pay. Other jobs are low effort and
| high income.
|
| > If you're against inherited wealth, I expect you to
| leave none to your own children.
|
| Complete non sequitur. Inherited wealth is an example of
| how money, time, and effort are absolutely uncorrelated.
|
| Following up on that non sequitur, though, there must be
| limitations to inherited wealth such that society doesn't
| separate into a landed gentry. You are also ignoring the
| middle ground between being against a generational
| aristocracy and forbidding inherited wealth altogether,
| such as an estate tax. Even if somebody is morally
| against inherited wealth, it is not inconsistent to still
| give wealth to their children, such that they can use it
| to lobby against inherited wealth. It's the same reason
| why I donate money to groups pushing for economic and tax
| reform, rather than deliberately paying more than the
| current tax rate. I still spend what I consider to be my
| fair share supporting society that way, and it goes
| toward making sure that others do as well.
| randalluk wrote:
| Nobody in this discussion has said they're against
| inherited wealth. Just that its existence is one reason
| to favour "one person, one vote" over "one dollar, one
| vote"
| kaba0 wrote:
| Wow.. so how many hours Jeff Bezos's day contains? I'm
| fairly sure a low level worker at amazon spends much more
| time on work than any of the billionaires.
| ilovepitchdecks wrote:
| A low-level worker made that career choice themselves.
| They were well aware they wouldn't become rich by working
| in a warehouse, no matter how many hours they worked.
| They still have their life in their own hands: They can
| look for another job.
|
| Jeff Bezos sure worked like crazy to get Amazon to where
| it is now, so he has every right to take it easy now that
| he's 'made it'.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Thank you, I prefer not being brainwashed into actually
| believing that billionaires' success has anything to do
| with hard work over plain old dumb luck and not being
| absolutely trash at what they do (and a "small" few
| million dollar from daddy here and there).
| PKop wrote:
| >Stop forcing your choices on people
|
| This will never stop, and essentially defines the realm
| of "politics". Either you and people like-minded that
| share your views collectivize to protect your preferences
| from others forcing theirs upon you, or you lose.
|
| This includes monopoly corporations that acquire power to
| restrict your ability to choose. And just wishing it
| weren't so, or asking people to stop achieves nothing.
| People won't, so your only choice is to protect your own
| turf however you can. "Libertarian" style abstaining from
| this fight ensures you lose, so is an impotent strategy.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Dns blocking is limited, very annoying advertising such as in
| video ones needs scripting to get around
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| It's ironic that the browser that presents the biggest red
| flag for removing user control of DNS is Firefox, with their
| push for DNS over HTTPS. It's true that you can turn it off
| (for now), but until Firefox baked DoH in, DNS was a
| sacrosanct user control switch mostly unimpeachable by
| corporate meddling.
| int_19h wrote:
| So long as DoH servers are configurable, why is it a
| problem?
| pmontra wrote:
| I use /etc/hosts daily to access computers with only an
| IP address and no DNS entry, or to override them for
| testing.
|
| I don't want to have to self host a DoH server when it's
| so easy to edit a test file.
|
| Furthermore, until every ISP has its own DoH server we
| are centralizing control of the basic internet
| infrastructure even more than now.
| GrayShade wrote:
| /etc/hosts works in Firefox:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1616252
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| DNS also leaks your domain lookups to anyone and everyone.
| If you make it opt in, then opting in becomes incriminating
| in some contexts. IDK, this sounds very much like a problem
| specific to people who don't need to worry about the state
| controlling their internet access.
| adrianN wrote:
| I don't know the internals of Firefox, but keeping DNS
| support alive seems like a fairly small patchset. I'd think
| that someone would provide a fork if Mozilla decided to
| drop support.
| fpoling wrote:
| Firefox cannot remove that option to use system-provided
| DNS API instead of own implementation of HTTPS DNS. Doing
| that will prevent using it with intranets.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| System DNS should always be used (unless the user
| configures it otherwise, e.g. by using a proxy for all
| connections). If you want DNS over HTTPS, this should be
| implemented as part of the system DNS, so that it can be
| used with any program that accesses the internet, rather
| than only the web browser.
| grenoire wrote:
| Honestly, I can't really browse on my phone anymore. I'm...
| spoiled by FF + uBlock and I can't tolerate all the distractions.
|
| Will we ever get enough traction on either blocking mechanisms or
| stop shoving ads everywhere? Will the general public experience
| the pleasures of an ad-less internet?
|
| P.S. I'm on an iPhone, blockers failed me so far. Thanks for the
| suggestions fellas.
| pacifika wrote:
| Firefox focus includes a decent safari content blocker
| zargon wrote:
| This is one of the top reasons I can't buy an iPhone.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I hear you. One of the greatest reasons I miss Firefox on
| android was because it allowed ublock.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| If Mozilla can continue honing their mobile browsing team and
| keep alive a mobile web browser with pre-Manifest v3
| WebExtension support, then maybe the status quo doesn't have to
| change. Advertisers can push whatever they want and the 0.1% of
| users that want to use uBlock can happily block them all. As
| far as the current landscape of adblocking goes, I have no real
| complaints.
|
| If people try to encourage too much radical change with how ads
| are distributed, I fear that the advertising agencies will
| panic and all start to do what YouTube does, which is to serve
| the ads from the same domain as the content, rendering all
| domain-based adblocking useless. At that point, the only thing
| between the general Internet and ads will be uBlock, and if
| Google obtains complete control of the WebExtension standards,
| I'm not sure there would be anything else we could do.
| pouta wrote:
| Insight Browser. No affiliation, just a very very happy user.
| asiachick wrote:
| You can push to force Apple to allow other browser engines.
| Firefox on Android supports extensions including uBlock Origin.
| Firefox on iOS is only allowed to be skinned Safari
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios
| therealmarv wrote:
| Using Adguard on Android for some years. It works really good
| with Chrome and all other apps. Mobile browsing without any
| adblocker is a very bad experience.
| bobiny wrote:
| I'm using this on iOS https://better.fyi/ I don't remember last
| time I saw ads.
| kube-system wrote:
| Run pihole or a similar dns solution at the network level, and
| you can block domains without installing anything on your
| devices.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Host based blocking is certainly better than nothing, but
| uBlock offers much more comprehensive and expansive blocking,
| not to mention cosmetic filtering and other features that you
| can't achieve with PiHole/NextDNS/AdguardDNS/Blokada etc..
| kube-system wrote:
| For sure, it's not as powerful as something that can modify
| the DOM, etc. But, you can also run both, if you still
| prefer uBlock on your PC.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Yup, I agree. Running both right now, the additional
| benefit of moving DNS queries away from my ISP (I pay for
| NextDNS) is certainly a good one too
| computronus wrote:
| I use both - uBO at the browser level and a PiHole for
| DNS. It's "defense in depth" - there's more than one
| layer of defense for something nefarious to get through.
| fsflover wrote:
| Firefox with uBlock works fine on my Pinephone ;)
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| On iOS, Safari with a couple content blockers (like Purify
| and/or 1Blocker) do a pretty decent job. Once in a blue moon
| something will get through, but the goal of dramatically
| improving load times and decrudding pages is accomplished well
| enough for me.
|
| On Android, Firefox supports a subset of extensions that
| includes uBlock Origin. Chrome seems to be the dominant browser
| on Android but regardless of how good it is, I can't imagine
| _not_ using Firefox there.
| rattray wrote:
| Firefox is my default browser on Android, and I use Chrome
| when I need to. It works fine.
|
| I personally tend to use Chrome for "logged-in" internet use,
| and Firefox for "logged-out" use like browsing, news, etc.
| True on both desktop and mobile. Partly this is because
| Google's password vault has great UX across Chrome and
| Android apps.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| On iPhone you have Safari content blockers. Better Blocker and
| Firefox Focus are two popular ones.
|
| There's also a Lockdown, an open source firewall implemented
| using iOS VPN capabilities (though it doesn't send your
| requests through an external server). Lockdown is able to block
| trackers in any app, not just Safari.
| zaik wrote:
| Firefox Mobile + uBlock works great for me.
| bentcorner wrote:
| It works pretty well but Edge/Chrome feel better than FF on
| mobile. Scrolling performance is probably the biggest
| difference. I've had issues with using FF as the default
| webview too.
| mminer237 wrote:
| You can always use Brave. Not quite as good as uBO, but it
| still blocks most ads while being Chromium-based.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Fells better even with all the ads and other annoyances uBO
| blocks? I've never noticed a scrolling performance issue
| myself, let alone one worth tolerating that stuff over.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| From my perspective, scrolling performance is a minor
| annoyance, whereas the inability to block ads is basically
| a complete showstopper.
| godelski wrote:
| FF Mobile has uBlock
| temp0826 wrote:
| Firefox on iOS does not support extensions, fwiw
| thereare5lights wrote:
| You can use Firefox Focus as the ad blocker for Safari on
| iOS
| benjohnson wrote:
| As I understand it, it's Apples fault for requiring all
| browsers delivered by it's App Store to be basically
| wrappers around Safari.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| How has Apple not been strung up on antitrust grounds
| over this?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Because IOS is a small fraction of the smartphone and PC
| market.
| kaba0 wrote:
| It doesn't preclude antitrust investigations.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I don't think it is in violation of existing law but I'm
| totally for addition protections like the ability of
| users to install software of their choosing on their own
| hardware including additional app stores.
| [deleted]
| skrowl wrote:
| That's because it's not real firefox. Apple doesn't allow
| real firefox / chrome / etc and all apps that browse web
| must use safari's webkit.
|
| Keep that in mind next time you go to buy a phone!
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Blokada for Android is a pretty good DNS-based ad blocker.
| leeoniya wrote:
| or if you have root, AdAway can patch your hosts file.
| ignoramous wrote:
| You can definitely do better than use Blokada:
| https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8536
| Ayesh wrote:
| Or, you can just set a DoT server that blocks ads by default.
| bootlooped wrote:
| Came here to say this same thing about NextDNS. Plus they'll
| block ads in apps, which uBlock Origin is not going to help
| you with. It seems like DNS ad blocking is a pretty good
| solution on mobile, with different pros and cons.
|
| I do also use uBlock Origin on Firefox Mobile though.
| Svperstar wrote:
| >spoiled by FF+uBlock and I can't tolerate all the
| distractions.
|
| I run FF+uBlock on my S21 Ultra. Works just like the desktop.
| sedatk wrote:
| Not possible with an iPhone, I presume.
| na85 wrote:
| Posting this from my oneplus running firefox and ublock origin.
| Firefox has been my daily driver on mobile for a few years now
| (since before Quantum) and it's been reliably great.
| rplnt wrote:
| Anymore? I don't think browsing on a phone was ever viable. The
| problems changed over time, but I never found myself using the
| browser for anything other than absolute necessity. It's sad
| really.
|
| Back in the day Opera with Turbo (or whatever it was called)
| was the peak of mobile browser usability for me.
| [deleted]
| timbit42 wrote:
| FF+uBO works great on Android.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Firefox does support no script on mobile! It's great
| [deleted]
| ub99 wrote:
| I use AdGuard pro on an iPhone and generally don't see any ads
| at all in Safari. I believe this app will block ads in any iOS
| browser.
| coldpie wrote:
| I'd like to switch to iPhone, but the lack of real Firefox +
| uBO is what keeps me from doing it. It's good to know there
| are some options there, thanks for the pointer.
| satysin wrote:
| I was much like you but I can say that AdGuard for Safari
| on iOS is pretty decent. Sure it isn't as flexible as
| Firefox+uBO on Android but it does a fine job at blocking
| ads and doesn't require any tweaking.
|
| The biggest benefit is that as every web view on iOS is
| Safari it means you get content blocking in _all_ apps that
| use a web view (providing they don 't disable it which I'm
| sure some do but I don't know of any that actually do it).
| E.g. in the third-party reddit app Apollo any website you
| load within the app also has all ads blocked.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If ad blocking is all you're looking for, I can't remember
| the last time I saw an ad in Safari iOS with Firefox focus
| content blocker, or Wipr content blocker.
|
| I don't notice any difference between Firefox or Chrome +
| ublock origin and Safari + Wipr/Firefox Focus.
| Scottn1 wrote:
| +1
|
| I paid for full version of AdGuard Pro late last year after
| my 6 month Android/Oneplus phase ended and I went back to
| iOS. It has worked REAL well and allows me to just use native
| Safari. I'm happy with this setup. I used to use free Firefox
| Focus as the content blocker before, but it would go long
| time between updates.
|
| The only annoyance with Adguard Pro on iOS (and probably the
| same for all app based content blockers on iOS) is it is
| clunky to whitelist a site as they aren't integrated with the
| browser. You have to open the app itself, dig into the
| whitelist area and then manually type in/paste the domain
| name to add it. Brave and FF Focus you can do it right from
| within the browser, same as it was with FF/ubo on Android.
|
| Also, AdGuard on iOS doesn't acknowledge specific pages only
| within a domain. For example; mlb.com is loaded with ads,
| their highlight videos show a 15 sec ad for literally every
| highlight. I have AdGuard enabled and the experience is so
| much better. BUT the "Standings" page doesn't load with
| AdGuard enabled and I can't just disable it only for that
| page.
|
| Regardless, the small price to pay for AdGuard on iOS is well
| worth it.
| pcf wrote:
| AFAIK, ads can only be blocked in Safari on iOS. I have
| Adguard on my iPhone, but it only works in Safari - not
| Firefox, which is the browser I use. So that's very annoying.
| axlee wrote:
| There are DNS blockers for iOS, which block most ads,
| including in-app ads. Just need to find the right list.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Firefox has an additional app called Firefox Focus which
| installs a content blocker for both Safari and Firefox.
|
| Also for Safari, Magic Lasso AdBlocker does a very good
| job.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| Edge browser on iOS has an option to make use of content
| blockers in the same way that Safari does. Last I checked
| Chrome doesn't.
|
| I'm surprised to hear that Firefox doesn't have the option
| to do so.
|
| I don't know if it's just muscle memory, but Safari on iOS
| is still my browser of choice due to the way you open and
| close tabs in it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Well, I use FF+uBlock on my phone :) It works super well.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| They said they're on iOS, where you can only use WebKit, and
| therefore extensions like uBO are not possible.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Ah, that was edited in after I wrote my comment, sadly.
| crocsarecool wrote:
| I can't look up a recipe for boiled eggs without coming upon a
| 15 paragraph essay with ads in between each paragraph. It's so
| obnoxious now. I don't mind that people want to monetize, but
| it's getting off putting when it is so obnoxious.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| I, too, am tired of reading fanfic murder mysteries to get
| basic recipe information.
| bilekas wrote:
| The same, I find news articles particularly bad examples. I
| get advertisments, but news articles with excessive
| clickbaiity adds (adds not internal links to other articles)
| really do just make me close the tab down.
|
| If there was some better mobile integration of the extensions
| or built into the browser itself to be perhaps less intrusive
| adds allowed it would be appreciated.
|
| From that, are browsers legally allowed to implement an
| adblock/ublock directly into their browser ? Seems like
| something that would be considered against fair use or
| something along those lines.
| SilasX wrote:
| >The same, I find news articles particularly bad examples.
| I get advertisments, but news articles with excessive
| clickbaiity adds (adds not internal links to other
| articles) really do just make me close the tab down.
|
| Yeah, they follow every dark pattern in the book,
| especially on mobile. 90% of the time, I'll see a video at
| the top that autoplays, and then if I scroll down, it will
| make the video hover over the 75% of the article I'm trying
| to read. Who is this supposed to benefit?
| mjevans wrote:
| Comcast and other ISPs who have crazy small data-caps and
| then bill the consumer 5 times over for used bandwidth
| and "overages" that might have MAYBE made sense 20 years
| ago.
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| that's not to mention the first page of results from your
| query will be from amzon, ebay, & eggsdirect.com trying to
| sell you the eggs in the first place.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| On recipe blogs, you are probably not looking at the actual
| author monetizing. Rather, someone decided to create a
| copycat website, hire a minimum-wage content writer off a
| freelancing platform to rewrite the original text so that no
| copyright violation is apparent, and then they put the
| copycat website up with a boatload of advertising and SEO.
| The 15 paragraphs are an SEO trick, as Google gives higher
| weight to longform text.
|
| This ecosystem is now so advanced that new copycat recipe
| sites are based on existing copycat sites. You can easily
| tell if a recipe website is a copycat by comparing the
| supposed author bio to the quality of the English. If the
| author bio claims these are recipes by a born and bred
| Louisiana native who wants to share Southern cooking with the
| world, but the actual text is full of grammatical mistakes
| typical of Eastern Europeans or South/Southeast Asians, it is
| clearly a rewritten copycat site.
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| Great point.
|
| There are fundamentally 2 types of content, although the
| line is getting blurred : The hobbyist blog, and the
| publishers magazine.
|
| The first exists for joy, the second only exists to deliver
| adverts.
|
| THe blurring occurs because some of the blogs became such
| hot property the founders sold up.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. Although in addition to the text acting as
| SEO, the initial reasoning behind all the "recipes-as-
| blogs" approaches is that recipes are not in general
| copyrightable, as they aren't generally considered creative
| works. (Whether the food itself is a creative work is not
| the question, it's whether the text qualifies as such.) So
| cookbook/recipe blog writers add enough text to the recipe
| to make the content subject to copyright protections.
|
| Then, as you note, when people do inevitably copy the
| recipe, they churn out new replacement text.
|
| You'll notice, for instance, that a recipe 'database' site
| like allrecipes doesn't have these massive text blocks
| associated with user-posted recipes, because there's no
| need or desire to have those be copyrighted.
| MacroChip wrote:
| I made https://thisfoodblogdoesnotexist.com as satire. It
| uses GPT2 to generate blog content like those 15 paragraph
| essays.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| 2 years from now someone else's AI is generating content
| based on your content, a year later someone is ripping them
| off, a year later another script is filtering out the most
| useful stuff from the second guys stuff and its actually
| good content.
| fsflover wrote:
| You should add your site to the list:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25176101.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Some of the recipes seem actually plausible, e.g.
| https://thisfoodblogdoesnotexist.com/30-Minute-Rice-
| Pudding-...
| astura wrote:
| five cups milk would make rice soup.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Needs more paragraphs. None of them talk about how their
| kids are doing in school.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| FF with uBlock is available on android.
|
| Alternatively check out "Paprika" which bills itself as a
| recipe manager but actually will scrape webpages and extract
| out recipes for you.
| IronWolve wrote:
| And darkreader addon. Addons for firefox mobile is very
| handy.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| The. Worst.
|
| I don't care at all about any of this. Give me the time they
| boil for ffs.
|
| I don't know if it's sites paying by the word, or SEO, or
| some "value added" psychological trick. It is getting worse.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I bet they've noticed 'more time spent on the page' since
| they added interesting stories to those recipes! "When I
| was little, Grandma did this and that and blah blah blah".
|
| Of course, the time spent is cursing, and skimming and
| hunting to find useful info. No one is finding the story
| interesting, but it looks good on metrics?
|
| I wonder if the above is accurate or not.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| I think the idea is that Google allegedly prioritizes pages
| by user dwell time, the idea being that if someone spends
| 10 minutes on your page, it's more relevant than another
| page where the user only spends 5 seconds before closing
| the tab.
|
| So forcing you to scroll through an essay on the complete
| history of nutmeg before you can see any of the ingredients
| in a chocolate chip cookie recipe may improve SEO
| Semaphor wrote:
| but every recipe site I've recently encountered, had a
| "jump to recipe" link right at the top
| Kelamir wrote:
| I use https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ for finding
| recipes, it has scraped over 2M of them. No distractions.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I have resorted to buying books after being burnt by just
| bad receips floating around on the Internet.
| astura wrote:
| Wow, it's exactly the opposite for me - bought a few
| cookbooks at ~19-20 years old and used them for a few
| years. Now it's been a decade since I last touched any of
| my cookbooks because the recipes are really limited and
| just not that great compared to what you find on the
| internet.
|
| I guess I avoid the junk because I have good instinct, I
| can usually tell if something is going to be bad based on
| the ingredients. Also if I'm looking to make something
| "basic" I'll specifically look for Alton Brown's recipe
| for it or sometimes Chef John's recipe. I also sometimes
| just use recipes for "inspiration" too - just to get a
| basic idea of what the ingredients are.
| LegitShady wrote:
| If you have android you can FF + Ublock on android.
|
| Sadly ios devices don't seem to have that option.
| christophilus wrote:
| Brave on iOS is great. So is the DDG browser.
| blub wrote:
| Give Brave a try on iOS. Besides offering ad blocking, it can
| block all JS (unfortunately just an on/off toggle, no subdomain
| specific settings) and this takes care of most annoyances like
| cookie pop-ups, article count limiters, ads, etc. On the other
| hand, mobile websites tend to break more often without JS
| compared to desktop websites.
| mtone wrote:
| My iPad Air 1 is aging, slow, and I loved it but I simply won't
| replace a machine where a publicly-funded news/docs store app
| in particular gets laden with unskippable ads.
|
| Half a thousand bucks for this frustration, no thanks! No
| amount of content/entertainment is worth this.
| dont__panic wrote:
| I host my own VPN on a raspberry pi at home so I can use my
| pi.hole even when I'm off my home wifi network. Unfortunately
| that seems to be the most comprehensive solution I can find for
| iOS, and sadly Android phones are pretty much all too large for
| me.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > Will the general public experience the pleasures of an ad-
| less internet?
|
| Remember how cable was supposed to replace ads on over the air
| tv? It was about minutes before it was all ads too. Streaming
| services are starting to get there but then the shows
| themselves are ads. And you have a scenario where Netflix and
| YouTube couldn't exist in scenarios that didn't rely on our
| bandwidth models and massive anti-competitive models.
|
| ... so IDKMAN... I don't know how we get to an internet where
| people making things aren't expecting to get paid for their
| submissions, especially now that we've jumped in there with
| both feet.
|
| I personally would pay for a no-bullshit internet, but it's
| just cable tv's promise all over again isn't it? As great as
| something would start out, soon would come the influencers and
| the narrative pushers and the censorship and the "forum
| sliding" and the downvotes / echochambers / bubbles / power
| tripping moderation...
|
| I'm wondering if the solution isn't just to give it all up and
| use the tools only when you need them. A cabin in the woods,
| but a spotty dialup connection for when you need to find
| something.
| freebuju wrote:
| > would pay for a no-bullshit internet
|
| The money is in selling you ads, on a revolving basis. Not in
| you ponying up a subscription fee to not see those ads.
|
| If it's not the ads, it's the usual FBI or whatever
| government surveillance program tracking you.
|
| You are right on the solution however. Some ads and tracking
| are so pervasive (e.g smart TVs) that the only truly
| effective way to mitigate against them is to cut down on or
| eliminate your exposure to these devices.
| Dobbs wrote:
| I run NextDNS on my phone. It isn't perfect particularly
| because it is an all or nothing type thing which gets
| frustrating with URL redirects. But it is far better than not.
| RGamma wrote:
| I have good results with AdGuard on iPhone (functions as
| content blocker in Safari).
|
| It's not perfect and difficult to customize but works well for
| the most part. It even gets rid of YT video ads (mostly anyway)
|
| I also combine it with NextDNS
| isatty wrote:
| On an iPhone?
|
| I was a noscript user from 10+ years ago (I guess?) and I've
| been using uBo for as long as I can remember but isn't Firefox
| on iPhone just a wrapper? Is it battery efficient?
|
| As a workaround I use a Pi-Hole (except, not on a pi).
| mcyukon wrote:
| It is just a webkit wrapper. At least the last time I looked
| into it. UBlock Origin isn't possible. You can get some Apple
| sanctioned Ad-Blockers, but I think most (or all?) of them
| use a invisible VPN with DNS based ad blocking.
|
| Mozilla has Firefox Focus for iOS, it does Ad Blocking but
| it's main selling point is No Tracking, No history and No
| synced bookmarks either
| xaos____ wrote:
| Install Firefox focus, go to Safari settings, add Firefox
| focus as Content Blocker and Firefox ( Not Focus, the real
| one) will show no ads anymore. Works, because Firefox on iOS
| is mandated to use the Safari engine
| mcyukon wrote:
| Nice, never thought to try that. Makes sense though.
| Thanks!
| xaos____ wrote:
| You are welcome!
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > Pre-fetching, which is disabled by default in uBO, is reliably
| prevented in Firefox, while this is not the case in Chromium-
| based browsers.
|
| I really wish ubo wouldn't disable pre fetching. It has nothing
| to do with blocking ads. It just slows down the browser.
| dash2 wrote:
| Tools like this are cutting off the branch they are sitting on.
| If you block all the ads on an ad-supported website, how will it
| survive?
| socceroos wrote:
| Adapt? That's what most industries that face change do.
|
| How did sites survive before the ad infestation business model?
| dash2 wrote:
| Could you be more specific, and say what strategies an ad-
| supported site might use to provide the same content?
| black_puppydog wrote:
| The branch that uBlock sits on is not ad revenue. It's people's
| annoyance at constantly being subjected to intrusive user
| tracking, especially for sites that they have little choice to
| not use. Think social networks and banks. Sure you can refuse
| to use them entirely on principle, but it's not a practical
| approach if you want to actually have a life.
|
| On top of that, much of the tracking that does go on is
| actually blatantly illegal in how it's done, at least in the
| EU. It's just too small-time to enforce at scale. Doesn't mean
| I have to take this as a given.
| dash2 wrote:
| I agree that tracking and ads are different. But uBlock does
| include ad-blocking functionality. The discussion here
| suggests that most people use it for that.
| sellyme wrote:
| > If you block all the ads on an ad-supported website, how will
| it survive?
|
| If the only thing that website provides of value is a
| billboard, it doesn't deserve to.
|
| I'm perfectly happy paying for high-quality ad-free services.
| yunohn wrote:
| So why do you use any websites that have ads/tracking? Surely
| you could avoid them and stick to your high quality paid
| options?
|
| It's annoying how self-righteous HN is about Ads.
| greenwich26 wrote:
| If uBlock makes itself redundant by killing all ad-supported
| websites for good, that sounds like a fantastic outcome. In
| this case, I will personally fund the creator's retirement.
| lenova wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but it was Firefox's Total Cookie Protection
| recently that finally got to me to switch from Chrome as my daily
| driver.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I miss Chrome as it just felt like
| a_smoother_ user experience, and I fear for Firefox replaying
| Opera's history given that the rest of the industry has
| standardized on Chromium... but I love how pro-privacy Firefox
| is.
| prox wrote:
| I always have the opposite idea, Chrome is a total mess for me
| when it comes to UX. Probably just what you are used to first.
| wojcikstefan wrote:
| I disagree. I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for
| at least 3 years now and still, whenever I have to fire up
| Chrome for some reason, my first impression is "ahh, this is
| sadly still so much smoother."
| hansel_der wrote:
| i disagree. imo peak browser-ux was around 2005 with the
| original opera. pre-quantum firefox was ok-ish but already
| part of the decline.
| blub wrote:
| I started using Brave in addition to Firefox recently and I was
| curious if it supports this. Seems like it does
| (https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/) and uBlock origin was the
| inspiration for that feature.
|
| I never used uBlock, but I did use uMatrix (discontinued, but
| still working) which allows you very fine grained control over
| scripts and other resources based on the domain. Unfortunately it
| was a pain to get some things to work with that, especially
| online payments which use many subdomains and redirects. Paying
| for anything online was a game of enabling 10 domains on average,
| reloading the website, re-inputting payment info, etc. Some
| websites (like twitter) simply didn't work even if one enabled
| all the domains which appeared in the matrix.
|
| Brave is pretty decent at blocking JS. Not as fine grained as
| uMatrix, and it apparently doesn't remember that you enabled
| things (at least in private browsing). I think it doesn't perform
| what uBlock calls HTML filtering, because it still makes requests
| to websites which were completely neutered by uMatrix. All in all
| it's more pleasant to surf using Brave than Firefox, because
| fewer websites are broken by the blocking.
|
| I wasn't pleased with Safari's native tracking protection + a
| simple Safari blocking extension which only looks at URLs.
| Websites work the best, but it's making requests to many unwanted
| domains still. Maybe it's blocking cookies and scripts, no idea,
| but I'm not happy even with the simple requests for resources
| going through.
| surround wrote:
| Brave is Chromium-based and suffers from all of the limitations
| stated in the parent article.
|
| (Except for CNAME cloaking. However, their CNAME uncloaking
| only applies to their built-in tracking protection. AFAIK, if
| you use uBo on Brave it will be still unable to uncloak
| CNAMES.)
| antonok wrote:
| > Brave is Chromium-based and suffers from all of the
| limitations stated in the parent article.
|
| Only for extensions. Brave Shields is implemented in natively
| compiled Rust and C++ (which is even more efficient than
| WebAssembly), is able to load rules before making any network
| requests, uses a compressed filter list data representation,
| and prefetching is disabled entirely in Brave. The only thing
| currently missing from that list is HTML filtering, which is
| fairly rare in practice and generally has fallback rules in
| popular lists anyways.
| Hiopl wrote:
| And it's still only half as effective as uBO on Firefox.
| The amount of pop-ups that manage to get through is absurd
| and it's one of the main reasons why Firefox remains my
| daily driver.
| tedivm wrote:
| Brave even openly admits this in that blog post announcing
| their support for native CNAME uncloaking-
|
| > In version 1.25.0, uBlock Origin gained the ability to
| detect and block CNAME-cloaked requests using Mozilla's
| terrific browser.dns API. However, this solution only works
| in Firefox, as Chromium does not provide the browser.dns API.
| To some extent, these requests can be blocked using custom
| DNS servers. However, no browsers have shipped with CNAME-
| based adblocking protection capabilities available and on by
| default.
| blub wrote:
| While uBlock inside Brave suffers from the same limitations
| as uBlock within Chrome, the more interesting question is if
| Brave's native blocking makes that irrelevant or not.
|
| Brave does have a few intriguing privacy features, like
| plugging WebRTC IP leaks while still allowing use of WebRTC
| (Firefox is off or on while Safari's always on AFAIK), so
| that's not excluded.
|
| The main problem with Brave is that they're building on a
| browser which is designed to leak privacy like a sieve. It
| seems that they're being careful and monitoring all the anti-
| features Google's adding, but who knows.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| It doesn't make it irrelevant. For example, sponsored
| Tweets on the Twitter web app aren't blocked in Brave (at
| least the last time I checked).
| clircle wrote:
| This is technical and interesting, but can anyone tell the
| difference between web browsing with FF/uBo and Chrome/uBo? I
| personally cannot, other than that the fonts render a bit
| differently. Webpages load fast and no ads get through in both
| cases.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Google searches on Chromium load the page, _then_ insert three
| or four ad links before the first result about a second later.
| Ridiculously annoying, as I 'm used to clicking quickly on the
| desired result.
| timbit42 wrote:
| The first chart in the article explains the difference. It's
| not so much about being able to tell the difference, but how
| much it is protecting you in the background.
| ehsankia wrote:
| To be fair the only difference there seems to be from a
| future RC release of uBO that isn't even out yet, and also
| that has to do more with third-party tracking cookies more so
| than ad-blocking, so most users probably wouldn't notice it.
| It's not about speed, it's about the probability of detecting
| these CNAME cloaked tracking.
| pharmakom wrote:
| I love Firefox and I use it on principle. I don't think I have a
| worse web experience, although that wouldn't stop me.
|
| What does break websites is turning on anti-tracking measures.
| The number of times a site won't work till I enable third party
| cookies shows the sad state of the web. Developers, do you only
| test in Chrome on Windows with default settings or something?
| toastal wrote:
| I've hated my experience with resistFingerprinting enabled. I
| can't get dark themes, my clock and times are always wrong,
| you're locked to en-US, no WebGL, etc.; basically any feature
| that could make the web nicer and have content tailored for be
| is now weaponized for fingerprinting. I've recently switched
| off fingerprint resistance and moved to a script blocker as the
| sites I do trust do offer a nicer experience I've been missing
| out on.
| noahtallen wrote:
| > The number of times a site won't work till I enable third
| party cookies shows the sad state of the web. Developers, do
| you only test in Chrome on Windows with default settings or
| something?
|
| Well, Chrome is removing 3rd-party cookies by next year, and
| they are disabled by default in Safari already (well, sort of,
| ITP is weird). So many problems which used to happen to very
| few users are now being quickly prioritized. There are lots of
| use cases for third party cookies (example: you have a
| centralized management platform for lots of websites which have
| unique mapped domains, and you want to be authenticated against
| all of them at once), so it's not surprising that critical
| features can be broken. It's very much backwards incompatible.
|
| But I agree, overall removing 3rd party cookies is great.
| Though, it's important that whatever advertisers think of next
| isn't just as bad.
| l3_ wrote:
| the tab containers are amazing
| skizm wrote:
| "Whatever gets my jira from the left side of the board to the
| right side of the board."
| cybert00th wrote:
| I truly hope gorhill is able to continue offering his services to
| the wider Internet community for a long time still to come.
|
| Our children have grown up on a, largely, ad-free Internet; and
| it's all thanks to people like him.
| sackofmugs wrote:
| This is honestly one of the first time I'm convinced in a
| technical sense to consider Firefox over Chrome. uBlock Origin
| feels as core to me to web browsing as Saved Passwords and
| Incognito Mode. That uBlock Origin can work better is like the
| browser itself being better.
| paxys wrote:
| I have been using Firefox as my daily driver for 3+ years now.
| Haven't encountered a single case of sites working any worse
| than on Chrome.
|
| I also recently started using Firefox full-time on my work
| machine despite IT strongly mandating that all our tools only
| work on Chrome and everyone should use that. Have had zero
| problems (and we use every Google service under the sun).
| milesvp wrote:
| I have to add my anecdata here as well. I've used firefox on
| *buntu for 8+ years as my primary browser, and have found I
| only need to open chrome ~1/mo for the rare case where I need
| chrome (and I suspect my issues may be more tied to linux
| than firefox specifically).
| u801e wrote:
| The only website I regularly use that doesn't work with
| Firefox is Google voice.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I use it in Firefox a lot, for several years now, with no
| problems. I'm using Fedora + KDE but I doubt that makes
| much difference.
| u801e wrote:
| It works for checking messages and sending them, but I've
| never been able to get audio to work for making or
| receiving phone calls. Then again, I even have similar
| issues with chrome, but it works most of the time.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| On my own videogame Neptune's Pride, I have noticed that the
| performance of canvas rendering on Firefox noticeably worse
| on OSX and Plasma. I still use Firefox for everything though.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > I have been using Firefox as my daily driver for 3+ years
| now. Haven't encountered a single case of sites working any
| worse than on Chrome.
|
| Really? It happens to me all the time. I can't log into my
| U.S. Bank account in Firefox, I can't submit a delivery order
| on Doordash in Firefox, and (just this morning) I couldn't
| validate a credit reporting form in Firefox.
|
| Now, despite those and many other examples, I continue to use
| Firefox as my primary browser, because Chrome has bigger
| issues in my opinion. I don't blame FF for this, I blame the
| websites. I just think it sucks that places do not test in or
| support Firefox better.
| paxys wrote:
| Can't say about your bank, but I have used Doordash on
| Firefox regularly and never had any issues.
| jamespullar wrote:
| Is it possible you have an extension blocking scripts or
| redirects? I'm able to use Doordash just fine on Firefox.
| karaterobot wrote:
| At the risk of this being a tech support comment, I have
| definitely tried disabling all my extensions, but no
| luck. It might be some setting I have flipped on in
| Firefox, but in general I am about as paranoid about my
| privacy/security settings in both browsers.
| Qub3d wrote:
| Not sure about U.S. Bank, but my brokerage, bank, and
| Doordash work great on FF. I'd try starting the browser in
| "safe mode"[0] to see if you have a setting or extension
| causing issues.
|
| [0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-
| firefox-is...
| boring_twenties wrote:
| I use DoorDash with no issues on Firefox, with both uBlock
| Origin and NoScript running, some but not all stuff
| whitelisted in the latter.
|
| I also have some "unusual" settings in about:config that I
| mostly don't even remember, for instance disabling service
| workers outright.
| Hiopl wrote:
| Why disable service workers?
| boring_twenties wrote:
| They sound scary, I found the explanation as to what they
| actually are on Mozilla's site to be rather lacking, and
| I don't see any need to have them -- I've had them
| disabled for at least a year, and everything works fine.
|
| The question becomes, why not disable them?
| JackC wrote:
| Don't know if this is your issue, but it could be Enhanced
| Tracking Protection -- I have it turned up pretty high in
| Firefox and find that a _lot_ of sites won 't work until I
| turn it off. One example seems to be sites that use "Google
| Tag Manager."
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Interesting, I blacklist googletagmanager.com in NoScript
| and have never had that break a single site.
| linknoid wrote:
| The only two places I use Chrome are Netflix and Costco.
| Costco's behavior is just plain weird:
|
| "Access Denied You don't have permission to access
| "http://www.costco.com/" on this server."
|
| Is this from running NoScript? Or does it affect all
| Firefox users? (Also the URL is https://, not http://, so
| the error message doesn't match the URL).
| roca wrote:
| Does Netflix not work in Firefox for you? Mozilla and
| Netflix have worked together a lot to make sure it does
| work.
| linknoid wrote:
| Nope, I get Error Code F7701-1003. I have Wildvine
| enabled, and I tried completely disabling NoScript. It's
| easier to just use Chrome for that one thing than have to
| troubleshoot the problem.
| roca wrote:
| I suppose that's true but it would be helpful for Mozilla
| if you filed a bug about it.
| linknoid wrote:
| I think I figured out what it is. I turned off web
| assembly in Firefox to reduce my attack surface for
| general web browsing (I wish I could turn off Javascript
| completely, but that doesn't really work these days, so
| NoScript is as close as I can come). I think Netflix must
| be the only site I actually care about that won't work
| without WASM, so I'm fine relegating it to a separate
| browser with a higher exposed surface that I never use
| for untrusted sites.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Netflix has worked fine on Firefox on Mac, Windows and
| Linux for as long as I can remember.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I've used Costco's site plenty of times on Firefox. I
| just double-checked Windows right now, and I'm pretty
| sure I've used it on OSX/Firefox in the past.
| linknoid wrote:
| I cleared my cookies in Firefox for everything Costco
| related, and it works now. Thanks for pointing out that
| it works. No clue how it got in that state.
| caoilte wrote:
| I keep chromium for Google meet exclusively. I got awful
| performance on Firefox... not that chrome is much better -
| but at least I can kill it after every meeting without losing
| other tabs.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Used Google Meet just yesterday, only a small meeting with
| five people, but all with webcams and of course audio.
| Flawless and smooth with Firefox 86 on Windows 10.
|
| Clearly not a universal thing then I guess.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I have also noticed better performance on Firefox
| compared to Chrome. Quite surprising but worth a try.
| Meet only really works well for small meetings though.
| Any bigger and it slowly starts to fall apart.
| caoilte wrote:
| These things change frequently. I'll give it another go.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Yeah, I want to point out that uBlock Origin is fully
| functional on mobile firefox which makes it by far the best
| browser on Android. Plus with firefox you can do fun things
| like disable the Wake Lock API on youtube so that you can
| listen to audiobooks or music with the screen off and ad-free.
| 725686 wrote:
| Is it? Last time I tried, here where a bunch of sites that
| just didn't work.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| I haven't encountered any issues since I switched almost
| two years ago.
| [deleted]
| jdubb wrote:
| I agree, ublock origin was my single most important reason to
| finally switch from chrome mobile to firefox mobile.
|
| There are some quirks though, minor annoyances that every so
| often get introduced in updates. For example, when closing
| the last private browsing tab it doesn't automatically show
| the regular tabs any more, but instead requires three more
| taps. But I'm happy to ignore those for the sole reason of
| having fully functional ad-blocking.
| mhitza wrote:
| I gave it a shot on Android, but the fact that it doesn't
| support userscripts (Greasemonkey), it makes old.reddit.com
| unreadable. For some reason Chrome increases the font size
| for that site, whereas on Firefox I have very tiny text and
| constantly have to zoom in. As I mostly read reddit/hacker
| news on my phone I had to drop Firefox on Android :(
| boring_twenties wrote:
| For reddit specifically there is more than one free-as-in-
| freedom app available. I use Slide, and am happy with it,
| but these days Infinity seems to be recommended more (never
| tried it myself). Both are GPL or AGPL and available from
| the main F-Droid repository.
| jackewiehose wrote:
| > you can do fun things like disable the Wake Lock API
|
| How? Is there a hidden about:config?
| Knufen wrote:
| I second this, if anyone knows how to configure this or has
| a guide it would be much appreciated!
| breput wrote:
| Install the "Video Background Play Fix" add-on.
| the_duke wrote:
| My only complaint on mobile is that the UI for customizing
| settings is annoying, eg for allowing JavaScript.
|
| But that's the fault of Firefox.
|
| I'm always astonished how bad/slow the mobile web experience
| is without Ublock with JS blocked by default.
| amluto wrote:
| The desktop experience of clicking the drop down is not
| fantastic: no tooltips and no real explanation of what
| clicking the empty boxes does.
| Semaphor wrote:
| yeah, it's the primary reason I still use the
| (undeveloped) uMatrix. ublock supposedly can do the same
| things, but umatrix has an amazing interface that's clear
| and straightforward while ublock is like one of those
| mobile first (but also only) websites
| ukyrgf wrote:
| And you have to actually click submenus to expand them,
| you don't just hover. And of course other menus like
| bookmarks open submenus when you hover, so it's a gamble
| every time.
| caoilte wrote:
| I like to use newpipe app on Android for YouTube.
| ineptech wrote:
| Same experience here! The only problem I have is that the
| Android search bar seems to ignore the default Browser
| setting, but avoiding it (opening FF rather than using the
| search bar widget) is a small price to pay for avoiding ads
| so effectively.
| jdubb wrote:
| Another option you have is to put the firefox search widget
| above you google search widget in your home screen. It's a
| bit ridiculous that the Google search bar can't be removed,
| but this is second best.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| That's strange I don't have any Google widgets on my home
| screen. Perhaps it's the Xiaomi variant of the Android UI
| that allows this?
| pmontra wrote:
| I did remove the Google search bar from all my phones. An
| old and defunct Samsung Galaxy S2, a Sony Xperia X
| Compact (Android 8) and a Samsung A40 (Android 11).
|
| Which phone / OS do you use?
|
| Btw, to search for something I open Firefox and type in
| the URL bar.
| NathanielK wrote:
| You can use the launcher too. If you set the launcher to
| open a new tab, it'll bring the keyboard up too. This means
| you're one tap from searching your query in the browser.
|
| If you have a good keyboard, you can even use DDG !bang
| syntax. I find this very helpful for finding what I want
| fast.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Depends. If you've also blocked ads with pi-hole or the
| Android hosts file Firefox and Chrome get closer. Ublock on
| Firefox is absolutely indespensible for sites that may be
| actively hostile like piracy or porn, but for casual browsing
| the UI of Chrome is a lot better.
|
| For example, I prefer the address bar at the top. Firefox
| doesn't like that, so the new tab button stays on the bottom,
| meaning I have a six inch stretch between where my finger was
| to hit the tab manager and where it has to go to open a new
| tab. It's full of little things like that where the only
| explanation that comes to mind is that Mozilla decided they
| couldn't do it the best way because Chrome was already doing
| it that way.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Fennec Fox (Firefox for Android) can be configured with
| controls (navbar, menus) at the top. Bottom is merely the
| default.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Yes that's the way I have it. Because I have it at the
| top there's a massive stretch between the tab manager
| button and the new tab button that makes me have to shift
| my grip on the phone.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I've been on Firefox since I switched away from Opera year and
| years ago and I don't know any technical reason I would use any
| other browser - not even mentioning the other spyware reasons.
|
| What technically do you find missing in FF?
| shmerl wrote:
| Never really got the appeal of Chrome. Firefox worked very well
| for me for years.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| For me:
|
| - command+d will save a bookmark to the last folder used
|
| - command-y will open the history in a new, full tab
|
| - bookmark manager also open full by default
|
| - Recently closed shows windows and tabs together without
| separating them
|
| - I can actually see and edit a list of all search engines I
| have registered that use the tab to autocomplete. Firefox's
| keywords don't
| jdfellow wrote:
| Years ago I switched at a time when Chrom[e|ium] had a better
| developer tools console than Firefox (although only slightly
| better than Firebug). But, nowadays the console is equal if
| not better in Firefox to Chrome.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I don't trust Mozilla to not break my workflow or remove
| features I use or ignore debilitating bugs for upwards of a
| decade in some ham-handed attempt to "keep me safe".
|
| That sounds pithy, and it is, but Mozilla burned every ounce
| of goodwill they ever had with me over the last 5 years or
| so.
| broodbucket wrote:
| ah yes, good will, the thing we all definitely have for
| Google
| kaba0 wrote:
| I never really understood this point of view. May I ask
| what browser do you use then?
| Karunamon wrote:
| So far, Brave hasn't done any of the things that caused
| me to abandon Mozilla. My browser is a tool, not a
| political statement. Mozilla has taken positive steps to
| make that tool less and less useful and waste more and
| more of my time.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Back when I first started using chrome it was the snappiest
| and had less memory usage than anything else on the block.
|
| Then I started to think about what kind of tracking google
| was doing with it, so I tried out firefox... which was just
| as snappy and just as memory efficient.
|
| Then I deleted chrome.
| shmerl wrote:
| I guess that performance gap didn't bother me at that point
| to switch to less privacy respecting browser and Firefox
| caught up well, so I never saw it as a problem.
| andoriyu wrote:
| Firefox, gecko specifically, performed very bad on Mac OS X
| when chrome just came out.
|
| That was also an era of websites crashing all the damn time -
| in firefox it was crashing the entire browser.
|
| Chrome was a significantly better browser for a while. Now
| it's just "why switch?" to your average consumer.
| stevewodil wrote:
| Yeah I never really got the appeal of Firefox. Chrome worked
| very well for me for years.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| So does the tracking ;)
| stevewodil wrote:
| Personally I enjoy being tracked, it's why I got the
| Covid vaccine
| timbit42 wrote:
| The appeal is not having Google tracking literally
| everything you do online.
| Noughmad wrote:
| Firefox is older than Chrome. Did you use IE before that or
| are you just that young?
| Sunspark wrote:
| It's my regular browser for years. There's a lot of things it
| does well or differently. For example, one UI thing I
| appreciate about it is the ability to override a webpage's font
| type and size choice. Chromium browsers don't let you do that,
| you only get to pick if the website didn't pick for you.
| [deleted]
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| It may sound dumb, but the only reason I don't use FF is
| because of its UI. Somehow I think Chrome (and Safari) "look
| better" and make browsing more enjoyable. And this comes from a
| "techie" that knows exactly why, objectively, FF is probably
| better than Chrome in terms of privacy.
|
| Can't Mozilla "just copy" the look and feel of Chrome or Safari
| while keeping FF's internals untouched?
| AegirLeet wrote:
| You can customize the UI using CSS. Look up userChrome.css.
| iaml wrote:
| They have a 'proton' redesign landing soon-ish parts of which
| you can enable via about:config options on dev/nightly that
| cleans things up a bit.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I have the opposite view: Google feels so obsessed with
| pushing Google branding on Chrome users that the UI seems to
| constantly be suffering because of it. Apart from a recent
| discussion to remove the densest UI view, Firefox has
| generally provided a better, more user-oriented UI than
| Google.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Interesting, I haven't run into any issues using ff over chrome
| for the past several years. It's way more common for my partner
| who uses chrome to have an issue that they avoid by opening ff.
| themgt wrote:
| Google intentionally crippling their own free, market-dominant
| browser in a way that just-so-happens to make ad-blocking
| difficult honestly reminds me of the Microsoft anti-trust case
| back in the late 90s. Google is an ad company doing embrace-
| extend-extinguish on other markets just to optimize selling
| your eyes/attention to advertisers.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Google's changes actually make a lot of sense. 99% of
| extensions out there should not be able to touch user data at
| all due to the simple fact they'd abuse this privilege.
|
| uBlock Origin just happens to be so incredibly important and
| trusted that an exception should be made for it.
| paxys wrote:
| Yet on Google's other large ecosystem (Android), they will
| happily let apps collect _way_ more private data than this
| with zero limits in the name of user freedom. In both
| cases, they made the decision that best serves the company
| bottom line, nothing more.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I think Firefox's shortcomings are overstated. Often they're
| actually Mozilla's rather than Firefox's.
|
| There are other things I consider superior about Firefox that
| Chrome has yet to implement: - Multi-account
| containers is a killer feature IMO. I have different
| containers for banking, Facebook, a container for every email,
| a container for every Google/YouTube account, and so forth.
| - The option to enable canvas permission prompts and canvas
| obfuscation. (though there are some arguments that those make
| you *more* trackable) - Autoplay blocking and
| permission prompt - Pop-out videos (aka picture-in-
| picture) are awesome and make it easy to keep videos on screen
| while browsing other tabs and apps. - Built-in anti-
| fingerprinting - Blocks tracking cookies by default
|
| I simply won't use a browser that doesn't have these things.
| trevor-e wrote:
| I had some serious performance problems on my MBP last year,
| back when a lot of the major Rust changes came out (no idea
| if that's relevant). Was super laggy trying to play videos.
| Gave it another try a couple months ago and everything is
| fixed! Very happy user now, won't be going back to Chrome.
| The features you highlighted are some nice added bonuses on
| top of removing another layer of Google tracking.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > Pop-out videos (aka picture-in-picture) are awesome
|
| Agreed on all points. It's funny, I've been using Firefox 20+
| years and when I saw them recently boasting about PiP I
| thought "another useless feature".
|
| Until I decided to try it out. Now I use it constantly.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| I had to remove multi-account containers due to issues with
| syncing, namely on a windows 8.1 install, and it causing a
| TON of browser bloat and CPU usage on MacOS and Linux and my
| windows 10 desktop in a fairly recent past.
|
| It's unfortunate. Plan to try it again but it was borderline
| burdensome that x containers or place settings wouldn't sync
| or that the Mac mini or linux box would start sounding like a
| jet engine.
| cat199 wrote:
| > box would start sounding like a jet engine.
|
| Not sure about the container connection, but Firefox also
| now has 'about:performance' which is pretty much like 'top
| for browser tabs'. When things start getting bogged down I
| can now find the culprit and nuke it.
|
| about:memory is also useful, it allows you to force garbage
| collection on the browser as a whole.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| That's super interesting.
|
| Was not aware of those. My observations were mostly noted
| while trying to figure out why one specific browser
| wouldn't simply not sync any custom containers. And then
| I noticed my fans spin up on my macmini. I only used
| system monitors at the time before just disabling the
| add-on.
|
| I'll definately look at those in the future. Didn't even
| know they existed.
| sfink wrote:
| about:performance is a little limited, especially if you
| have a single window, because switching to it makes it
| the foreground tab and all the other tabs background
| tabs. Background tabs can be throttled, and generally
| behave very differently.
|
| (There's an experimental sidebar extension that works
| better and gives a graphical history, but I'm pretty sure
| it's unfinished and unavailable for general use.
| Hopefully it'll come out sometime.)
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Privacy considerations aside, containers are great for using
| multiple AWS accounts simultaneously. Since we use an AWS
| account as a deployment container, it's typical to have 10s
| of different accounts you have to jump between and it's just
| not possible to effectively do ops with another browser.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Mutli-account containers is really a game-changing feature
| for me. I switched from Chrome back to Firefox about 3
| years ago (even before containers were available) and at
| this point there's no going back. I keep chrome around for
| some sites that require it, but that's it.
|
| Now how do I get Chrome to stop auto-installing itself in
| my login items on macOS everytime there's some kind of
| update.
|
| Edit:
|
| Also, if you're on Android, set Firefox Focus as your
| default browser! It's amazing to not have to think about
| the tracking consequences everytime you click a link
| somewhere on your phone. It's basically a new "container"
| for every link click. If you need the cookies, then there's
| a handy "Open With" menu to let you re-open the page with
| regular Firefox, or Chrome.
|
| And uBO works on the regular Firefox Android browser..
| Again, game-changer for me.
| dexterdog wrote:
| You can use the aws switch roles addon that lets you do
| that in one container.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| I really wish AWS would figure out multiple accounts on one
| session.
|
| Even with multiple containers, it still means logging into
| AWS SSO multiple times and selecting the right account.
| rshm wrote:
| By any chance you are using nightly. I am not able to login
| as IAM user in firefox nightly. For last couple of months
| always get 403 from AWS.
| jdfellow wrote:
| This is honestly a killer feature! I use Temporary
| Containers and load the AWS console in a fresh container
| automatically, making it very easy to switch between
| accounts and have multiple open at once. (Caveat emptor: be
| sure which account you're using at any given time!)
| pablodavila wrote:
| It really is. I think this is one of the features they
| (Mozilla) spend some more resources into. It's really
| unique and could drive non-tech savvy users to it.
| diroussel wrote:
| Let's not forget Tree Style Tabs, no other browser can do it.
| Great for the tab hoarders amongst us.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Simple Tab Groups awesome complement. In special with
| Firefox, not loading tabs that you not have opened. And if
| you combine with Total Suspender... Like having infinite
| tabs with paying any price.
| jamespullar wrote:
| I don't often keep many tabs open, but still vastly prefer
| Tree Style Tabs. I primarily work on a widescreen monitor
| and would rather give up horizontal space rather than
| vertical.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't use a
| widescreen monitor these days?
|
| Out of all my computers the only one I have is a Thinkpad
| T60, manufactured in 2006 if I'm not mistaken.
| JonTarg wrote:
| I love FF. It's fantastic on macOS and the customization
| beats every single other browser out of the water. BUT, and I
| know this is controversial, and I know the foundation is not
| the same as those who manage the browser, after the events on
| the capitol they released and statements saying something
| like "deplatforming is not enough" and even though I asked
| several times, I could never get a confirmation from anyone
| within the Mozilla Foundation assuring me they would never
| use telemetry data to spy on "undesirables" or that they
| would never try to block content they deemed harmful.
|
| I get the situation is different, but my parents escaped from
| two civil wars in Central America in the 70s and the stories
| they told me about political persecution were scary enough to
| make me distrust organizations that don't seem to understand
| nuance when it comes to politics.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I feel very much the same way. I don't particularly like
| the direction Mozilla has taken, both in terms of current
| day politics and the "resignation" Brendan Eich. Granted,
| it's part and parcel with today's mainstream, but that blog
| post they published last year was kind of chilling IMO.
| Their statement was totally out of the bounds of what
| Mozilla should be responsible for.
|
| I still use Firefox not only because the browser is not
| necessarily the same as the foundation, but the
| alternatives are organizations with far, far worse track
| records. (putting aside the advantages I mentioned)
| sfink wrote:
| I certainly can't offer any official word, but telemetry
| doesn't have enough data to spy on anyone, and the privacy
| policy spells this out pretty clearly. And if something
| snuck in, it's all open source and I imagine people would
| raise a big stink pretty quickly (whatever their political
| leanings were).
|
| I remember that post, and I think you're mischaracterizing
| it. The point wasn't that "deplatforming is a good start,
| but we need to go even farther"; it was "deplatforming is
| not the right solution, we need something better".
|
| As for trying to block harmful content -- Mozilla is
| _already_ doing that, all the time, so you 're certainly
| not going to get any promise there. Firefox blocks malware,
| sites with expired/mismatching certificates, things on the
| (un)safe browsing list, 3rd party cookies in some
| configurations, etc. Whether any of those constitute
| censorship is up for you to decide. Right now, it feels
| fine to me, but I agree that there's reason for concern.
| All the browsers have all the mechanisms necessary for
| censorship, and there's no way to crisply define "harmful".
| katsura wrote:
| > Pop-out videos (aka picture-in-picture)
|
| Chrome has this.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Multiple pop-outs simultaneously?
|
| I know it sounds silly but I've used it for SpaceX launches
| to keep an eye various official and unofficial streams.
| abdusco wrote:
| Firefox puts the option right in front of me, and I
| regularly use it. But I have to hunt for it / even google
| it to find the option in Chrome.
| krisdol wrote:
| No it doesn't? I'm on Chrome right now and cannot pop out
| vimeo videos. Youtube appears to have a "pseudo" pop-out
| that I suspect is their own js-driven miniplayer thing.
| Just a fancy change to the DOM. You can't resize, drag the
| video around, or watch it from other tabs or with chrome
| unfocused/minimized.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| > You can't resize, drag the video around, or watch from
| other tabs or with chrome unfocused/minimized
|
| Umm...you can do all of those things. You might have to
| right click the video twice to get the picture-in-picture
| option (to get around the contextual menu of many video
| players including YouTube) or you can use the official
| extension that you click to popout whatever video is on
| the webpage.
| starik36 wrote:
| Multi-account containers are a killer feature for sure. There
| is an ancient bug out there to provide "home page" for the
| container. That would truly make it a home run.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Strong agree on multi account containers. Keep in mind though
| if you disable them they drop all settings, unlike every
| other add-on ... ever. Bug is three years old but maybe we
| can push it over the top: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-
| account-containers/issues/1...
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| There is also no way to rearrange your containers aside
| from deleting them and making new ones in the desired
| order. Since I am using this for o365 administration it is
| a little annoying that I can't keep them in alphabetical
| order to find them easily.
| jedberg wrote:
| Are you on the latest version? I can rearrange them on
| mine. If click on "manage containers" there is a gray on
| gray bar on the right. If you hover it, your cursor
| should change to an arrow to rearrange them.
| gxnxcxcx wrote:
| That allows for visual rearrangement of that particular
| menu, but as far as I can tell the new tab button's list
| does not change and the extension keyboard shortcuts are
| still limited to the first 10 containers, which are bound
| by their creation order.
|
| A non-sanctioned way to mitigate this might be achieved
| by editing containers.json, but I'm wary of inviting sync
| shenanigans.
| [deleted]
| FalconSensei wrote:
| This is something that I don't like about firefox. They
| have a ton of cool stuff, but I feel that they are always
| lacking a few things.
|
| What I always give as an example, is how to add custom
| searches (Amazon, Reddit, HN, etc), you save the query
| url and add a keyword. Works very well to type `rdt
| something` and have the results. But: there's no option
| in the menu to see all keywords/search engines you have
| registered.
| quesera wrote:
| My workaround for this is to title the bookmark, e.g.
| "kw:rdt Page Title".
|
| Imperfect, but the convenience is worthwhile for the
| dozen-or-so keyword searches I use.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Yeah, but that's kinda the point: seems that there's
| always a need for a workaround. Also, I know I'm going to
| forgot to rename a bunch :/
| fn1 wrote:
| Yes there is. Saved keywords are just
| (Parametersteuerung) bookmarks so open the bookmark
| manager and you will find them.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I know they are bookmarks. But the point is that there is
| no way in the bookmark manager to filter bookmarks that
| have keywords.
| fastball wrote:
| I like Brave's adblocking better than uBlock Origin anyway.
|
| Saying this as a former uBlock Origin fanatic.
| grayrest wrote:
| If you do switch, check out the temporary containers addon. It
| makes use of the Firefox containers tech to provide the anti-
| tracking benefits of incognito but maintains history and isn't
| detected by websites as incognito mode.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| It amazes me that a consensus seems to have formed around this
| conclusion that Firefox is technically inferior. I have always
| been using it and it has always been a fantastic browser
| relatively free of Google's icy tendrils. The technical issues
| that people bring up about it are usually nonexistent for me,
| and while I am troubled at its direction it remains an
| unusually solid and reliable workhorse given the stakes
| involved and the size of its userbase
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| On a PC I don't have any issues with firefox. On mobile I do.
| I also am still pissed that they killed almost all the
| extensions for firefox on mobile.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Well, in js performance it is unfortunately behind in some
| benchmarks as far as I know. And some major non-standard
| website refuses to run under firefox, like teams
| unfortunately (definitely the fault of Microsoft)
|
| So I am an FF user by ideology, but sometimes do use Chromium
| (basically only to not have to run electron).
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I am certain that I've used Teams in Firefox? I regularly
| use other 365 webapps as well with no problems (apart from
| troubles that are also present in every other browsers).
| kaba0 wrote:
| I think joining a meeting itself is what doesn't work
| (for me at least) under linux. I can log in and use other
| features.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Ah I see. My employer uses teams quite heavily for its
| other features but we use Zoom for meetings.
| f1refly wrote:
| Being "behind in some benchmarks" is not an argument at
| all. You're implying that
|
| 1. Those test convey any useful information leading to
|
| 2. The average user is able to notice the difference in the
| real world
|
| I think that things that are not js execution time for
| actual site functionality are much worse for the overall
| web experience, namely js execution time for ads/trackers
| and overall latency caused by bad connection quality or
| bandwidth. The overall experience on firefox with ublock is
| en par with chrome with ublock for your average mom.
| kaba0 wrote:
| You don't have to convince me of Firefox being all around
| better, but I think it is important to note the areas
| where it could improve.
| bilekas wrote:
| Firefox does seem to have really improved over the last few
| iterations, performance also when large numbers of tabs open.
|
| I cant find the link right now, but there was a nice timings
| done where Chrome was using less CPU at lower tab counts, but
| when it increased count, the CPU utilization was considerably
| higher than FF.
|
| I'll be giving it a fair shake for a few months.
| bennysomething wrote:
| True but I've gone back to version 68 on Android. Latest
| versions don't work with s load of extensions I use. Old
| Reddit being one of them. And I don't care about cookies
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Yes, Firefox is pretty much unbeatable in performance per
| tab. I just installed the tab counter addon and it reports
| that I currently have >1500 tabs open in Firefox. I know from
| experience that if I run just a tenth of that in Chromium the
| whole system will basically lock up. And as pretty much every
| other more conventional browser is based on Chromium nowadays
| there's no alternative really unless I get a RAM upgrade.
| diroussel wrote:
| You can see the tab count without an addon. It's not
| pretty, but you can do it.
|
| Go to: about:telemetry#scalars-tab
|
| Then look at: browser.engagement.max_concurrent_tab_count
| sfink wrote:
| Ah, but if you use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/tab-stats/ then you can not only get the
| count, but also be able to mass-close large numbers of
| tabs (eg specific duplicate URLs, or everything for
| specific domains). A tab hoarder's best friend.
|
| (Pretty clever to use telemetry for this, though.)
| whatshisface wrote:
| Firefox recently rolled out an update that broke up the big
| GC passes into small GC passes. That contributed to a huge
| improvement in responsiveness.
| sfink wrote:
| That sounds great. But as someone who works on the Firefox
| GC team, I gotta say: what?
|
| Or more specifically, I'm wondering what change you could
| be referring to. We've had incremental GC for many years
| now, which does exactly what you describe. It's true that
| we keep splitting up more of the uninterruptible pieces
| into smaller chunks, but I don't recall any major change
| there recently. (I'm not very good at marketing, am I?)
|
| And according to telemetry, the incremental slices have
| been working quite well for most people, at least within
| the last dozen releases or so. We have a budget, and it's
| rare that we go over it. Not that I fully trust telemetry;
| if you have counterexamples please file a bug. (I'd _love_
| to have a nice set of scenarios that are problematic for
| the GC. Our telemetry errs strongly on the side of privacy,
| as it should, so I can 't get URLs automatically.)
| whatshisface wrote:
| It might not have been that recent. Incremental GC was
| not new in the patch, what changed was the tuning. It
| happened some time in the last six months and was a huge
| improvement for the use case of realtime rendering. At
| the time I was comparing performance between release and
| nightly, and it was night and day.
| kaba0 wrote:
| May I ask you about the "big picture" of how Firefox's GC
| work? How does it compare to something like OpenJDK's
| ZGC?
| bilekas wrote:
| That might have been related to what I was reading, it
| looked impressive anyway, I did mean to go check out FF
| then, I guess now is the time !
| solarkraft wrote:
| I use Firefox out of principle and because of Sidebery, but
| WOW, Chromium is faster by a lot from my experience. That is
| fresh Chromium vs. configured and used Firefox, though.
| scotu wrote:
| thanks for getting Sidebery on my radar! I tried
| treestyletabs and unfortunately it _felt_ somewhat
| disappointing given how much people seem to like it.
|
| At a first try Sidebery looks and feels more modern/slick!
| Might be what I was looking for!
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| I just recently (few months ago) switched over to FF from
| Chrom(e|ium). What pushed me was Google, on short notice,
| revoking all Sync API keys from all Linux distros, and I'll be
| damned if I'm going to use software that's as important as my
| browser from a source like the AUR. The AUR is great mind you,
| and for a small number of things I accept the risks and burdens
| that come with using it (auditing the PKGBUILDs on updates
| etc), but for browser software I just won't on principle. I
| want that from my distro's packagers.
|
| It's been fine so far. The biggest annoyance is that Firefox on
| iOS struggles a lot with form autofilling, and I don't think
| credit card autofill is allowed at all. You'd think this would
| be a minor annoyance (don't most sites save your payments
| methods?) but it's honestly been a big issue. So many sites are
| so broken on mobile that I actually can't create an account
| from mobile, and barely function well enough to get through the
| guest checkout flow.
|
| Examples: Jersey Mike's (sub sandwich shop), and another local
| deli place that's too local for me to name without letting
| everyone know I live in a cornfield.
| simfree wrote:
| From whar I have experienced Chrome and Chromium act
| differently FYI. I would discourage lumping them as one in
| the same.
| maccam94 wrote:
| Firefox on iOS isn't really Firefox, it's Webkit with a
| Firefox skin (because Apple won't allow any other web engines
| on iOS).
| Yoofie wrote:
| > I don't think credit card autofill is allowed at all
|
| I would consider this a feature, not a bug.
| nwmcsween wrote:
| Just reinstalled Firefox due to this info
| mentos wrote:
| Yea not sure if anyone on the Firefox team is reading but I
| have not had any reason to consider Firefox until reading this
| thread.
|
| If Firefox made their browser the best at ad-blocking instead
| of performance (which also might go hand in hand) I would
| consider using it again.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I'm fairly sure they have made their browser the best at ad-
| blocking already. But due to human nature, negatives like
| daring to remove some feature with minuscule usage gets
| heavily upvoted.
| smabie wrote:
| Is Firefox worse than Chrome in anyway? Performance seems on
| par and it has a truly transformative app that iirc is
| unavailable in chrome: treetabs.
| tfehring wrote:
| > _Is Firefox worse than Chrome in anyway?_
|
| IME Firefox is much more of a battery hog on MacOS,
| Chrome's history page is much better, and some sites
| (Glassdoor and Google Meet come to mind) don't work
| properly in Firefox. And I don't really use the developer
| tools in either but I've generally heard that Chrome's are
| better. I still use Firefox as my daily driver but it's not
| flawless.
| dlandis wrote:
| I just tried FF again today for the first time in months and
| updated to the latest Mac version and...I found the Quit
| feature didn't work. Neither Command-Q nor Quit option from the
| menu...And it's something like this every time I try it --
| there another wtf moment with the first 5 minutes.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| What you describe has always worked just fine on my
| Firefox/Mac installations.
| dlandis wrote:
| A quick google reveals a large number of people facing the
| same issue every year, going back to at least 2014.
| MAGZine wrote:
| I keep chrome installed as a backup because some sites are just
| plain broken. But 99.9% of my browsing works fine, and so I've
| made FF my default browser on both personal and work machines,
| and have not looked back.
|
| Chrome is just too hostile to its users. Between incognito mode
| tracking users around the web, this extension/API hoo-hah,
| among other things, I'm just not excited about it as a browser
| anymore.
|
| You did a lot for us, Chrome, but it's time to loosen your grip
| on the browser market.
| Groxx wrote:
| > _At browser launch, Firefox will wait for uBO to be up and
| ready before network requests are fired from already opened
| tab(s)._
|
| > _This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers, i.e.
| tracker /advertisement payloads may find their way into already
| opened tabs before uBO is up and ready in Chromium-based
| browsers, while these are properly filtered in Firefox._
|
| > _Reliably blocking at browser launch is especially important
| for whoever uses default-deny mode for 3rd-party resources and
| /or JavaScript._
|
| Oof. TIL. That makes blockers kinda crippled in chromes, if you
| expect them to _actually block things_.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Either I'm understanding it wrong or you're way overestimating
| this issue. Unless you close and open your browser between
| every single website you visit, this impact is probably
| negligible. Most people don't even close their browser windows
| ever between computer restarts.
| OJFord wrote:
| And when you do restart, every single open tab will/might be
| able to load everything, unblocked and unfiltered, in the
| period between Chrome starting, and starting the extension.
| ehsankia wrote:
| I have used Chrome for years with uBlock and I have not
| once since a single ad go through during launch. So
| realistically this "window" is most likely negligible,
| which make sense given how efficient and fast uBlock is.
| Maybe if you're running on a potato.
|
| On the other hand, I don't want random extensions, which
| could be misbehaving or poorly coded, to be able to
| indefinitely delay the browser's launch, even if it comes
| at the cost of one ad making it through. Imagine having
| dozens of extensions and trying to figure out which one is
| slowing down your launch because there's a bug.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Absolutely correct but I guess many innocent souls here
| will still think of it as a minor inconvenience, so let me
| explain:
|
| For some people it is not just about annoying ads; for
| those people paid or unpaid work (or something else, I'm
| not here to judge) takes them to sites where you'd rather
| not be surfing with js enabled.
|
| Remember: Client-side JS is a way for whoever controls the
| server side to execute code on your machine. Disabling JS
| instantly removes whole classes of nasty exploits.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Google has an obvious incentive to make life hard for ad
| blocking extension developers. Chrome and chromium exist
| because their business model is showing ads in it. That's the
| only reason it exists. Everything else it does is there only to
| convince users to use it and thus get exposed to ads and
| tracking. That includes performance work, UX work, etc. that
| Google puts a lot of time and money in. It makes Chrome really
| nice to use.
|
| Mozilla and Firefox exists because it's developers wanted to
| create the best browser possible. That's why it had extensions
| before Chrome was even a thing and that's why ad blocking
| extensions exist almost as long as extensions have been a
| thing. Adblock emerged somewhere around 2002 which was very
| soon after the first OSS releases by Mozilla reached the 1.0
| stage. Also Phoenix, Firefox' ancestor became a thing around
| that time. Tabs and extensions were some of the early things
| that made that popular. Ad blocking always was the #1 use case
| for extensions.
|
| Ironically, that's why Chrome has extensions. The only reason
| it supports extensions is that not having that would have made
| it impossible to grab market share from Firefox (and Internet
| Explorer). Having support for both extensions and ad blocking
| were a hard requirement for Google despite its business model.
| But now that it is the dominant browser, that feature is no
| longer as important as it once was. So, Google has been slowly
| making it harder for extensions to interfere with their ads and
| tracking. They can't make it too hard or their market share
| will evaporate. But they don't have to be particularly good at
| it. And now that they have Android, they don't have to worry as
| much about losing market share. Android exists for the exact
| same reason. Chrome is losing relevance as a revenue stream as
| users consume more content on Android via "native" apps running
| in a virtual machine compiled against mandatory proprietary ad
| & tracking technology.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Reminds me of cable television: the TV shows exist to keep
| people watching the ads.
| pjfin123 wrote:
| Great write up! I hope Brave can improve on this.
| blub wrote:
| Brave is doing something similar: https://brave.com/privacy-
| updates-6/
| yepguy wrote:
| I doubt Brave will do anything about it, because ad blocking in
| Brave is built-in and implemented without the extension APIs.
|
| https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
| korginator wrote:
| Long-time monthly donor to Firefox here, and have been a Mozilla
| / Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox user for a couple of decades now.
| I still think their principles are worth supporting but I'm
| starting to question their choice of priorities.
|
| IMHO they seem to be losing focus on their technical strengths -
| making a browser their audience wants to use. Over the past year
| I'm seeing a lot more problems with addons, specially on Linux.
| Several popular addons like umatrix and ublock origin make the UX
| sluggish, interacting with the addons UX are hit and miss, and
| such operations are often unresponsive for me. I'm seeing this on
| Ubuntu, PopOS and Mint.
|
| Mac and windows variants work reasonably well for me, but it's
| come to a point where I've reluctantly switched to Vivaldi for
| day to day personal use.
|
| My thanks and appreciation for Raymond Hill's excellent work.
| Though the technical aspects favor Firefox in theory, the
| extension / addon works far better with Chromium based browsers
| in practice for me.
| bosswipe wrote:
| From the beginning Firefox's advantage was that it was a platform
| for extensions. Crowdsourcing features that later became
| standard, such as ad blocking and web debugging. It's mind-
| blowing to me that Mozilla has been on a quest to kill extensions
| and customization in the name of simplicity and supposed
| security. They will never be able to beat the wealthiest
| companies in human history that way.
| podiki wrote:
| I can't live without uBlock Origin and uMatrix, and was sad to
| see uMatrix archived [0]. Still works great, but I'm wondering
| what will happen long term. Anyone also use both and since drop
| uMatrix for something else, or just uBlock? How is it?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973
| freedomben wrote:
| uMatrix is so fundamental to my web experience, I dread the day
| it stops working.
| caoilte wrote:
| It's been really interesting to watch recent gorhill tweets
| where he describes some laboured efforts to type in rules to
| block content in ublock that you can do in umatrix with the
| click of a button.
|
| I don't understand it, but I agree that unlock+umatrix on
| desktop and mobile has been the best thing about browsing for
| years.
|
| I think maybe he wants to consolidate Dev effort and I
| completely understand. He's probably the only person I'm
| patriotic about right now.
| coldpie wrote:
| FWIW, I use uBO together with NoScript, on both desktop and on
| mobile (Android). I've never used uMatrix, and I've been told
| by others that it was a superior experience, but if you want a
| combination that is still being supported, I can recommend this
| combo.
| callesgg wrote:
| So do you have it installed in your pacemaker or something...?
| donatzsky wrote:
| As I remember it, you really shouldn't be using both at the
| same time. Don't remember why, only that it's a bad idea. And
| you can set up uBlock to do most of what uMatrix does anyway.
| Valmar wrote:
| It's because there was some overlap in their functionality.
|
| What I did was disable the overlapping functionality in
| uBlock Origin, and let uMatrix handle the rest.
| [deleted]
| bassdropvroom wrote:
| > The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for
| core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-
| based browsers because this would require an extra permission in
| the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing
| the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
|
| Anyone know what this extra permission is and why requesting this
| extra permission would cause friction?
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Presumably one that allows the extension to run Wasm code
| geku3 wrote:
| If extension requires new permission it wouldn't automatically
| update anymore until you allow it. It's enough friction for
| such an extension I guess, personally installed it for
| countless of people and most of them would just ignore updating
| it.
| RamRodification wrote:
| Yeah that one sounds like a negative being described as a
| positive.
| bassdropvroom wrote:
| I wouldn't say that. Using WASM is legitimate and will
| certainly give a performance boost at the very least. I'm
| just curious about the nuances of having it included in
| Chrome.
| the_duke wrote:
| UBlock already had a new version rejected a while ago. Big HN
| thread at the time.
|
| Presumably they are just really careful to avoid giving Google
| any excuses.
| 10000truths wrote:
| My guess is that it's much harder to review WASM bytecode to
| make sure it doesn't do anything sketchy.
| antpls wrote:
| The whole point of WASM bytecode is that it doesn't need to
| be reviewed. The worse it can do is "stealing" your CPU time,
| but WASM was specifically designed to safely run third-party
| programs in the browser
| dahfizz wrote:
| Surely the ublock devs are not writing WASM directly? It
| would be possible to have the source code available for audit
| with some way of proving it generates the assembly that is
| being shipped.
| tmp538394722 wrote:
| Sorry anything is possible, but your comment is a bit hand
| wavy.
|
| Reproducible builds are non trivial.
|
| And then what - the reviewer is now supposed to build your
| software and verify some Hash?
|
| Or were you thinking something else?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > Reproducible builds are non trivial.
|
| That's true, but they aren't rocket science either. It's
| perfectly reasonable to require them for browser
| extensions.
| wnevets wrote:
| >And then what - the reviewer is now supposed to build
| your software
|
| I believe that is standard operating procedure for the
| chrome store.
| starwatch wrote:
| The approval process differs for extensions published to the
| Firefox and Chrome stores.
|
| When submitting to the Firefox store you need to send them
| your un-minified, un-obfuscated source, along with step by
| step instructions on how to build. If you get big enough they
| do review the code in surprising depth. The hash of the
| compressed file pushed for release, also needs to match that
| of the compressed file the reviewer can build.
|
| When submitting to the Chrome store this is not the case. You
| can push up minified, obfuscated code and that's what the
| reviewers have to work with.
|
| I'm not familiar with why WASM needs extra permissions for
| Chrome extensions. It might be that the increased complexity
| of reviewing bytecode does indeed introduce more risk for the
| user. The permission request might just be the Chrome store
| pushing acceptance of that risk to the user?
| ehsankia wrote:
| > You can push up minified, obfuscated code and that's what
| the reviewers have to work with.
|
| Minified maybe, but obfuscated is against the rules, for
| over 2 years now: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-to-
| no-longer-allow-chro...
|
| Chrome also does check the code manually, not sure if it's
| on the same level as Firefox though.
| starwatch wrote:
| yup, you're absolutely right [1] Code
| Readability Requirements: Developers must not
| obfuscate code or conceal functionality of their
| extension. This also applies to any external code or
| resource fetched by the extension package. Minification
| is allowed, including the following forms: -
| Removal of whitespace, newlines, code comments, and block
| delimiters - Shortening of variable and function
| names - Collapsing files together
|
| [1]:https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/program_po
| licies/
| throw0101a wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 the pros and cons of using uBlock Origin and/or
| uMatrix?
|
| Should I be using one, either, both? Are they competitors or
| complementary? What does each do best?
| noisem4ker wrote:
| uMatrix is unmaintained and most of its functionality is
| supposed to be available in uBlock Origin in advanced mode.
| DannyB2 wrote:
| uMatrix provides fine grained control in a matrix by domain
| names (rows) vs various permissions to grant (columns).
|
| Example: Allow domain foo.com to run scripts, but domain
| bar.com cannot run script, no cookies, but css and images are
| okay.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| If you're on a Mac, using Firefox with uBlock Origin is a realy
| nice experience:
|
| - no ads on Youtube
|
| - I prefer the Firefox dev tools over Chrome for vanilla-js.
|
| FYI: I'm one of the earliest and longest-term users of Firefox,
| starting at Netscape in 2000. Never had a reason to switch.
| ilovepitchdecks wrote:
| uBlock Origin has been my favorite browser extension for years
| (it's in fact the only one I have installed). These days I only
| use it for YouTube however.
|
| The best way to avoid ads is not to visit sites that have them.
| franklyt wrote:
| I should note that, on iOS, it seems that Safari with a content
| blocker outperforms the brave skin by a little, which outperforms
| the Firefox skin by a lot, which outperforms the chrome skin by a
| lot.
| smoldesu wrote:
| What a brilliant and unexpected turnout.
| ck2 wrote:
| It even works well on firefox android which is arguably more
| important though I am not sure about that products future after
| the complete rewrite.
| f6v wrote:
| I had to resort to using Firefox with uBlock to watch YouTube. I
| can't make it work on Safari with ad blockers, which is a shame.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Latest Firefox really does a good job supporting MULTIPLE video
| frames. - Something that I have yet to see on Chrome.
| [deleted]
| Black101 wrote:
| I have v1.34.0 ... is that RC1?
|
| But either way, I take this wonderful tool for granted since I
| have been using it forever (and its predecessors).
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