YSK: Google is Killing uBlock Origin. No Chromium Browser is Safe.
YSK: Google is Killing uBlock Origin. No Chromium Browser is Safe.
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
Google is weakening ad blockers as part of their MV3 extension standard and this will trickle down into all Chromium browsers. Built in ad blockers lack features compared to uBlock Origin as well.
Dammit, Sam. 🤦🏽♂️
Who is the Lemmy user not aware of this? Show yourself!
Google is not killing uBlock Origin. It's changing how Chrome works. uBlock Origin will continue to work in my Firefox and other browsers.
They're changing how chrome works... ...in a way that just coincidentally makes ad blockers a lot less functional.
They're an advertising company, no conflict of interest there at all
Ashit Pie doing his work
This is a shit take. Manifest v3 is like activex. As of right now, it shuts down extensions they don’t want. Going forward, it sets up a system for extensions that are publisher-approved. When internet explorer took over the market I could still use Netscape until I couldn’t. I’m hoping Firefox doesn’t reach the same end
Manifest v3 is like activex. As of right now, it shuts down extensions they don’t want.
ActiveX was the opposite of this... It gave third party code way too much access. It was essentially unsandboxed native code running directly in the browser, like if you were to write a Windows app and let a site automatically download and run it.
Yes, awful title. I agree.
LMAO welcome to Firefox, the objectively better Browser. Might also use a custom search engine or DDG while at it.
Why the LMAO?
Firefox was and still is recently vulnerable to a massive zero day:
Mozilla is now using users for their new AI focus.
We need to support continuous competition in the browser market through enhanced support and integration of W3C standards. And at the most important, decoupling corporations from the browsers. At the moment, it seems Google is being actively defensive (see manifest v3) against that while Firefox (Mozilla corporate) is just sort of moot on the issue, more concerned with AI.
As soon as you think it’s “us vs them” and your browser is also owned by a for profit company, we’ve lost
There are Firefox forks like LibreWolf if you need to be a crybaby about Mozilla being a company that needs to pay their developers with the most user friendly way possible...
Also their AI is more of a play thing for some of their developers, they need to go with the flow at least a bit. Its also opt in where i am, idk if thats the case everywhere, but if not its opt out.
Furthermore, from your own article:
Mozilla has patched a critical security vulnerability in its Firefox Web browser that's being actively exploited in the wild
Oh noooo they patched it.
Keep being a crybaby and use Opera, for all i care you can even install yourself red star OS.
Still better than Chrome. Mozilla is not perfect, but in comparison to Google and its behavior they are saints.
was and still is
Me when I lie.
Unfortunately, firefox is becoming just as bad as chrome.
Unfortunately, your statement probably only deserves bothsides.jxl. Please attempt to honestly and objectively compare things, despite the personal inconvenience.
They make mistakes, but Firefox and Mozilla are obviously nowhere near as fucked up as Chrome and Google by any measure. And Firefox would only improve if people stopped running back to Chrome when something was not perfect.
Firefox and its other forks are the best option right now
Has been for as long as I can remember.
Duh, Firefox. This is not a problem.
I've recently switched to FF as my main browser, but I still need Chrome for some work things. And some people will want to stay on Chrome. So for them, this IS a problem.
Just dismissing it because other browsers exist isn't helpful.
Usually I sympathize with sentiments like this ("people use X because of uncontrolled circumstances"), but browsers are not one of them.
If you have a website that requires the use of Chrome, then just use Chrome for that website! It's not an either-or thing -- you can install both browsers and use Firefox as the primary one.
And some people will want to stay on Chrome.
And that's what makes this statement so problematic. You don't earn anything by staying exclusively on Chrome, when both it and Firefox can work alongside each other.
As a person who cares about css , it’s still a problem. There are so many cool features that everyone has implemented Firefox. I still use FF as my daily driver, because, as you said, duh, but every time I see new stuff added to the spec, I check MDN, and it’ll be all green except Firefox.
I mean, maybe if the Firefox/Chrome market share ratio inverts, ff will suddenly have a lot more pressure to keep up?
I've gotten to the point where I don't even really care about new web features. It's all come with so much shit that I can't say the internet today is a better experience than it was back before marketers leaned into it so much and everyone wanting a piece of that data money drowned out much of the rest of it.
I'd take the current feature set with ad blocking and reader mode over any feature set without those. Well, reasonable feature sets. But then again, if I had the option of getting a star trek holodeck but had to let marketers regularly nag me about buying their shit any time I wanted to use it, I'd still be conflicted.
You have to remember that sometimes when that shiny new CSS feature comes out, it is underspecced, with unhandled corner cases -- "just do what Chromium does" is not a standard -- or is it? Having multiple implementations of a spec prove that it is interoperable - without that, you might have a good spec, or you might have a spec that says "whatever Chrome does is what is expected". Not sure that is what we want from new CSS (or any) features.
Make no mistake, what Google is doing is absolutely dangerous. Malvertisements are definitely a thing. Back in 2010, I got a virus from an ad on a meme site that just went through and trashed my hard drive.
It's unfortunate that there are use cases out there where Chrome is absolutely required. Firefox can't display large directories, for instance. It'll lock up while chromium browsers work fine.
If you have examples, maybe you can report it on their issue tracker? I wish the browser had built-in ways to report problems like how amd's bug reporter works
Can you expand on what you mean by Firefox can't display large directories? Curious to see this for myself with FF and a couple of forks I'm playing with.
The only example I can think of off the top of my head is something I'll have to DM you.
Now introducing Enshittium Browser ad diarrhea flows freely
Oh I should market this idea, maybe polish up the slogan. I will pay all users half of the ad revenue, which they can see tick up on their browser...
Then it will be super invasive and vacuum up as much user data as possible, but not mention it to the users, so they don't think to quantify it.
The first thing I thought of for user assessment testing was the enhanced reality helmet from Space Cop where it's just pop ups and malware until you get ran over by one of those digital mobile billboard platform trucks you see in Vegas.
I know that ploum blog post gets cited way too often on Lemmy, but this is a situation where I think Google has either intentionally or inadvertently executed a variation of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" playbook that Microsoft created.
They embraced open source, extended it until they've practically cornered the market on browser engine, and now they are using that position to extinguish our ability to control our browsing experience.
I know they are facing a possibly "break up" with the latest ruling against them.
It would be interesting to see if they force divestiture of chrome from the ad business. The incentives are perverse when you do both with such dominance and its a massive conflict of interest.
I'm laughing at myself right now. I keep wishing people would switch to more progressive politics when people cannot even switch to a free piece of software with zero drawbacks even when their software starts blocking other software they use.
I'm no longer surprised by people who "doesn't like change" when they have to change things, but will just accept (even if they complain internally) when someone above them changes things that impact their quality of life.
People accept the most ridiculous things. The amount of potential we have to improve everything is enormous.
Highly recommend setting up a PiHole. It may not be quite as comprehensive as uBlock, but it cuts the ads way down, and it's not something that browsers can easily bypass. You do have to make sure to shut of DNS over HTTPS, or setup a separate solution for that to tunnel into PiHole.
aaaaaaand then there's Android.
Android will not remove your default DNS, and will only use added DNS servers as additional rather-than instead of.
edit: this is only if you aim individual devices at a pihole instance and not wrapping your whole network or vlan to pihole. If you're forcing every request the phone makes, it doesn't matter and this is moot.
There are free apps that make localhost VPNs on your device to bypass this that force your network to use a chosen DNS server.
This is also a built-in function of Tailscale, setting Tailscale's DNS to Pihole or Adguard, and were you running wireguard or openvpn already, you could use them as entrypoints as well.
Mullvad and other paid VPN services often also offer to use DNS servers that blocks ads, tracking and malware.
Pihole has always worked as expected on my Pixel phones. To the point that I have to drop off of our wifi to visit some sites when they don't load correctly. Pihole is happening at the router level though, not a setting on my phone. Unless Android starts tunneling around it (I wouldn't put this past Google), then all traffic will continue to go through Pihole since it's going through our router. Any device connected to our network has Pihole as its DNS.
I use blokada. I have no idea how it works or if is safe, but I haven't seen an ad even in apps since I installed it
Fuck Google.
Vivaldi (and Brave I think) are safe until July 2025.
Any chromium browser is with a flag enabled.
Just switch to Firefox or a derivative already guys.
LibreWolf or mullvad browser both FF based.
"Safe until" = not safe
Yes
No, it's safe "for now" You have time to find a better solution
Gonna stick with Vivaldi until its last breath, love this browser
Chromium
No
Honest question: why is it not safe after then? They developed their own adblocker if I'm not mistaken? What am I missing?
I'm using the word "safe" here to mean "dependable". As in, you can depend on Vivaldi to support v2 manifest addons (of which uBlock is one). If you use any addons you like that require v2 manifest in a Chromium based browser, you can Vivaldi (or Brave, I believe) to continue to support your desired addons until July 2025. After July 2025, the code in the browser that allows v2 manifest addons will be removed from all supported Chromium browsers (that I'm aware of).
What makes you say this? Brave is my primary and doesn’t need uBlock to effectively block ads
I switched to Firefox about a month ago for personal use. It's nearly impossible for me to quit using Chrome, though, due to work.
I don't hate Firefox, but it does absolutely do some stupid shit that I don't like.
What kind of stuff?
As someone who uses Vivaldi, which has a significant number of power user and customization features, the fact this is no longer a thing is fucking bonkers to me
I can turn on an unsupported flag to make the UI a little cleaner for me
To me, it’s wild that the browser for the user decided to deprecate an option like that. Since they dropped XUL support I have very few options on customizing my browser outside of a theme or just writing my own CSS
From there, I’d just point to:
Firefox pulls in like 500 million dollars a year from Google. Barely any of those features exist in Firefox
I started with Firefox. I used it from day one, when it was an experiment coming out of the Mozilla suite.
I want to use it day to day so bad
But it’s become “how do we chase chrome”
And occasionally they get wins like this. And it no longer feels like
“How can we be best?”
- It's not super simple to setup multiple, completely separate profiles like it is in Chrome
- I never, ever visit google.com while I do visit gmail.com at least daily. Yet, when I type 'g' the suggestion is always google.com
- I visit m.fark.com on my phone quite frequently. Firefox on my phone randomly decides I want to do a google search for 'm.fark.com' instead of visit the site
- I don't want the recently closed tabs to be tracked and listed, yet there is no way to turn that off
- If the menu bar is displayed the the first browser tab is left aligned. If the menu bar is turned off then the first browser tab is indented for no obvious reason.
- I don't think I can clear my history without it closing all of my Firefox instances and making me reopen everything.
There's no one thing that is a show-stopper... just little annoyances.
It's not firefox's fault, but I still use music.youtube.com and google hangouts and there's no option to treat them like standalone apps like there is with chrome.
MS Teams does not work properly on Firefox for example (I'm forced to use it once in a while for work). Same with other web-apps that often don't function correctly.
On Android Chrome manages to stay open while multitasking while Firefox will close the tab 90% of the time requiring reloading the page. That's especially annoying during check-out or logins when I need to switch to a 2FA app.
I'm in almost exactly the same boat, I also switched to FF a month ago but need Chrome for some things. It's a nice irony that your name is echo :-)
Agree completely with what you're saying.
that's why I haven't downloaded OperaGX to run twitch in the background
Happy pfSense + pfBlockerNG user here. It even blocks ads on some of my streaming services.
Anyone know how/if this affects Opera GX? I've been curious about it for a while but with MV3 it makes me curious if they will do anything at all. Or honestly if Opera GX even could block ad's and such, I never checked
Opera is chromium based, so yes it's affected.
Turning off auto updates on chrome was convoluted. I assume everything will break when they force this update even with auto updates off.
Is safari work ?
Fuck Safari
Yes, safari is WebKit and not chromium. AdGuard seems to be safe.
Untrue. Safari never had the real version of uBlock Origin (it was always a port) and it lost many features when Apple moved to a new extensions framework (much like Google). See more: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158
Or use UBO-Lite? MV3 has some limitations but I'm tired of people acting like it ruins ad blocking when it doesn't.
Afaik, UBO lite only updates filter lists when the extension updates, has no element zapper/picker, no per site switches, and no dynamic filtering.
If you can live without these features, then good for you. But there's no need to get frustrated about our claims just because we need better ad-blocking and privacy functions than you.
For situations where you're forced to use chromium browsers it's better than nothing, but abandoning chromium browsers is the right thing to do. An example of a situation where you can't is an IT policy preventing you from using Firefox.
Abandoning Chromium browsers does nothing to improve security or privacy. I certainly encourage people to try Firefox and other browsers as they become available, but it's mostly just a matter of preference in what features you want. If you want maximum privacy with Chromium or Firefox then you're going to use policies, flags, etc. Otherwise both are prone to telemetry.