[HN Gopher] Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other...
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Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in
Edge
Author : thombles
Score : 692 points
Date : 2025-02-28 05:20 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.neowin.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.neowin.net)
| zfg wrote:
| uBlock Origin always worked best in Firefox anyhow:
|
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
| nicman23 wrote:
| hando wehn
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| This was the drop in the bucket I was waiting to migrate my
| daily use to Firefox, and keep a vanilla Chrome installation
| around to test my frontends.
|
| It's funny how Chrome became practically my new Internet
| Explorer.
| krzat wrote:
| Sometimes a webpage works only on Chrome somehow. Would be
| fun if Firefox had some kind of extension to emulate Chrome
| for those scenarios.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Usually this is for one of the following reasons:
|
| (1) negligence on the side of web devs (2) the site in
| silly ways relying on shit like google fonts or other
| trackers, which a privacy consciou user will block (3) the
| site relying on being able to plaster your face with ads,
| which u block (ha!) (4) stronger fingerprinting
| countermeasures on FF and again site stupidly relying on
| that (5) incapability of web devs to test their stuff
| properly (6) junior web devs being very green and not
| adhering to standards, that will work in any mainstream
| modern browser
|
| In 99.9% of the cases it comes down to bad engineering or
| even intentionally ethically highly questionable methods.
| AcquiescentWolf wrote:
| For me it's Safari. In Firefox, everything works as I expect
| almost always. Chrome requires weird workarounds from time to
| time. And Safari is just all kinds of screwed up.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Embrace, extend, extinguish. Oldest play in the Microsoft book.
|
| I sincerely think Microsoft can't be trusted.
| zfg wrote:
| This play is actually in Google's book. Microsoft is going
| along for the ride.
| TheCleric wrote:
| It is their original play. However I think this is just "Chrome
| is going to do this anyway and we're not about to write custom
| code to work around it."
| hirsin wrote:
| This. It's extremely expensive to keep core functionality
| like this in a fork. Every single surface that manifest v2
| touches (js runtime, extension hosting, permissions, network,
| APIs, chrome even) that gets changed upstream has to be
| redone to account for v2. Every new system built into Chrome
| that only works with v3 has to be effectively back ported to
| v2.
|
| The only other option is to keep v2 in chromium itself and
| have Chrome disable it... While still paying the cost of
| supporting it in all new feature dev.
|
| There's no world where Microsoft spins up a new engineering
| team solely to deal with the extra cost of keeping v2 around.
|
| That said this sucks. I got my first internship on the
| Internet Explorer team by talking about how hard it was to
| install an ad blocker in IE, compared to Chrome.
| hulitu wrote:
| > It's extremely expensive to keep core functionality like
| this in a fork
|
| Modularity in SW is still a challenge after 50 years of
| progress.
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| No one cares for specifically V2, it's just V3 is
| intentionally crippled. Just allow functionality required
| for more feature-rich extensions like uBO and everyone will
| forget V2 very fast. V3 does allow extensions to monitor
| and sell network data (no privacy improvements), but blocks
| modifications (no cutting out ads)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Actually this is Google's doing, you know the folks that do
| Chrome, that _Chrome_ Edge builds upon.
|
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/2595287/ublock-origin-is-off...
|
| But by all means, keep the EEE story.
| greyadept wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't have to do this. The chromium-based Brave
| has committed to supporting uBlock Origin:
| https://x.com/brave/status/1725622768262128006
| kernal wrote:
| They'll cave eventually and walk it back if history is
| anything to go by.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| They implement ublock origin compatible adblocking in the
| browser, not as an extension. Manifest v2/3 is irrelevant
| to brave's adblock capabilities.
| lmm wrote:
| And we all know what a credible organisation they are.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sure, lets see for how long they will keep their fork.
| bagacrap wrote:
| I really doubt Brave will be able to support manifest v2
| for long after chromium deletes that part of the codebase.
| Brave does not have the resources to maintain a fork in
| perpetuity. They are really just a reskin with a marketing
| team (privacy conscious individuals being the mark).
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| >They are really just a reskin with a marketing team
|
| I dunno their adblocker is the best one I've ever used.
| AFAIK they built it themselves.
| topspin wrote:
| My policy is: don't talk about Brave. If Brave ever gets
| enough share to be a problem for Google et al. it will
| get ruined, one way or another.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah and Firefox is completely under Google control
| already through the funding chain.
| bix6 wrote:
| It's not just a reskin though...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| How much is actually removed? And even supporting the
| single main callback uBlock needs would be very
| meaningful.
| remoteambience wrote:
| This same conversation is being held about Vivaldi as
| well, as they are subject to the same thing. Unless and
| until people move en masse to Firefox or other, the
| monoculture invites abuse by those who control it. This
| is the new milieu of control.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable. The
| result is one of the following two: migrate to Firefox, or the
| biggest web detox ever
| geor9e wrote:
| Or the third option "you can still make them work by clicking
| "Manage extension" and toggling it back"
| lloeki wrote:
| Until the Manifest V2 code is ripped out.
|
| The current situation looks more like a deprecation brownout
| than a chance at continued support.
| romanovcode wrote:
| Safari with [0]AdGuard works very well as well. Been using it
| for around 4 years now without any issues.
|
| [0] https://github.com/adguardteam
| matwood wrote:
| It's not UBO, but it does work well. Safari is my default
| browser except for Google sites and development.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Safari does Manifest v3 blocking, exactly the same as Chrome
| except with fewer filters, and is otherwise worse in every
| way.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Lot of noise today over Firefox claiming license to use
| anything you transmit with it ...
| qwerpy wrote:
| Brave still works with ublock origin but every month or so they
| pull a windows and some new Brave feature I don't want gets
| turned on or featured in some way.
|
| I wonder how long they'll maintain manifest v2 compatibility.
| Once they throw in the towel, Firefox will truly be the last
| stand.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I never see ads with default Brave. I was under the
| impression that uBlock was obviated by Brave.
| yannis wrote:
| Have been using it for a long time. I am very happy with
| it.
| jemmyw wrote:
| What new features? I've been using it for years and it's been
| very steady, I've switched off their wallet and that's it.
| panarky wrote:
| Automatically inserting affiliate links into URLs when
| users visit certain e-commerce websites.
|
| Integration of Web3 features, including cryptocurrency
| wallets and NFT support.
|
| Inclusion of Brave News and sponsored images on the new tab
| page.
|
| Addition of a VPN service within the browser.
|
| Feels very scammy and grifty for a project that's
| supposedly about user privacy.
| arcticbull wrote:
| It was always just a crypto grift.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| 1. Sleazy
|
| 2. Weird but not evil
|
| 3. 100% acceptable
|
| 4. Good, maybe. What vpn?
| Technetium wrote:
| 4. No, it is not good. "Brave appears to install VPN
| Services without user consent"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932754
| somenameforme wrote:
| #1 existed for literally 24 hours and was clearly a
| stupid idea.
|
| #2 opt-in only.
|
| #3 agreed. annoying. can opt out.
|
| #4 opt-in only.
|
| #5 disagreed.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Broken trust, even if only 24h.
| notsylver wrote:
| opt-in but afaik they still show up in places unless you
| disable them
| philistine wrote:
| Has Brave advertised those opt-in features on first
| launch forcing a choice? Cause that is scammy if they
| did.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Brave does not need ublock origin, and brave adblock is
| independent of manifest v2/3.
|
| They implement compatible features in the browser itself.
| esperent wrote:
| Can you create your own filters, or subscribe to filter
| lists with Brave's ad blocker? If not then it's in no way a
| replacement for uBlock.
| sunshowers wrote:
| No fan of Brave here, but you can, yeah.
| esperent wrote:
| Are you sure? I just installed it on Android and can't
| find anything about lists in the settings.
|
| Tried searching and I can't find anything about
| subscribing to lists on desktop either, only a few
| discussions about the default set of lists they use.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Assuming it's the same as on desktop, go to
| settings->shields->content filters. They have a bunch of
| default filter lists you can subscribe to or you can add
| your own. You can also create your own custom filter
| rules. You can also do it semi-automatically by right
| clicking (no idea the equivalent on mobile) on an element
| in a page and there will be a "Block Elements" option
| that does a pretty decent job of wildcard blocking the
| element group you selected, and can be configured pretty
| easily with the popup.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Settings -> Brave Shields and privacy -> Content
| Filtering.
| causality0 wrote:
| I'm gonna be honest with you, the giant orange un-hideable
| brave logo might be the biggest reason I don't use Brave.
| It's like I can feel it burning into my phone's OLED.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Lol, understandable.
|
| I actually like kiwi browser quite a lot on mobile.
| Extensions, Devtools(!!!) make it especially great. Try
| that if you want (it's on top of chromium android).
|
| I use brave most of the time though, because I use their
| sync service across all my devices.
| kcb wrote:
| With Brave you can enable manifest v2 ublock origin if you
| prefer anyway.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| How long will Firefox take to fall? Until Google tells the
| lawyer who runs Mozilla that they'll stop sponsoring her if
| she doesn't fall in line?
| rciorba wrote:
| Firefox has such a small slice of the browser market, that
| I doubt Google will bother.
| tripplyons wrote:
| I stopped trusting Brave after they launched a crypto token
| and started replacing affiliate codes in URLs.
| maineagetter wrote:
| There seem to be a handful of anti-Bravers in this thread,
| and is it too much to hope they'd do 5 minutes of research?
| https://np.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/nw7et2/delet
| e...
| graynk wrote:
| I mean, I initially installed it on mobile to get rid of
| the ads, and then eventually deleted it, after it started
| showing me ads on the main page. I also think that their
| whole original "ad replacement" scheme
| (https://archive.is/W0k4j) is complete BS and pretty
| telling.
|
| But sure, let us do 5 minutes of research! So, this
| referral code injection was a mistake (that their CEO had
| to apologize for
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-
| aff...)
|
| Then there was the "donations for content creators"
| debacle, where they started gathering donations for
| various YouTubers, without.. actually talking to those
| YouTubers. But using their names and faces to promote the
| whole thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/h
| ttps://twitter.c...
|
| Apparently, the original idea was that you could
| "contribute to any website you visit. The idea was that
| once a site reached a threshold, the potential owner
| would be notified. They could then authenticate (prove
| ownership, etc) and claim the donations." (https://old.re
| ddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1e9i5ls/how_...), which
| is mind boggling to me that somebody actually thought
| it's a good idea.
|
| Anyway, they had to apologize for it, after hearing
| "important feedback": https://brave.com/blog/rewards-
| update/
|
| They have also installed VPNs onto users machines without
| asking: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-
| installing-vpn-se... I don't think they apologized for
| that one... But they did revert the decision.
|
| Then there's Brave News, Brave Wallet, Brave Rewards,
| which is just completely unnecessary bloat IMO. You _can_
| turn some of it off, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth
| though.
| knowitnone wrote:
| that sounds as illegal as wiretapping
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > I wonder how long they'll maintain manifest v2
| compatibility.
|
| https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
|
| They are going to keep it enabled until google removes the
| code from chromium in June. Then it sounds like they are
| going to try to use other means to offer "limited MV2
| support" but there are some issues, including the fact that
| they don't have their own extension store (and presumably the
| chrome one won't allow mv2 extensions to be updated) so I'm
| not sure to what degree that will actually work.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Also maintaining a browser fork is not work to be taken
| lightly specially if it touches such core and security
| critical functionality like extensions.
| cautious-fly wrote:
| The massive amount of online features Brave has (just have a
| look at all the toggles in settings) makes me wonder whether
| this has been exploited in the wild at all.
| kernal wrote:
| > Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable
|
| Oh please. Change your DNS to AdGuard or NextDNS and job done.
| derkades wrote:
| uBlock origin is so much better than just DNS-level blocking
| can ever be
| swiftcoder wrote:
| AdGuard also has a browser extension for blocking inline
| ads. The combo of AdGuard extension + DNS blocking is good
| enough that I haven't missed uBlock Origin
| SoftTalker wrote:
| ISPs make it difficult or impossible if you're using their
| router.
| 7bit wrote:
| What? You can set a DNS server on every OS and device. It
| works for Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
| virtualcharles wrote:
| But that's really only viable if you have a very small
| number of devices and those devices only have one user.
| Let's say you have a family of 4, each with smart phones,
| two tablets, three computers, each with myltiple user
| accounts... setting DNS on each individually becomes
| extremely cumbersome. Not to mention all the other
| connected devices that want to throw ads at you these
| days, TVs gaming systems, etc. And god help you if you've
| invested in any kind of crazy connected thing like a
| fridge with a screen on it, setting device level DNS
| there might be so obfuscated t's not possible.
|
| Point is that using any kind of DNS based blocking is far
| better at the router level but the above poster is right
| in that a lot of ISPs these days make it impossible to
| adjust your router level DNS and even for someone tech
| minded setting up some kind of downstream secondary
| router can be become so convoluted that they just give
| up.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I'll route this to my grandma and my gen Z relatives who
| never touched anything outside of an iPhone, thank you for
| your very insightful comment.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-
| tls#...
|
| Not exactly the simplest instructions, to your point, but
| you can still just do it once for them or get on a call and
| walk them through it. They might even notice that websites
| load faster when they don't make dozens of requests to
| advertisers and trackers.
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| Simple DNS blocking has been insufficient for some time
| thanks to cnames. They also can't block first party ads.
| Corrado wrote:
| Does that work with DoH (DNS over HTTP)? It's my
| understanding that using systems like AdGuard or NextDNS or
| even PiHole fail to handle DoH requests. In that case the
| only solution is something like uBlock Origin.
| TingPing wrote:
| It's just a dns server, they use DoH themselves.
|
| If you are trying to intercept dns traffic that ignores
| your dns setting that's a separate issue.
| werrett wrote:
| https://help.nextdns.io/t/x2hmvas/what-is-dns-over-tls-
| dot-d...
|
| > NextDNS supports all 4 protocols. See the setup tab for
| more information on how to use them.
| achempion wrote:
| Places for which you would need to use ublock origin are ai
| generated seo spam or funnel to some product, why visiting them
| in the first place
| iamacyborg wrote:
| You don't really believe that, do you?
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Have you ever used YouTube?
| encom wrote:
| Or any website in EU. Those idiotic cookie popups are half
| the reason I have uBlock installed.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Can't say i have big problems using Edge in combination with a
| pihole, but i do agree that Firefox with the very nice plugins
| like uBlock origin does look so much better.
|
| I mostly use Edge for accessing the big streaming websites and
| Firefox for everything else. Video runs somewhat better on Edge
| for me.
| esperent wrote:
| > Can't say i have big problems using Edge in combination
| with a pihole
|
| I use NextDNS on both my phone and laptop. Much easier setup,
| and much more portable (e.g. it'll work on cafe wifi).
| bad_user wrote:
| DNS-level blocking doesn't work very well. It only blocks
| requests to 3rd party domains; however, publishers can just
| turn to 1st party solutions, and many do just that.
|
| E.g., DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links
| in Google's Search or the ads on YouTube. And while my
| NextDNS has blocked ads on my Samsung TV, it was unable to
| block ads on the new Max streaming service (former HBO).
|
| I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking. If it's for
| privacy, I guess it's fine, but 1st party requests can and do
| share your data with first parties, with just one more level
| of indirection.
|
| I, for one, block ads because ads can be dangerous for my
| family and even for myself. I don't want ads because I don't
| want behavior modification, or malware. I also don't want my
| son to watch ads for services that should be illegal, such as
| gambling services. And don't get me wrong, I'm one of those
| people that actually pays for subscriptions to avoid ads, I'm
| against freeloading as well.
|
| So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're
| happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of
| the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those
| websites anyway.
| emberfiend wrote:
| To your point, ads _are_ brain malware.
| mopenstein wrote:
| Not sure what you're using but I found that Google
| streaming devices hard code their 8.8.8.8 and .4.4 DNS
| addresses into their products. Blocking those IP addresses
| at the router forces the device to default to your router's
| DNS.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| "DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links in
| Google's Search". It's true i see the weblink in Google
| results, but you can't click them.
|
| "or the ads on YouTube" i use other methods for that on
| Firefox.
|
| "I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking." I do not
| need any reason to block or allow any form of communication
| on my own infrastructure. I get to decide what connects to
| it and what comes in and gets out of it. I am fully aware
| some info will always get passed because otherwise i cannot
| consume the things i want to consume.
|
| "So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're
| happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of
| the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in
| those websites anyway."
|
| So far my list of 5 million blocked sites serves me quite
| well in pihole.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Tbf though, UBO Lite works well enough in the 'optimal' filter
| mode. On the pages I visit regularly I see no difference to
| UBO.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Why are you being fair to a company worth billions of dollars
| that are trying to control your computer and what you see? Do
| you regularly advocate for the devil as well? Who does that
| help?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The only alternative is giving up web browsing completely,
| because the 'new' Mozilla isn't any better than Google or
| Apple.
| j_maffe wrote:
| If you're not trying to be fair with your arguments then
| what's the point of making an argument at all? If you're
| deliberately introducing a bias to your arguments then you
| completely invalidate them to anyone seeking to find a
| grounded understanding. This can cause people to completely
| discredit any criticisms of products by Big Tech as just
| whining by the open source community. I hate this kind of
| mentality and unfortunately you're not the only one.
| jessekv wrote:
| Third option is disable JS.
|
| Although I wish more browsers made it easier to selectively
| enable it per site, like Orion.
| redder23 wrote:
| Disable JS in 2025 does NOT work. Petty much every site only
| works properly with JS, with some exceptions.
|
| JS is a core part of the modern web experience. 10 years go
| MAYBE Noscript would work, I never bothered, you end up
| having to whitelist a bunch of sites anyway even 10 years
| ago.
| lenkite wrote:
| Goodbye web-components. A W3C spec that mandates the use of
| JS to keep browser vendors happy. Once upon a time, there was
| HTML imports which didn't need this, but the ad-boys killed
| that spec.
| everdrive wrote:
| >Goodbye web-components. A W3C spec
|
| And good riddance. I really don't get any personal value
| out of the vast majority of modern web apps. Much, but not
| all, of what we do on the web could be via a much more
| basic interface.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Much, but not all, of what we do on the web could be
| via a much more basic interface.
|
| ... but it won't be.
|
| Delivering information and digesting it from users is the
| purpose of the web as the user sees it. HN is a good
| example of a website meant to do this. No ads, minimal
| algorithms, no feature creep beyond a traditional news-
| and-comment feed.
|
| Only one problem: that doesn't drive engagement. I come
| to HN because I'm genuinely interested in the content and
| discussion here. Being interested in content and
| discussion, though, is not nearly as profitable as being
| addicted. A lot of the UI elements and behaviors of
| websites today are meant to drive addiction, and thus,
| engagement.
|
| Hell, HN itself might not even _be_ profitable or even
| break-even. It 's the side-project of YC; something that
| exists to further the profit-building exploits of that
| organization.
| jajko wrote:
| This is not practical for common folks. I wouldn't be able to
| get into ebanking, buy anything in eshops, probably most
| stuff I use daily would be at least half-broken. Imagine this
| for my elderly parents, just endless desperation and
| frustration, I am happy if they manage to use internet as it
| is and not fall for some scam or hack.
|
| Heck, stuff sometimes breaks without me even trying to
| disable anything, like airbnb login via facebook popup
| stopped working suddenly few months ago (biggest internet
| mistake I ever done many years ago, as a host I am locked to
| specific well-rated account and airbnb support told me they
| can't migrate my account to another form of auth).
|
| Edit: just saw its 'per site' - that would work for me, but
| not for my parents who live far. But damn I don't want to do
| this active fight of cat and mouse with whole internet.
| Firefox/ublock origin user here, on both desktop and phone
| for many years. Internet looks utterly horrible when I open
| it somewhere without those, hell youtube with all those ads
| is absolutely ridiculous shit service. Apple devices I've
| seen aren't that good either, shame that would be a great
| selling point for me.
| baq wrote:
| > Third option is disable JS.
|
| You mean you'd like to use a web browser as a document viewer
| instead of an operating system? This ship has sailed a decade
| ago, at least.
| tim333 wrote:
| Anyone tried uBlock Origin Lite, the v3 compatible version?
| tasuki wrote:
| Yes, it's fine.
| reddalo wrote:
| But at this point, why not switch to Firefox?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Some sites have issues with Firefox, it is rare, but it
| happens. Some streaming services may not work at full
| resolution on Firefox because of DRM. You may also want
| sync with your Microsoft or Google account and not your
| Firefox account (if you even have one) for whatever reason.
| tim333 wrote:
| I've got used to the google lens thing. If you click the
| address bar then the lens icon and then highlight part of
| the page it visually analyses it, ocr's text, searches for
| the text, optionally translates it etc. I use it all the
| time because people will post text in image form.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Yes. I switched to it a couple of months ago. Saw no
| difference in usage compared to regular one.
| TingPing wrote:
| It will get worse with time. Now certain types cannot be
| blocked which will become more common.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| What can't be blocked?
| tim333 wrote:
| One thing I heard it it doesn't have the custom block
| element feature which would be a shame as I like the
| thing.
| TingPing wrote:
| Ads that use dns cnames to bypass block lists. Only
| Firefox has an API for this.
|
| Ads that previously were blocked at the HTTP Response
| level. ManifestV3 removed this API.
|
| A world where the number of ad rules exceeds the new
| limit. Which is 500 dynamic rules, 50 static rulesets,
| 30,000 rules. This may sound high but its not.
| deanc wrote:
| This is really really important now that server side
| tracking is rolled out at the major Ad providers. Keeping
| up a block list of the custom domains every site uses to
| mask their tracking will lead to an unsustainable cat and
| mouse game.
| exe34 wrote:
| I have pihole in a docker container and it works pretty nicely.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > or the biggest web detox ever
|
| I'm slowly thinking that this might be the correct way forward.
| It's difficult, at least for me, because I am addicted to the
| internet, but recently I realized that I need to be more
| mindful about my internet time, simply because it became shit,
| and using it actually has hugely negative impact on my life.
| I'm not sure how to phrase it, but it's not "ah yeah I'll do
| that someday", but rather "ok, things are getting serious, I am
| making a decision and starting to follow though right now".
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really
| took off?
|
| As in, suppose your daily browsing generates about $3 of
| monthly ad revenue [0]. Instead, you have a (digital) wallet
| linked to your browser, which could be pre-loaded with credit
| each month. For each website you visit you may decide to opt-
| out of ads by paying a fraction of your credits.
|
| You could even have a system where you could pay for a model
| with light-ads (i.e. at most 1 ad per page, 10 seconds of ads
| per 30min of video), or pay more for zero ads.
|
| I understand it's a difficult system to organize and is
| dependent on a strong network. But I'd expect there to be a
| solid small market by now.
|
| Lots of individual websites have this option (e.g. Netflix,
| newspapers, Spotify, Youtube Premium) but there's nothing
| overarching.
|
| [0] https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-
| go...
| messe wrote:
| > Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never
| really took off?
|
| Friction. The vast majority of people are not going to go
| through the effort of setting up a digital wallet to browse,
| when the existing system allows them to do it for free.
|
| Some people would for sure, but then you also need websites
| and creators to agree to participate in the scheme (or don't,
| and just unethically redirect ad revenue to yourself, like
| Brave used to).
| samiv wrote:
| And whatever users are willing to pay for not seeing ads
| someone is willing to pay more for users to see ads.
|
| Of course the best would be to let users pay for not seeing
| ads and then shove them in their face anyway for maximum
| profit.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| I don't think so. The fact you see any particular ad
| instead of another, is because someone put the highest
| bid for that slot to show you this ad, and nobody else
| was willing to pay more.
|
| By very definition 99% of ads that could be in the slot
| are not there because someone is not willing to pay that
| much to show that ad, except for the single one that won
| the auction.
|
| Ads have a maximum cost at which they don't become
| viable/profitable anymore.
|
| The only difference is that now the user could bid on
| that ad slot himself, to keep it empty.
|
| If you look at the average ad revenue, that wouldn't be
| all that much money. Certainly a fraction of what it
| costs to become a no-ad subscriber currently in various
| platforms.
| pbronez wrote:
| Yeah. I think this is probably insurmountably hard.
|
| ApplePay is about as frictionless as digital payments can
| possibly be, and I still occasionally abandon a purchase
| because of some annoying authentication issue.
| t-writescode wrote:
| If I had to guess, I think the big reason that never took off
| is that no one can agree on the standard and everyone wants
| money on the edges, and won't agree with each other.
|
| So, instead, we get companies like the New York Times
| thinking they're worth, what, $20/mo, per person, all by
| themselves?
| dageshi wrote:
| I imagine it's because people are worth far more to
| advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to
| browse. That and once you've given something away for free,
| for so long, it's very hard to then charge for it.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| > I imagine it's because people are worth far more to
| advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to
| browse.
|
| People must be ultimately paying the money somehow.
| Otherwise advertisers wouldn't bother.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| People aren't rational when it comes to money. They will
| haggle and loose sleep over very small amounts, but have
| no problem overpaying thousands of dollars when it's a
| big purchase or throwing away their life savings.
| blablablerg wrote:
| Only a small percentage of people are willing to pay for
| internet services. It is psychology and competition between
| the sites who offer services for free vs requiring payment.
| Paying for a service is a barrier to entry, while getting it
| for free and selling your data instead is not perceived as
| such. That is why all the big sites never would've taken off
| if they had paywalls.
| viraptor wrote:
| That and regional differences. The amount that people in
| many regions would be able (not even willing) to pay would
| be tiny for the company running the site in many cases.
| 7bit wrote:
| I know. Because for every paid service you have one that is
| "free".
| indymike wrote:
| > Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never
| really took off?
|
| 1. Free competition and lots of it.
|
| 2. No widely adopted standard for micropayment
|
| 3. Transaction processing fees often left very little for the
| site.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| TBH, pay to browse will not work. Look at Netflix/Spotify.
| Yes, it's a good revenue stream for them, but the incentives
| are plain wrong:
|
| 1) Consume more content -> More revenue -> Means more bloated
| content, esp. with LLM
|
| 2) They will simply re-introduce ads even though you're
| paying
|
| I really don't mind ads, and I don't really mind ad-
| targeting, except for 'sensitive' topics.
|
| But I despise animated ads, big walls of ads, interstitial
| ads, popovers, etc, etc, etc. Just be like google in the
| early '00s: I want content, and I'd be very happy to have non
| obtrusive relevant-to-the-current-topic ads on the side.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Why would I pay someone to stop sending me malware? I'm not
| going to pay random sites to not send crypto miners or not
| auto download and execute a virus. I expect my computer to
| protect me from those things.
|
| For more general pay-to-browse, it needs to have the friction
| of the user deciding to pay, or you still incentivize spam
| (maybe even worse than with ads). As long as you keep that
| friction, you don't really change much because most sites on
| the Internet aren't worth anything, especially the
| commercially motivated ones. The ones that are worth
| something already charge money (and people pay because it's
| valuable) or they're not trying to monetize (academia, free
| culture groups, hobby discussion groups, etc).
|
| "How do we get people to pay fractions of a cent" is the
| wrong problem to solve. The correct related problem is "how
| do we filter out all the cruft that isn't even worth 1 cent?"
| Blocking ads removes the financial incentive for spam, and is
| therefore a socially positive action in addition to being
| prudent security posture. Assuming ads have an effect on your
| psychology (and we ought to believe they do), it also helps
| you to remain a more moral person by preventing you from
| receiving and internalizing constant messages to consume
| frivolously. With climate change being one of the most
| important issues of our time, cutting out such consumption is
| imperative.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
| ethagnawl wrote:
| There are also "upstream" options, like PiHole or NextDNS which
| block requests to ad/tracking/malicious domains at the network
| (local machine, router, etc.) level.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| DNS based blocking is a good front-line, but in my
| experience, it's not sufficient on the modern web.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| I can't say I understand why that would be the case --
| probably naivete on my part. Are browser/JS apps loading
| ads via proxies or websockets or something? Is uBlock
| Origin somehow able to intercept those?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| IIRC, Firefox at least has its own DNS-over-HTTPS client
| configured out of the box? So they aren't using your DNS
| servers _at all_?
| _fat_santa wrote:
| My issue with upstream options is that it prevents ads from
| coming through but their "place" on the page is still
| preserved so you still need uBlock to remove the elements.
| chrsw wrote:
| What about an "AI" browser? You put in a URL, it fetches the
| page, re-renders the page without ads, cleans up any mess as
| much as possible, and passes the result to your screen? Could
| that work?
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think this is possible with V2 extensions.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable_
|
| Huh? uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine.
|
| I've seen absolutely no difference after switching.
| PKop wrote:
| Use uBlock Origin Lite, it works fine and in some ways is more
| efficient than the regular extension. Most people won't notice
| much of a difference if anything.
|
| Firefox is debatably less bearable than a Chromium based
| browser with uBlock Lite at least on Windows.
| postalrat wrote:
| Once most people run the lite version the trackers will
| change in a way that v3 extensions can't block.
| raverbashing wrote:
| There is a ublock manifest v3 and it seems to be working ok
| (though you need to change the level and allow the permissions)
| groggo wrote:
| What actually changes? ublock origin is still available, right?
| But it just can't block requests?
|
| My understanding is that adblockers: 1. block requests from
| certain domains 2. block elements matching certain criteria
|
| Does this change just affect #1?
| bufo wrote:
| Brave.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah yes, the crypto shill browser. I'd rather take the
| thousand buggy stabs of Firefox than get down to that level.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Well, with it, it is just barely bearable still, if you do not
| pull yourself back radically and are paranoidly picky. Crap
| with ad vs crap without ad is the typical choice nowadays. The
| web is murdered by those whose livelihood depend on it, like a
| virus. Leaving alone only tiny safe heavens like this.
| BeetleB wrote:
| On my work laptop (not an old one), Chrome easily consumes a
| huge amount of RAM when I go to a page with lots of ads
| (including this article). I don't have an ad blocker on it.
|
| Essentially, if I open 2-3 pages with these types of ads, I
| run out of RAM (16 GB) and the whole laptop slows down. I
| simply can't browse the web while working (which may be a
| good thing!).
|
| Of course, part of the problem is Outlook and Teams and some
| other apps using a lot of RAM, but Chrome is the real
| bottleneck.
|
| So no, not "just bearable". I couldn't even read this
| article. It's the norm that I just close the tabs without
| reading because I don't want a laggy PC.
| est wrote:
| If MS continues to support ManifestV2 in edge, I think the usage
| would increase.
|
| Sadly they chose not.
| sureIy wrote:
| They could do something really funny and just fork Chromium
| like Google forked WebKit.
|
| The reality is that no business likes ad-blockers so why go
| through that trouble only to get less money?
| chippiewill wrote:
| Microsoft don't really invest the right kind of resources into
| Edge to make that happen. There are sound technical reasons
| (aside from the obvious financial reason) why Google wants to
| make this change, I suspect this'll unblock the Chromium team
| making a very substantial refactor of the networking layer
| which Microsoft can't feasibly maintain a fork of.
| harrygeez wrote:
| I wish all Chromium forks would band together to maintain a
| base that supports Manifest V2, it shouldn't be that
| difficult to each chip in some funding.
| wavemode wrote:
| > I suspect this'll unblock the Chromium team making a very
| substantial refactor of the networking layer
|
| I'm curious as to why you suspect this. Have they stated so?
| ingohelpinger wrote:
| they want to track your ass, whatever it costs.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| I still somewhat miss the old Edge(trident-based). IME it worked
| perfectly on low power netbooks.
| nicman23 wrote:
| YES! it was great for those old under powered win8 tablets. I
| had an acer with a amd c50 and edge was actually fast!
| feverzsj wrote:
| Edge is only good for its support of cleartype on Windows. Now
| it's nothing.
| picafrost wrote:
| Recently I've been asking myself, what do web browsers and the
| web look like in twenty years? I've been applying this to all
| "free" software (e.g., VSCode) released by the large tech
| companies who ultimately are incentivized by profit.
|
| I really have no clue, but as far as I can see the answer is
| _never_ better. More centralized, more bloated, more invasive,
| less choice, and less freedom.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's at the point now where basically everything you do is
| online owned by some online mega-corp.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Ladybird, Servo, etc... offer a brighter future. Servo takes
| donations if you want to help put our collective thumbs on the
| scale.
| silisili wrote:
| Personally, I wish it was more like 20 years ago.
|
| I've always held AOL fondly. You paid per month, and get access
| to a giant ecosystem including forums, chat, email, news,
| zines, games, etc. Mostly ad free as I remember.
|
| In fact, when NetZero became a thing, people mostly weren't
| interested. They were turned off by the stupid permanent ad
| bar, and the lack of community.
|
| I wish something like AOL would come back around. Charge me $20
| a month, give me a community, email, etc. Don't dare show me an
| ad.
|
| We're just now getting back to pay for no ads, but its 5
| dollars here or there for disparate services.
|
| Man, AOL was ahead of its time. All it needs today that it
| didn't have was the 'wall', 'profile', whatever. And of course
| vid/pic sharing.
|
| I remember when moving off AOL to broadband, my family hated it
| despite the speed. They thought it was clunky and stupid to
| have to download separate programs or visit different websites
| to do one thing at a time, in what was in AOL an integration.
|
| FB is probably closest to that experience today, but of course
| is ad and data driven, and somehow still doesn't feel very
| community like.
|
| I'd love to see a new, electron based AOL type service come
| about today. It'd cost a crapton to get the network and content
| up to attract any user base, else I'd try it myself.
| hulitu wrote:
| > I wish something like AOL would come back around
|
| https://www.thelaughline.com/the-diary-of-an-aol-user/
| silisili wrote:
| Yeah, that was the sentiment at the time.
|
| It reminds me of that meme, maybe called the midwit meme?
|
| On the left you have the dumb guy, saying AOL does
| everything. On the right you have the hooded guy, saying
| AOL does everything.
|
| In the middle you have the crying guy saying no you should
| use Netscape browser, and ICQ for messaging, and usenet for
| forums, and dogpile for search, etc.
| fiverz wrote:
| can anyone find this?
| Larrikin wrote:
| As an avid AOL user, that is the worst version of the
| internet. I remember keywords and thinking that was the
| internet. Whatever some large corporation had paid AOL so
| they could build a shitty little Visual Basic type app that
| controlled everything you looked at. There were no ads
| because the entire experience besides the chat rooms and IM
| was an ad. It was a lot of people's first email accounts but
| spam blocking was so bad back then I count that as
| advertising.
|
| I remember being blown away by discovering people would
| randomly make private chats and trying to guess at what the
| chat name would be for things I was interested in as a kid.
| Then I remember having my mind blown that AOL had a built in
| browser where someone had built a website, not a keyword,
| that actually had my niche interest that no one in real life
| did. Then I discovered you could download a much better
| version of that experience called a browser.
|
| Your idea is just Facebook where you can't link out and is
| fully corporate controlled. Which I guess is actually
| Twitter.
|
| I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies
| and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they
| thought they could make money by talking about them.
| silisili wrote:
| > I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet
|
| Is it really that different from having the .com of a word
| today?
|
| > I think you long for the Internet where people had
| hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because
| they thought they could make money by talking about them.
|
| I struggle to see how you got to that conclusion, but it's
| an absolutely true statement nonetheless so I cannot
| complain.
| irrational wrote:
| 20 years ago, but with gigabit Ethernet speeds and 5g WiFi.
| Oh, and modern dev tools in the browser. I'd hate to go back
| to only Firebug.
| ickelbawd wrote:
| I can say my family never once paid for AOL or cared about
| its basket of features. But we did pay for NetZero for a long
| time until broadband become more affordable in our area.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Mobile web will be dead and Google will have neutered
| whatever's left with WEI when they get around to trying it
| again.
| tigrezno wrote:
| 20 years? no jobs for sure. AI will do everything
| megadata wrote:
| VSCode futures doesn't look good, OSS wise. "Microsoft loves
| open source" is the joke of the century.
|
| https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
| harrygeez wrote:
| VSCode is still a very competitive text editor even without
| its proprietary plugins.
|
| Ootb VSCode is already a superior experience to Emacs, which
| I only begrudgingly move away from because of subpar
| TypeScript + JSX support like 6 years ago. However, after I
| started using VSCode for work there was just no going back. I
| use VSCode a lot for text manipulations. I find its regex
| search replace much easier than using sed in the terminal.
| Multiple cursors, Git integration, beautiful diffs, command
| palette is just like Emacs M-x.
|
| Without its proprietary plugins it's still a great gift to
| the public and forks like Cursor is a good showcase of that.
| Thanks to monaco almost every web editor nowaways have great
| usability, syntax highlighting and the keybindings that I'm
| familiar with.
|
| I think the bigger joke of the century are open source
| beneficiaries that only take and give nothing back, but still
| have the audacity to demand for things and hound open source
| developers to implement what they want. You can't have your
| cake and eat it too
| encom wrote:
| >take and give nothing back
|
| Then don't release under MIT or BSD, and use GPL.
| nsm wrote:
| Yes! Please support good paid software companies if you can
| afford them. Jetbrains, Sublime Text, others.
| 827a wrote:
| Agreed. Open source is great, but the only way we build the
| software world we want to see is by supporting the software
| projects which align with your values. Using software is not
| supporting it; contributing to it is, but that simply isn't
| viable for many people; paying for it also is, and that's
| viable for most people, especially software engineers.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| Its not just the internet. Its almost everything in your life.
| Financialization of products and services seems to keep pushing
| products to get cheaper while providing additional supposed
| 'value'. In reality, you are usually paying more for less but
| are fooled into believing that you are getting more.
|
| I was reminded of this recently by comparing an old 90s Toyota
| to the latest models. The 90s cars were over-engineered and 30
| years later, had more breathing room to keep going. Meanwhile
| the latest stuff is all plastic pieces that have been
| engineered to perform many tasks using just one piece. The idea
| was that they could focus on making that one piece as robust as
| possible and still save money on reducing parts and making the
| operators life easier during assembly (no one cares about the
| plight of the repairman). All in the name of saving costs to
| keep the product competitive in the face of the declining value
| of fiat money.
|
| Well even though its supposed to be better, the new stuff still
| sucks. People are holding onto their old cars, we lost so many
| wonderful 2000s cars due to cash for clunkers. The designs and
| colors are also more boring.
|
| How do you fight this?
|
| Well as software people we have an out: Homemade software and
| open source. Homemade software allows us to cut the cruft out
| of products that companies add. We pay for in our time but if
| it is important enough to us then it has to be done.
|
| This applies to everything: You can make your own food instead
| of accepting the declining garbage from takeout/restaurants,
| you can buy raw materials and do your own
| woodwork/electronics/metalworking.
|
| Even something like cars can be somewhat pushed back on.
| Communities form around popular cars to document and better
| understand the issues prevalent with certain models. Use this
| info to self select on a vehicle that has a large community and
| to help anticipate problems that can be coming down the pike
| with that particular model.
|
| Again, no one has infinite time so you have to decide for
| yourself what things are important to you and take back control
| while trying your best to minimize nonsense in other areas.
| AnonC wrote:
| Seems like Microsoft is just taking whatever Chromium releases
| and repackages it to show more ads and to make Bing the default
| search engine. In this case, it's just dropping support for
| Manifest V2 extensions, such as uBlock Origin, and moving to
| Manifest V3, which does not support extensions intercepting and
| blocking requests using blockingWebRequest.
|
| Just three days ago, Mozilla reiterated [1] that Firefox would
| continue to support Manifest V2 alongside Manifest V3. So if you
| want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your
| only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it). While you're
| at it, note that "uBlock Origin works best on Firefox". [2]
|
| [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-
| manifes...
|
| [2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-
| works-b...
| nout wrote:
| It's quite relevant to highlight that Mozilla is removing the
| promise that they won't sell your data:
| https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
|
| Another browser option is Brave, but you have to disable the
| altcoins stuff :/
| WithinReason wrote:
| No you don't, it's opt in.
| handoflixue wrote:
| Full context, from the link you provided: ""Mozilla doesn't
| sell data about you (in the way that most people think about
| "selling data"), and we don't buy data about you. Since we
| strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of "sale of
| data" is extremely broad in some places, we've had to step
| back from making the definitive statements you know and
| love."
|
| I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're
| still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling data
| as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated in the
| linked Privacy FAQ on their official site:
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
| ginko wrote:
| Still makes it sound like they want to profit from user
| data.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| What "sale of data" falls under a legal definition but
| would be understood by everyone to not be selling data? An
| example?
|
| It sounds more like 'we sell your data, but we do it in a
| legally protracted way so we could claim up to now that we
| don't'.
|
| Given this relates to Firefox's central selling
| proposition, they surely have an essay detailing exactly
| what data they're selling?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I would expect that the default search engine deals that
| Firefox mostly relies on for financing could be
| interpreted as such.
|
| Mozilla gets money, and as a result of the deal, the
| searches (data) of anyone who didn't change the default
| go to the company running the default search engine.
| folmar wrote:
| By default Google gets not only search but everything
| entered into the address bar (for "suggestions").
| Yizahi wrote:
| It is always the same idea - if the data is even slightly
| touched and/or processed, it is suddenly not a personal
| data anymore and is "ok" to be sold.
| glenstein wrote:
| >What "sale of data" falls under a legal definition but
| would be understood by everyone to not be selling data?
| An example?
|
| I assume probably data that's anonymized (in some sense)
| and/or aggregated (in some sense). But there's so much
| grey area there that it's a lot less reassuring than a
| straight up blanket statement that they used to be able
| to make.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| Even fuller context:
|
| > Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most
| people think about "selling data"), and we don't buy data
| about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL
| definition of "sale of data" is extremely broad in some
| places, we've had to step back from making the definitive
| statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work
| into making sure that the data that we share with our
| partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially
| viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or
| shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy
| preserving technologies (like OHTTP)."
|
| How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox
| commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not
| "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still
| data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel
| it in by changing the definition.
|
| > We are as close to not selling data as it is legally
| possible to be.
|
| Normally when you say "as close to X as legally possible",
| that means you want to do X fully, but you can't because
| the law forbids you to. X in this case is "not selling
| data". But "not selling data" is not illegal at all. What
| are they even trying to say here?
|
| (Also I don't find that sentence on their FAQ page)
| pimterry wrote:
| > How is sharing data with partners in order to make
| Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in
| exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated
| data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them
| to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.
|
| This situation isn't perfect, but I disagree that this is
| particularly weasely or disingenuous. It's not black &
| white and there are meaningful differences here.
|
| I think the assumption of 'selling data' and primary
| concern from most users is the sale of their
| _identifiable personal data_ - i.e. telling advertisers
| "this user is interested in X", using their privileged
| position as a browser to track and collect that
| information. This is absolutely what Facebook is doing
| when they sell your data, for example.
|
| The description here is suggesting that Firefox are still
| committed to never doing that or anything similar. That
| is the main thing I'd want to know, so that's great.
|
| However, it sounds like they may be selling generic
| anonymous data in some way - for example telling Pocket
| what percentage of people use the Pocket extension, or
| telling Google what percentage of people change their
| search engine away from Google. Both of those are cases
| where you can imagine they might receive significant
| extra income from partners given that data, and they feel
| this is reasonable but means they can technically no
| longer say the 'never sell your data'.
|
| You could consider that level of data sharing problematic
| of course. That said, there is spectrum of problems here,
| and personally (and I think for most people) I am much
| more concerned about the tracking & distribution of
| actual personal identifiable data than I am about generic
| metrics like those, if that is what's happening
| (unfortunately, they haven't explained much further so
| this is still somewhat speculation - I fully agree more
| precise language would be very helpful).
| superq wrote:
| Mozilla owns Pocket.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| The problem is that 'anonymized data' is quite a big
| spectrum, and may be able to be deanonymized quite
| easily.
|
| See this submission from earlier this month: _Everyone
| knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app
| ads_ (26 days ago, 1957 points) -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909921
| glenstein wrote:
| >The description here is suggesting that Firefox are
| still committed to never doing that or anything similar.
|
| This runs into what I'm calling the "who ordered that"
| problem, because this represents a retreat from a
| stronger commitment to privacy, and is not a conception
| of privacy that anyone was asking for, or that satisfies
| anyone who is concerned about privacy.
|
| I don't want my interest in sci-fi to be made to conflict
| with my preference from buying locally, and influence
| campaigns urging me buy books through Preferred LArge
| Retailer and pushing me toward that clash are a problem
| whether the data powering them is personal or fed into an
| abstracted anonymized group.
|
| And depersonalized profiling that "knows" I can be sorted
| into a specific "type of guy" bucket may involve learning
| things about me that I don't want to be inputs into
| marketing. They can still, for instance, make inroads
| into judgements about things like self esteem (e.g.
| colognes and beauty products), financial precarity, and
| can work to socialize groups into consumerist self-
| conceptions. They probably can be used to make inroads
| into classic forms of privacy violations like "looking to
| buy a home" or "trying to get pregnant" or other such
| aspects of identity that I don't want marketing to touch.
| Izkata wrote:
| I think the key is the "about you" part, not the "selling
| data" part. Based on the rest of the statement, your
| personal information (name, age, location, personal files
| (uploads/downloads), that kind of data) isn't shared,
| which is what most people would think of when they hear
| "your data". It sounds like the information they do share
| may be associated with you, but isn't _about_ you in the
| colloquial sense - even if it is about you in the legal
| sense.
| glenstein wrote:
| >I think the key is the "about you" part, not the
| "selling data" part
|
| They're certainly _attempting_ to articulate that as a
| conceptual distinction, but I don 't think that division
| is as real as would be implied by trying to separate the
| one thing into two different words. Aggregated data is
| "about you" too, in many of the senses that matter in the
| context of privacy, and I would reject attempts at
| conceptualizing this into two things to imply otherwise.
| glenstein wrote:
| I agree that this is a huge breath of fresh air because
| you are (1) actually reading what Mozilla said and (2)
| making sober nuanced distinctions absent from most
| criticisms.
|
| But that said, these reassurances run into a "who ordered
| that" problem. No advocate for privacy was ever
| advocating on behalf of anonymized data any more than
| personally identifying data. Anonymous averaging over
| interests of groups still involves privacy compromises;
| and metrics, fingerprints and learning algorithms can mix
| and match that in ways that still cross the line.
| Abstracted profiling still works, and digs deeper than
| you might suspect (I recall the netflix data that could
| predict interests across different categories, like
| people watching House of Cards also liking It's Always
| Sunny in Philadelphia). Preferences can hang together in
| a measurable way, which is exactly why ad companies want
| them.
|
| It's also just part of the long slow, death by one
| thousand cuts transformation into a company that doesn't
| have categorical commitments to privacy.
| tomrod wrote:
| > I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're
| still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling
| data as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated
| in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site:
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
|
| It's actually super simple and needs no obfuscation or
| verbal esoterica. Don't engage in a contract where data
| Firefox has collected from users is transferred to a third
| party.
|
| Done. Easy as.
|
| The sister comment on search engine data transfer is FUD --
| the browser can of course send queries to a default search
| engine without needing to pipe any information to Firefox.
| Firefox would need no usage monitoring whatsoever, just do
| a firm fixed price contract and the details are settled.
| dcow wrote:
| It may be armchair speculation, but it's not FUD.
| tomrod wrote:
| Perhaps no fear, but definitely uncertainty and doubt,
| thus in the ballpark.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| There's also Zen, which is Firefox based.
| bix6 wrote:
| By altcoins do you mean BAT? What's the issue with it?
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Turn off bat - no issues. I installed brave from a portable
| version and update the parts - found thru trial and error -
| as required, from the latest downloads
| bix6 wrote:
| What's the issue with BAT though?
| asmor wrote:
| They falsely advertised that creators who didn't opt in
| (or even knew about this) could be supported by donating
| BAT, and then kept it once it remained unclaimed.
|
| BAT is also different from adblocking, because it
| monetizes other people's content. It's about as close to
| stealing as you can get in the ad business, aside from
| the Honey affiliate highjacking.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I don't think they _kept_ any BAT in that situation.
| soundnote wrote:
| The BAT was Brave's to begin with as far as I know, part
| of a pool to promote the launch of their tipping system.
| It makes perfect sense to return the BAT users could
| assign from the pool to creators back to the pool if the
| creators didn't sign up.
|
| Which is not to say that the tipping UI wasn't a hot
| mess, which it was. Hard to tell who was onboard, who
| wasn't and eg. Tom Scott got a bunch of tips when he had
| no interest in the platform whatsoever.
|
| > BAT is also different from adblocking, because it
| monetizes other people's content.
|
| It doesn't. The browser literally shows you toaster
| popups all by itself, and gives you some pocket change
| amounts of BAT for viewing them.
| emberfiend wrote:
| mad-max-tom-hardy-nuh-uh-thats-bait.webm
| herbst wrote:
| I also thought Brave is the browser with the annoying token.
| But I still haven't seen anything about BAT but happily using
| brave for a while now.
| SllX wrote:
| Arc is a Chromium web browser that also includes uBlock Origin
| in the default install.
|
| Orion is a WebKit web browser from the folks at Kagi that
| supports both Firefox and Chromium extensions (including on
| iPhones and iPads) and has zero telemetry, and I have the
| Firefox version of uBlock Origin installed.
|
| Firefox is not the only option for people that want
| alternatives to Chrome that support uBlock Origin.
| elcomet wrote:
| If it's chromium based, they will need to remove manifest v2
| at some point to stay close to the upstream version.
| SllX wrote:
| Possibly in Arc, although Brave also continues to support
| Manifest v2 so it's possible it will continue to persist in
| some subset of Chromium-based browsers and as I said, it
| ships _with_ the browser and is installed by default; but
| Orion is not Chromium-based.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Brave supports it _right now_ , which is 2 months after
| it's been removed upstream.
|
| I strongly suspect they're gonna drop support as soon as
| the first bigger merge issue happens along with a
| heartfelt blog that "they did they everything to support
| it, but it was just too much for the resources available
| to them"
|
| I doubt it's gonna take more then 1-2 years (December
| 2027) for this to happen, but we will see.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I don't understand or know alot about extensions, but
| what is so incredibly impossible about adding new
| capabilities to manifestv3? It's a manifest describing
| what the addon wants to do and some UX to allow it right?
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| It's not really about the manifest. It's about the APIs
| available to extension programmers. Chrome has made the
| "webRequestBlocking" API unavailable and that's what's
| affecting adblockers. Chrome will eventually remove the
| code supporting this API, and it is not feasible for
| downstream to make it available anyway.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Why can't forks just maintain an independent
| implementation afterwards?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| They could, theoretically. But just imagine what that
| actually means. Unless you cease merging upstream/the
| project you've forked, you'll have to resolve all
| conflicts caused by this divergence.
|
| And that's _a lot_ of work for a multi million LOC
| project, unless the architecture is specifically made to
| support such extensions... which isn 't the case here.
|
| And freezing your merges indefinitely isn't really viable
| either for a browser
| Zak wrote:
| A quick look at the code gives me the impression that
| webRequestBlocking is a fairly trivial modification to
| webRequest, and they seem to be keeping the latter. This
| leads me to two conclusions: it wouldn't be terribly hard
| for a fork maintainer to keep webRequestBlocking, and
| Google's technical excuses for removing it are
| disingenuous.
| justinclift wrote:
| > ... and Google's technical excuses for removing it are
| disingenuous.
|
| That's been the default assumption of pretty much
| everyone anyway.
| SirMaster wrote:
| So go make an LLM manage the fork or something. Everyone
| keeps telling me they are amazing at code these days.
| Surely it can do a task like that if that's all it's
| doing all day.
|
| If not today maybe soon...
| bawolff wrote:
| Because these aren't really independent browsers but
| reskins.
|
| Being independent of google requires actually doing the
| work and not just copying google.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Chrome officially supports Manifest V2 extensions until
| at least June 2025, hidden behind an enterprise flag: htt
| ps://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate
| ...
|
| I expect Brave to easily support it until then and _then_
| drop it very quickly as you described.
| bbarnett wrote:
| You know, Google's really playing with fire here. There
| are enough browser companies running Chrome underneath,
| to more than equal Google's commitment.
|
| That is, if those companies choose.
|
| If even 80% of them wanted to fork? Not a biggie. And
| they could still cherry pick commits from the alt fork.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| How hard would it be to "wrap" the browser in a ublock
| like shell, so that all network requests are filtered
| through a firewall before they even reach the chrome
| application layer.
|
| It might be easier to maintain than an actual extension
| interface with hooks thought the code.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| I don't think you'd need manifest V2 for such a rudimenty
| logic.
|
| The reason why ublock origin is so powerful is because it
| works with the DOM/not at the network level and can use
| heuristics to determine wherever something is a
| advertisement or not.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think you might be underestimating the scope of work
| that happens on chromium a tad, from Github's "pulse"
| feature:
|
| "Excluding merges, 684 authors have pushed 3,139 commits
| to main and 3,866 commits to all branches. On main,
| 14,924 files have changed and there have been 740,516
| additions and 172,682 deletions."
|
| That's stats from _last week_. Last year Google
| apparently was responsible for about 95% of
| contributions. Other than Microsoft (which has the same
| bad incentives as Google) none of the alt-chromium
| browser companies has like, 5% of the engineers to
| maintain a real alternative
| kolanos wrote:
| This is arguably the most compelling reason for people to
| switch to Brave. If there are smart people over there,
| they'll make a concerted effort to keep Manifest v2 in
| their fork.
| mindcrash wrote:
| Brave supports uBO blocklists OOTB, no extension needed.
|
| So even when they have to say farewell to Manifest v2 it
| really doesn't matter, at least in case of privacy (and
| for some medical) protection.
| SllX wrote:
| This is good info to keep in my back pocket. Thanks!
| paradox460 wrote:
| As does Vivaldi
| soundnote wrote:
| In addition, since their adblocker isn't an extension and
| doesn't care about extension APIs, they can do things
| even Manifest v2 Chrome extensions can't. For example,
| full-fat uBO can't do CNAME uncloaking on Chromium due to
| API limitations, but can do it on Firefox which has the
| APIs. Brave is Chromium-based, but since Shields isn't an
| extension they've built CNAME uncloaking into it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think if a bunch of Chromium forks come together, they
| can maintain v2 support for quite a while. A fork
| maintained by a combination of Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and
| maybe some of those startup-based browsers can probably
| keep the most important APIs running for quite some time.
|
| At some point the issues will become too difficult to fix,
| but none of these companies need to be doing it alone.
| Adding a separate upstream with some "fuck off Google"
| fixes for them to base their proprietary browser on seems
| like a smart thing to do.
| AnonC wrote:
| Orion cannot support uBlock Origin _completely_ either. I
| know that Orion allows the extension to be installed (I have
| done it too), but it only has partial support.
|
| Quoting from a reply in a discussion on the Orion Feedback
| site from a few months ago (November 2024):
|
| > " uBO is not supported on iOS due to Apple limitations."
|
| [1]: https://orionfeedback.org/d/9145-ublock-origin-not-
| existent-...
| voidmain0001 wrote:
| I am using Orion on iOS with uBO for two years and UBO
| works well enough for me. There is the odd website that
| won't load in Orion so I switch to Safari, which I never
| use, and the amount of ads that are presented in Safari
| reassures me that uBO in Orion is working.
| Squarex wrote:
| I've just tested it and while the ubo extension can be
| installed, it does not work at all.
|
| I use brave browser and nextdns to block ads on ios now.
| ShockedUnicorn wrote:
| The ubo extension does work in orion, but I remember
| having to go somewhere deep into settings to make it
| actually be enabled. I don't remember exactly how I did
| it but eventually after a few restarts of the browser I
| got it working.
|
| I did compare against other adblock systems on ios and
| found it to be the best option, as other adblocks either
| gave broken webpages or just didn't work at all.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Are you sure you're not just using Orion's built-in
| content blocker? I realized I had the uBO extension
| installed on iOS but it wasn't doing anything because I
| also had Orion's ad blocking enabled.
| graynk wrote:
| I have tried UBO on Orion on iOS and it does not work. It
| is definitely installed. It definitely thinks that it's
| working. But the moment you switch the default Orion
| blocker off - the ads appear. And uBO just says "Blocked
| on this page 0", no matter the page. If you actually did
| manage to get it to work - that would be golden, would
| really appreciate it if you shared how you made it work.
|
| To be quite frank - I haven't manage to get _any_ of the
| extensions (that I would like to have) to work in Orion.
| They all just silently fail in different ways.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _the amount of ads that are presented in Safari_
|
| First, consider NextDNS to DNS adblock all your apps.
|
| For in the browser, for those who do use Safari, consider
| 1Blocker, otherwise consider AdGuard Pro.
| justinclift wrote:
| Sounds like Orion will do the job on macOS though, so
| that's at least one platform with an alternative. :)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Is the partial support _only_ on iOS? Because iOS is a
| rather special case. Personally I don 't count iOS versions
| of browsers as even being the same software.
| zamadatix wrote:
| When the platform itself limits the browsers then it's more
| a platform discussion than about what each of the browsers
| do on the platform.
|
| The problem with support on iOS is that each browser is
| forced to be a skin for Safari and Safari only supports
| Safari Web Extensions, which are MV3-like, hence the
| platform limitation. The EU law may allow a browser to
| release in that region but Apple placed such heavy
| requirements and restrictions to do so none have actually
| been approved. I haven't seen a clear answer if less
| limited extension access itself would result in not being
| approved by Apple.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Whose idea was it to take over the whole screen and play
| sound when you start Arc for the first time? It also showed a
| signup screen.
|
| I removed it right away. I just want a browser, not whatever
| that was.
| ljm wrote:
| I was using Arc as my main browser until they added the
| mandatory account requirement. It came around the same time
| they moved iCloud syncing to their own backend.
|
| Now I just use Safari because all I do really is read
| stuff.
| rchaud wrote:
| "The Browser Company" does not want to be seen as a dumb
| pipe. You are not downloading a mere browser, but a
| "platform" for "experiencing the web as never before".
| Yeul wrote:
| They have to make money somehow I guess.
|
| Obviously Google has many income streams. Mozilla does
| not.
|
| It always comes down to the question: do you want to pay
| money for a browser? And the answer for 99% of the users
| is "hell no".
| rchaud wrote:
| ...and US tech companies take that as a reason to fill
| the app with feature bloat and then charge a subscription
| for it. Arc as a product is dead because the founders are
| of course pivoting to an "AI browser".
| mihaaly wrote:
| "It's not shit, it's experience" kind of corporate bs
| repacked?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Arc is a very... Appley browser. Its marketing and
| communication pretends it's a world-changing product of
| massive importance, something everyone desires to own. In
| reality, it's a fork of someone else's browser with some UX
| tweaks.
|
| I looked into it, but couldn't get over the
| pretentiousness. They seem to make plenty of money from
| either investors or customers because they're not bankrupt
| yet, so I guess there must be a demographic that likes
| being treated like that.
|
| There's something funny about a browser pretending it's the
| best thing since sliced bread telling me to drag the
| downloaded application to the macOS dock after downloading
| the Windows setup file.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I use Arc for work. It has a few nice UX enhancements.
| None of those things that you mentioned affect me on a
| day to day basis. (Honestly, I don't pay attention to
| marketing when making my decisions.)
|
| Pretentious or not, Arc is pre-enshittification. Chrome,
| Edge and FF are not, which is what matters.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Arc is in maintenance mode as The Browser Company focuses on
| building a new browser:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24279020/browser-
| company...
| deanc wrote:
| Lost all trust for a lot of users after they did this.
|
| Zen browser would be an almost drop-in replacement for
| those that like Arc but it uses FF under the hood instead.
| SllX wrote:
| Yeah, I saw their YouTube video which was immensely
| annoying to watch. That's why I was pretty pleased when I
| discovered Orion and I recently switched from Arc and
| MobileSafari to Orion as my defaults, but I'm using Arc as
| the Chromium browser I keep around for when that matters
| (which right now just means DRM streaming sites like
| Netflix and Crunchyroll), but Brave could fill this spot
| just as easily.
| tomrod wrote:
| Especially since Firefox's new leadership has been
| encroaching on a lot of the value Firefox provides people
| (e.g removing the pledge to not sell data?!?).
| _hyn3 wrote:
| Also Brave.. just not sure when or if someone will breaking
| fork chromium.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| What about Brave? I eas avoiding it for a long time for no
| reason while chrome was getting continually worse.
|
| Maybe it's time
| wyclif wrote:
| It's time. People can complain that "oh it's based on
| Chromium" but I don't think that's the hill to die on right
| now.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| What makes Brave a better choice than Firefox? While it
| claims to be privacy-focused, it's developed by a VC-
| funded company, not a non-profit foundation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controv
| ers...
| superq wrote:
| Mozilla now sells data, while Brave does not?
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Does Mozilla sell your data, or did they remove language
| saying they won't?
|
| Do you really think Brave won't, when it comes time to
| pay the piper?
| glenstein wrote:
| Brave sells ads and discloses aggregate-level data to
| advertisers, and has a history of trust-undermining
| transgressions mentioned upthread:
|
| >installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert
| referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers
| without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc
| josephh wrote:
| For the simple reason of not using Gecko
| johnmaguire wrote:
| What's wrong with Gecko?
| glenstein wrote:
| I would think the logic runs exactly the opposite way.
| Browser diversification would make not using chromium the
| good thing, rather than not using gecko.
| soundnote wrote:
| Site isolation is one: Firefox doesn't sandbox websites
| from each other on non-Windows platforms, and even on
| Windows its sandboxing solution is just worse than
| Chromium's. They're doing work on implementing sandboxing
| more widely, mind, but still have a long road ahead of
| them to get to parity.
| awnird wrote:
| I think many people's issue with Brave is that it's a
| cryptocurrency grift, not that it's a Chromium reskin.
| graynk wrote:
| I would really like people to stop recommending Brave :(
|
| It may be an okay-ish browser, but the company behind it
| _repeatedly_ does shady things (installs VPN without
| asking, overriding links to insert referral codes,
| collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even
| knowing about it, etc, etc), I am honestly not sure why
| people are OK with it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controver
| s...
| 42772827 wrote:
| It's so frustrating to me that the Brave boosters can't
| seem to fathom that I don't want a "better ad
| experience." I want a /"no-ad experience."/
| someotherperson wrote:
| It's equally frustrating to me that some people don't
| seem to realize that you can opt-out (once, at initial
| setup) and have a completely ad-free experience.
| glenstein wrote:
| It's the same kind of iterative creep of compromises on
| privacy that initially raised alarms with Mozilla, which
| culminated in Mozilla's "don't be evil" moment (or,
| their, erm, not-"don't be evil" moment).
| soundnote wrote:
| That's what a lot of us have. Brave's own ad systems are
| opt-in, and a majority of users don't opt-in. It's a
| minority that are interested in the crypto features. I
| just left the crypto stuff off, hid the icons and have a
| degoogled Chromium with strong adblock and some nice
| quality of life extras.
| someotherperson wrote:
| Brave is still the best browser on the market. Trying
| creative things for monetization (and failing loudly) is
| a million times better than anything else that any other
| browser is doing -- including Firefox.
|
| If you don't want the Web3 crap you can turn it off -- as
| I have done for years now. But someone please help me
| understand how a browser that takes in half a billion
| dollars from Google annually to function as controlled
| opposition in case of an antitrust case is somehow OK to
| recommend, but a browser that is independent is somehow
| bad because of bad business decisions made years ago.
| glenstein wrote:
| Brave is organizationally independent, sure. But it also
| relies on Chromium, and so isn't independent from the
| Chromium code base.
| glenstein wrote:
| I would also add the dead simple point that Brave is yet
| another Chromium-derived browser. If someone likes Brave
| just because they like it then, sure, whatever.
|
| But it doesn't belong in a conversation about browser
| diversification away from Chromium. I am so bewildered
| why it keeps getting referenced in "let's get away from
| Google Chrome" threads
| SllX wrote:
| > I am so bewildered why it keeps getting referenced in
| "let's get away from Google Chrome" threads
|
| At the end of the day, it's not _Google_ Chrome. I've
| mentioned in other comments that Brave isn't my top 1, 2
| or 3 choice, so I won't rehash that here, but I think it
| absolutely belongs in a conversation as an alternative
| for people that want to get away from Google Chrome. The
| basic skeleton that composes Google Chrome and other
| Chromium-based browsers mostly isn't the issue, because
| Chrome is and always has been technically excellent. It's
| all the other crap Google started grafting on top of it
| that _is_ , on top of their stance (backed up by many
| many web developers here) that the standards and web
| technologies that Google supports should be the standards
| and web technologies that _all_ browsers support and
| prioritize.
| glenstein wrote:
| Brave is better than Chromium in the same way that a sore
| throat is better than strep throat, when what everyone
| really wants is a vaccine.
|
| All the arguments in favor of Brave over Chrome are going
| to apply tenfold to browsers fully independent of
| Chromium, and it's a perilous place to be, a boat on the
| edge of the Chromium whirlpool forever rowing (Brave
| repeatedly branching and forking the parts of Chromium it
| doesn't want and reconciling them to new updates) to not
| get sucked in.
| SllX wrote:
| I stopped using Brave a couple of years ago when I switched
| to Arc and I have since switched from Arc to Orion. I
| didn't have any issues with at the time even though it was
| not my default; it made a nice enough fallback Chromium-
| based browser for the very few times that mattered. I just
| turned off all the crypto-crap, and regular reviews of the
| settings didn't reveal them to be turning on anything I
| already disabled.
|
| If Brave works for you, go for it.
| ls612 wrote:
| Please use Firefox instead of a Chromium derivative. We need
| variety in the browser space and Gecko is pretty much the
| only independent option remaining.
| SllX wrote:
| No.
|
| Firefox is still my primary work browser because all the
| anti-tracking stuff Orion does actually breaks some sites I
| depend on (well, makes them harder to use anyway), but
| Orion has become my main and I have lost confidence in
| Mozilla.
|
| If you want to continue using Firefox as a kind of service
| to the world or weird self-imposed civic duty, that's on
| you. I can pay for Orion and know that there is a company
| with an actual business model behind it and also not worry
| about misaligned incentives, or fixing all the tracking and
| telemetry defaults (only to watch my hard work crumble like
| when a random Firefox update hosed my settings on my
| personal machine a couple years ago) because there _is no
| telemetry_.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Why? Variety for variety's sake is just inefficiency. There
| are plenty of Chromium forks that work just fine.
|
| FF's legalese may have burned through their last bit of
| good will, and if that's the last nail in their coffin let
| it be a lesson in terminal enshitification and not
| understanding or caring about your users.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Why? Variety for variety's sake is just inefficiency.
|
| It's more than that. It prevents monopolization of the
| web by a single company. This isn't like picking a
| different version of Ms. Dash from the grocery store.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Maybe I'm a bit slow and I'm not following. Why does
| using chromium give Google a monopoly? One might argue
| the opposite: that having a lot of stakeholders prevents
| Google from unilaterally applying unpopular changes,
| because a large critical mass can simply fork it.
| glenstein wrote:
| It gives Google unparalleled power to influence web
| standards, effectively giving other browsers no choice
| but to adopt their preferred implementations.
|
| They can push technologies that benefit their ads
| business (e.g. manifest 3 breaking ublock origin). And
| the notion "embrace extend extinguish" was practically
| invented for circumstances like this, of engaging the
| development community in a particular field of software,
| dominating it, and achieving leverage to change the way
| the web works.
|
| >that having a lot of stakeholders prevents Google from
| unilaterally applying unpopular changes
|
| Google controls commits to Chromium, and it does that
| with an invite only developer pool almost entirely of
| people associated with Google. The stakeholders don't
| have a proportionate hand in the destiny of Chromium. I
| think you're right that it's maybe better, in the sense
| that we could imagine something even worse, but that's
| loo low a benchmark to offer comfort that Chromium is
| having a net-positive impact on balance of power in terms
| of who can help you access the web.
| wubrr wrote:
| Arc and Orion are both closed source.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| I wish they released an android version, much easily ported
| to debian &| windows.
|
| Although, if kagi fails, it probably won't matter.
| SllX wrote:
| On an HN thread a couple weeks back, the Kagi team
| mentioned they just started working on a Linux version of
| Orion.
|
| No idea what they plan to do about syncing though since
| right now they just use iCloud syncing, but it's a start.
| Natfan wrote:
| Arc is a Chromium browser that has been kneecapped to
| explicitly not work on Linux. No thanks!
| pyeri wrote:
| The end of extensions like uBlock Origin will mark the end of
| power user era in web development history.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I think power users are the type of users who can be bothered
| to install a browser that supports the features that they
| want (and doesn't implement the misfeatures that they don't
| want) ;)
| alberto-m wrote:
| Yes, but there seems to be a growing hiatus between the
| tools used by power users and normal ones. Fifteen years
| ago everyone had a PC with Firefox, now this browser has a
| marginal market share, and even personal computers are
| starting to be a second-class platform, the focus being
| phones. And products used by a minority tend to be less
| supported - as shown by the increasing number of sites that
| don't support Firefox.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Until sites block them completely, which will be easier
| with attestation
| viraptor wrote:
| It's already been trivial. There's a few sites showing
| you a special message or denying access if you block ads.
| uBlock doesn't really help here that much and if they
| tried, the issue is very asymmetric - it's much easier to
| update the site than to patch it again.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| So far, most of these sites that try to exclude adblocker
| users don't detect uBO on Firefox.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Most anti-adblock also fails on Brave. Those that don't
| can generally be sidestepped with literally two clicks to
| disable scripts. The remaining few require substantially
| more tweaking (generally disabling a _specific_ script
| while allowing others to run) which is outside the domain
| of most people, but still viable.
| viraptor wrote:
| Marketshare. People don't care that much.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| This requires a proper alternative to continue to exist.
| Firefox users already have to make a lot of concessions(i
| know, i'm one of them). With how Mozilla management is
| running, we're at risk of the only real alternative being
| mismanaged into oblivion.
| Akronymus wrote:
| I am cautiously optimistic for ladybird. But itll take
| quite a bit longer to become viable, sadly.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| You may have heard G. Michael Hopf's famous quote: _Hard
| times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good
| times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times_.
|
| I think we may be advancing to another step in that cycle
| with software development. Strong, principled software
| companies created good times in the late 2000s and 2010s,
| now good times have created software company leaders who
| are less principled, and the hard times are beginning. And
| eventually, after the hard times have gone on for long
| enough, principled leaders will hopefully emerge and create
| good times again.
|
| That being said:
|
| - I really admire the thinking and moral aptitude that
| resulted in the Oxide Principles page[0]. Oxide and
| 37signals[1] are two examples of very principled companies
| that are keeping good times rolling in their respective
| fields, and both of them do a ton to support open source
| software.
|
| - And, there is _nothing_ like ad revenue to accelerate
| corruption of good principles in software companies that
| handle user data -- to the extent that I wonder if it 's in
| the same moral category as government officials accepting
| bribes.
|
| [0] https://oxide.computer/principles
|
| [1] https://37signals.com/
| HPsquared wrote:
| The trouble is, it's hard to say how long the "bad times"
| arc will last.
| teddyh wrote:
| Exogenous factors! <https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comic/strong-3>
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Users should never had the power to block what we did in
| the first place.
|
| -- Some prominent ad company which happens to run a search
| engine as a side business and build a web browser to make ad-
| targeting better for their customers.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Its like they want their own web crawlers to be slow as
| hell
| cle wrote:
| They'll carve out exceptions for themselves don't worry.
| They tried with Web Environment Integrity, it'll be back
| with a different name.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| Many users don't notice any difference after switching to a
| Manifest v3 ad blocker. I'll reserve judgment until it
| actually happens.
| kccqzy wrote:
| What you said is true: I indeed cannot tell the difference
| between a v2 and v3 ad blocker. But that doesn't change
| OP's perspective that a v2 ad blocker is a symbol of the
| power user era. Power users often want customizability to
| an extreme level. Normal users who block ads simply install
| the extension and be done with it: they don't write custom
| rules or adjust the filters.
| kevincox wrote:
| This isn't the end of uBlock Origin. Just the end of it on
| Chromium-based browsers.
|
| If you are a power-user you may well benefit from using
| Firefox where uBlock Origin has always claimed to work best.
|
| By switching you will also be removing power from an ad-
| funded near-monopoly that feels (correctly) that they can do
| whatever they want even if it is universally despised by
| users because the other choices are quickly going away. Every
| using using another browser weakens that grip, every user
| using a Chromium derivative allows them to keep trying to
| wedge new features that no other browser wants to implement
| for user privacy reasons and creates website incompatibility.
| 7bit wrote:
| That is sad. I need multiple profiles for my work and I cannot
| use Firefox because the profile support is awful. Creating and
| managing profiles as well as switching profiles is so intuitive
| in Chrome, it just works. In Firefox it's extremely user
| hostile. Hearing that Microsoft will also remove uBlock from
| Edge makes me angry, because that will make my work-life so
| much more annoying.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Better profile support is coming soon, already in Nightly.
|
| Edit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-out-
| firefox-p...
| ourmandave wrote:
| I assume this means they've added AI to better tie together
| the profile you use for work and the one you use for sh*t
| posting.
|
| Working title: Copilot for Tracking.
| viraptor wrote:
| Are containers not good enough to replace profiles for your
| use case? I've been juggling those like profiles and I'm very
| happy.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Only thing I can suggest is filing feedback. They don't have
| market share so they still listen, for now
| tharos47 wrote:
| You should use "Multi account containers" instead of profiles
| in firefox. It's like profiles in chrome/edge but it works by
| tab instead.
| zeeZ wrote:
| It doesn't allow for different extensions though. I need to
| use a full profile in order to use separate bitwarden
| accounts, for example.
| antifa wrote:
| I like that Orion (safari based, Mac only) shows different
| icons in the dock. All chrome profiles show up as a single
| icon. I haven't checked Firefox, I've got away with just
| installing separate types (default, ESR, nightly).
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I created shortcuts in my taskbar for launching firefox with
| each of my profiles. It works pretty well.
| pbronez wrote:
| Edge has two features I actually like:
|
| - integrated screen shot, which includes a "full webpage"
| option that handles scrolling for you
|
| - Split View, which lets you open two webpages side by side
| within a single tab
|
| I use both of these daily and get a decent productivity boost
| from them.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It's funny because Firefox and Chrome both support full
| webpage screenshots natively, but they just bury it in their
| dev tools.
| meew0 wrote:
| The screenshot feature is easily accessible in Firefox
| using the right-click context menu on any webpage
| Izkata wrote:
| If you customize your toolbar you can also add a button
| for it there
| madeofpalk wrote:
| TIL! Thanks!
| rdlw wrote:
| If Mozilla really is as shady about user data as some
| people think they've become, someone's about to be pretty
| confused about why they suddenly have hundreds of nearly-
| identical screenshots of this HN page on their servers
| virtualcharles wrote:
| All the major browsers can do the screenshot thing, most just
| keep it hidden in the dev tools for some reason while MS
| realized "hey, people who have no idea what html is might
| like taking screenshots too".
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I used to use edge quite a bit when I did a contract stint at
| a Fortune 500. My favorite feature was the vertical tabs.
| Working there I often has 20-30 tabs open and having them in
| a vertical list was super nice.
|
| Never used it since because of data privacy concerns. But in
| the context of working for that company where the assumption
| was that I would have zero privacy it was fine
| davet91 wrote:
| Firefox has vertical tabs now, but they are still behind a
| feature flag I think. Using them for some time now and it's
| working great.
| quesera wrote:
| Also, the Sidebery extension for Firefox is great for
| vertical tabs.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Indeed, Ive used firefox (since 2004) with uBlock (since 2015
| or so) and have mac Mini(s) connected to TVs; use wireless
| mouse to enjoy the web from my couch or in my room. There are
| zero ads or popups seen.
|
| On other TVs like my Roku i do pay for a few streaming services
| with ads and get bombarded with ads on that tv. But its a group
| tv that many use.
| spacephysics wrote:
| Meanwhile FireFox just removed their commitment to not sell
| user data. Its their "Don't be evil" moment
|
| https://www.osnews.com/story/141825/mozilla-deletes-promise-...
| cma wrote:
| > Nope. Never have, never will.
|
| Promissory estoppel maybe? Stronger case for it if you ever
| paid them for anything after this promise.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| Given most EULAs contain standard tech boilerplate that
| paraphrases to "We can change anything about this agreement
| at any time without warning or notice to you", I doubt it.
| bink wrote:
| It's really hard to take someone seriously when they say
| things like this:
|
| > For years I've been warning about this inevitable outcome,
| and for just as many years people told me I was overreacting,
| that it wouldn't happen, that I was crazy.
|
| The removal of that language is important but this person is
| trying to make it about themselves.
| CursedUrn wrote:
| I can understand them being frustrated
| preisschild wrote:
| Independent FOSS forks of firefox without Mozilla services /
| tracking exist
|
| https://librewolf.net/
| orphea wrote:
| They are not prepared to maintain a fork of Firefox: https:
| //codeberg.org/librewolf/issues/issues/2252#issuecomme...
| iamkonstantin wrote:
| Vivaldi is a chromium browser with a built-in ad blocker that
| doesn't require extensions at all.
| internetter wrote:
| MV3 is non-negotiable. The second its dropped in Arc I am
| jumping ship... somewhere. Firefox isn't appealing, Zen isn't
| fleshed out, Orion is coming along nicely but isn't done yet.
| But above all else I need MV3. Very sad Vivaldi won't be
| supporting it, before I was an Arc user I used Vivaldi and I
| quite liked it
| biugbkifcjk wrote:
| I've been looking at Floorp and Zen, maybe add those to
| your list to check out
| lxgr wrote:
| That's exactly what Edge is. It reminds me of the mobile
| operator branded versions of feature- and early smartphones:
| Same core functionality, more intrusive ads, delayed feature
| updates.
| bastard_op wrote:
| Microsoft loves ad revenue as much as anyone, why would they
| argue it? They can just blame google, having their cake and
| eating it too.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin,
| Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support
| it)._
|
| Stand up against the browser hegemony*, choose WebKit with
| support for UBlock Origin:
|
| https://kagi.com/orion/
|
| ---
|
| * Tongue in cheek, of course. Long live Firefox.
| gamedever wrote:
| Can you explain in detail what feature of UBlock Origin I will
| lose because of V3 vs V2 extensions?
|
| I see people complaining, I don't see concrete examples, only
| panic
| quyleanh wrote:
| I just moved my main browser on Android to Edge using the uBlock
| Origin installation trick. It will not have a happy ending as I
| hoped. I will consider moving away from Edge on my PC now.
|
| Sadly, I still cannot add custom filters to uBlock Lite.
| esperent wrote:
| Have you tried Kiwi browser on Android? It's supported
| installing extensions for many years but for some reason never
| gets much traction. I guess they don't have enough of a
| marketing budget.
| kasabali wrote:
| Kiwi browser is abandoned
| quyleanh wrote:
| I was long time Kiwi user, then changed to Cromite recently.
| But I missed uBlock Origin so I decided to give Edge a try.
| And fyi, Kiwi browser is discontinued. [1]
|
| [1]: https://browsernative.com/kiwi-browser-
| discontinued-7097/
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| firefox for android works wonderful
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Firefox is an alternative, just saying.
| neilv wrote:
| Is the timing only a coincidence, with Mozilla pulling another of
| its multiple-personality-disorder moves?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43201096
|
| There really isn't a trustworthy Web browser anymore.
| Larrikin wrote:
| There is always a massive push when Mozilla does something dumb
| for large numbers of people to say that they are the devil
| incarnate and it's a waste of dev time to care about anything
| besides Chrome and we are all better off just letting Google
| control the browser. Just assume Mozilla has the worst possible
| intentions and Google, Microsoft, or a crypto browser are the
| same choice.
|
| It's good to call Mozilla out for doing something shitty, but
| it always feels chicken little at best when people yell about
| switching to any Chromium varient. Usually it just feels kind
| of like Astro turfing,
|
| The best version of ublock origin is the one that is banned by
| Google but allowed in Firefox, Ad Nauseum
| neilv wrote:
| You're too generous to Mozilla, and too ungenerous to people
| tired of being betrayed repeatedly.
| buyucu wrote:
| The internet is unusable without uBlock. At this point I don't
| have a browser preference, I only have a uBlock preference. I'll
| use whatever browser that has good uBlock support.
| indit wrote:
| For users who will miss custom filtering in uBlock Origin,
| AdGuard supports custom filtering and is compatible with Manifest
| V3. Custom filter lists from uBlock Origin can be imported into
| AdGuard. However, AdGuard lacks the element picker function.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Firefox is still here for you, folks. It's been here the whole
| time and it's been great.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Time to go back to Firefox.
|
| I switched to Edge on my Windows machine for a while, because
| that meant that I didn't need the disk space for an additional
| browser (same as when just using Safari on Mac) and it was
| reasonably pleasant and worked well. Guess that's ending, I liked
| the DevTools in Firefox a bit more anyways.
| tored wrote:
| I find Firefox much more heavy on resources vs Edge. I'm always
| get disappointed when trying to make Firefox my main browser.
|
| Chromium devtools has more features but more cluttered and more
| annoying to work with.For the common devtools tasks Firefox
| works better IMHO. But that can be my bias after using
| Firefox/Firebug devtools for over 15 years.
| maigret wrote:
| How many tabs do you have open? I am often surprised at such
| statements, because my browser have basically never been slow
| the last 20 years. Like, never. Sometimes they crash / hang.
| But then I view on screen sharing colleagues who have like
| 200+ tabs open, and then I'm like "ah, this must be it". Not
| discarding your case but maybe try to have better digital
| hygiene?
| tored wrote:
| Yes, it is the 200+ tabs (probably closer to 500) over
| multiple windows.
|
| My latest move was to merge every tab in all windows to one
| window only (with an extension) and start using vertical
| tabs (better scrolling and overview of tabs) Then sort tabs
| by title with another extension (Edge built in AI tab sort
| sucked on sorting so many tabs). With sorted tabs I could
| start create tab groups, Edge AI tab sort worked better
| when the tabs was already sorted alphabetically and managed
| to create most of the tab groups for me. With all this
| reorganization it was easier to manage all of them and to
| start closing tabs.
|
| I'm not done yet but it is much better and number of opened
| tabs has been significantly reduced. Now I have one main
| window with all the tabs and some temporary windows that is
| only used for temporary stuff that get closed within a day.
|
| What makes things a bit more complicated is that I also use
| two profiles, private and work. Firefox always sucked on
| multi-profile setup. Firefox's new container stuff is
| somewhat improvement but not fully (at least when I tried
| last)
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I usually have at most 10 or so tabs open. Anything more
| than that and that tab gets buried visually and
| cognitivly. I like to be able to read the first bit of
| the title page. Anything else I make folders of 'tosort'
| and bookmark them. Then every few months I do an 'open
| all' in that folder. Usually I find that only one are two
| were really worth keeping. The rest I was just hoarding
| and are just clutter.
| tored wrote:
| My problem with bookmarks is that I tend to forget about
| them.
|
| What would be nice is a browser where tabs, history and
| bookmarks blended together seamlessly.
| Tarball10 wrote:
| Check out the Auto Tab Discard extension for Firefox. It
| removes the contents of tabs from memory after a period
| of time, but keeps the tab icon/title around. Next time
| you click the tab, it acts like a bookmark and reloads
| the page it was on. As a tab hoarder, I've found it very
| helpful to keep CPU/memory usage down.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Firefox is the best browser on Windows IMO
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > because that meant that I didn't need the disk space for an
| additional browser
|
| Is that even a consideration nowadays? That's wild!
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| This is because Microsoft Edge is embedded deeply into the
| Windows operating system, with no way to remove it.
|
| On Linux, you typically can install whatever browser and
| uninstall the default one that came with the OS if you want.
| HHalvi wrote:
| The current boat I am on is relying on Firefox for most of my
| devices: Windows Laptops, Android Phones/Tablets with Ublock
| Origin and NextDNS set over DNS mode for all of the devices in my
| family.
|
| For iDevices relying on Orion Browser paired with Ublock Origin
| and NextDNS set up. As good as Safari but without the annoyances
| of Plugins. Their compatablity mode seems to work on sites where
| Safari seems to have issues.
|
| Ungoggled Chromium for sites that seem to break on both Firefox
| and Orion, unfortunately there are loads out there. It's a shame
| that Firefox isn't as effecient with Battery Consumption as Orion
| is.
|
| Brave/Edge just never cut it for me.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Edge is much worse than chrome anyway. Chrome just screws the
| user behind their back, with hidden tracking.
|
| Edge has all the user-hostile stuff much more in your face.
| Like the shopping bar that keeps popping up with coupons or
| tries to get you to buy at a shop that pays more for
| advertising. And it tries to trick the user into getting bogged
| down with loans by offering buy now pay later schemes.
|
| All the sneaky tracking stuff from chrome also happens. So why
| would you bother?
|
| The only reason it's still popular is that companies love it
| because they can lock it down in full BOFH mode. At my work I
| can't even choose to reopen the last tabs anymore on launch.
| That and pretty much every other setting is "managed by your
| organisation"
| Symbiote wrote:
| Is Portable Firefox still an option, or is that sort if thing
| possible to lock down too now?
|
| (I've only very briefly worked with restrictive Windows, and
| it was years ago.)
|
| https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's not allowed in our policy. However Firefox is still on
| my system from the time when it was officially supported.
| I've heard they want to schedule a removal though.
| thecleaner wrote:
| I have been on firefox since forever. Not quite sure why people
| would even bother with Edge unless of course its the "approved"
| browser in your org.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I've not followed this issue with ad blockers being blocked. Is
| there any legitimate reason for this or is it just a corrupt
| change from big tech?
| bix6 wrote:
| Any "legitimate" reason is a smoke screen. It's about the dolla
| dolla bills.
| u02sgb wrote:
| Anyone have suggestions for which other browser is best for power
| saving? I've been using Edge on my Surface as it seemed much
| better on the battery than Chrome.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| LibreWolf.
| zerr wrote:
| There is no way uBlock Origin users suddenly accept seeing ads.
| They will switch browsers.
| fph wrote:
| There is no way someone smart enough to use Ublock Origin was
| using Edge in the first place.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Honest question since I am not exactly of a skill level that
| really understands what goes on under the hood of popular
| browsers, but I am baffled as to why people are so resistant to
| just switching to Firefox.
|
| Every time this conversation comes up here and elsewhere, you get
| a huge swath of comments decrying Mozilla or suggesting Brave
| instead, which is Chrome in a trenchcoat last I checked. I've
| used all sorts of browsers over the years, and I keep returning
| to Firefox, at this point being able to configure it for good
| level of privacy in less than a minute with each install on a new
| machine.
|
| My experience is perhaps skewed, but I view Google and Microsoft
| as modern enemies of the Web I want to see happen, perhaps having
| started off the hero, but living long enough to see themselves
| become the villain. Their products seem actively and aggressively
| hostile to users and compliant with websites that demand we use
| them for "best experience" which, by now we should all know means
| harvesting our data.
|
| Again, I have some ignorance here that needs to be rectified, but
| where are the true apples to apples comparisons of all browsers
| so that users can use to evaluate which is best? I don't mean
| just surface level features and marketing woo, but what's
| happening at the code level that allows the developer or websites
| we visit to treat us like data thralls. Where are the resources
| to learn about that in these discussions?
| Alifatisk wrote:
| If you enjoy FF, check out Zen browser, it's gathering
| attention
| 0xEF wrote:
| Why, though? I suppose the point of my original comment was
| to ask that in broader strokes. I'm happy with Firefox and do
| not see a compelling reason to switch to Zen without an
| apples-to-apples comparison, which seems like a ridiculously
| taboo ask in this space.
|
| I appreciate your recommendation, I'm just frustrated with
| the level of discourse I see in these discussions.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I had issues with Firefox sometimes not showing Google Docs /
| Sheets (which I use extensively) in other words, would not show
| any text / values, whereas Edge worked fine. So I switched and
| didn't go back.
| undersuit wrote:
| Why would Google bother to make their apps work with a
| competitor? I used have to install an extension in Firefox to
| not have Office365 applications throw a fit about the user
| agent.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I wouldn't expect them to. But Chrome is such a memory hog
| that I dumped it long ago.
| quesera wrote:
| How recently?
|
| FWIW I use Firefox with Google Docs/Sheets extensively, with
| no issues.
| jppope wrote:
| The Firefox feature set is limited compared to other browsers
| and Mozillas business model is literally hush money payments to
| keep google out of anti-trust litigation. While I hear you that
| they are a lesser evil, its part of a greater system that is
| working against consumers
|
| I'm a fan of Brave and Arc. The LadyBird announcement is great.
| tristor wrote:
| Because, as a society, we like to complain about things but not
| actually do the necessary effort to change things, even at
| small scale. It's part of our society-wide drive towards
| enshittification in every aspect of life. Our society and our
| experience in the world is made up of millions of small
| individual choices that happen every day, but we all see
| ourselves as lacking agency rather than doing something about
| it.
|
| I have more issues with Mozilla management and more reasons to
| do so than almost anyone on HN, and yet I still use Firefox as
| my predominant browser, as I have done so since 2003. I worked
| at Mozilla and then quit over some of my concerns, yet at the
| same time it's blatantly obvious that Firefox very much
| empowers you as a user to configure anything you like in
| `about:config` regardless of what the default settings may be.
|
| I predict this will only get worse as the iPad Kids in Gen-Z
| and Gen-Alpha come of age and accept the soulless shitheap that
| is modern corporate software without question. You're on the
| right path, all you can do is make your own individual choice
| and continue pointing out the sheer laziness and hypocrisy of
| those who complain but do nothing about it, including in their
| own lives.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| >but I am baffled as to why people are so resistant to just
| switching to Firefox.
|
| Somehow Chrome has fried my brain and I can't stand the UX of
| other browsers. I understand you may be asking "how bad can it
| be? Its just a browser?" but when I use other things (even
| Safari) it just doesn't cut the mustard.
| Aachen wrote:
| My theory for a while now has been that we hold Mozilla to a
| higher standard and that's why they get flak and lose users
| over what others get away with. They're supposed to be better,
| so when they do something you'd expect from Google, people go
| to... Google? It makes no logical sense but this keeps
| happening. Or if not Google then some other thing with a
| questionable business model, or something that depends on
| Mozilla continuing to maintain Firefox
|
| Same goes for, eh, everything else actually: from political
| parties to non-profits, any time something isn't executed
| perfectly or some compromise needs to be made, people pull the
| rug by moving away (votes, donations, spreading the word,
| whatnot) and we're more in the hands of the orgs we wanted to
| oppose than before. Bathwater baby sports. We should hold
| olympics for them
| srmarm wrote:
| > If you use the uBlock Origin extension in Google Chrome or
| Edge, you should probably start looking for alternative browsers
| or extensions--either way.
|
| I've used Firefox on android for a while as android chrome hasn't
| had adblocking for a long time.
|
| Am pretty anti-google these days but it'll take some time to
| untangle myself from the ecosystem.
|
| Anyway, I've largely moved back to Firefox on the desktop too,
| swapped a few icons about so my muscle memory now opens Firefox
| instead of Chrome and it's been totally painless. An easy win.
| reddalo wrote:
| I think Firefox on Android could be better, but even in its
| current state is better than Chrome.
|
| The next step is start paying for Kagi...
| srmarm wrote:
| Good call, I've been meaning to try it for a while.
|
| It feels a bit like ~25 years ago when Yahoo was this bloated
| do everything company with a bad search engine and someone
| showed me this simple website with just a search bar that was
| super quick with clean results...
| kleiba wrote:
| The day my webbrowser cannot run an adblocker anymore is the day
| I'm saying goodbye to the www.
|
| Together with the recent FF news, this is terrible news for the
| open, user-controlled web.
| bustling-noose wrote:
| >We are deprecating the blocking version of the webRequest API.
| This required extensions to proxy all network traffic to provide
| filtering capabilities, which came at a performance and privacy
| cost. The new declarativeNetRequest API provides a safer
| alternative for many use cases.
|
| This is from manifest v3 google page. Is this
| declarativeNetRequest API not able to provide any filtration ?
| Proxying traffic does affect privacy, I agree, but that also
| means that Google is trusting all traffic by default which is
| another privacy concern. So the privacy concern seems to not make
| sense except that in one of the two, google loses money because
| of ads being blocked.
| chippiewill wrote:
| It allows for filtering, but in a less powerful way.
|
| It'll still block some ads, but anti-ad-blocker tech will have
| an easier time.
| delduca wrote:
| Safari + Wipr is perfect and fast.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Safaris ad blocking APIs have the same limitations as
| ManifestV3
| delduca wrote:
| It gets 100/100 blocking in my tests, not same for V3.
| kalleboo wrote:
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cr
| e...
|
| > _Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to
| block. Because Safari doesn't have to consult with the app
| during loading, and because Xcode compiles content blockers
| into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally,
| content blockers have no knowledge of users' history or the
| websites they visit._
|
| This is the same change that ManifestV3 brings - ad
| blockers can no longer run code to determine if they get to
| block content or not, they have to supply lists that the
| browser applies.
|
| If you're getting good results that just means you're using
| good lists.
| lilyball wrote:
| This is the same combination I'm using, and it works so well
| that I really have to wonder if all this handwringing over the
| move from Manifest V2 to V3 is really worth it. What is uBlock
| Origin supposed to be able to block that Wipr isn't already
| blocking?
| delduca wrote:
| See this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43207606
| stuckkeys wrote:
| Well I guess that will be the last time I use edge. KUNTZ
| everdrive wrote:
| Does anyone know if any of the Firefox forks avoid this problem?
| Librewolf, Waterfox, etc. I know this might not be a long-term
| solution if Firefox continues to degrade, but it does seem like a
| valid short term measure.
| guerrilla wrote:
| All of them do, including Firefox.
| nanis wrote:
| This is why Firefox's changes are so frustrating[1].
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096
| kevincox wrote:
| The perfect opportunity to attract more market share, but
| instead they are shooting themselves in the foot at exactly the
| wrong time.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| I'm going to be honest, but this is a really weird way for
| Microsoft to announce Edge is EOL and they can't afford to even
| hire two or three more developers to perma-fork Chrome and bring
| the rest of the Chromium community under one roof, away from
| Google (who is an extremely bad steward of the project).
|
| Shame that Microsoft just chose to no longer have a real browser.
| Oh well, long live MSIE I guess.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| It is also a collossal missed opportunity. When Google
| eventually kills it on Chrome, everyone will switch to the next
| best thing. Microsoft could have put Edge ahead of Firefox in
| that game and collected all those users. Since Microsoft's
| business doesn't revolve around ad-revenue, they don't even
| have any skin in this game. It's pure lazyness that will only
| hurt them long-time.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Yep. And they don't even have skin in the Windows game.
|
| They haven't been the Windows company for... Oh Christ, I'm
| getting old, since 2014. The day Sataya became CEO they
| officially became a cloud company.
|
| If it wouldn't literally fuck over the entire world, they'd
| just stop Windows entirely.
| apricot wrote:
| Gotta admire the way they worded the dialog box.
|
| "uBlock Origin was turned off. This extension is no longer
| supported. Edge recommends that you remove it."
|
| I have a few decades of experience with the Internet, and even I
| understood the dialog box as saying that Ublock didn't work
| anymore. In reality, as the text says, it still works if you
| click "Manage Extension" and turn it back on.
|
| This infuriates me.
| underseacables wrote:
| You guys are using Edge?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Yeah, I use everything else MS at work, why wouldn't I?
| sylware wrote:
| agenda-->
|
| next: kernel code deployment _MUST_ go thru them, namely internet
| or offline storage for clients paying more (A LOT more).
|
| next: app installation _MUST_ go thru their store (or the ones
| from their big tech friends).
|
| next: "validated" hardware will have to have _NOT_ "secure boot"
| you can disable.
|
| And now we have a "MicrosoftStation", the new video game console.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Speaking of Edge, every so often it resets by default search
| engine to Bing (from Kagi), and it requires about 10 clicks in a
| well hidden away setting to restore it.
| knowitnone wrote:
| "every so often" Microsoft does this on purpose but when one
| has a monopoly, they do anything they want
| jppope wrote:
| Lazy web reminder try Brave or Arc. Ladybird is also looking
| promising
| edem wrote:
| Time to put a dns sinkhole on your network
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| As one of the few (only?) HN users who uses Edge, I'll wait until
| this actually reaches the mainline Edge build. If it even does.
| And then, I'll evaluate the Manifest V3 compatible ad blockers.
| And if those are inadequate, I'll switch to another browser. But
| I'm expecting that, as always, this is largely a nonexistent
| scenario.
| remoteambience wrote:
| FreeTube works very well for watching YT videos. They have
| adblock and sponsorblock. You can subscribe without logging in.
| You stay out of the ecosystem as it were.
|
| This is a cat and mouse game. The overarching issue here is the
| web embraced the monoculture of Chromium as the basis for
| browsers. Can we really expect any less?
|
| I've had good success with Violent Monkey and scripts from Greasy
| Fork on every browser I run, which is Edge (work becoz SSO),
| Chrome, and Firefox. They have never been detected.
| remoteambience wrote:
| Serious question: Would it not be possible to build an adblocker
| that is not browser based but installable? The browsers control
| what they allow to be loaded (extensions, add-ons). They are
| forever changing internally. If the blocking was outside the
| browser, they could do nothing about it. Yes, a type of proxy
| perhaps, whereby the stream was filtered. Could a type of uBO or
| similar be created that has lists to filter all traffic through
| the program?
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Pihole?
| remoteambience wrote:
| I've ran a Pi-hole for years, but increasingly there is 1st-
| party content and Pi-hole cannot handle this. Likewise for YT
| videos. Pi-hole cannot handle this issue.
| gigel82 wrote:
| DNS ad blockers like Pi Hole and AdGuardHome have been around
| forever. However, in non-free browsers like Edge and Chrome,
| they can (and do) play all kinds of tricks such as hardcoding
| DNS servers, cert pinning, fixed DOH routes, etc. which means
| it's only a matter of time until those stop working as well.
| physhster wrote:
| I gave up and started using ControlD instead of uBlock or PiHole.
| It's been great and well worth the price. Clean, fast page loads.
| knowitnone wrote:
| this is funny. This is an opportunity for Microsoft (and other
| browsers) to gain some marketshare/goodwill and they fumble it.
| dadrian wrote:
| You can install uBlock Origin Lite [1], and get literally the
| same blocklists but with better security properties.
|
| [1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-
| lite/...
| emaro wrote:
| Tbh, I trust uBlock Origin more than Edge and Chrome. The
| security properties of uBo Lite are better but the blocking
| properties are worse.
| cautious-fly wrote:
| Last time I checked it did nothing on YouTube. Has that
| changed?
| e2le wrote:
| It's not an exact drop-in replacement. There are many filtering
| capabilities that cannot be ported [1] to MV3, filtering lists
| can only be distributed through extension updates [2], and
| filtering is unreliable.
|
| > Injecting content scripts in a non-declarative way is
| unreliable in MV3 due to fact that extensions are really
| service workers which can be suspended at any time.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-
| as...
|
| [2]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-
| as...
| gorbachev wrote:
| It's a tradegy antitrust enforcement isn't forbidding advertising
| networks owning / having undue influence on browsers.
|
| I think this is heading to a point where lot of power users are
| simply not updating their browsers any more.
|
| Personally I'll take the miniscule chance of being infected with
| malware due to a security bug on an older version of Firefox over
| the inability to run uBlock Origin any day. I can recover from
| malware installation. I can not use the web without an ad
| blocker.
|
| What I'll probably do is use an isolated sandbox environment for
| any web browsing I need absolute security (e.g. online
| banking/shopping).
| a123b456c wrote:
| The doj v Google ad tech case is awaiting resolution and
| possible remedies, so we don't know what antitrust allows right
| now.
| solardev wrote:
| What's a good Webkit browser to switch to that supports ad
| blocking?
|
| Don't want to use Firefox, too many rendering bugs and
| performance issues we've run into.
| kcb wrote:
| Brave. Either the built in adblocker or you can enabled
| manifest v2 ublock.
| solardev wrote:
| Isn't that Blink/Chromium though? Just worried they'll
| eventually be affected by the Manifestv2 deprecation too.
| agigao wrote:
| Today I moved from Firefox & DuckDuckGo to Orion + Kagi.
|
| After 21 years of Firefox, that was rather bitter goodbye moment.
| kadomony wrote:
| I think that we'll need to adopt network-level filtering if we
| want to outsmart the browsers. I haven't looked back since
| adopting NextDNS and configuring my router to filter all traffic
| through it. It does a great job of stripping ads out of all my
| devices connected to it, and that's something I don't mind paying
| a few bucks for a year (I think it's like $19/year).
|
| Check it out here: https://nextdns.io/
| Arnavion wrote:
| Unfortunately, the browsers are one step ahead of you. They
| already have a way to ignore your DHCP-provided DNS and instead
| use DoH, which you can't inspect and filter easily, especially
| since it's over the HTTPS port. There is also a proposal for
| individual web properties to tell the browser what DNS (DoH)
| servers should be used for further requests to them, so even
| blocking a few well-known DoH resolvers could become
| impossible: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9462/
| kadomony wrote:
| Ugh. Can't someone please just let us customize how we want
| to experience the Internet? It seems like a right to repair
| law. But right to remove. If I know how to take out ads and I
| want them gone, I should be free to do so.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Not surprising since they're gearing up to inject ads into their
| office suite (free tier anyway)
| debo_ wrote:
| Does anyone have (educated) qualms about ungoogled chromium? I
| started using it on a whim awhile ago, and it works great on
| MacOS and Linux for me with uBlock installed.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| This arms race between users and ad companies is lost. The users
| have lost utterly.
|
| We DO have an ace up our sleeves should we choose to use it:
|
| _Stop using any of it_
| airstrike wrote:
| TIL people are using Edge.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| Also - there are people forced to use Edge ... Like me. To look
| at my payslips. Because InTune.
|
| I use Firefox for everything else :)
| Gormo wrote:
| Thorium (https://thorium.rocks/) is a fork of Chromium that
| maintains a patchset that reverses functional and UI regressions
| introduced by Google (such as the tabs and menu styling from the
| 2023 refresh). The author has committed to maintain manifest V2
| support for as long as possible.
| resfirestar wrote:
| I've moved to using systemwide Adguard on my home PCs and Macs.
| It's not a solution for work devices (my employer doesn't have
| ads on internal websites so this is not much of an issue), but it
| frees me from worrying about browser APIs and having to copy my
| custom filters to every single browser I want to use.
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