The problem at this point isn't whether chrome will disable it... It can be added back, probably fairly easily as google intents to keep it around for "enterprise" anyway, so it's probably just gonna end up changing/removing one if-statement. If not, then the code already exists and has to be merged back in.
The problem is distribution of the actual extensions, as Vivaldi kinda pointed out, as the other browsers mostly rely on the Chrome Extension store. If Google really decides to pull the plug here they could start rejecting extensions using the old, removed-from-Chrome APIs. And then what? Each browser such as Vivaldi, Brave, Opera has to implement their own app store just to host the old-API ad-blockers. And implementing such a store is a major feat. And the walled garden strikes again.
Vivaldi already indicated they might create a "limited" store, meaning not a real store open to the public, but one where they list hand-picked old-API extensions such as ublock origin. Of course, innovation is still stiffed as you in such a "chrome-store + limited vendor store" scenario cannot just develop new extensions using the old-API because you'd have no chance of getting listed in the chrome store, and essentially no chance in the hand-picked limited vendor ones.
Since Firefox support WebExtensions now (or will soon get it) which are very close to Chrome extensions, it wouldn't be unthinkable for all non-Chrome browsers to use Firefox store instead of the Chrome one. I think Mozilla could even be convinced to open it up as an "open web extensions" store or collaborate with others to build a new one. They certainly have the infrastructure and experience to run one.
Mozilla supports WebExtensions since 57+ afaik. Not sure about this if there are some differences in implementation and API's between Firefox's WebExt and Chrome's.
Uh, Firefox already supports WebExtensions and it is like common knowledge. Mozilla barely has the experience to run a sync service, and even that is a disaster.
Why wouldn't the other vendors band together and make a single, non-Google chromium extensions repository? If anyone from Microsoft is reading, this would be an excellent opportunity to give Edge a leg up on Chrome.
I suppose an extension is easier but as browsers can be told to go through proxies, an extension isn't necessary for adblocking. A 2nd process on the machine, a change to the browser (set localhost and a port) and you're done. Someone did something similar and called it Dan's Guardian IIRC, but that's all it was.
That's how I run mine, a local (and very ancient) version of squid blocks everything. It won't be as flexible but it works.
Usually proxying can work for https connections - by letting the proxy terminate ssl. But then you really need to trust the proxy's ssl implementation, and it probably also breaks standard security ui like viewing the cert.
The SSL implementation is the least of your problems. You’d need to have a private CA on your system that creates certificates on the fly. How do you secure that proper. You’d also have problems when reporting SSL errors between the site and the proxy to the browser because from the browsers PoV, the connection looks good.
If I'm wrong about the first point, please clarify. Web/HTTP is really not my area so maybe squid receives and passes stuff through entirely as a blob, if https is used.
Edit. What dgoldstein0 wrote suggests I do misunderstand.
This is an excellent opportunity for Microsoft to distinguish their Chromium-based Edge from Chrome. Leave the webRequest API intact, ensure that these adblocking extensions are available from their own store, and invite other Chromium-based browsers to use their store instead of Google's.
My gut feeling is that Google won't pull this stunt with chrome, this is some kind of scare mongering or a PR tactic, I dunno.
It doesn't make a logical sense because if they are banning the ad-blockers, it means they accept that chrome is largely used by power users who can install these blockers (otherwise, what's the need?). But they should realize that a power user who installs an addon can just as easily move to another browser like firefox/brave. And the PR repercussions will ensure that a lot of newbies will leave too (because they usually follow the power users on youtube) which will essentially kill the advertising income that they wanted in the first place?
I think its gotten to the point where power users go around to all their non-power-user friends and install ad blockers for them, at least I do in our office. The reason this is so successful is because it takes 5 seconds to go the the chrome store and add ublock origin. Convincing my non-power-user friends to move to firefox would be significantly harder. Google's goal is to remove the severity (and effectively the ease) of ad blocking for non-power-users.
This had been happening for a decade or more based on anecdotal evidence - so much so that I had to double-check then change my intranet app at a previous smaller company (2008).
The new thing is Google valuing their profits over the wishes of a large population of their users.
This is how big companies lose their way and get eaten by smaller companies. We all think Google is invincible because of their technological monopoly, but the problem of having to grow forever due to the way public markets work necessitates product evolution or squeezing blood from the stone. The real monopoly is philosophy, not technology, and it's so, so, so easy to lose the logos/pathos/eros high ground (and thus the philosophical war).
In Google's case, their innovation has never been able to eclipse their original sin: advertising. As long as your god is ads, you will make compromised product decisions that are not in alignment with your users. This is part of why I actually hope FB's currency takes off because maybe they can stop worshipping at the altar of click revenue.
Who am I kidding, it's just another revenue line-item on the 10K.
I tend to think of ethics as a subset of logic with a side of pathology, whereas love (eros) is a singular category.
I guess if I had to really sort it, I would only talk about love and power, in that order, but I think it's more addressable to speak in language people already kinda get.
GP wasn't saying Firefox is difficult. GP gave a specific example of how it's easy to install an ad blocker on a system that's already running Chrome for someone else; no need to convince them to change browser, no need to tell them to double-click a different icon.
> it means they accept that chrome is largely used by power users who can install these
You're making a very big assumption here. Last I checked people who blocked ads counted in the hundreds of millions and the number was growing rapidly.
Chrome isn't "largely used by power users", it's used by 60+% of all web users[1] which means it's largely used by nontechnical users. Power users will block ads somehow, whether by changing fork or changing browser or running a PiHole.
However, over 300 million users run adblockers[2][3] and it's probably a fair assumption that most of those users are relatively nontechnical and only run them because they're very easy to install.
I think this push is just to add a tiny bit of friction into the process so that 'casual' adblockers stop bothering.
Maybe think about it in a different way. Right now, there is a kill-switch within googles primary product that could essentially destroy their business model.
This is not about google wanting to harm the current power users. It is probably the idea that someone could come along and destroy their business.
If such an extensions goes mainstream that could seriously harm them.
They may also want to get rid of paying Adblock Plus money for their highway robbery.
Now that I think about it, getting rid of ABP may be the primary reason for this move. They have to basically pay a third party to get access to their own users.
Either way, the battle is not over the power user minority, but over the average user.
The idea is to make the API just powerful enough for the most annoying ads to disappear. Most users would probably be content with this. They will probably make it so they won't lose all of their power users. I think what they really want is increasing the amount of works it takes to have full adblocking functionality to the point where the average user has no access to it.
> getting rid of ABP may be the primary reason for this move
This makes no sense to me.
ABP is already publishing a version using a declarativeNetRequest-like API, it's in the Mac App Store[1], so clearly it's not going to "get rid of ABP".
Google benefits from ABP and AdBlock[2] being the most used content blockers, as they do not block Google ads by default, and do not block trackers/data miners out of the box.
If Google (rightly) deems content blockers as unavoidable, it sure would want people to install the ones which are not blocking its ads and trackers by default.
You are probably right, although a low number of rules will also affect them as their acceptable ads program is based on the fact that they block everything else. I still wonder if they can continue to offer that program with 30,000 rules only. My idea that they target ABP came from their arbitrary 30,000 rules limit.
As I have written elsewhere I consider ABP and AdBlock as "infiltrated" by Google, so they definitely want to see the rigorous blockers disappear first. Should have made that clearer in the comment.
The Safari version supports "Acceptable Ads". I counted ~17,000 rules[1] which includes exception rules. Also, keep in mind cosmetic exception filters are not implemented through the declarativeNetRequest API.
It's been my assumption that with a little bit of scripting, EasyList could be pruned to land within the 30K without too much trouble. As you have more experience in this fields though, do you have any thoughts on how viable this approach would be, and if the 30K limit will be a problem in the end?
Doesn't any finite length list that is only able to be updated when the addon is updated mean ad networks can use a random string with more combinations than the size of list to defeat all ad blocking?
This is API that ABP can use. But with the new API the rules list will be limited to 30 000 rules vs. for example 42 000 EasyList is using, and an update to the rules will require a full update of the plugin.
You do link the comments, so just to point out "will not be affected" isn't true for many reasons...not just the reduced ruleset. Details are in those comments. It will be a lesser product all around.
The idea is to make the API just powerful enough for the most annoying ads to disappear.
In other words, to block ads on third party networks but leave Google ads alone. That's a bold move these days, when antitrust regulators are putting big tech under the microscope.
well, anti-trust these days is just a buzzword, in a legal sense it is defined in a very strict way, and the cost for companies to anticipate an anti-trust ruling is way higher than just pushing their own interests.
With 66% market share and countless other browsers available, the only question for antitrust when it comes to browsers is if users have equal access to browsers, not whether google supports ad blocking.
I think they will make sure that the ad blocking capability does not explicicly favor google ads.
You know that's wrong. There's Chrome, Safari, and Firefox that support most things and which most people actually use; Internet Explorer is dead and Edge is becoming Chromium; and Brave, Midori, and Vivaldi are also Chromium.
There's also Lynx, Links, w3m, Dillo, and Netsurf, but very few people use those and ad-blocking isn't much of a concern there, because they don't enable JavaScript necessary.
>It doesn't make a logical sense because if they are banning the ad-blockers...
To be clear, you can still block ads under Manifest v3. I don't know where this idea that you suddenly won't be able to block ads came from, but somebody is being dishonest about it.
Ad blocking capabilities are limited and there's no API to implement advanced rules like media size limiting. For example manifest v3 has no way to implement the full EasyList.
That's true on both counts, but less of a concern than you might be thinking. EasyList can be slimmed down significantly without losing any blocking. Media size limiting is a more interesting use case, but probably not why most installed adblockers in the first place.
They do have their own store. However, Opera's add-on store is not a great experience. I'm not sure what's going on there, but I know of at least one company where they submitted a new extension to that store it took them around 6 months(!!!) to approve it.
It was easier to self-host the add-on for people who want it, so that they can download it from your website.
The problem you described actually happened with Firefox and Firefox forks not too long ago. Mozilla kicked out all traditional Firefox add-ons from their repository to "replace" them (note: they didn't actually replace the vast majority) with chrome style webextensions. Firefox forks were forced to implement and run their own add-on hosting system and API, and navigate the complex legal waters of re-hosting the add-ons if they wished to continue having access. One notable example of this is the Pale Moon browser. But it all turned out all right. The PM add-on "store" works great and is reliable.
It's not beyond the capabilities of efforts like Vivaldi or Brave to do the same as the Pale Moon team.
And how many add-ons are updated and maintained specifically for Pale Moon - especially compared to the number of add-ons for Firefox for which that is the case?
Because that is the danger for the Chromium forks too - that nobody will bother with their forked store.
Ironically Firefox killed their extension API to be compatible with Chrome's extensions. Now they probably don't want to be compatible with the new Chrome API.
As well as to expose a stable extension API (no more XUL extensions breaking randomly on every browser update) and to enforce any sort of security boundary/permissions system.
Its sad to lose DownThemAll and the plethora of othwr XUL extensions, but having performant multicore support is critical given the shift to having many cores (as single thread performance improvements become uncommon).
I recently used the webRequest API in Firefox and it is already more robust than the Chrome equivalent. For example, you can write stream filters to process request responses. No so in Chrome, where you have no such capability.
Each browser such as Vivaldi, Brave, Opera has to implement their own app store just to host the old-API ad-blockers. And implementing such a store is a major feat. And the walled garden strikes again.
They should team up for the good of all, and create a communally owned fork of Chromium that they all contribute to, and a marketplace. That way the ensure their ecosystem can thrive outside of Google's kingdom.
Isn’t one of Brave’s main selling points that it itself is an ad blocker and doesn’t require a third party extension? Something about removing ads from pages before they even make http requests.
Walled gardens for extensions is also a big problem. Maybe web browsers will finally be forced to give up that control because of all this. Personally I would like at least user freedom to choose extension stores for themselves.
Business-wise, I would love to own an app store, and exercise control, and (eventually) cut myself in as the middleperson on for-pay software sold through it, as well as paid placements and ads.
The reason that no browser does this is because that's the easiest way to go from "some sites are broken in this browser because no webdevs care to test with it" to "many sites are broken in this browser because webdevs deliberately go out of their way to break it". It's the nuclear option that a browser like Firefox would only go for (in the climate of the current web) if things got truly desperate for them. It's why, for example, Firefox didn't start blocking third-party cookies until Safari did it first: it gave them political cover to do so (and Safari can do whatever it wants because it's the only game in town on iOS).
I hadn't considered the ramifications to extension distribution. If Google's Chrome extension store chooses to not host extensions that use the webRequest API, other Chromium-based browsers will need to maintain their own extension stores or users will start installing unvetted extensions from shady third-party websites.
Damn Google! This is so short sighted. People/everyone just installed Chrome on whatever systems they could find and that's how Chrome become so prevalent. Not because it was a superior product, not because of technology but because everyone was anti IE. Google is painting Chrome into similar corner. In a way, this is a good indicator of decline of Google. Revenue not through innovation but by coercion
I think that's rather revisionist. At a point in time Chrome was way better than not just IE, but way better than Firefox. The performance was leaps and bounds ahead.
>Not because it was a superior product, not because of technology but because everyone was anti IE.
>>>I think that's rather revisionist.
I agree with the sibling comments that remembered the past differently: Back in 2008, Chrome was actually the superior product -- for both users and developers.
- Chrome had a better partitioned process for each tab. IE and Firefox 3.x didn't so they often crashed on buggy web pages or bad Javascript. In Firefox, that would also take down all the other tabs one had open which obviously frustrated users.
- Chrome with V8 had the fastest Javascript engine at the time. This translated to faster UI on Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc.
- Chrome had a built in PDF viewer which was convenient. In IE, clicking on a pdf link triggered a disruptive "Save file as" prompt or if one had Adobe installed, it would launch Adobe Reader which was a jarring UI experience. (Also add that Chrome included ability to print to PDF. To duplicate that functionality in IE required buying the full Adobe Acrobat Professional for $300 or installing a similar PDF printer driver such as Bullzip.)
- Chrome had very good dev tools included. With Firefox, you had to install the Firebug plugin which was slower and buggier
It's fascinating how Google's recent controversy has caused widespread amnesia of Chrome browser's real technical advantages in 2008.
Chrome had a built in PDF viewer which was convenient. In IE, clicking on a pdf link triggered a disruptive "Save file as" prompt or if one had Adobe installed, it would launch Adobe Reader which was a jarring UI experience&
Good points for the most part, but not that one. A shitty JavaScript .PDF viewer is a much more "jarring UI experience" than launching an external viewer that I intentionally installed for just that purpose.
> - Chrome had very good dev tools included. With Firefox, you had to install the Firebug plugin which was slower and buggier
I remember very well that after I made the switch to Chrome, I still used Firefox for all my debugging purposes and web-development. Firebug was way ahead of Chrome Dev tools.
I remember Chrome being way better than anything else at the time. I switched from Firefox to Chrome during that period because it was just so fast and lightweight in comparison. I think it was also the first time mainstream users had access to features like tabbed browsing, which was truly novel at the time.
Chrome was the first to give each tab its own thread, which helped prevent rogue pages from bringing the whole browser down (not completely, but it was a dramatic improvement).
Firefox had tabs. Chrome's selling point at the time was that its tabs were process-isolated. Crashing one couldn't bring down the others. Which was a common Firefox experience.
I’ve been using both Firefox and Chrome since they came out and they have always felt near each others performance. It would be interesting to see some data on the subject.
One huge advantage Chrome had was it's multi-process model. This was back in the day when stuff like Flash would often nuke your entire Firefox session.
At least on Linux, I've found Chromium to be dramatically more responsive than Firefox every time I've tried switching (since about the time Chromium became usable on X11). Firefox still drops frames for me, which I find to be exceptionally jarring; and in combination with a UI that I'm not really that fond of, a backlog of basic standards compliance issues that I've been burned by as a developer (and as a user), and generally less-useful built-in fine-grained script and cookie controls, it's never really made sense for me to use Firefox.
Now I use Brave, and it's cool, it also encourages you to use interesting stuff like IPFS Companion, which I didn't know existed for Chromium until I switched to Brave.
I think even if Google ruins Chromium, it'll continue in the open somewhere else, and still be better than Firefox at the things that are important to me.
arewefastyet.com used to show benchmark comparisons between Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It seems to now only show Firefox's performance across a slew of benchmarks. However, the old metrics are still available on the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110901000000*/arewefastyet.com
Chrome became as widespread as it did because it was bundled like crapware with installers for various pieces of software and they plastered scare-mongering banners all over their service telling people they had to use Chrome to get the correct experience, or deliberately gimping their own services on other browsers.
Chrome may have been the better browser at release, but simply being better did not get it to where it is.
As someone who kept bouncing between Firefox and Chromium for quite a long time before finally settling with Firefox, I think that's the case only for light workloads with not a lot of tabs open. I was switching from Firefox to Chromium because Firefox was getting slow, but after a while of my normal usage, Chromium wasn't just getting slow - it was getting unusable, so then I switched back to Firefox (and the same cycle repeated after a while). But yeah, right after refreshing the browser profile, fresh Chromium felt a little bit faster than fresh Firefox. I don't think that's the case anymore.
There was always Firefox. When Chrome first came out I tried it. It didnt have plugins therefore no AdBlocker so I went back to Firefox cause pop ups are super annoying. Then when it did have addons it had a crappy adblocker that wasnt effective at all. I never went back to Chrome except for as a secondary browser. Firefox has been my main driving browser since the mid 2000s.
People were anti-IE because IE was vastly inferior to other offerings. Firefox had been making steady but slow progress as tech-savvy folks would install it for their friends/family.
Chrome came out and it was even better than Firefox on speed (javascript especially, with v8), reliability (process isolation, websites would freeze all of your tabs if not your whole computer at the time), and usability (unified search/url bar). And it had Google marketing behind it, meaning non-tech folks knew and loved the company making it and don’t rely on their tech-savvy friends to hear about it.
Because anti-IE? I doubt it was the driving motive for much people. People usually switch to something because it's better or at least because it's cool and popular.
I switched to Opera because it was so much better than anything in 2000. Then I tried Firefox because a friend switched to it and I sticked with it occasionally as it was becoming better and better and cool extensions emerged. Then I switched to Chrome because Firefox became so slow it was driving me crazy (yes, I always use obsolete hardware) and Chrome was ok (it lacked functionality I loved in Firefox extensions but I could tolerate this).
Now I actually am increasingly anti-Chrome because I don't want Google's monopolism and dictate so I feel like I want to switch back to Firefox and guide friends to do so but Firefox is still notably more slow than Chrome although not as slow as it used to be. I hope Mozilla guys are going to keep on improving its performance.
> People/everyone just installed Chrome on whatever systems they could find and that's how Chrome become so prevalent. Not because it was a superior product
This statement logically does not make sense.
People installed Chrome => Chrome was a superior product. Although, now it isn't anymore.
Power corrupts. When did Google find they had the power to force people to do things? It started with some beneficial, "thou shall not." Power corrupts, however. Was it around 2011?
Brave is good† and probably if Google tries to close down the Chromium open source project, a lot of resources will just instead go to whoever maintains the biggest open source fork.
† except fine-grained cookie blocking is a bit broken compared to stock Chromium (only works properly if you always allow first-party cookies, which I also want it to ask first about), script blocking is about the same.
I tried opera a while back, and while it's fast and looks good, it has a new tab page with "recommended" sites that you can't turn off - I tried, but it's protected by DRM (opera will refuse to start if the file doesn't have a valid digital signature).
So if I'm going to switch browsers because of privacy/advertising concerns, it's not going to be Opera.
I mean... at least it has mouse gestures. Hard to knock it for being not feature-rich enough when it has a feature no other browser has by default (except Vivaldi, which has Opera lineage).
a) This built-in feature is way below the standards trivially achievable via extensions in Firefox, Chrome etc.
b) It's a downgrade in relation to what Opera itself used to offer in the past (and then, if I recall, got so stripped of functionalities it didn't even support bookmarks at some point).
The new tab page has a list of bookmarks you can customize. It starts off with some "recommeded" sites in there, but you can just remove them once and they never come back. The only thing you can't remove from the new tab page is the Google search bar, which never really bothered me. Either way, it seems like you're implying that Opera will populate the new tab page with sites it chooses, but that's just not the case.
It is described under the "new tab page" section. I can't really comment on the privacy/advertising concerns but I do know that Opera providers a VPN for you (who know what they are doing behind the scenes) and have their own adblocker built in.
I don't see anything like that in new tab page. I have only searchbar and thumbnails for pages I like to visit. I'm on Mac, do they have different versions of new tab page for other systems?
As I understand it, that should also make it relatively straightforward to switch between Servo and Gecko, as a developer. But I'm not an Android dev, so take that with a grain of salt.
> I feel like things would be easier if Firefox could be embeded in another browser just like chromium can.
Completely agree. I made my own little browser (with ad blocker built in to the network layer) using CEF simply because there was not an easy to use FF equivalent library.
I haven't seen this talked about here but... last I checked Mozilla was in majority funded by Google royalties. What's their plan of aligning their income with essentially directly attacking their funding source?
I guess Google could still be interested in being the default engine in Firefox even with ads and tracking blocked, since it would slow down alternatives from spreading.
I would be more comfortable in Mozilla not being founded by Google though.
They’re not attacking anything - I don’t think ad blockers block search ads, which are embedded into search results - and Firefox royalties have always been for search.
I don't see how Chrome's new anti-ad blocking isn't seen as anti-competitive, considering Google basically runs the ad business on non-Google sites, etc. Sure, Facebook and Amazon also serve up ads...but Google is by far the company that is hurt the most by ad blocking. Then at the same time Chrome is essentially blocking "intrusive" ads by default...and by intrusive they basically mean non-Google ads that have the same CPC and CPM model Google has.
It is absolutely anti-competitive garbage, and you should be prepared to see more and more of it (and increasingly anti-consumer iterations if it) until people wake up and start demanding that their political leaders do something about it.
“Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story.
You're right that this is potentially anticompetitive, but
“Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story.
I've never heard libertarians say that. Rather, they say that consumers have the potential to regulate companies if they choose to do so, by voting with their feet. We should do so more often than we do; when there's a free market (monopolies are not free markets) it feels pretty good to tell a company to go screw themselves.
Personally I switched back to Firefox when Chrome tried to force login to my Google account, and I haven't missed a thing (other than some dev tools, e.g. websocket inspection). Firefox Quantum is really good, and their bookmark sync has replaced my previous usage of the now-defunct Xmarks.
“Companies will regulate themselves” is libertarian orthodoxy, and suggesting otherwise is ahistorical and silly. (But then again so is libertarianism.)
Google never said they were blocking ad-blockers. It was the hyperbole Firefox crowd who used some post by Raymond Hill from the creator of uBlock Origin as a reason to start another "Switch to Firefox" campaign.
However, Hill admitted that adblockers aren't going away and it is just a proposed change in the WebRequest API to make things more akin to Safari to help adblockers operate in a standard in speedy way.
Mozilla on the other hand did expose a bunch of users to ads and malicious sites recently though when they didn't renew a certificate and didn't push out a fix for over 24 hours in which all addons were disabled in their browser and the configurations were lost as well.
I didn't "admit" anything -- I never made the statement "ad blockers are going away" in the first place. If you want to argue I did, please provide a specific source supporting this.
> Ad blocker uBlock Origin “can no longer exist” if a proposed change to Chrome goes through.
First, I never ever referred to uBlock Origin as an "ad blocker", so the article is wrong there. Second, I specifically point out that uBlock Origin can no longer exist, not that "ad blockers" can no longer exist.
I switched to Chrome years ago. Recently I switched back to Firefox.
It's changed dramatically. Speed, security, and stuff that you can't do in Chrome, like extensions like Facebook Container.
To me this isn't about Chrome Vs Firefox though. It's about the benefits of a healthy marketplace for software, and the dangers of near monopolies to consumer choice.
Except mobile browsers, arguably the most critical place where you need blocking to get any kind of reasonably decent experience (load times, viewable area, battery life, etc.).
Extensions like uBlock target people who don't want to bother with editing hosts files and keeping them updated.
Agreed. My point was playing with hosts file is definitely not something easy on a mobile, or something most people would want to bother with. Especially when it comes to adding exceptions and getting some sites to work.
For computers and Android devices Firefox and uBO are far more capable solution than DNS blocking, at least when it comes to browsing.
On iOS, you can use DNSCloak[1] which has recently been open-sourced[2]. You can either setup a DNS server (DoH or dnscrypt) somewhere that include these filters, or you can use in-app Blacklist functionality to block domain (although it needs domains only-type of block file, instead of host file, but converting them is quiet trivial).
I use PiHole and firewall to manage adblocking at home, and uBlock on every device that supports it. uBlock is a far more effective solution than DNS based ones which is why I prefer to install Firefox+uBlock on Android than use hosts file.
I'll give DNSCloak for iOS a try, thanks for the recommendation.
If you use an Android browser that supports the Chrome Custom Tabs protocol [1] such as Lynket [2][3][4] it's possible replace the Chrome tab that appears when you click/tap a link with a completely differently browser such as Brave or Firefox (inc. Focus, Nightly or Preview). [5]
By doing this you inherit the features of the replacement browser like ad-blocking and tracking protection.
You can sign up at https://www.nextdns.io/ and then you can block ads at the DNS level. Simple to do, and updated, and without the overhead of running a local VPN.
I think that's a reason why DNS based ad-blocking is as effective a solution as any, though easily worked around against (I see that Amazon's android app is able to show ads despite DNS blacklist).
It would be great if you were right, but I don't think you are. Do you have sources?
I got the idea from this [1] reddit comment made by someone with an Mozilla Employee flair:
> [...] There is not yet a concrete plan (feature) to bring Web Extensions to Fenix. That does not mean it is not going to happen. It does mean we have some things to figure out first.
and this [2] github issue where they state
> Not for MVP, will look at it for further versions
I fear that what they'll want to figure out first is whether not implementing them will hurt adoption.
I, for the first time ever, uninstalled chrome/chromium from my computers. It pains me because I liked it overall, and firefox isn't happy with my 2009 laptops.
Maybe chrome devs mistake will be the air gap that creates a new leader from another group.
I got a new computer recently (old one died), and because of this change I will not install Chrome on the new computer. I’m planning to use Edge for anything Google-specific like Google Docs or Sheets, and Firefox for everything else.
Unfortunately, my wife has a Chromebook and it’s hard to convince her that her very cheap, almost-disposable laptop should be replaced with something more expensive just to avoid Chrome. (And no, she did not want me to install Linux on it - sigh.)
Buy a second hand machine. I just grabbed a 3rd gen thinkpad x1 carbon for a neighbor and the thing is a ferrari compared to any laptop I have. 390$. Probably less than 300$ for a less thin model (x250~)
FF and Safari were the only browser that worked well on my 2009 MBP ... until FF went multi process, and then started using too much ram. Today I think its total ram usage is worse than Chrome.
Memory usage used to be a lot better than chrome, but I'm under linux, maybe on macos it's different, also I stopped caring about it so maybe it got worse.
I really don't understand why security concerned people use Google's product in spite of knowing that Google steals everything and compromises user's privacy.
As far as security goes, I trust Google way more than any other site to handle my credentials properly, follow security best practices, use the highest level of encryption where applicable, keep servers up to date and patched faster than anyone else, etc. Outside of Google+, I can't remember the last time there was a major security incident at Google, when they happened, the impact was minimal (contrast this to say the Apple Cloud leak which led to the infamous "fappening", the Marriot leak, the Equifax hack, Target, etc). Breaches and 0-days happen, but as far as I know, Google is going to be the best it gets when it comes to security.
Now when it comes to my privacy, no. I don't trust Google as far as I could throw them.
> contrast this to say the Apple Cloud leak which led to the infamous "fappening"
This breach was not due to missteps or problems with security on Apple’s part (though Apple has had issues with security lapses, notably passwordless root login on macOS which was never reported to have been exploited [0]).
In the instance of “The Fappening”, the breach that lead to the exposure of iCloud data was “revealed to have been gained via spear phishing attacks”. [1]
I wonder if that is sustainable as features are built on top of the new system and their codebase diverges further and further from chrome as a result.
I won't worry about that. I'm guessing this effectively creates a fork of Chromium that does not have the anti-ad blocker changes in question, which Opera/Brave/Edge will use instead of the main one.
On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?
> On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?
Not sure why power users ever left Firefox as their default browser when surveillance tech came along. I sure didn't. Firefox was always the more competent and customizable browser. Happy to see users returning. Among other things, the current "Welcome Chromium/Chrome users!" megathread in the Firefox subreddit[1] seems to indicate there's something going on. :)
I switched because CPU usage on Mac OS was so much higher under Firefox than Chrome. I tried so many different things, following suggestions in Bugzilla, HN comments and just about every site I could find through DDG and Google. Nothing worked, and usually when I bring it up people dismiss the complaint with "it's better than it used to be", "it's not that bad" or "it's just you". But I'm not the only person complaining (or being dismissed outright).
To be clear, it's not pegging any core at 100% or anything so extreme. But it causes my laptop to heat up and my fans to kick in very frequently - something that almost never happens with Chromium/Webkit/Blink based browsers. If I primarily used a desktop, I wouldn't even have noticed, but a warm lap and constant fan noise makes it unusable for me.
Safari was out because I needed to run multiple browser profiles concurrently (something Firefox and Chrome support readily).
I've recently switched from Mac OS to Windows but my experience (as recently as a month ago) with Firefox leaves me feeling that it's the less mature implementation with an over zealous fan base ("it's not us, it's you!").
I flicked between multiple browsers at work since the Chrome news dropped. Having used Chrome for many years.
Firefox always had and still has an issue which can cause up to 2x page load times when used on Mac with scaled mode. Fascinating bug report but ultimately impossible to cope with at work!
I’ve actually landed up using Safari (I rarely use dev tools) and pleasantly surprised by it.
> Now the problem is that Google web apps are tuned for Chrome, so users will complain their gmail is slow on FF.
I've heard this argument often, but it does not really resonate with me well. I've always used Gmail in Firefox and never noticed it being especially slow. I just tried it now and emails open seemingly instantly when I click on them. It feels quicker than ~100ms on average and certainly not slower than 200ms even for the occasional large email or hiccup. I just don't see how this can be used as a reasonable metric for choosing a browser.
> Not sure why power users ever left Firefox as their default browser when surveillance tech came along.
On any Firefox thread on HN, search for “macOS” and you’ll find several complaints. In my case, I could live with most of Firefox’s problems, but not the lack of AppleScript support.
I'm writing this from Firefox to test if it's still unusable on Mac. It's not that bad as before, to be honest. But for some reason now I can't synchronize it on Android... hopefully after another few years I will be finally able to switch over to it.
I've been using Firefox for 6+months now as my primary browser. Once used to the slightly different UI I've not noticed any difference in day to day browsing.
Only complaint - and this is my fault for enabling it and not a Firefox issue - is that if I used a container for Google, reCAPTCHAs are a huge huge huge pain in the arse now and take many attempts to pass. This is (I guess) because the Google cookie cannot track your general web usage (since your google cookie is in a container that only works on google domains, rather than general web properties) so it is harder to distinguish you from a bot. Also the dev tools are not as nice, but that is a niggle.
Search for the "Buster" plugin. It uses the sound captcha to automatize the process. Works great, though sometimes the sound option is "not available", but those are the least in my case.
Oh DDG gas been my primary search engine for ages now. Highly recommend DDG. No CAPTCHAS there - it is just on random other sites that use reCAPTCHA that are a pain now as I believe (I don't know for sure) that Google relies on your Google cookie(s) that they have associated with your account - if you have sandboxed Google then there is no "normal" browsing history to check so you look like a bot. Annoying, but not really a big deal.
I don't think having proxied Google search results will solve the reCAPTCHA menace since you presumably won't get the Google cookie(s)? If Google still cookie you when using startpage then that kinda defeats the point surely?
> I don't think having proxied Google search results will solve the reCAPTCHA menace since you presumably won't get the Google cookie(s)? If Google still cookie you when using startpage then that kinda defeats the point surely?
Let me be clear. I'm not taking about SOCKS proxies. In this context I'm saying that both DDG and StartPage are acting as anonymizing proxies for Bing and Google.
Whatever DDG does to Bing, it makes it worse. I recently switched from DDG to Bing and the difference is colossal - 95% of the time it’s as good as Google.
This might be sustainable for a couple of months but Google will keep on developing chromium with the assumption that those APIs aren't available and maintaining and back porting patches will not be sustainable in the long run. And we've seen Opera and Edge shying away from too much work with their own webengines, why would it be different this time?
I'm not sure how the architecture of these browser projects work, but is it too difficult to stub out the non-existent APIs in their forks?
I'm hoping it's different this time because this is a topic people care for... but I can only hope.
Maintaining a fork takes effort and this effort grows when the codebases diverge from each other. If the affected code is at a busy location in the source code then other changes can also affect it which makes maintaining the fork harder in the long run.
I think Google will find people switch browsers more easily than they think.
There was a time when Chrome was not ubiquitous. Even non-technical users can be convinced to click on a different icon to access the Internet if it results in a better experience. That's how we ended up with Chrome after all.
> Even non-technical users can be convinced to click on a different icon to access the Internet
Google put a lot of effort in convincing those users, by plastering Chrome icons in their products and saying it was the supposed way to access the internet "safely".
Google said that the adblocking would still be available for entreprise customers so it should be as simple as flipping a switch. Maintenance should be easy if that's true.
WebKit/Blink is a mixed LGPL/BSD licensed project, with KHTML and other KDE developed parts being LGPL. Google likely can't keep most of their patches stripping support secret.
I don't see that as a problem. Sure it takes effort, but especially since Google has the feature in their enterprise version, it shouldn't be too hard to just turn it on.
Regardless, I'm sure a company like Brave or Microsoft can handle the engineering necessary to keep this working. You don't have to fork the whole thing.
The main question is how long they will do it. Now it's easy, but google can move the locker deeply inside. If anti-ad-blocker changes will needs 1-2mb patches every release, they will just give up fast.
My worry is that because Chrome has become a standard of web-browsing so even after such decisions taken by Google, people would not switch to other(better) options.
I looked around but I can't figure out if this affects extensions like Tampermonkey. If not, writing an adblock script for that seems like an alternative.
When Chrome did this they quickly highlighted how much control they have over what people view. Privacy focused open browsers will gain marketshare because of it.
If you don't control the browser you downloaded, do you control the OS you chose to install? Can Microsoft ban Google Chrome from even running on their platform? Where does the 'user gets to decide' line end and the 'vendor knows best' line begin?
So not only is Google introducing this change into the Chromium codebase, but it sounds like they aren't putting it behind a Chrome-only compiler flag. And if you're satisfied with Chrome as-is then too bad because the GoogleUpdater will automatically update Chrome and is harder to kill than a cockroach, and Chrome will give you an annoying popup 80-some days after that version's build date telling you to upgrade Chrome even if you have managed to block GoogleUpdater.
Tried Opera on Mac OS - half of toggles on the Settings page is not rendered - "Pref not found for element SETTINGS-TOGGLE-BUTTON in SETTINGS-APPEARANCE-PAG". It was so epic trash - removed instantly. They obviously don't test it on Mac OS.
Tried Vivaldi - render sites with errors (some images missing). 0 plugins installed. Not acceptable, removed.
Brave - I really hate person who run this project and how he is trying to sell his product by "if you hate google as much as me, use Brave", while using Chromium.
So, for now I don't see any Chromium-based alternative.
> Tried Vivaldi - render sites with errors (some images missing). 0 plugins installed. Not acceptable, removed.
Not sure what version of Vivaldi you used when that happened, but using Vivaldi every day on multiple workstations with different OS's without any issues I can only urge you to give it another try.
The problem is distribution of the actual extensions, as Vivaldi kinda pointed out, as the other browsers mostly rely on the Chrome Extension store. If Google really decides to pull the plug here they could start rejecting extensions using the old, removed-from-Chrome APIs. And then what? Each browser such as Vivaldi, Brave, Opera has to implement their own app store just to host the old-API ad-blockers. And implementing such a store is a major feat. And the walled garden strikes again.
Vivaldi already indicated they might create a "limited" store, meaning not a real store open to the public, but one where they list hand-picked old-API extensions such as ublock origin. Of course, innovation is still stiffed as you in such a "chrome-store + limited vendor store" scenario cannot just develop new extensions using the old-API because you'd have no chance of getting listed in the chrome store, and essentially no chance in the hand-picked limited vendor ones.