Just three days ago, Mozilla reiterated [1] that Firefox would continue to support Manifest V2 alongside Manifest V3. So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it). While you're at it, note that "uBlock Origin works best on Firefox". [2]
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-manifes...
[2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
https://www.osnews.com/story/141825/mozilla-deletes-promise-...
Changes are recorded, then applied to the latest upstream version (Firefox) then packaged and sent as an update (LibreWolf)
Or how does the semantics of patch/changes/update differ in any way from maintaining a fork? The packaging has nothing to do with this. It may not be a well-maintained fork, the maintainers might not see themselves capable of adding features and bugfixes on their own, but a fork is a fork.
It's a shame that GitHub messed up this term by calling any clone of a repository a "fork".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreWolf
It may just be semantics though.
Promissory estoppel maybe? Stronger case for it if you ever paid them for anything after this promise.
> For years I’ve been warning about this inevitable outcome, and for just as many years people told me I was overreacting, that it wouldn’t happen, that I was crazy.
The removal of that language is important but this person is trying to make it about themselves.
Orion is a WebKit web browser from the folks at Kagi that supports both Firefox and Chromium extensions (including on iPhones and iPads) and has zero telemetry, and I have the Firefox version of uBlock Origin installed.
Firefox is not the only option for people that want alternatives to Chrome that support uBlock Origin.
Quoting from a reply in a discussion on the Orion Feedback site from a few months ago (November 2024):
> " uBO is not supported on iOS due to Apple limitations."
[1]: https://orionfeedback.org/d/9145-ublock-origin-not-existent-...
The problem with support on iOS is that each browser is forced to be a skin for Safari and Safari only supports Safari Web Extensions, which are MV3-like, hence the platform limitation. The EU law may allow a browser to release in that region but Apple placed such heavy requirements and restrictions to do so none have actually been approved. I haven't seen a clear answer if less limited extension access itself would result in not being approved by Apple.
I use brave browser and nextdns to block ads on ios now.
I did compare against other adblock systems on ios and found it to be the best option, as other adblocks either gave broken webpages or just didn't work at all.
To be quite frank - I haven't manage to get _any_ of the extensions (that I would like to have) to work in Orion. They all just silently fail in different ways.
First, consider NextDNS to DNS adblock all your apps.
For in the browser, for those who do use Safari, consider 1Blocker, otherwise consider AdGuard Pro.
I removed it right away. I just want a browser, not whatever that was.
Now I just use Safari because all I do really is read stuff.
I looked into it, but couldn't get over the pretentiousness. They seem to make plenty of money from either investors or customers because they're not bankrupt yet, so I guess there must be a demographic that likes being treated like that.
There's something funny about a browser pretending it's the best thing since sliced bread telling me to drag the downloaded application to the macOS dock after downloading the Windows setup file.
Pretentious or not, Arc is pre-enshittification. Chrome, Edge and FF are not, which is what matters.
It was fast. At some point it had its own install of Adobe Flash so you could get rid of your regular Flash install and run two browsers: one without Flash as your main, and use Chrome for those few websites that require Flash effectively isolating them from your regular web experience, until this eventually became moot, it was another WebKit browser, albeit with V8 instead of JavaScriptCore, and pioneered per tab process isolation so rather than your whole browser crashing, just that one tab would. Prior to Chrome, whole browser crashes were not uncommon, oftentimes because of Flash (giving another reason to want to isolate it, although plug-ins I think were also isolated).
What Chrome subsequently became is the very definition of enshittification, and you can pinpoint it to around the time Google started trying to force people to link their Chrome profiles to their Google Accounts.
Obviously Google has many income streams. Mozilla does not.
It always comes down to the question: do you want to pay money for a browser? And the answer for 99% of the users is "hell no".
I strongly suspect they're gonna drop support as soon as the first bigger merge issue happens along with a heartfelt blog that "they did they everything to support it, but it was just too much for the resources available to them"
I doubt it's gonna take more then 1-2 years (December 2027) for this to happen, but we will see.
I expect Brave to easily support it until then and then drop it very quickly as you described.
That is, if those companies choose.
If even 80% of them wanted to fork? Not a biggie. And they could still cherry pick commits from the alt fork.
"Excluding merges, 684 authors have pushed 3,139 commits to main and 3,866 commits to all branches. On main, 14,924 files have changed and there have been 740,516 additions and 172,682 deletions."
That's stats from last week. Last year Google apparently was responsible for about 95% of contributions. Other than Microsoft (which has the same bad incentives as Google) none of the alt-chromium browser companies has like, 5% of the engineers to maintain a real alternative
Opera has pinch-zoom text-reflow in a chromium backend, and that seems to be substantial, and yet it is (on purpose) kept out of mainline chrome. So they do loads of tracking/merging too.
The scope of work to do a few small features on top of chrome wouldn't be a biggie, compared to the entire project.
It might be easier to maintain than an actual extension interface with hooks thought the code.
The reason why ublock origin is so powerful is because it works with the DOM/not at the network level and can use heuristics to determine wherever something is a advertisement or not.
So even when they have to say farewell to Manifest v2 it really doesn't matter, at least in case of privacy (and for some medical) protection.
And that's a lot of work for a multi million LOC project, unless the architecture is specifically made to support such extensions... which isn't the case here.
And freezing your merges indefinitely isn't really viable either for a browser
That's been the default assumption of pretty much everyone anyway.
If not today maybe soon...
Being independent of google requires actually doing the work and not just copying google.
At some point the issues will become too difficult to fix, but none of these companies need to be doing it alone. Adding a separate upstream with some "fuck off Google" fixes for them to base their proprietary browser on seems like a smart thing to do.
Maybe it's time
It may be an okay-ish browser, but the company behind it _repeatedly_ does shady things (installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc), I am honestly not sure why people are OK with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
If you don't want the Web3 crap you can turn it off -- as I have done for years now. But someone please help me understand how a browser that takes in half a billion dollars from Google annually to function as controlled opposition in case of an antitrust case is somehow OK to recommend, but a browser that is independent is somehow bad because of bad business decisions made years ago.
But it doesn't belong in a conversation about browser diversification away from Chromium. I am so bewildered why it keeps getting referenced in "let's get away from Google Chrome" threads
At the end of the day, it’s not Google Chrome. I’ve mentioned in other comments that Brave isn’t my top 1, 2 or 3 choice, so I won’t rehash that here, but I think it absolutely belongs in a conversation as an alternative for people that want to get away from Google Chrome. The basic skeleton that composes Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers mostly isn’t the issue, because Chrome is and always has been technically excellent. It’s all the other crap Google started grafting on top of it that is, on top of their stance (backed up by many many web developers here) that the standards and web technologies that Google supports should be the standards and web technologies that all browsers support and prioritize.
All the arguments in favor of Brave over Chrome are going to apply tenfold to browsers fully independent of Chromium, and it's a perilous place to be, a boat on the edge of the Chromium whirlpool forever rowing (Brave repeatedly branching and forking the parts of Chromium it doesn't want and reconciling them to new updates) to not get sucked in.
That said, I do have a general preference for browsers that aren’t Chromium-based as well.
If Brave works for you, go for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
>installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc
Do you really think Brave won't, when it comes time to pay the piper?
Firefox is still my primary work browser because all the anti-tracking stuff Orion does actually breaks some sites I depend on (well, makes them harder to use anyway), but Orion has become my main and I have lost confidence in Mozilla.
If you want to continue using Firefox as a kind of service to the world or weird self-imposed civic duty, that’s on you. I can pay for Orion and know that there is a company with an actual business model behind it and also not worry about misaligned incentives, or fixing all the tracking and telemetry defaults (only to watch my hard work crumble like when a random Firefox update hosed my settings on my personal machine a couple years ago) because there is no telemetry.
Orion is not a Chromium derivative.
Further, nobody here said Firefox was incapable as a browser. Use it if you like it, but having used Firefox off and on since 2005, I’ve written it off on my personal machines.
John Gruber had the Kagi CEO—Vlad Prelovac—on in December. I yoinked this from the auto-generated transcript in Apple’s Podcasts app:
> Orion is still in beta. We are nearing V1. There was so much to do.
> One thing that differentiates building on top of WebKit to Blink is that for Blink, there is Chromium, which is the web browser app framework. You get the entire browser out of the box. You can just change the name.
> And you have a browser for WebKit. There is no Chromium equivalent. You have to create every menu, every button, everything, which is why it took us six years to get where we are.
> It's basically written from scratch. And on top of that, we also decide to port web extensions, to port API to natively to WebKit. We're doing all these hard things that take a lot of time.
> And I know many people [aren’t] happy to see Orion is buggy. This extension doesn't work. Well, yes, it takes time to do this properly, but we are determined to do that properly.
> And of course, it also has the native ad blocker included and all these good things that a browser should have. But for various reasons, all the mainstream browsers cannot do. And yeah, that's the origin story for Orion.
Notably they have been porting in support for Web Extensions APIs that even Safari doesn’t support. You can see a full breakdown comparing Orion (Mac) and Orion (iOS) vs other popular browsers here: https://kagi.com/orion/WebExtensions-API-Support.html
And now Firefox has shad the bed so badly with their "we will actually sell your data now" that I don't even care. It can burn in hell.
FF’s legalese may have burned through their last bit of good will, and if that’s the last nail in their coffin let it be a lesson in terminal enshitification and not understanding or caring about your users.
It's more than that. It prevents monopolization of the web by a single company. This isn't like picking a different version of Ms. Dash from the grocery store.
They can push technologies that benefit their ads business (e.g. manifest 3 breaking ublock origin). And the notion "embrace extend extinguish" was practically invented for circumstances like this, of engaging the development community in a particular field of software, dominating it, and achieving leverage to change the way the web works.
>that having a lot of stakeholders prevents Google from unilaterally applying unpopular changes
Google controls commits to Chromium, and it does that with an invite only developer pool almost entirely of people associated with Google. The stakeholders don't have a proportionate hand in the destiny of Chromium. I think you're right that it's maybe better, in the sense that we could imagine something even worse, but that's loo low a benchmark to offer comfort that Chromium is having a net-positive impact on balance of power in terms of who can help you access the web.
Zen browser would be an almost drop-in replacement for those that like Arc but it uses FF under the hood instead.
Although, if kagi fails, it probably won't matter.
No idea what they plan to do about syncing though since right now they just use iCloud syncing, but it’s a start.
Another browser option is Brave, but you have to disable the altcoins stuff :/
I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
It sounds more like 'we sell your data, but we do it in a legally protracted way so we could claim up to now that we don't'.
Given this relates to Firefox's central selling proposition, they surely have an essay detailing exactly what data they're selling?
Mozilla gets money, and as a result of the deal, the searches (data) of anyone who didn't change the default go to the company running the default search engine.
I assume probably data that's anonymized (in some sense) and/or aggregated (in some sense). But there's so much grey area there that it's a lot less reassuring than a straight up blanket statement that they used to be able to make.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)."
How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.
> We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be.
Normally when you say "as close to X as legally possible", that means you want to do X fully, but you can't because the law forbids you to. X in this case is "not selling data". But "not selling data" is not illegal at all. What are they even trying to say here?
(Also I don't find that sentence on their FAQ page)
They're certainly attempting to articulate that as a conceptual distinction, but I don't think that division is as real as would be implied by trying to separate the one thing into two different words. Aggregated data is "about you" too, in many of the senses that matter in the context of privacy, and I would reject attempts at conceptualizing this into two things to imply otherwise.
But that said, these reassurances run into a "who ordered that" problem. No advocate for privacy was ever advocating on behalf of anonymized data any more than personally identifying data. Anonymous averaging over interests of groups still involves privacy compromises; and metrics, fingerprints and learning algorithms can mix and match that in ways that still cross the line. Abstracted profiling still works, and digs deeper than you might suspect (I recall the netflix data that could predict interests across different categories, like people watching House of Cards also liking It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Preferences can hang together in a measurable way, which is exactly why ad companies want them.
It's also just part of the long slow, death by one thousand cuts transformation into a company that doesn't have categorical commitments to privacy.
This situation isn't perfect, but I disagree that this is particularly weasely or disingenuous. It's not black & white and there are meaningful differences here.
I think the assumption of 'selling data' and primary concern from most users is the sale of their identifiable personal data - i.e. telling advertisers "this user is interested in X", using their privileged position as a browser to track and collect that information. This is absolutely what Facebook is doing when they sell your data, for example.
The description here is suggesting that Firefox are still committed to never doing that or anything similar. That is the main thing I'd want to know, so that's great.
However, it sounds like they may be selling generic anonymous data in some way - for example telling Pocket what percentage of people use the Pocket extension, or telling Google what percentage of people change their search engine away from Google. Both of those are cases where you can imagine they might receive significant extra income from partners given that data, and they feel this is reasonable but means they can technically no longer say the 'never sell your data'.
You could consider that level of data sharing problematic of course. That said, there is spectrum of problems here, and personally (and I think for most people) I am much more concerned about the tracking & distribution of actual personal identifiable data than I am about generic metrics like those, if that is what's happening (unfortunately, they haven't explained much further so this is still somewhat speculation - I fully agree more precise language would be very helpful).
This runs into what I'm calling the "who ordered that" problem, because this represents a retreat from a stronger commitment to privacy, and is not a conception of privacy that anyone was asking for, or that satisfies anyone who is concerned about privacy.
I don't want my interest in sci-fi to be made to conflict with my preference from buying locally, and influence campaigns urging me buy books through Preferred LArge Retailer and pushing me toward that clash are a problem whether the data powering them is personal or fed into an abstracted anonymized group.
And depersonalized profiling that "knows" I can be sorted into a specific "type of guy" bucket may involve learning things about me that I don't want to be inputs into marketing. They can still, for instance, make inroads into judgements about things like self esteem (e.g. colognes and beauty products), financial precarity, and can work to socialize groups into consumerist self-conceptions. They probably can be used to make inroads into classic forms of privacy violations like "looking to buy a home" or "trying to get pregnant" or other such aspects of identity that I don't want marketing to touch.
See this submission from earlier this month: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads (26 days ago, 1957 points) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909921
It's actually super simple and needs no obfuscation or verbal esoterica. Don't engage in a contract where data Firefox has collected from users is transferred to a third party.
Done. Easy as.
The sister comment on search engine data transfer is FUD -- the browser can of course send queries to a default search engine without needing to pipe any information to Firefox. Firefox would need no usage monitoring whatsoever, just do a firm fixed price contract and the details are settled.
BAT is also different from adblocking, because it monetizes other people's content. It's about as close to stealing as you can get in the ad business, aside from the Honey affiliate highjacking.
Which is not to say that the tipping UI wasn't a hot mess, which it was. Hard to tell who was onboard, who wasn't and eg. Tom Scott got a bunch of tips when he had no interest in the platform whatsoever.
> BAT is also different from adblocking, because it monetizes other people's content.
It doesn't. The browser literally shows you toaster popups all by itself, and gives you some pocket change amounts of BAT for viewing them.
-- Some prominent ad company which happens to run a search engine as a side business and build a web browser to make ad-targeting better for their customers.
I think we may be advancing to another step in that cycle with software development. Strong, principled software companies created good times in the late 2000s and 2010s, now good times have created software company leaders who are less principled, and the hard times are beginning. And eventually, after the hard times have gone on for long enough, principled leaders will hopefully emerge and create good times again.
That being said:
- I really admire the thinking and moral aptitude that resulted in the Oxide Principles page[0]. Oxide and 37signals[1] are two examples of very principled companies that are keeping good times rolling in their respective fields, and both of them do a ton to support open source software.
- And, there is nothing like ad revenue to accelerate corruption of good principles in software companies that handle user data -- to the extent that I wonder if it's in the same moral category as government officials accepting bribes.
If you are a power-user you may well benefit from using Firefox where uBlock Origin has always claimed to work best.
By switching you will also be removing power from an ad-funded near-monopoly that feels (correctly) that they can do whatever they want even if it is universally despised by users because the other choices are quickly going away. Every using using another browser weakens that grip, every user using a Chromium derivative allows them to keep trying to wedge new features that no other browser wants to implement for user privacy reasons and creates website incompatibility.
On other TVs like my Roku i do pay for a few streaming services with ads and get bombarded with ads on that tv. But its a group tv that many use.
Edit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-out-firefox-p...
Working title: Copilot for Tracking.
Stand up against the browser hegemony*, choose WebKit with support for UBlock Origin:
---
* Tongue in cheek, of course. Long live Firefox.
- integrated screen shot, which includes a “full webpage” option that handles scrolling for you
- Split View, which lets you open two webpages side by side within a single tab
I use both of these daily and get a decent productivity boost from them.
Never used it since because of data privacy concerns. But in the context of working for that company where the assumption was that I would have zero privacy it was fine
https://github.com/pl4nty/msedge/commit/96aa52634072b12fa175...
Too bad a lot of websites just don't work with Firefox. It seems web devs are not testing with Firefox anymore.
I see people complaining, I don't see concrete examples, only panic
The size of blacklists has gone from unlimited to a limited size. The blocking ability has been limited. And the worst of all, blocklists have to be bundled in extension updates and not downloaded. While they have increased the limited blocklist size for V3 overtime, I don't know if they ever changed the other limits.
I wonder how long they’ll maintain manifest v2 compatibility. Once they throw in the towel, Firefox will truly be the last stand.
But sure, let us do 5 minutes of research! So, this referral code injection was a mistake (that their CEO had to apologize for https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...)
Then there was the "donations for content creators" debacle, where they started gathering donations for various YouTubers, without.. actually talking to those YouTubers. But using their names and faces to promote the whole thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c...
Apparently, the original idea was that you could "contribute to any website you visit. The idea was that once a site reached a threshold, the potential owner would be notified. They could then authenticate (prove ownership, etc) and claim the donations." (https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1e9i5ls/how_...), which is mind boggling to me that somebody actually thought it's a good idea.
Anyway, they had to apologize for it, after hearing "important feedback": https://brave.com/blog/rewards-update/
They have also installed VPNs onto users machines without asking: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-se... I don't think they apologized for that one... But they did revert the decision.
Then there's Brave News, Brave Wallet, Brave Rewards, which is just completely unnecessary bloat IMO. You _can_ turn some of it off, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth though.
https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
They are going to keep it enabled until google removes the code from chromium in June. Then it sounds like they are going to try to use other means to offer "limited MV2 support" but there are some issues, including the fact that they don't have their own extension store (and presumably the chrome one won't allow mv2 extensions to be updated) so I'm not sure to what degree that will actually work.
Integration of Web3 features, including cryptocurrency wallets and NFT support.
Inclusion of Brave News and sponsored images on the new tab page.
Addition of a VPN service within the browser.
Feels very scammy and grifty for a project that's supposedly about user privacy.
#2 opt-in only.
#3 agreed. annoying. can opt out.
#4 opt-in only.
#5 disagreed.
Happened before I even started using it, and I've been using it for a long while now. Probably time to let this one go?
> Integration of Web3 features, including cryptocurrency wallets and NFT support.
That's not a new feature, it's been in there since I started using it, and it's off by default and then easily hidden. It didn't turn up one day turned on.
> Inclusion of Brave News and sponsored images on the new tab page.
Yeah I'll give you this one. I've turned this off... I mean they're developing free to use software, so I feel bad about it. I'd probably pay for Brave at this point, but I don't want to see ads ever. At least it's easy to turn off.
> Addition of a VPN service within the browser.
I think this one is fine? I used it once when I was staying at a hotel, it was easy to use, other than that it's just hidden.
2. Weird but not evil
3. 100% acceptable
4. Good, maybe. What vpn?
They implement compatible features in the browser itself.
Tried searching and I can't find anything about subscribing to lists on desktop either, only a few discussions about the default set of lists they use.
I actually like kiwi browser quite a lot on mobile. Extensions, Devtools(!!!) make it especially great. Try that if you want (it's on top of chromium android).
I use brave most of the time though, because I use their sync service across all my devices.
You don't think Google is spending all that money for nothing, do you?
Though now a bribe to Trump/Musk should be enough so maybe they don't need FF anymore.
As in, suppose your daily browsing generates about $3 of monthly ad revenue [0]. Instead, you have a (digital) wallet linked to your browser, which could be pre-loaded with credit each month. For each website you visit you may decide to opt-out of ads by paying a fraction of your credits.
You could even have a system where you could pay for a model with light-ads (i.e. at most 1 ad per page, 10 seconds of ads per 30min of video), or pay more for zero ads.
I understand it's a difficult system to organize and is dependent on a strong network. But I'd expect there to be a solid small market by now.
Lots of individual websites have this option (e.g. Netflix, newspapers, Spotify, Youtube Premium) but there's nothing overarching.
[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-go...
For more general pay-to-browse, it needs to have the friction of the user deciding to pay, or you still incentivize spam (maybe even worse than with ads). As long as you keep that friction, you don't really change much because most sites on the Internet aren't worth anything, especially the commercially motivated ones. The ones that are worth something already charge money (and people pay because it's valuable) or they're not trying to monetize (academia, free culture groups, hobby discussion groups, etc).
"How do we get people to pay fractions of a cent" is the wrong problem to solve. The correct related problem is "how do we filter out all the cruft that isn't even worth 1 cent?" Blocking ads removes the financial incentive for spam, and is therefore a socially positive action in addition to being prudent security posture. Assuming ads have an effect on your psychology (and we ought to believe they do), it also helps you to remain a more moral person by preventing you from receiving and internalizing constant messages to consume frivolously. With climate change being one of the most important issues of our time, cutting out such consumption is imperative.
Friction. The vast majority of people are not going to go through the effort of setting up a digital wallet to browse, when the existing system allows them to do it for free.
Some people would for sure, but then you also need websites and creators to agree to participate in the scheme (or don't, and just unethically redirect ad revenue to yourself, like Brave used to).
Of course the best would be to let users pay for not seeing ads and then shove them in their face anyway for maximum profit.
By very definition 99% of ads that could be in the slot are not there because someone is not willing to pay that much to show that ad, except for the single one that won the auction.
Ads have a maximum cost at which they don't become viable/profitable anymore.
The only difference is that now the user could bid on that ad slot himself, to keep it empty.
If you look at the average ad revenue, that wouldn't be all that much money. Certainly a fraction of what it costs to become a no-ad subscriber currently in various platforms.
ApplePay is about as frictionless as digital payments can possibly be, and I still occasionally abandon a purchase because of some annoying authentication issue.
People must be ultimately paying the money somehow. Otherwise advertisers wouldn't bother.
1. Free competition and lots of it.
2. No widely adopted standard for micropayment
3. Transaction processing fees often left very little for the site.
So, instead, we get companies like the New York Times thinking they're worth, what, $20/mo, per person, all by themselves?
1) Consume more content -> More revenue -> Means more bloated content, esp. with LLM
2) They will simply re-introduce ads even though you're paying
I really don't mind ads, and I don't really mind ad-targeting, except for 'sensitive' topics.
But I despise animated ads, big walls of ads, interstitial ads, popovers, etc, etc, etc. Just be like google in the early '00s: I want content, and I'd be very happy to have non obtrusive relevant-to-the-current-topic ads on the side.
Although I wish more browsers made it easier to selectively enable it per site, like Orion.
And good riddance. I really don't get any personal value out of the vast majority of modern web apps. Much, but not all, of what we do on the web could be via a much more basic interface.
... but it won't be.
Delivering information and digesting it from users is the purpose of the web as the user sees it. HN is a good example of a website meant to do this. No ads, minimal algorithms, no feature creep beyond a traditional news-and-comment feed.
Only one problem: that doesn't drive engagement. I come to HN because I'm genuinely interested in the content and discussion here. Being interested in content and discussion, though, is not nearly as profitable as being addicted. A lot of the UI elements and behaviors of websites today are meant to drive addiction, and thus, engagement.
Hell, HN itself might not even be profitable or even break-even. It's the side-project of YC; something that exists to further the profit-building exploits of that organization.
Heck, stuff sometimes breaks without me even trying to disable anything, like airbnb login via facebook popup stopped working suddenly few months ago (biggest internet mistake I ever done many years ago, as a host I am locked to specific well-rated account and airbnb support told me they can't migrate my account to another form of auth).
Edit: just saw its 'per site' - that would work for me, but not for my parents who live far. But damn I don't want to do this active fight of cat and mouse with whole internet. Firefox/ublock origin user here, on both desktop and phone for many years. Internet looks utterly horrible when I open it somewhere without those, hell youtube with all those ads is absolutely ridiculous shit service. Apple devices I've seen aren't that good either, shame that would be a great selling point for me.
JS is a core part of the modern web experience. 10 years go MAYBE Noscript would work, I never bothered, you end up having to whitelist a bunch of sites anyway even 10 years ago.
Ads that previously were blocked at the HTTP Response level. ManifestV3 removed this API.
A world where the number of ad rules exceeds the new limit. Which is 500 dynamic rules, 50 static rulesets, 30,000 rules. This may sound high but its not.
I mostly use Edge for accessing the big streaming websites and Firefox for everything else. Video runs somewhat better on Edge for me.
E.g., DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links in Google's Search or the ads on YouTube. And while my NextDNS has blocked ads on my Samsung TV, it was unable to block ads on the new Max streaming service (former HBO).
I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking. If it's for privacy, I guess it's fine, but 1st party requests can and do share your data with first parties, with just one more level of indirection.
I, for one, block ads because ads can be dangerous for my family and even for myself. I don't want ads because I don't want behavior modification, or malware. I also don't want my son to watch ads for services that should be illegal, such as gambling services. And don't get me wrong, I'm one of those people that actually pays for subscriptions to avoid ads, I'm against freeloading as well.
So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those websites anyway.
"or the ads on YouTube" i use other methods for that on Firefox.
"I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking." I do not need any reason to block or allow any form of communication on my own infrastructure. I get to decide what connects to it and what comes in and gets out of it. I am fully aware some info will always get passed because otherwise i cannot consume the things i want to consume.
"So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those websites anyway."
So far my list of 5 million blocked sites serves me quite well in pihole.
I use NextDNS on both my phone and laptop. Much easier setup, and much more portable (e.g. it'll work on cafe wifi).
Firefox is debatably less bearable than a Chromium based browser with uBlock Lite at least on Windows.
I'm slowly thinking that this might be the correct way forward. It's difficult, at least for me, because I am addicted to the internet, but recently I realized that I need to be more mindful about my internet time, simply because it became shit, and using it actually has hugely negative impact on my life. I'm not sure how to phrase it, but it's not "ah yeah I'll do that someday", but rather "ok, things are getting serious, I am making a decision and starting to follow though right now".
Essentially, if I open 2-3 pages with these types of ads, I run out of RAM (16 GB) and the whole laptop slows down. I simply can't browse the web while working (which may be a good thing!).
Of course, part of the problem is Outlook and Teams and some other apps using a lot of RAM, but Chrome is the real bottleneck.
So no, not "just bearable". I couldn't even read this article. It's the norm that I just close the tabs without reading because I don't want a laggy PC.
My understanding is that adblockers: 1. block requests from certain domains 2. block elements matching certain criteria
Does this change just affect #1?
Huh? uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine.
I've seen absolutely no difference after switching.
I would encourage you to read their explanation.
For instance it doesn't block youtube ads. Arguably the single most important reason people have ublock.
Also, original uBlock Origin didn't always block YouTube ads.
Adblocking with YouTube has gone back and forth. It's not about original vs lite.
Oh please. Change your DNS to AdGuard or NextDNS and job done.
Not exactly the simplest instructions, to your point, but you can still just do it once for them or get on a call and walk them through it. They might even notice that websites load faster when they don't make dozens of requests to advertisers and trackers.
> NextDNS supports all 4 protocols. See the setup tab for more information on how to use them.
If you are trying to intercept dns traffic that ignores your dns setting that’s a separate issue.
Point is that using any kind of DNS based blocking is far better at the router level but the above poster is right in that a lot of ISPs these days make it impossible to adjust your router level DNS and even for someone tech minded setting up some kind of downstream secondary router can be become so convoluted that they just give up.
I really have no clue, but as far as I can see the answer is never better. More centralized, more bloated, more invasive, less choice, and less freedom.
I've always held AOL fondly. You paid per month, and get access to a giant ecosystem including forums, chat, email, news, zines, games, etc. Mostly ad free as I remember.
In fact, when NetZero became a thing, people mostly weren't interested. They were turned off by the stupid permanent ad bar, and the lack of community.
I wish something like AOL would come back around. Charge me $20 a month, give me a community, email, etc. Don't dare show me an ad.
We're just now getting back to pay for no ads, but its 5 dollars here or there for disparate services.
Man, AOL was ahead of its time. All it needs today that it didn't have was the 'wall', 'profile', whatever. And of course vid/pic sharing.
I remember when moving off AOL to broadband, my family hated it despite the speed. They thought it was clunky and stupid to have to download separate programs or visit different websites to do one thing at a time, in what was in AOL an integration.
FB is probably closest to that experience today, but of course is ad and data driven, and somehow still doesn't feel very community like.
I'd love to see a new, electron based AOL type service come about today. It'd cost a crapton to get the network and content up to attract any user base, else I'd try it myself.
I remember being blown away by discovering people would randomly make private chats and trying to guess at what the chat name would be for things I was interested in as a kid. Then I remember having my mind blown that AOL had a built in browser where someone had built a website, not a keyword, that actually had my niche interest that no one in real life did. Then I discovered you could download a much better version of that experience called a browser.
Your idea is just Facebook where you can't link out and is fully corporate controlled. Which I guess is actually Twitter.
I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
Is it really that different from having the .com of a word today?
> I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
I struggle to see how you got to that conclusion, but it's an absolutely true statement nonetheless so I cannot complain.
It reminds me of that meme, maybe called the midwit meme?
On the left you have the dumb guy, saying AOL does everything. On the right you have the hooded guy, saying AOL does everything.
In the middle you have the crying guy saying no you should use Netscape browser, and ICQ for messaging, and usenet for forums, and dogpile for search, etc.
I was reminded of this recently by comparing an old 90s Toyota to the latest models. The 90s cars were over-engineered and 30 years later, had more breathing room to keep going. Meanwhile the latest stuff is all plastic pieces that have been engineered to perform many tasks using just one piece. The idea was that they could focus on making that one piece as robust as possible and still save money on reducing parts and making the operators life easier during assembly (no one cares about the plight of the repairman). All in the name of saving costs to keep the product competitive in the face of the declining value of fiat money.
Well even though its supposed to be better, the new stuff still sucks. People are holding onto their old cars, we lost so many wonderful 2000s cars due to cash for clunkers. The designs and colors are also more boring.
How do you fight this?
Well as software people we have an out: Homemade software and open source. Homemade software allows us to cut the cruft out of products that companies add. We pay for in our time but if it is important enough to us then it has to be done.
This applies to everything: You can make your own food instead of accepting the declining garbage from takeout/restaurants, you can buy raw materials and do your own woodwork/electronics/metalworking.
Even something like cars can be somewhat pushed back on. Communities form around popular cars to document and better understand the issues prevalent with certain models. Use this info to self select on a vehicle that has a large community and to help anticipate problems that can be coming down the pike with that particular model.
Again, no one has infinite time so you have to decide for yourself what things are important to you and take back control while trying your best to minimize nonsense in other areas.
Ootb VSCode is already a superior experience to Emacs, which I only begrudgingly move away from because of subpar TypeScript + JSX support like 6 years ago. However, after I started using VSCode for work there was just no going back. I use VSCode a lot for text manipulations. I find its regex search replace much easier than using sed in the terminal. Multiple cursors, Git integration, beautiful diffs, command palette is just like Emacs M-x.
Without its proprietary plugins it's still a great gift to the public and forks like Cursor is a good showcase of that. Thanks to monaco almost every web editor nowaways have great usability, syntax highlighting and the keybindings that I'm familiar with.
I think the bigger joke of the century are open source beneficiaries that only take and give nothing back, but still have the audacity to demand for things and hound open source developers to implement what they want. You can't have your cake and eat it too
I switched to Edge on my Windows machine for a while, because that meant that I didn’t need the disk space for an additional browser (same as when just using Safari on Mac) and it was reasonably pleasant and worked well. Guess that’s ending, I liked the DevTools in Firefox a bit more anyways.
Is that even a consideration nowadays? That's wild!
On Linux, you typically can install whatever browser and uninstall the default one that came with the OS if you want.
Not going to be a big deal once I install the new 1 TB SSD, though I’ll probably also need to move to Windows 11 in the process, because of the EOL (will still dual boot with Linux).
Chromium devtools has more features but more cluttered and more annoying to work with.For the common devtools tasks Firefox works better IMHO. But that can be my bias after using Firefox/Firebug devtools for over 15 years.
My latest move was to merge every tab in all windows to one window only (with an extension) and start using vertical tabs (better scrolling and overview of tabs) Then sort tabs by title with another extension (Edge built in AI tab sort sucked on sorting so many tabs). With sorted tabs I could start create tab groups, Edge AI tab sort worked better when the tabs was already sorted alphabetically and managed to create most of the tab groups for me. With all this reorganization it was easier to manage all of them and to start closing tabs.
I’m not done yet but it is much better and number of opened tabs has been significantly reduced. Now I have one main window with all the tabs and some temporary windows that is only used for temporary stuff that get closed within a day.
What makes things a bit more complicated is that I also use two profiles, private and work. Firefox always sucked on multi-profile setup. Firefox’s new container stuff is somewhat improvement but not fully (at least when I tried last)
What would be nice is a browser where tabs, history and bookmarks blended together seamlessly.
How on earth do you find what you're looking for in 200+ tabs?! When I'm deep into something I'll have maybe 10-15 open. It's such a good feeling when I'm done and realise I can close them all. I could almost let out an audible sigh.
If you forget about a bookmark, is that a bad thing? Maybe what you really need is a todo list that supports more than just browser tabs.
Finding tabs was a bit of hit or miss, you can search for them if remember the title, otherwise you have to manually find it, time consuming.
With my new strategy that I described above, it has become much easier to find what I’m looking for.
Bookmarking has always been clunky, putting them into hierarchical folder structure is both time consuming and has the same problem as files and folders, it lacks a dimension, a bookmark can be in multiple folders.
Bookmark toolbar could work, how paradoxical it may sound with all the tabs opened, it just don’t like that UI element cluttering my browser.
Forgetting about bookmarks can be a good thing, it is similar when browser loses all opened tabs, the feeling is a strange mix of anxiety and relief, anxiety of missing out but a relief that I don’t need to process them anymore.
Sometimes a find ten year old bookmarks on some backup, most bookmarks dead or just out of date. I feel we need better ways to organize things in this temporary cloud world.
I think this is heading to a point where lot of power users are simply not updating their browsers any more.
Personally I'll take the miniscule chance of being infected with malware due to a security bug on an older version of Firefox over the inability to run uBlock Origin any day. I can recover from malware installation. I can not use the web without an ad blocker.
What I'll probably do is use an isolated sandbox environment for any web browsing I need absolute security (e.g. online banking/shopping).
I've used Firefox on android for a while as android chrome hasn't had adblocking for a long time.
Am pretty anti-google these days but it'll take some time to untangle myself from the ecosystem.
Anyway, I've largely moved back to Firefox on the desktop too, swapped a few icons about so my muscle memory now opens Firefox instead of Chrome and it's been totally painless. An easy win.
The next step is start paying for Kagi...
It feels a bit like ~25 years ago when Yahoo was this bloated do everything company with a bad search engine and someone showed me this simple website with just a search bar that was super quick with clean results...
Shame that Microsoft just chose to no longer have a real browser. Oh well, long live MSIE I guess.
They haven't been the Windows company for... Oh Christ, I'm getting old, since 2014. The day Sataya became CEO they officially became a cloud company.
If it wouldn't literally fuck over the entire world, they'd just stop Windows entirely.
[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
> Injecting content scripts in a non-declarative way is unreliable in MV3 due to fact that extensions are really service workers which can be suspended at any time.
[1]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
[2]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
Every time this conversation comes up here and elsewhere, you get a huge swath of comments decrying Mozilla or suggesting Brave instead, which is Chrome in a trenchcoat last I checked. I've used all sorts of browsers over the years, and I keep returning to Firefox, at this point being able to configure it for good level of privacy in less than a minute with each install on a new machine.
My experience is perhaps skewed, but I view Google and Microsoft as modern enemies of the Web I want to see happen, perhaps having started off the hero, but living long enough to see themselves become the villain. Their products seem actively and aggressively hostile to users and compliant with websites that demand we use them for "best experience" which, by now we should all know means harvesting our data.
Again, I have some ignorance here that needs to be rectified, but where are the true apples to apples comparisons of all browsers so that users can use to evaluate which is best? I don't mean just surface level features and marketing woo, but what's happening at the code level that allows the developer or websites we visit to treat us like data thralls. Where are the resources to learn about that in these discussions?
I'm a fan of Brave and Arc. The LadyBird announcement is great.
Somehow Chrome has fried my brain and I can't stand the UX of other browsers. I understand you may be asking "how bad can it be? Its just a browser?" but when I use other things (even Safari) it just doesn't cut the mustard.
Same goes for, eh, everything else actually: from political parties to non-profits, any time something isn't executed perfectly or some compromise needs to be made, people pull the rug by moving away (votes, donations, spreading the word, whatnot) and we're more in the hands of the orgs we wanted to oppose than before. Bathwater baby sports. We should hold olympics for them
FWIW I use Firefox with Google Docs/Sheets extensively, with no issues.
I have more issues with Mozilla management and more reasons to do so than almost anyone on HN, and yet I still use Firefox as my predominant browser, as I have done so since 2003. I worked at Mozilla and then quit over some of my concerns, yet at the same time it's blatantly obvious that Firefox very much empowers you as a user to configure anything you like in `about:config` regardless of what the default settings may be.
I predict this will only get worse as the iPad Kids in Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha come of age and accept the soulless shitheap that is modern corporate software without question. You're on the right path, all you can do is make your own individual choice and continue pointing out the sheer laziness and hypocrisy of those who complain but do nothing about it, including in their own lives.
I appreciate your recommendation, I'm just frustrated with the level of discourse I see in these discussions.
Sadly they chose not.
I'm curious as to why you suspect this. Have they stated so?
That said I've now read that the API is still available to policy based extensions (essentially OS installed extensions) in manifest v3, so that doesn't hold water since it's literally the same API.
The reality is that no business likes ad-blockers so why go through that trouble only to get less money?
Together with the recent FF news, this is terrible news for the open, user-controlled web.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
It's funny how Chrome became practically my new Internet Explorer.
(1) negligence on the side of web devs (2) the site in silly ways relying on shit like google fonts or other trackers, which a privacy consciou user will block (3) the site relying on being able to plaster your face with ads, which u block (ha!) (4) stronger fingerprinting countermeasures on FF and again site stupidly relying on that (5) incapability of web devs to test their stuff properly (6) junior web devs being very green and not adhering to standards, that will work in any mainstream modern browser
In 99.9% of the cases it comes down to bad engineering or even intentionally ethically highly questionable methods.
For iDevices relying on Orion Browser paired with Ublock Origin and NextDNS set up. As good as Safari but without the annoyances of Plugins. Their compatablity mode seems to work on sites where Safari seems to have issues.
Ungoggled Chromium for sites that seem to break on both Firefox and Orion, unfortunately there are loads out there. It's a shame that Firefox isn't as effecient with Battery Consumption as Orion is.
Brave/Edge just never cut it for me.
Edge has all the user-hostile stuff much more in your face. Like the shopping bar that keeps popping up with coupons or tries to get you to buy at a shop that pays more for advertising. And it tries to trick the user into getting bogged down with loans by offering buy now pay later schemes.
All the sneaky tracking stuff from chrome also happens. So why would you bother?
The only reason it's still popular is that companies love it because they can lock it down in full BOFH mode. At my work I can't even choose to reopen the last tabs anymore on launch. That and pretty much every other setting is "managed by your organisation"
(I've only very briefly worked with restrictive Windows, and it was years ago.)
Check it out here: https://nextdns.io/
This is a cat and mouse game. The overarching issue here is the web embraced the monoculture of Chromium as the basis for browsers. Can we really expect any less?
I've had good success with Violent Monkey and scripts from Greasy Fork on every browser I run, which is Edge (work becoz SSO), Chrome, and Firefox. They have never been detected.
> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn’t have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles content blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, content blockers have no knowledge of users’ history or the websites they visit.
This is the same change that ManifestV3 brings - ad blockers can no longer run code to determine if they get to block content or not, they have to supply lists that the browser applies.
If you're getting good results that just means you're using good lists.
This is from manifest v3 google page. Is this declarativeNetRequest API not able to provide any filtration ? Proxying traffic does affect privacy, I agree, but that also means that Google is trusting all traffic by default which is another privacy concern. So the privacy concern seems to not make sense except that in one of the two, google loses money because of ads being blocked.
It'll still block some ads, but anti-ad-blocker tech will have an easier time.
Don't want to use Firefox, too many rendering bugs and performance issues we've run into.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43201096
There really isn't a trustworthy Web browser anymore.
It's good to call Mozilla out for doing something shitty, but it always feels chicken little at best when people yell about switching to any Chromium varient. Usually it just feels kind of like Astro turfing,
The best version of ublock origin is the one that is banned by Google but allowed in Firefox, Ad Nauseum
Sadly, I still cannot add custom filters to uBlock Lite.
[1]: https://browsernative.com/kiwi-browser-discontinued-7097/
We DO have an ace up our sleeves should we choose to use it:
Stop using any of it
next: kernel code deployment _MUST_ go thru them, namely internet or offline storage for clients paying more (A LOT more).
next: app installation _MUST_ go thru their store (or the ones from their big tech friends).
next: "validated" hardware will have to have _NOT_ "secure boot" you can disable.
And now we have a "MicrosoftStation", the new video game console.
After 21 years of Firefox, that was rather bitter goodbye moment.
I use Firefox for everything else :)
"uBlock Origin was turned off. This extension is no longer supported. Edge recommends that you remove it."
I have a few decades of experience with the Internet, and even I understood the dialog box as saying that Ublock didn't work anymore. In reality, as the text says, it still works if you click "Manage Extension" and turn it back on.
This infuriates me.
I sincerely think Microsoft can't be trusted.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2595287/ublock-origin-is-off...
But by all means, keep the EEE story.
I dunno their adblocker is the best one I've ever used. AFAIK they built it themselves.
The only other option is to keep v2 in chromium itself and have Chrome disable it... While still paying the cost of supporting it in all new feature dev.
There's no world where Microsoft spins up a new engineering team solely to deal with the extra cost of keeping v2 around.
That said this sucks. I got my first internship on the Internet Explorer team by talking about how hard it was to install an ad blocker in IE, compared to Chrome.
Modularity in SW is still a challenge after 50 years of progress.