Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...
I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy, a joke coming from Google. Then the excuse was "well it improves performance", which they could easily do by marking extensions as low performance.
If Google wanted to improve this they have an entire search engine where they could re-rank sites based on privacy and performance.
It was never about improving peoples web experience.
Been using uBlock Origin for so long I forgot what the raw internet actually looks like. Spent 3 minutes without an ad blocker last week when setting up a new machine and nearly lost my mind. Google knows exactly what they're taking away from us - a usable web. They've just decided that our sanity is less valuable than their ad revenue.
What boggles my mind is the fact that surely people working for Google also use Chrome. Are they not up in arms internally because of how awful the web is without ad blocker?
I have the same experience as you, every time I set up a new machine or watch friends/relatives browse the web, it just blows my mind how bad the unfiltered internet is.
I wouldn't be surprised if the people that did care about that internally at Google either used something like Firefox or had their private build that can run uBlock or similar ;)
In 2011, when I worked at Google (on ads, not on Chrome), I did use Firefox as my main browser. But back then, there was much less need for an ad blocker. I still remember asking my manager whether it was OK to click an ad (from a VPS provider) while browsing from the corporate desktop.
This will continue to allow MV2 extensions for your Chrome instance. Confirm the policy has been set by checking chrome://policy. See [1] for possible values.
Now, because uBO is now disabled in the Chrome Web Store, you also need to install it as a "forced extension" (the way extensions are deployed in enterprise environments). Install the extension according to the section "Use a preferences file" in [2]:
- Create a file named cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm.json
- Place it in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/External Extensions/
- With content:
{ "external_update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx" }
You'll need to create the "External Extensions" directory, set file permissions according to docs, restart Chrome. The file name contains the extension ID to be installed, which you can verify from the submission URL of this post. Upon Chrome restart, it should notify you with a message in the top right that an extension was forcibly installed.
The ExtensionManifestV2Availability definitely still works for now, but it's been a about a month since I used the preferences file way of installing the extension on a new device. YMMV.
> Are they not up in arms internally because of how awful the web is without ad blocker?
Chrome still has many ad blockers. While I use chrome/chromium fairly little, ublock origin lite has worked well for me when I do. I'm aware older manifest V2 extensions are theoretically superior at blocking a wide variety of undesired content but if your main concern is not seeing ads, that is absolutely doable.
The core issue is that those ad blockers are easy to defeat. The only reason ad companies haven't invested energy in defeating them (yet) is because they're not popular enough.
Once they are the only option in Chrome, it's just a matter of time until Chrome becomes largely useless at blocking ads.
If you've never used an ad blocker, I guess it may just be the normal web rather than anything terrible. Because ad blocking isn't illegal, it may not be quite as bad as a Disney employee pirating all their movies, but I suspect it's still not that common (at least most people I knew while there didn't use one, and of course I was happy to install one again the day after leaving).
The list of things that can be done is way bigger than the liat of things that are in fact done in real life. A Google employee could voluntarily put his hands over an open flame, but it's just very improbable.
Well the crappy copy does come with some extra text. (No judgement from me on whether the extra text improves the comic here; just that someone might think it does, and there's no arguing about taste.)
It's also interesting to see that XKCD itself explicitly supports eg hotlinking, and the license makes putting it into your own crappy creations rather easy. (Though I think the example linked to fails the 'attribution' requirement.)
>Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...
Doesn't Safari have the same restriction, also ostensibly for "security/privacy" reasons? The only difference is that Apple doesn't have a web advertising presence, so you can't make the accusation that they're "abuse its market position to their own benefit".
People scratch their heads about how "just a default setting" can be worth an annual $20 billion payment from Google. It makes more sense if it's actually for a raft of wildly illegal under-the-table measures this.
Imagine what it would cost Google's bottom line if Apple was truly user-focused and enabled ad-blocking on desktop, mobile and embedded safari views by default. Someone do the napkin math please!
Defaults is exactly how Microsoft has been getting away with everything they did for forever. Anti-trust investigations? Irrelevant if you can just make it configurable but the default is Microsoft.
Most people don't change default settings unless prompted and guided. And adding a setting shuts up most of "us" coz we'll just change it.
The only reason they're remove the ability to configure something would've been if too many of us change the settings for too many of our friends and relatives for it to register negatively on their end and they'd try to get away with not allowing it to be configured / hiding it as much as possible until they actually get anti-trust investigated // convicted (Re: requiring Windows to ask if you want to install other browsers than Internet Explorer).
Heh, sometimes you feel pressed between “but it’s just a default” and “who uses settings anyway”. Because the first group is blind and deaf to network effects of a default and the second to the fact that workflows and preferences differ.
It's a revenue share deal where Google pays Apple 36% of the search revenue they get from Safari users [1].
In other words, Google pays Apple ~$20B per year to be default search engine because they make ~$53B in revenue from those searches. This is profitable for both Apple and Google -- no "wildly illegal under-the-table measures" required.
How much would Google even lose if Apple didn't make Google the default search engine? People would almost certainly just use Google anyway. If Apple switched to Bing most people would use it once, get pissed off, and then switch it back to Google.
It's not that weird that people are a bit suspicious that it's really worth Google $20B/year.
I couldn’t possibly disagree more. I’ve always worked with end users and I can say with confidence that the majority of people wouldn’t change it or more accurately wouldn’t feel like putting in the effort/dealing with the hassle of changing it, minor as it may be. Also a non-trivial segment of the population most likely wouldn’t be aware of that it is even an option.
The power of the default is just that, they it is the default.
Also Apple themself has only one incentive which is to get the best deal for themselves. Is Microsoft willing to offer more money than Google? The evidence points to no.
Back when I tried both more extensively a few years ago, Google was a lot better giving me results relevant in Europe and Asia. Bing and duck duck go used to be very US only focused. Which made me go back to Google.
the fuzziness is too high (forget searching for specific error messages, prepend !g for that) and it doesn't have a 'verbatim' mode (on google search: tools -> verbatim) ..
This conspiracy theory doesn't make sense because safari's content blockers (ie. the nerfed version of adblock) block most ads just fine, especially from google ads. The only ads that get through are first party ads (eg. youtube), but as of a few years ago adblockers could block those as well, so it's a moot point.
Safari content blockers are awful compared to UBlock and I’m a Safari user. Not only does YouTube either get through or cause weird issues, YouTube now blocks you until you completely disable the extension. Content blockers often block cookie banners too which can often result in broken functionality - a nightmare when you’re trying to buy tickets to something and have to “reload without blockers” for the website to work.
If I go to buy something, I switch off ad blocking on that page, at the very least, on the checkout page. Ads can even be actually relevant there.
If the page is too ad-ridden to tolerate, I may consider to just close that page, and go search for other options.
I use Firefox + uBlock Origin, because going to the wide commercial internet without some form of ad blocking is like going out without an umbrella when it's raining heavily.
Usually checkout pages don't have pesky ads galore, or any. But such a page usually has a ton of anti-bot scripts, such as captchas and other privacy-invading checks.
Ad blockers usually block such stuff, for a good reason. But I don't mind it on a checkout page specifically though, because on a checkout page I wilfully disclose a ton of my private details, such as name, address, etc.
Good checkout pages work well with an ad blocker on.
They removed wording in their FAQ saying that they wouldn't sell data. It's a subtle distinction, and may or may not make a difference depending on your perspective.
It's just the paradox of when you present yourself as "the good guys" - people will hold you extra accountable for things that others easily get away with as nobody expects them to do better.
Unfortunately, Mozilla tends to shoot themselves in their foot this way somewhat often.
Being the good guys is the only reason anyone still uses Firefox. If Mozilla doesn't want to be the good guys, we'll use one of their many forks that remove the bad guy code.
Suggest using a service like NextDNS or Pi-hole for DYI ad blocking at the DNS/network level. I started with pi-hole but the hassle of updates and most importantly not having it available outside of my home network pushed me to a service like NextDNS which works on any network (5G, work, etc)
If you think manifest v3's adblocking is bad, DNS-based adblockers (eg. NextDNS or Pi-hole) is even worse. It can't do any filtering based on urls or elements, so any first party ads will be able to get through.
First party ads aren't evil usually tho. If someone builds their own ad infrastructure they might as well build it properly because they know it's going to be their fault if someone uploads something fishy.
In my experience only the big ad networks let you post anything. Small specialized ad platforms usually have actual moderation.
Edit:// by the way it wasn't that hard to get ads trough ublocks filters by self hosting them either. But that's rarely really evil and I never saw that abused.
to get any actual work done with DNS based blocking (ie. visiting Google ads, or their other dashboards) you quickly have to start whitelisting a ton of sites, which applies everywhere.
Apparently, it doesn’t have the described issues. I also use AdGuard on iOS/Safari and see only occasionally desperate ads. I expect ad networks to target this with mv3-hard methods now that it will become widespread, but up until now it just worked.
Apple and google did everything for you to not know about it. It’s not the first thread where people either don’t know about it or will read but won’t try.
The only time I use Safari is when the MBP is unplugged because it improves the battery life. I have the AdBlock extension but I'm looking for something better.
>Not only does YouTube either get through or cause weird issues, YouTube now blocks you until you completely disable the extension
Works fine on my machine. You might need to update your filter lists or try another content blocker app.
>Content blockers often block cookie banners too which can often result in broken functionality - a nightmare when you’re trying to buy tickets to something and have to “reload without blockers” for the website to work.
So don't enable the filter lists that try to block cookie banners?
YouTube has been playing a cat and mouse game, disabling some accounts until disabled, randomly re-enabling them. I personally think it's so when people talk about issues like this - people say "Well, it's been ok on my end". But it's definitely some kind of A/B testing.
For me the element blockers are the most important of all. It's not just about blocking ads. It's about making websites more usable. Ads are only one of those detrimental points. Many websites bombard you with big photos of their articles. I block all that with custom blocklists so the end result is a lot more like here at hacker news.
The main difference between this and current element blockers is that Web Defuser allows you to block annoying behaviors (by modifying requests/responses in flight) in addition to elements.
At the moment it's a bit lacking in the UI department, I'd appreciate early adopter feedback (you can contact me at gmail with my username).
The webRequestBlocking api, which allows the extension to inspect all request/responses in real time and act on them. With manifest v3 the extension can only supply a list of expressions to block, and the expressions that can be used is very limited.
I understand that nerfing adblocking is definitely a big draw for Google, but Apple went the ManifestV3 route many years before, specifically to increase extension performance and privacy.
Back then there was a big uproar too, but mostly because Safari extension developers charged for a new version because they had to rewrite the entire thing.
> specifically to increase extension performance and privacy
This reasoning is so bogus that it’s hard to believe anybody could believe it in good faith. Ad blockers are essential for performance and user privacy and security.
If Apple truly bought into this reasoning then they’d integrate an ad blocker like Brave does. Follow the money.
It is not bogus. It does increase privacy because the extension no longer sees what pages you load or your web content. And it is indeed more performant.
And Apple does care because later on they started to allow blockers to spread blocking rules over multiple sub-extensions. Initially they were limited on... 15 000 rules? Can't quite remember.
You're downvoted so much that I can't even read your text without copy and pasting it.
But you're right. When I'm using Safari with 1Blocker, I don't even notice that I'm not using Chrome with uBlock Origin. And it accomplishes that with static rules instead of with an API that reads every request.
You can still install uBlock Origin in Brave, assuming you don't mind the crypto stuff and how they pay it out (or, rather don't) to site owners. Even Firefox feels a little weird now with the advent of Mozilla Advertising.
You can, but ultimately Brave is downstream of Chrome and their stated intention of supporting Manifest V2 "for as long as [they're] able" doesn't inspire as much confidence.
Firefox is also the only open alternative to Chromium at the moment, so I prefer to endorse it instead.
Brave has its own Rust based Adblocker BUILD IN. That is at the very core of the Browser, uses the exact same filter lists uBlock Origin and all the other use. There is no point in using uBlock origin in Brave at all. I have been using Brave for years now and the adblocker pretty much like uBlock. Never looked back. I think it even inspired by uBlock but the fact they can even integrate it tighter with Chromium makes more then than an extension written in JS.
uBlock Origin does a bit more than applying community maintained filter lists though. I regularly use its capability to add custom filters for instance. Is that also possible in Brave?
We would not do that on principle, but imagine we're the mustache twirlers you fantasize we are: we'd light our brand on fire doing any such thing, lose all our lead users, stop growing and start shrinking. Think / Type / Post is the Ready / Aim / Fire analogue you seek.
I know that you probably went with Chromium based on the way your relationship with Mozilla ended, but man... I'll never have a Chromium based browser as my daily driver, I simply never trusted the ad company to not do what they ended up doing in the end (killing ad blockers). Brave will always be a no go for me for this reason. And now more than ever, we really need some company with real fire power to take the reins of the Firefox source code and create a real trustable fork.
This is a choice we made. As I wrote in my last reply, I think we would have died trying to get Gecko/Graphene with a Web front end up to competitive scratch vs. Chrome (nm Firefox).
A Firefox fork would have gone over badly with some potentially large number of Mozilla/Firefox fans, and we'd still lack key elements not part of the Mozilla open source (at the time, e.g., Adobe's CDM for HTML5 DRM). On the upside we'd have more UX customizability.
But our choice of Chromium/Blink (via Electron, so we had Web front end upside without Firefox extensions) was not a slam dunk choice. It involved trade-offs, as all engineering does. One downside is we have to audit and network-test for leaks and blunders, which often come from Chromium upstream:
Huh, I was under the impression that you were forking Chromium itself instead of building over Electron. Or are you talking about a past, post-Gecko decision that had to be dropped as well?
No, we started with Gecko (on Graphene, a sandboxing multiprocessor framework from b2g/FirefoxOS). We switched for hard-nosed wins of Chromium (as part of Electron) because out of the box vs. Gecko, most rows in the spreadsheet favored Chromium decisively. This is covered in
Why do you write "probably... based on... relationship ended"? Brave as a startup does not have time for feels not realz, pathos-over-logos nonsense. I recommend you avoid it in your work efforts too.
Thanks for the replies. I did not knew that you started with Gecko. Anyway, Brave is my go to advice when a regular user asks for a mobile browser, it just works out of the box. Not for me, and I still hope to see a Firefox fork becoming the main Chrome competitor in the future.
I get it. I run FF as my primary browser (mostly because I don't want to see the internet devolve into a Blink mono-culture).
But, I always recommend Brave for less-technical folks. It just works! My FF setup includes a number of extensions, some of which need a bit of tuning to be useful. Then you have to deal with issues in websites that just don't properly support FF, etc. My grandmother can install Brave and simply start browsing. Things just work without extra config or tinkering.
What I specifically mean by 'large media elements' is that I currently have the uBlock option active to 'Block media elements larger than [50] KB'. (Where the 50 is a spinner so I can increase or decrease the size if I want.)
I would like to know this, too. It does not seem to be on the list of features unless they are referring to it via "cosmetic filtering". I often block particular elements on websites.
There is an Aggressive setting for Brave Shields, which you can set either per-site in the Shields menu from the URL bar, or globally in brave://settings/shields - that should take care of SERP ads and other first-party placements.
Brave has a native adblocker that lets basically nothing through, though it can be configured as desired. Crypto stuff is opt-in, though there is a little monochrome button for it on the browser that one can disable with a right click.
As I see it, Brave is the only Chromium-based browser with a competitive Mv2-deprecation-resistant adblocker. If adblocking is important to you - and it is, to many people - then Brave literally is the only one worth considering. Not to mention it is open source, unlike most of the others.
(I work on Brave's adblocker, and FWIW the folks who work for Brave are very open about their affiliation when commenting about it online)
It is not a subtle insinuation, Brave is the defacto only browser apart from Chrome right now. All the rest are niche and irrelevant if you measure adblock, compatibility and widely subpar privacy protection.
There is some bitching about the ads crypto token, but that is entirely optional, so complaints are mostly fear and dogma. And to be honest, is a fascinating new approach to ads that suvberts the current state of affairs in the advertising market.
Do you have thoughts about Kagi/Orion browser? I've been using it for a bit now and I've been pleased with the ad blocking capabilities and the ability to have ublock origin on my iPhone and iPad. The browser definitely has scales but it's usable for me at this point.
Your comment was downvoted into oblivion, but it's a very valid point. There is a significant number of GNU/Linux users who value the freedoms granted by FLOSS licensing, so I believe Orion not being a FLOSS project is a valid argument against it - specifically in context of GNU/Linux (as a part of Free Software movement).
At least it certainly leaves me (personally) having second thoughts, even though I'm no purist and use proprietary software (but try prefer free software if I can).
If the Google, Pocket and other ad money dries up, Mozilla the company may go away but the Firefox browser itself will continue on because it's open source. As an exclusively Firefox user for over 20 years, I suspect if Mozilla the company dies, it will won't negatively impact Firefox much, at least in any meaningful way. In fact, the browser may be somewhat better off managed like the Blender or MAME projects.
In the last five years or so Firefox has increasingly introduced controversial changes that make it (IMHO) less good, primarily around interface design. And, from what I understand, Mozilla employs full-time UX designers who've been driving much of that. Of course, with Firefox it's still possible to modify, fix and restore all these recent interface "improvements" with user CSS but it's a constant annoyance to need to keep fixing it. Fortunately, there's an active community effort around restoring the Firefox interface and usability, exemplified by the brilliant Lepton project https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/releases.
My perception just watching the evolution of Firefox from the outside, is that it used to be a browser that celebrated the ethos of "Have it Your Way." However, Mozilla the company gets money to pay its executives and employees (millions in the case of more than one recent CEO) by actively driving users and eyeballs for Google, Pocket and other advertisers. So the company is highly incentivized to try myriad changes and redesigns to increase appeal to "the masses" of browser users. Thus, the UX keeps getting 'simplified' and 'de-cluttered' with advanced functionality 'de-prioritized' and add-on support demoted to second-class afterthought - instead of the shining key feature advanced users value most. Basically, in recent years the Firefox UX and end-user features have been pushed by the substantial payroll needs of the Mozilla company to become more like Chrome and Safari instead of embracing its unique position as a tool for power users who value advanced features, customization and extension. And it was all for naught because Firefox has continued to lose market share while ignoring (and even actively alienating) its niche community of fanatically devoted power users.
Do you think the open source community is capable of maintaining Firefox without Mozilla? I find that doubtful. Even if they did, without Mozilla, Cloudflare and friends would start trying to kill Firefox like they do to other independent browsers.
...so long as you're not in a market where they automatically opt you in to sending all your DNS requests to a for-profit company without asking, and if you are, you remember to set up a canary domain or go and update your settings for every new install and new profile.
It's time for a Google breakup from the DOJ / FTC.
They've gone well beyond what Microsoft did in the 2000s.
Google owns so many panes of glass and funnels them all through its search and advertising funnel. They've distorted how the web (and mobile) work to accomplish this massive market distortion.
Search, Ads, and Android should be broken up into separate units. Chrome shouldn't be placed with any of those units.
While we're cutting, YouTube should be its own entity and stand on its own legs too.
Apple, Amazon, and Meta need the same scrutiny. Grocery stores and primary care doctors should not be movie studios and core internet infrastructure. Especially when those units are wholly subsidized by other unrelated business units, and their under pricing the market is used to strangle out the incumbents and buy them up on the cheap.
Well, this country (the US) decided in November to go the exact opposite direction of having a government capable of, let alone willing to, pursuing litigation like this, so I hope we enjoy this digital feudalism only expanding, never receding, in the coming years.
>Well, this country (the US) decided in November to go the exact opposite direction of having a government capable of, let alone willing to, pursuing litigation like this
Okay, I'll retract my remarks when the new formation of the FTC actually goes after a tech giant. And frankly, I have doubt any DOJ filings of this type won't get repealed by force from above in short order. This is a case that was mostly handled by the prior DOJ, which is gone now, replaced by new management.
New management is aligned with breaking up big tech.
Founders Fund (Thiel), A16Z (Andressen [0], Horowitz), and YC (Gary Tan) have all been lobbying for some form of big tech breakup because it sucks up capital+oxygen needed for startups they funded to exit at respectable valuations.
Also, Andressen's Netscape was screwed over by Microsoft, so he has a grudge against large players.
Breaking up big tech would oxygenate the entire tech sector.
Startups would be able to grow larger. There would be less threat from big tech coming in to eat your market, and M&A wouldn't be the preferred exit strategy.
Tech talent would be able to get paid more without big tech setting wages and orchestrating coordinated layoffs. More successful startups = more money for venture and labor capital. Right now that money just goes to institutional shareholders which are not the innovation drivers of the economy.
Startups will actually get to compete for markets rather than having them won and subsidized by unrelated business units at the big tech titans. The solutions delivered will fit the market needs much better.
Even big tech itself might fetch a higher valuation and be greater than the sum of its parts. So much of big tech is inefficient, untethered from market realities (eg. Alexa), and a waste of talent and human capital on dead end projects. Having Jeff Bezos "pay whatever it takes" to acquire the rights to "007" is a sign of how bloated these market distorting companies have become.
It's working fine on Youtube in Optimal mode. If you have still issue, you will have to go through self-diagnosing steps[1] to rule out all the myriad other ways you suffer such issues -- most commonly another extension is interfering negatively.
uBO being so good at blocking YouTube ads to the point where you didn't need to signup for Premium may have been the tipping point for Google that ended manifest V2.
i suspect that youtube mobile is responsible for more traffic than web. And that it's harder (but not impossible) to have adblocking on mobile (such as revanced).
Honest question here: Could someone explain to me how Apple and Safari relate to what Google is doing?
I currently use Adguard as a content blocker for Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Does this mean that Safari will also start restricting access to these ad blockers?
This is coming from an Apple antagonist, but don't the Apple OSs have adblocking at a system level (implying Safari)? This does vindicate Apple (but doesn't help in the other legitimate scenarios that this API is needed, which I have been told do exist).
Apple gets Google revenue for being their default search, and that is worth much less if the search ads pay less if Safari users were able to browse other sites untracked.
That's a BIG difference though, and makes the claim about security more believable, especially since it isn't a sole restriction. There are also a number of ad blockers available for Safari, although personally I'll stick with Firefox either way.
Google is an ad company restriction use of the primary ad-blocker on its browser, it's blatant.
What ads are not blocked by other ad blockers though? I'm upset too that ublock origin is no longer usable. I tried ublock origin lite and it seems to be blocking most ads so it's still blocking google's ads and that's not banned. It seems kind of hard to argue that it's just about banning ads given plenty of ad blockers still block Google's ads.
Apple is totally an advertising company. Have you missed the part about their stalling phone, tablet and laptop revenues, that they hope to compensate with "services" revenue, i.e. App Store 30% racketeering and App Store search ads?
>Apple is totally an advertising company. Have you missed the part about [...]
Have you missed the part of my comment of my comment where I specifically mentioned "web advertising presence"? That's relevant, because ublock would only work on web ads. It can't block ads in the app store, or any other app (eg. spotify).
Thus they also clearly have an incentive to sabotage uBO. It may be a much smaller piece of their revenue than at Google, but it is a huge proportion of their revenue growth. Don't believe Apple's marketing about their caring for privacy, belied by their actions.
>Here are the relevant built-in uBlock Origin filter rules:
Can you link to a specific rule that shows Apple has web ads? The search results you linked either removeparam filters (which I guess is "tracking", but probably the most benign kind), malware sites that contain "apple.com", or analytics domains that seemingly belong to apple. Moreover there's no evidence that Safari's content blocker restrictions make a difference here. The domains are trivially blocked so it's unclear how apple is materially gaining from their nerfed adblock.
Ads that apple serves (outside of marketing pages on apple.com) are ads that displayed on ad supported ads. uBO won't help you there. Luckily, every Apple device comes with an AdBlock for those ads - airplane mode.
It's not whataboutism. If the claim is that google's actions with manifest v3 is "abusing its market position to their own benefit", but Apple did the same thing when it didn't stand to benefit from it, then it severely undermines that claim.
Sure, it doesn't rule out google was secretly intending on doing it, only internal memos or whatever can prove that definitively. But at the same time, to immediately conclude that google was "abusing its market position", you would have to be maximally uncharitable to google. That's a sad way to see the world. Take for instance, the flak that google got for banning third party cookies. If this is done by anyone else (eg. Firefox), this would be seen as a good thing. However, cynics have opposed this on the basis that such change would disadvantage third party ad networks more than google, thus google was "abusing its market position to their own benefit" and therefore the change was bad.
You talk about Google as if it's a person. You should take a step back and think to yourself why the changes were made to Manifest V3 that broke backwards compatibility, weakening ability to ad-blocking. Rule set based modification is one of the first features I'd think of when developing a systems of extensibility in browser, and they removed it.
The reasoning is obvious, and "plausible deniability" is not enough to give Google charity. The more difficult you make it to block ads, the more impressions, and the more money made. Yet you believe people should be "charitable" to the same company that can't hire the manpower to defend their own users against bad faith DCMA takedown notices. Because they ran the analysis, and it wasn't worth the cost.
Best case scenario, Chromium loses market share, implements the parts removed from V2, Google likely kicks the can down the road to Manifest V4.
There's no reason to believe companies deserve charitability. Companies are systems designed to extract maximum value, and when the world around that system changes, the system adjusts itself. It's not the systems fault for trying to get more value, it's our fault for letting them.
Ad blockers still run in Chrome - just not ublock origin. Google's ads are still blocked by those blockers. If they really were motivated to stop ad blocking wouldn't they have blocked all ad blockers?
Note: I'm upset too that ublock origin stopped working. I switched to ublock origin lite and it's mostly working, though there are some ads sneaking through. I'm not sure if that just means
(1) it needs an update
(2) I should look for another blocker (IIUC ublock origin lite is not maintained much?)
(3) It's impossible in V3 to block these few things that are currently not blocked.
Manifest v3 is not going to lose any meaningful marketshare. There continues to exist working adblock and most users won't notice any difference in functionality. I sure don't.
Manifest V3 has 100% market share for all "full featured" browsers. My understanding is that just yesterday, YouTube made a change that allows them to apply DRM to videos, with even the client side buffer maintaining encryption until playback. How long until we start seeing similar applied to websites/articles?
Eventually, there will be an overstep that make enough capable people mad, and those people will get together and make/mod something better.
I don't think those two can be compared at all. Safari didn't have proper plugin support at all, doesn't matter ad-blocking or not. Rich plugin ecosystem was one of the Chrome's selling point.
There was a time in Chrome when it didn't support extensions at all. If Google had release an extension API like manifest v3 then, would that have been abuse of market position?
The reason why Chrome waited for so long to add extensions was the danger they posed to users. I was at Google when Sergey often worried about what extensions would do to non technical and older users who get tricked into installing them, then I saw first hand that danger with my own grandparents. They had extensions intercepting every network request, redirecting certain sites to fake sites, and injecting code into pages. It was horrifying, and they were lucky that they didn't have significant money or identity theft.
Before the introduction of extensions, Chrome supported NPAPI. I can't readily verify whether that was present in the first Chrome release, but it was present in very early releases. Browser Extensions was the alternative Google came up with to have a blessed API and sandboxed execution.
Abuse of extensions was certainly a problem with IE. But, Google was also happy to use IE controls for Google Toolbar and other functionality. It irks me when a company/tool makes use of another's more permissive policies/APIs in order to gain a foothold and then restricts others from doing the same with its products. It feels like pulling the ladder up behind you.
So it's impossible for a company to make a mistake and rectify it? If they settle on the same approach as their major competitor, it's bait and switch?
it seems overly charitable to give Google, THE advertising company, the benefit of the doubt here when the biggest impact is it will now show way more advertising.
If it's really that big of a problem this can be addressed by locking extensions by default and hiding the on switch where casual users won't look. But come on, this is obviously a pretext. You expect people to believe that the most prolific adertising and surveilance company in history is crippling the ability to block ads and trackers for altruistic reasons?!
It's not "obviously" a pretext. I don't think that the change in ad revenue to Google is going to be significant between v2 and v3 ad blockers. It might be to ad networks and sites that employ significant ad blocker counter measures though.
And it's not "altruistic" - it's because eval() and webRequestBlocking are bad for security and performance, so they're bad for a lot of users. Users who will switch to Safari or another browser without that extension API, because the browser is faster or didn't exfiltrate their banking credentials.
People's web experience is in degradation for long time.
No point using 99% of the web due to the hostile, fraudolent, abusive approaches on top of the hollow (yeh, very very gentle world for the thing what it is) content. No point searching for advice, products, job, as crap is poured at you while your actions are registered, your profile is sold, just to pour dedicated crap on you by the highest bidder.
I have mail and 5 (7 with weather) pages I check regularly, and that's it. That's my online life. More like a hermit goes into town for tools and cans kind of digital solitary. Clicking on links only after reconsidering five times, if I am really interested in the possible content. Mostly here. So, so far away from the extremely curious me 20 or so years ago spending hours to the limit of my thirst and bladder, navigating all that is out there.
It is very sad what humanity made out of the Internet. It does not even hurt anymore. It is numb blob where the feeling about the rich common knowledge source this was and could have been should be.
Note: Edge is also gaining. They use Chromium but their stance on Manifest v3 is unclear to me. So far they don't seem to have any plans to deprecate v2 support
I know these numbers seem tiny, but if these trends were to continue, Chrome could be under 50% marketshare by June 2026 and overtaken by the end of 2027
As much as I dislike their Chrome practices, I am rather against the idea of forcing them to sell Chrome.
For one, they simply have had a better product, at least in the past. Part of their large monopoly is due to just being better outright for a large portion of users (presumably). Are we to punish making overly-good products?
For another, sell to whom? And why would they be a good steward?
And yet another, there's literally Chromium, which other browsers (built by other corps) use, e.g. Edge, Brave, etc.
Did Google have to open Chromium? No.
Disclaimer: I hold these opinions weakly and would love to learn more about why they might be ill-premised.
Google did not make Chromium from scratch, and so were obligated to use a license compatible with the previous source they used. That source can be traced back to KDE's Konqueror browser and its KHTML engine.
Your argument is that Google couldn't possibly have written their own web engine and browser at a time when Firefox and IE were the alternative options?
What’s wrong with V8? Had only pleasant interactions with it so far (maybe compiling takes long, can’t tell, whole webkit is a nightmare in that regard)
Oh it's perfectly fine, but Firefox was kind of the only illusion that the web does not rely on a single implementation, so discovering that even that depends on V8 is kind of funny :)
> Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it.
Google has a long history of "accidentally" breaking gmail on firefox and funneling users to Chrome back in the day. It's beyond stupid to argue they should be able to do whatever they want with their vertically integrated monopoly.
Like, if you want to dig holes in your own driveway sure whatever, but if you own all the roads in Detroit and you want to dig holes in them, then make a killing selling new tires and suspension repair a fair society wouldn't move out of Detroit, they'd fucking run you out of town.
Why be bitter at the people dealing with the shit, why not be angry at the people making the world shit? My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.
How is your company forcing you to use gmail any worse than your company forcing you to use outlook? Is it your company that is making the world shit, or google.
Indeed. I'd like to. Except Google also make it nigh impossible for anyone hosting their own email (the original-internet ideal) to get email into gmail reliably enough to be useful. I have my own address on my own domain, but can't rely on it (yes, DKIM and DMARC and SPF are properly set up) not to be marked "spam" for opaque reasons, so gmail remains my "main" address. It's a network-effect problem: once enough people are "captured", then everyone else is forced to join - or else be unable to participate.
It's a collective action problem: you'll have to persuade millions and millions of "normies", who have no idea what's going on, or what internet privacy is, or what's broken about the system, and who don't care to learn, and won't listen to us - or you'll have to impose regulation. Those are the choices. The second seems more possible than the first. Us nerds saying "walk away" is idealistic; we will, and always will, get squished, because the corps have the power and most folks won't (ever) care.
GP Post:
> My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.
Your post:
> Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to.
No, it's clear that not everyone dealing with Gmail is doing so because they chose to. Repeating your incorrect statement does not make it correct.
Further, everyone has to deal with its impacts on the email ecosystem as it's practically impossible for somebody who works a 9-5 to run their own mail server that Gmail will deign to not only accept mail from but also successfully deliver it to its intended recipient.
So even if I never use Gmail I still have to deal with replies going to / coming from it.
GSuite/Workspace and consumer GMail is not the same thing in the slightest. They may use the same mail servers but that is about where the similarity ends.
I would recommend Google Workspace to any company because it gives them a ton of business productivity tools.
I would probably not recommend gmail as a users default personal email because frankly it's not that good.
The reality is most users have a Google account ans just use their Gmail account which is bundled.
Most of my circle which cares effectively use their Gmail account for sites that insist on it and never open that e-mail if they can get away with it.
True, and applies to many other things as well. Anyone claiming otherwise is shirking responsibility for their own actions. Every single sibling comment here suffers from this.
Arguments in the form of "other people do it, so I must also" are unpersuasive and pathetic.
Except for anyone whose employer requires them to use Google services, since Google Apps (or whatever they call it these days) is a hugely popular offering for central company email/contacts/calendar/office suite. And frankly, it's better than dealing with Outlook and its unrelenting AI slop machine advertising.
You don't own the roads in Detroit; the government owns most of them.
Gmail is not a government service. Google is free to make that work with only one browser, if they want.
You can't assert that Google must make Gmail work with any browser whatsoever, because that means supporting someone using Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 5.5.
I'm not going to waste my time explaining to you what a metaphor is, but I will say this Firefox was the dominant player in the 00's 2010's when they did this, not the 2% market share it is now.
I don’t work for Google and genuinely think it’s better for users. It’s always bugged me that ad blockers request arbitrary read write permissions for all websites I visit, and it didn’t seem like that was ever going to change until Chrome forced the issue.
Read/write permissions are necessary to effectively block ads. There's a lot of sites that will throw up a screen saying "please turn off your adblocker" and refuse to let you view the page if they detect ads aren't being loaded. Read/write permissions allows uBlock Origin to inject scripts into the page to fool the anti-adblock scripts into thinking that ads are being served.
At the platform level, you have to have a security model, and sometimes it will conflict with functionality. I’m sure there’s a lot of potentially interesting browser extensions you could build with the ability to read and write arbitrary files, but Chrome has decided (much less controversially) that the sandbox is key to their security model and extensions can’t ask to escape it.
If manifest V3 ad blockers were nonfunctional to the point of being broken, I’d be more concerned, but in my experience they’re perfectly OK.
Yea but, I think its a bit misplaced to be angry at Google for this. Surely its the content creators that place the ads in their content to blame for this.
I don't understand why they ads are not spliced into the stream. It would be undetectable by extensions at all.
Because ads are auctioned in nanoseconds. This isn't the newspaper were everyone saw the same as which was vetted by the editors.
You are seeing different ads than your neighbour. Everything is automated to cost as little money as possible.
It's my computer. I will run code that I choose and disallow code that I choose. If I choose to run code that blocks your code, that's my prerogative. Whether that's a full blown right is another topic.
You're just pissed because I've chosen to block your code in software you created. Next, you'll tell me I have to watch your programming on a TV I bought with your code on it.
The idea that we have to do anything that evilCorp wants us to do is just insane that people have come to the point of accepting that.
It really isn't. They can spend some of their billions of revenue to review changes when popular extensions are updated, just like Mozilla does. Every uBO update is vetted by Mozilla and is only then pushed out to users. But doing this is not in Google's interest at all.
Mozilla’s guidance on this (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tips-assessing-safety-e...) is that only some extensions are manually reviewed and you shouldn’t trust this as a guarantee of safety if you don’t trust the developer who owns the extension.
If I’m going to be the devil’s advocate, it’s probably better for performance.
When I maintained a hook-based plugin system, I learned that many programmers do not know data structures or algorithms and would slow down the whole software by writing plugins that looked up rules using extremely slow ways extremely often. And if users wanted to complain about the software being slow, they would always blame me first.
But when I replaced it with rule lists, now I was in control and could implement fast data structures.
Actually I have a problem is both. Chrome/Chromium is Google's product and it's theirs to do with what they please, but if they do user-hostile things with it, that's enough to criticise them for me, even if they're honest about it.
Of course lying about why makes it worse, but I don't think it would've been that much more okay if Google was honest and said "users' ability to install highly effective ad blockers hurts our bottom line so we're removing them".
And I don't understand what is the benefit of lying as well - everyone on the internet knows what this is about, at least if they used ad blockers. A lot of people don't, but they will not be affected anyway.
I've seen a lot of their engineers here on HN defending Google's position, and very few of the anti-Google crowd here claim to be (x)googlers.
That said, I know a number of xooglers (myself included) who don't believe for a moment that this would have gotten off the ground if someone important hadn't opined on the usefulness WRT ad-serving.
I don't think killing actual, effective ad-blocking was the sole motivation of moving to Manifest V3, but it was certainly a nice side effect that was hard to resist.
> Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...
What makes me sad is that if we go back a handful of years here in HN comments, there were tons of posts assuredly stating google would never do anything like this.
Even though it should have been obvious that a company who lives and dies by ad revenue will of course do everything to protect ad revenue and block users freedom.
100% agree with you. Unfortunately Chrome is damn near a requirement if you are interacting with the Google Cloud console. Try to use BigQuery studio in any other browser and you are in for a world of hurt.
Exactly the reason why I use https://choosy.app to always redirect everything Google Cloud to Chrome, but everything else to Firefox.
That way if I click on some random GCP link in Slack it opens the link in Chrome, but everything else stays in Firefox. I don't need ad blocking for GCP so that works fine.
I need this for Android pretty badly. I currently just don't set a default, and often use urlcheck in the middle to edit the URL if necessary, then pick my browser. I would love an app that automated this after the first use. I've submitted feedback to multiple apps that are halfway there, but none have seemed interested in getting the rest of the way there.
UrlCheck is currently the closest, it has single buttons to remove tracking parameters and paths like landing pages, and I think it remembers the browser based on domain, but it doesn't have a list of changeable per-domain settings, won't open it automatically, and doesn't show a launcher-style grid (it uses a scrolling list that has to be opened manually). Google doesn't make things easier either, since apps can no longer be inserted as a chooser, and setting a chooser app as default breaks things.
For various functionality, there's also NeoLinker, UntrackMe, Intent Intercept, unalix, LinkSheet, and Open Link With. I believe Lynket browser, which uses the custom tab protocol, also has some basic rules-based choosing but it only works with two browsers and the rules are based on the app making the request.
It looks like LinkSheet added many of the settings I'm looking for at some point, so I'll be trying that out.
I recently had cause to sign in to the Google Cloud console (not BigQuery specifically) and found it unusable on Firefox. It pegged a core at 100% and consumed memory at a prodigious rate. Basic UI actions were painfully slow.
I killed the tab and tried it in Chromium where the UI was... not snappy, but in range for my expectations of a heavyweight frontend.
Yeah, I use Chromium for anything Google made, and FF for everything else. Google makes sure that their pages work sloooowly on Firefox (e.g. Google Earth). No such problems elsewhere.
I use it all the time on multiple platforms and it is a DOG on anything but Chrome/Chromium. We have 30+ datasets each with many tables/views/functions etc tho so that could be part of the issue.
Same thing will happen in the billing portal or really any experience but I notice it the most in BQ.
Oh yes, but Google products are notoriously worse on Firefox, if one is to believe the numerous comments on HN on the topic (although I haven't tried myself recently so I can't be quoted on this), and that interpretation doesn't sit well with your comment.
But you know better than anyone's else what you meant :-)
If you're looking to move away from Chrome, Firefox + uBlock Origin is still your best bet IMO. Mozilla's committed to keeping the robust ad-blocking capabilities alive despite Google's changes.
Brave is decent too if you want something Chromium-based but more privacy-focused (comes with minor controversies).
Safari works well if you're in the Apple ecosystem.
I actually run a dual-browser setup these days - Firefox for most browsing, and only fire up Brave for those annoying sites that Google has mysteriously "optimized" to run poorly elsewhere. Not ideal but gets the job done!
They had the market position and option to do that for years now. "Told you so" whenever a patterns matches, and ignoring the times when it does not instead of providing a good model that encompasses both, is a fairly lame way to reason about the world.
The position is always, Google's position is so strong they can do whatever they want even if it isn't beneficial to users, this confirms that. I'm not sure the "they could have abused this sooner" defense is a good one.
Not only not a good defense, but practically indecipherable. What scale of abuse couldn't be excused by this? I'm not sure I even understand what the notion of abuse means to a person who thinks it could be excused by such a logic.
It seems to completely lose track of the face value significance of any individual instance of abuse because it gets lost in the comparative equation to hypothetical worst harms.
It also confusingly treats restraint as though X amount of restraint can then be cashed in for a certain amount of harm, rather than something that's supposed to happen by default under good stewardship.
And it shifts the whole question to whether or not that position is being abused when I think the criticisms are more fundamental about the fact that they shouldn't be in the position to have or not have that leverage in the first place.
So that, long and short, would be my detox from the assumptions at play here.
It's funny that this line of defense is sincerely attempted here, as it's so absurd that it's actually the punchline of an SMBC comic. And honestly, one of my favorite ones that I find genuinely very funny.
>Lawyer: Okay, let's say my client killed his wife. What about the people he didn't kill?! That's six billion people! Don't they matter? Don't they matter?!
>Caption: In an alternate universe, Jeffrey Dahmer has a thank you parade every year.
I view it as a symptom of the broader effort to villify the fourth estate and condition people to act(vote) on their emotions rather than a rational look at verifiable facts.
The "Main Stream Media" rhetoric really started with the teaparty stuff, powered by the internet, and championed both the right (tea party in america, faragists in the UK) and left (corbynistas in the uk, AOC types I assume in the states)
>If you think improving privacy is a joke, go look at how easily extensions can steal your browsing history and steal your passwords. uBlock Origin is the good one, but for every good one there are malicious ad blockers that do far worse things.
Except removing support for webRequestBlocking in manifest v3 doesn't really improve security. Nearly every extension require the "access your data for all sites" permission. The infamous Honey extension works just fine with manifest v3, for instance.
Ad blocking is a must. In a world without MV3, you choose between ad infested sites or extensions with have the potential to harm your privacy. Now you don't. It's a win for normal users, at the expense of power users for whom declarative request blocking does not suffice.
There are plenty of other reasons to hate Google. This isn't one of them. Sacrificing the "power" desired by couple thousand HN users in return for the safety of couple millions of normal users is the right thing to do. Of course HN users will disagree; let's just see how badly this post will be downvoted. Downvotes won't change my opinion.
"Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit..."
That's some fatalistic wording. How about:
Company that publishes a free product and business model relies on ads, stops distributing app that piggybacks on their free product while circumventing ads.
Also true. But it’s a charitable way of putting a fundamentally broken contract on the open web since it was invented: you are in control of your browser. If you want reading mode, large text, anti-fingerprinting, disable autoplaying video, heck even banning popups, the browser is your tool and does what you tell it to. If Google or any other company comes between you and your browser then one part of the open web is discarded. I think extensions are gonna get nerfed even more in the future, for whatever reason large commercial interests have.
Right. I think people were alert to these possibilities long before the actual stuff happened with Manifest V3.
And it shouldn't take waiting until specific examples happen to understand the incentives and the possibilities that could ripen at some future date.
And just to throw in my little side hobby horse on this conversation, it's what I find personally frustrating about conversations with people who think that Brave counts as an alternative.
Being attached at the hip to the Chromium project is a ground level commitment to a long-term vulnerability, and it means that similar circumstances could "ripen" at some future date as the family of Chromium browsers become dependent on an increasingly vast foundation of code and web standards. To me, the combination of that capability and the incentive should be enough to be treated as a complete argument which disqualifies Chromium derived browsers from counting as alternatives.
Yes that is how the law views it. That’s not necessarily a good thing. I agree that I should have rights because I’m a person. As the crazy radical I am, I don’t agree that companies ”are free to X”, because they shouldn’t have freedoms, only entitlements that can be regulated to serve the purpose of the citizens.
Right, and that's why ad and spying funded products should be illegal. They don't just distort but destroy markets. It's an extremely unfair business practice.
That people claim it's impossible for a browser to survive without Google's funding demonstrates how broken the market is by ad money: of course people would pay for something like a web browser if it were illegal to make money by selling your users. The web is obviously valuable to people.
>Right, and that's why ad and spying funded products should be illegal. They don't just distort but destroy markets. It's an extremely unfair business practice.
Call your senator and propose a bill, otherwise we'll keep doing what's legal.
I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy, a joke coming from Google. Then the excuse was "well it improves performance", which they could easily do by marking extensions as low performance.
If Google wanted to improve this they have an entire search engine where they could re-rank sites based on privacy and performance.
It was never about improving peoples web experience.