Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads

Why wait? Migrate now. There's even Firefox for mobile with ublock

Yup

Easy to understand. People don't like change.

Despite 25 years in IT, and knowing better, I only recently switched back to Firefox. I expected a fair bit of hassle, and I won't say the transition was seamless, but I was astounded.

Those of us in the know aren't doing any good circle jerking ourselves over our superior browser. We need to get our friends, coworkers and relatives engaged. And that should be easy if we contrast our ad-free experience with theirs.

I'd use Firefox over brave. The company behind brave will still sell your data.

They're selling the tor feature of brave. You can install tor in FF.

I like brave because it's staffed with developers full-time to block YouTube. I don't love their crypto, but I don't use it, and it does pay their devs.

brave is based on chromium, so it's not 100% safe from google

Yea, that is what gets me too, when I look at the blockers to use; Ad blockers have access to all keystrokes, forms and pages. They have access to my banking and other codes when I use them .

While I am sure the more popular blockers do not abuse this, and the code most likely checked line by line. It’s still possible for a handful of mistakes to allow supply chain attacks or a dozen other things to happen.

It worries me, so I don’t use them as extension and use security elsewhere

Thankfully, Firefox is open-source, so we can just use one of the forks, or perhaps Ladybird will be ready for general release by that time.

Firefox already adopted manifest V3 but specifically kept the features needed for adblockers

Yep, I'm watching intently with the shit they've been doing.

Make sure jnn-pa.googleapis.com isn't blocked anywhere in your network. It may perhaps be blocked in a filter list you have activated in uBO, DNS, VPN, Firewall, anti-virus, Firefox enhanced tracking protection, etc.

Try NewPipe or a fork of that for YouTube on Android.

Saaaaame for me on PC. Such a bummer.

FreeTube is available for Windows and Android. It has SponsorBlock built in as well.

I know its everyone's personal choice and all that but in my opinion people should stop using chromium engine browsers. It was a good engine however the fact that chromium has the majority users is the only thing holding lazy developers from porting websites to work with other browser engines gives google more control.

What you are missing out on? Probably not much. Some sites might even work worse if you switch, due to lazyness or sabotage by devs.

Using Firefox is good for the ecosystem in general, to have a counter balance to Google. I use both Firefox and chromium and see very little difference. Some extensions might be worth it (like the title says), so that might be a difference for you.

fuck brave. use librewolf.

Support for Chromuin backed browsers ?

I keep Throriim there for the odd shit ball site thear refuses but then thats the point.

Brave altered URLs clicked to add their own affiliate links. Browsers should go to where you click. That's like their whole job. There are reasons to dislike Brave apart from crypto.

You don’t want crypto, don’t use it.

I use Brave as my Chrome based browser when not using Floorp but there were other issues with Brave in the past like injecting their affiliate links unbeknownst to users so they could make money off them. They have reverted that decision but that they thought it was acceptable in the first place leaves some to question, rightly, what other shenanigans they might pull. They've also had issues with paying out Creators BAT tokens.

Good news for Mom, Firefox doesn't really change functionality wise compared to Chrome.

Sometimes people just refuse common sense and have to be left to ruin their own lives, no matter how much you love them.

Cause theres no point drowning yourself, trying to keep idiots that refuse to swim above water.

And then it gets blamed every time something doesn't work right with the internet

Honestly that's way too much work. Keep it simple imo.

Bullshit, they are trying to kneecap ad blocking to protect their bottom line. They could have protected people from sketchy add one without fucking up ublock

Good, smart IT would have installed ublock and locked that shit down. Saves bandwidth and protects the kids.

But you're probably right, most IT departments are useless.

I was able to install it on my daughter's Chromebook.

The IT department at my daughter's school allowed me to install the uBlock Origin extension last year. Granted, some extensions (and websites for that matter, no PornHub) were blocked, but not that one.

Joe Camel

Except no they don't because they have to do things like research for their essays, which requires using the web in general.

It must be a wealthier school district because Chromebooks are far cheaper, even in bulk, than Surface notebooks.

https://discountcomputerdepot.com/shop?product_listings=Chromebooks+For+Students

That type of person didn't use ublock to begin with. Anyone that did is going to be a Firefox user today.

Even if only a fraction of those kinds of users switch, that's still millions of users chrome loses, and no longer get to make a buck off of.

Yeah, it takes some mental effort to change your habits, people are more likely to just install a new extension.

BUT, those extensions are probably next, dropping uBlock is part of a long-standing war by Google against ad blocking of all kinds. So at some point Chrome users won't be able to escape ads, and then i do wonder if they'll switch.

I feel like normal people who are too lazy to care would probably just use the default browser that came with their device. It will be Chrome if it's an Android, but it will be everything but Chrome if it's any other OS, it will be Edge or Safari.

Now i haven't installed Chrome in a minute, but how many devices is it the default for? My understanding is that a lot of Chrome users specifically looked for it and installed it to use instead of the default, especially Windows users. And for that public, i do think it matters, i do think they would consider switching.

As an example, Firefox still had a separate search bar and address bar, although you could search in the address bar if you wished.

The advantages of that was you could set the URL bar and search bar to different search engines. I would do a Google search with the URL bar while keeping the search bar set to Wikipedia. Eventually this feature was removed, and then the search bar itself (since there was no reason to search from the URL bar and a dedicated search bar.) It's a feature I missed for a while, but I got over it.

I have never understood the desire to combine the search and the address fields. I occasional search a url when I forget the rules for what it thinks is keyword. It just seems like a scheme to collect more data by bouncing your intended site to google and increase your reliance on them rather than being a real UI feature.

Yeah, it's ironic that one of Google's selling points was that Chrome didn't have a lot of clutter. It's even where the name comes from. Now it looks messy. It's no Microsoft product yet, but it's definitely one of the ways it used to be better.

See also: accessibility

Hahahahaha, so true. "Maybe when we have one of those hackathons you can try and do it."

What if we stop using User-Agent altogether? It would increase privacy and prevent browser discrimination. Too bad for the Analytics services, but after all... who cares?

I really hope ff gets WebSerial support.

The addon I found to reload broken streams and collect drops while I’m at work only has a Chrome version.

The question is, is it gonna have a Manifest V3 version?

Didn't know about those in Chrome. Sounds good, though I've always just grouped my Firefox tabs by having a browser window of tabs per logical group

Waterfox has a native sidebar/vertical tab feature along with container tabs that might fill your tab group needs (I stopped using chrome before they added tab groups so I watched a 4m video on them and seems like you could get all the features and more out of the sidebar).

To be honest, the Lite version is working well enough for me right now that I don't feel like I need to switch.

Firefox native tab groups are coming soon!

I'll let corporate worry about corporate... I don't want the ads at home.

I went ahead and switched to Firefox which I can also use on my phone and now block ads there, too.

Chromium got opera bruh…I’m sorry.

Let's be honest, Mozilla is only 1/10 as shitty as Google because they're 1/100 the size. If they had the resources, they'd be just as awful. They've already shown us how awful they can be at their current size, I can't imagine how bad they'd be if they were at Google's scale. Firing your employees and giving your execs bonuses is 100% a Google-like move, and the only reason they stopped at a few hundred employees was because they didn't have more to give.

Just because they make a good open source product doesn't make them immune from criticism.

I think that specific concern is unfounded, but it's obviously problematic that their revenue fines from Google.

That said, everyone has been trying to find an alternative for the last decade, yet here we are.

I never do personal stuff or even search for non-work related stuff on the machine, and when I'm at home it's on a guest network by itself on a different subnet. Outside of work hours I manually turn off wifi on the machine and block it on the router.