[0] See https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1in2ls4/ubloc...
1. These browsers can barely add their own functionality on top of upstream, and maintaining Manifest v2 compatibility may be expensive. Consider that the development of Chrome exceeds 1 billion per year.
2. They all use Chrome's Webstore as a distributing channel, except for Edge, but IMO, Microsoft has an even bigger interest in seeing uBO die.
Brave itself has ad-blocking built-in, which won't be affected, and it's fairly capable, but promising that they'll keep compatibility with uBO is a lie, if they ever made that promise.
> For as long as we’re able (and assuming the cooperation of the extension authors), Brave will continue to support some privacy-relevant MV2 extensions—specifically AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix
I'm no fan of Brave, but it's nice to see that they at least somewhat acknowledge that they likely won't be able to support v2 forever. Only time will tell how long they're "able".
1 billion what, LOC? Dollars? Downloads? Emails from the ad department demanding QoD improvements to Chrome?
Firefox is currently developed with half a billion, but IMO, that is why there are only 3 browser engines left, with all the “forks” depending on the upstream.
But Google haven't made those changes to how web requests are performed yet, so it's impossible to say how difficult it will be to add back whatever functionality is necessary to add back dynamic web request hooks. Maybe it'll turn out to be relatively easy, and maybe Google will leave that part of Chromium relatively unchanged for a long time. Only time will tell.
edit: link to their adblocker: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
Original comment: Brave's built in blocker is OK for what it does but I believe that it only replaces a subset of all uBO's features. For example I don't think that Brave's built in blocker has an element picker that lets you create cosmetic filters on the fly. I use that feature all the time in uBO.
I haven't used it enough to know if it works like the uBlock one, but at least it is there.
I feel like nobody will have to consciously do anything in particular, with the current way how things are going.
- Chromium is the modern IE and developers will primarily be on the hook for supporting it, Firefox support will be an afterthought so some sites will just be broken, moving more users over to Chromium.
- The Firefox marketshare is dwindling, it's likely that the users with proper ad blocking will eventually be a rounding error and therefore quite inconsequential. Especially if there are any more ad-related APIs pushed by Chrome that make users more profitable (e.g. Topics API).
- Even among tech enthusiasts, Mozilla in particular doesn't have very good reputation (e.g. how much they spend on actually improving the browser vs other initiatives) and I don't see the marketshare of Firefox skyrocketing, unless something big happens. New competitors like Ladybird are also niche, though it's a really cool project.
- If Apple ever moves over Safari to Chromium, like Edge did, then that effect will only be amplified.
It's basically non-existing already (less than 4% globally) [1] and with basically zero mobile presence.
[1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage#top-browsers...
I posted this comment some days ago [1]:
To put some numbers on what a 2.54% market share means, Firefox actually tracks this data. See here: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity:
> Monthly Active Users (MAU) measures the number of Firefox Desktop clients active in the past 28 days.
> February 10, 2025: 163,203,913 clients
> February 17, 2025: 163,742,671 clients
It's possible some people accept it because they don't know any better, but I have never seen anyone going back once they realize it's possible to get rid of the pollution; I have never heard anyone say "where dit the ads go? I miss them".
So maybe it's just our responsibility as power users to educate our friends more?
This causes the majority of people to only be exposed to Edge/IE or Chrome at work, and use their phones the rest of the time.
However I do not rely on extensions/add-ons as I believe extensions/add-ons are not the right solution. Unless the computer user is compiling the browser herself, extensions/add-ons can be crippled/disabled/etc. by whomever is distributing binaries. When the distributor is supported by online advertising as is the case for both Chrome and Firefox, and all the other so-called "modern" graphical browsers, this possibility cannot be ignored.
I have primarily been using Chrome up until this point as I was under the impression that performance (and therefore battery life) is bad with FF on MacOS. Recent results seem to indicate that Chrome is in fact the worst offender [1].
Yesterday I uninstalled Arc as they have all but abandoned their browser to work on some AI crap browser (after saying they planned to support manifest v2 for the forseeable future).
Today I installed Orion Browser [2]. It's using webkit under the hood and seems to be far lighter on battery life than Chrome, Arc (Blink) and Firefox. They fully support FF and Chrome extensions and therefore UBO seems to be working (on the whole) very well.
[1] https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...
> We are getting a lot of repeat questions about windows/linux/android version and sometimes it appears that users think that the team is choosing not to work on these platforms. The situation is quite different and simpler - we do not have the resources to hire a new team to do any of these platforms yet.
> And since Orion is funded by its users only, it is entirely up to the number of subscribers and Orion+ sales we have that will enable funding a new team to make Orion for any new platform. And building a browser is not cheap, especially one on top of WebKit.
> Ways you can help accelerate this is: > Contribute to Orion development with your time > Help spread the word about Orion to attract more users > Get Orion+ and financially support developmet
This is a tricky situation to be in. A lack of resources to support multiple platforms, but the solution being more subscribers. But the incentive structure is perplexing. Those supporting development going to be those already using Orion. And those not on Mac/iOS are unlikely to financially support a browser they can't use in the hopes it might one day come to a platform I use.
[1] https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l...
Orion user on Mac (but I think of it as a better Safari if anyone saw me writing I only use Safari and Firefox), but would like to have it available on my non Mac machines as well.
I think the smallest macropod is the Tammar Wallaby?
I believe that most say "remove" because they get removed from the plugin-bar when disabled.
I'll ditch Chrome without a second thought if they really remove it. They'll lose access to my browsing history, so I don't see what they have to gain with it. What about the ads which are blocked at network level via PiHole?
Have they even considered that PiHole might then catch on and start blocking ads on mobile devices in households which would otherwise not use it?
The fact that Orion on iOS existed was a major reason I was able to this. On Android I was a Firefox user since Firefox was the only browser with the ability to run proper uBo.
Orion is not without its bugs, but it does support a lot of Firefox and Chrome extensions. But you don’t even need to install uBo as an extension,it’s got built in ad blocker with the ability to add or remove filter lists. Even without installing uBo, in terms of ad blocking, it instantly matched Firefox on Android. That I can install things such as Tapermonkey or Bypass Paywall Clean as extensions is a huge bonus.
It’s amazing how Google is pushing its early adopters and cheerleaders away by one anti user move after another.
I still wish Apple would remove some of the restrictions on iOS, allow other browser engines etc. Installing unknown software from unsigned developers on macOS is really difficult these days but still doable if you know where to look. If only iOS was the same. The potential lost revenue from loss of control would be more than made up by new people who would be brought on to the platform.
They have not shipped anything but browser updates and minor fixes for months.
I would LOVE my browser to do just that!
That said, it’s been fine for me and I’m still using it. I don’t see any reason to abandon it yet. When the company fails maybe they’ll open source or sell it. I’d happily pay for this.
It makes money almost exclusively from ads, and people want to block ads. No matter how they try to portray decisions like this - it is obvious they are moving in direction where people are unable to do what they want.
I am sure if Google from today would launch a browser, it would fail to gain traction knowing all the state of their core business and negative sentiment users have.
Let's hope Mozilla doesn't go the same route, but it seems they are also not under good leadership and are slowly loosing the trust of users.
(Yes, that is a joke I hope, but if I compare what I think a puppet controlled by Google would do to destroy the Mozilla brand to what Mozillas CEO has been doing, I think there is a lot of similarities.)
The development of Firefox costs around half a billion $ per year. Estimates for Chrome range from 1 to 2 billion $ per year. In other words, take the donations of something like Wikimedia, which is arguably very successful in asking for donations, and you'd still be very short on the money needed to fund a web browser. And if you bring those costs down to something more manageable, like say, 100 million $, and assuming you can convince people to donate (IMO, when pigs will fly), then you'll have a browser that may be completely unable to compete with Chromium.
All the browser “forks” survive because Google and Mozilla are doing the hard work.
Are you sure that USD 500 million goes into the development of Firefox each year? Or does it go to funding of questionable Mozilla Foundation projects?
Admittedly, I have not checked the numbers recently but last I looked into it I got the impression that Firefox development was an embarrassingly small amount of what Mozilla spends their money on.
Half a billion, IIRC, is what Mozilla gets from Google every year. This is AFAIK mostly not spent on developing the browser.
To add insult to injury AFAIK it arrives through Mozilla corporation (which develops the browser) and is then funneled through to the foundation to be spent on "initiatives".
I already knew the same change was coming to Chrome so I went directly to Firefox.
I will burn my computer to the ground before I watch any kind of intrusive non-contextual advertisement online.
I used to work adjacent to a team working on anti-ad-blocking tech. Safari's protections are fairly easy to circumvent, with Adblock Plus not being great either. It was uBlock Origin that was making this team sweat, and they didn't even bother with it.
The reason is that whatever you can do in the browser, e.g., via JavaScript, uBO can inject scripts with stubs and protections to fool any anti-ad-blocking tech that ads are, in fact, being served. There's no way to combat uBO without a degraded user experience, even for users that aren't using ad-blockers. Compared with uBlock Origin, other alternatives looked like toys.
Note that many people are happy with just DNS-level blocking, even if it's the easiest to circumvent. That's because many publishers don't bother with circumventing ad-blocking protections, either because it's too expensive, or because they don't want to piss off users. But that doesn't mean that the available solutions are equivalent. They aren't.
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Note, if an ad-blocker also works “inside other apps”, on iPhone it's only because the same blockers can be activated inside web views. But not in all apps and not even in all web views, e.g., try it in Facebook's app.
Android has a solution that actually works in apps, but to achieve this, it requires root, and it will act as a man in the middle, and that's not something that I can trust:
LLMs are much better in searching for information than advertisement-exposure optimized google.
People are paying for LLMs, consumers are no longer a commodity.
Internet will change, maybe creators will be paid for their content? But what will happen with advertisers?
Soon, I expect them to be almost invisible. The LLM will gently be nudging the user towards some products rather than others.
For example, let's say a user asks how to do X. The LLM could then respond with an itemised list of steps to accomplish X. But the steps might involve doing it in a way that would later require services from some company.
Obviously, there is a potential to do this in ways we cannot even imagine yet.
Blocking it using traditional adblocking technologies like uBO will not be possible.
Only solution I see is to run trusted LLMs locally. But it will require some sort of "open source"-like trusted training of those LLMs. I think we need a movement similar to what gave us Wikipedia and Free software in the 90s/00s.
In other words, LLMs work well when you don't really need them and don't work well when you do. I have yet to see an LLM give a good result when a better result, written by a human, isn't available.
Completely disagree. Just this morning I've been trying to search for how to pair a wireless headset that I own to a new receiver. Gemini tells me there is no need to pair the adapter, but if I do need to do it I should press <button that doesn't exist on the model I specifically searched for>. It also pushes the PDF and TS articles that the manufacturer provides off of my main search window.
This is my example from today, but I have consistently found Gemini suggests outdated, or inaccurate information and cites "sources" that don't match what it says.
I.e confirming your opinion, compiling a report about something you're not gonna take action on etc
Ask your LLM: "How many percents of world populations is paying for LLMs? Any estimates how many will never pay for it?"
Before anyone had ever heard of Electron, you used to be able to embed gecko into other apps and it could render html in other applications (that’s how Firefox itself started cause the old monolithic Mozilla suite separated the engine into gecko so other apps could use it, and then a bunch of Mozilla engineers started developing a new UI around it as their side project). Of course they gave up on that, and look where we are now.
Testament to its engineering team really that despite so many own goals and false directions from its leadership (Remember Firefox OS?) the project is still alive.
(Pax nubem would probably be too obscure…)
https://tuta.com/ is a German privacy-focused alternative that I'm currently using for email & calendar. Easy switch, although I was already using web clients rather than IMAP before the switch.
I looked at Proton Drive for cloud storage, but their CEO Andy Yen is a Trump supporter (https://archive.ph/2025.01.15-162500/https://www.reddit.com/...), which makes me question his decision-making.
I settled on a 5€ / month VPS from Hetzner and using Syncthing instead, but this requires some minimal amount of technical skills to set up and maintain.
There is no alternative to YouTube, unfortunately.
In general it involves setting ExtensionInstallForcelist, but I haven't tried it in practice yet, it's a concept..
Funnily enough, it made me review the block lists of the extension and I realized that I could select more of them. Too early to jump to conclusions.
It’s a fork of Firefox by some young developers from Japan who seem to have good values and ideals. It’s been my daily driver for 6 months now (on Mac, Windows and Linux).
I originally found it because I wanted to easily have vertical tabs in Firefox (without the horizontal tab bar being left over) and got tired of manually editing Firefox’s chrome.css file (which acts differently on different platforms). Floorp allowed me to do this out of the box with no dramas.
I then discovered its many other cool features and Mozilla’s telemetry and their other sneaky advertising are also disabled by default. As a Firefox fork, it of course supports all Firefox extensions including proper uBlock origin.
(at least is has been force-removed on one of my machines. On another machine, it hasn't happened yet)
Already migrated my Firefox to Librewolf, just need to find something for Chrome, as I don't really follow the scene close.
I wonder if Google asks them not to implement one because of the search engine deal?
These will die if Firefox dies as well. Its a dire situation!
I'm a happy Firefox user on mobile though (yeah, I know, I know the recent changes in their legal stuff)
If Firefox performed better for me I would have switched to it long ago. This is on Windows 10 btw.
gfx.webrender.all was set to false. I will give true a try. Thanks.
Everything is a lot smoother now than it was about 3-4 years when I last tried, even with the same hardware.
Happily using Firefox as my daily browser now.
By the way does anyone know if you can just turn off updates on Chrome and have it keep working in its present state?
It will stop working. Why not get ahead of the curve and move to Firefox now?
In a way, every time a Firefox user-agent string is logged it is a sort of vote for a more open web.
My observation is that the developers who spearheaded the MV3 transition did so for understandable technical reasons and without any consideration for marketing concerns, yet their explanations get downvoted in favor of conspiracy theories.
It's in fact the other browsers who try to market sticking to MV2 as a unique feature, even though they too will abandon it sooner rather than later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Ad blocking was one of the original reasons people switched from IE to Firefox in the 2004-2008 era. Hopefully, history will repeat itself again.
In the long run, the answer will not be Chrome. The world needs a browser engine that’s not tied to an ad company