Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox
Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox
Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs.
Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox::Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs.
I love Firefox. Love it.
But I keep coming across sites that don't function properly with it. Is this Firefox's fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don't, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Chrome seems to have such a foothold that it is getting away with embrace/extend/extinguish and I think it's a very sad thing.
That was Internet Explorer 20 years ago and look where we are now.
I personally can't remember the last time I had issues with a site on Firefox in the last few years since I switched.
The teams web app was borked for me on Firefox at one point. Idk if it's still like that. Also Google Chat or whatever tf it's called now disables a bunch of features on Firefox.
Still worth it to switch. 99% of websites work just fine. They basically have to intentionally design sites to not work with FF.
Chrome turning into Internet Explorer was something that I didn't foresee some years ago.
Heck they have literally done that with Edge lol.
Been using it for years, and the only few times I had issues was due to worthless websites creating artificial obstacles with an "unsupported browser/OS" page or banner rather than something actually breaking for being incompatible.
This is an especially common problem on Android. I have found many sites whose mobile version simply does not work in Firefox. It's very frustrating.
I keep seeing this sentiment on these posts, often with a suspicious number of up votes that don't seem to correlate how many up votes everything else in the topic get.
Literally the only place I have EVER seen this issue was a state toll road website, which was using a timezones that didn't actually exist but chrome added (and documented on the Internet to trick people into using it). A simple email to the website with an explanation and the correct timezones name and the problem was fixed.
Pretty sure a lot of this sentiment is either astroturfing, or people passing on astroturfing trying to be helpful.
I tried to bring this up as an issue back on Reddit, and I got downvoted into oblivion.
I think sometimes switching your use agent to Chrome can bypass some issues.
So many tech minded people, but at same time, so many of us fail to consider others POV and priorities.
JUST DON'T VISIT THAT WEBSITE! - sure bro, that means i won't be able to pay the bills this month because the only traditional way of doing this is visiting a physical kiosk at working hour. Did i mention that i gotta work?
Similar with messaging apps.
YOU NEED BETTER FRIENDS LOL - trust me I've tried. i also need to send my resume using this app to whoever interviewing me. no, no email. yes, i tried teling that. no, i won't be that guy preaching about software freedom when all i want is a fucking job.
Make sure to only do that temporarily and only if it's absolutely necessary. Otherwise just avoid using said website and look for alternatives.
Give me examples. I've been using Firefox exclusively for over ten years and I can recall one website I've had to use chrome on. That was draw.io to get shared drawing through a Google drive to work.
For me there are certain sites where the site icon doesn't show up in my bookmarks. While not world shattering, it can be annoying.
But I keep coming across sites that don’t function properly with it. Is this Firefox’s fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don’t, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Reminder for others that they can report to Web Compat
This is a good comment! I've reported to them in the past. A good reminder.
on desktop I don't think I ever notice an issue, but on mobile it's really noticable
It blows my mind how many people do you not understand how essentially useless Chrome is now and how much it has changed.
What I don't get is that my browser experience is legitimately better overall, I don't know what was keeping me from switching all these years. Familiarity perhaps.
I had the same reaction. Used to love Firefox with all it's awesome plugins but it took me soo long to go back to it. I just became so used to Chrome that the switch seemed daunting, although, I'll admit it took a little while to get comfortable with it again.
What about chrome is useless? What makes chrome so useless that a normie would want it to change? In the end both let you browse the internet just fine. from work i use Firefox and at home i had chrome for years. I did not recognise any diffrenses except ram usage and it beeing a Google product. I changed to firefox at home a few months back so it is the same at work and at home. Can't say it feels any snapier or whatever. For a normie Privacy is no reason to change. They don't care. Ram, they probably don't even know what that is. You have to search for new extensions in the mozilla store if the same one you used does not exist there. That is the reason firefox will not dominate Chrome in my opinion. For a normie there is absolutely no reason to change and normies are the majority of people. Some anecdotal story. At work i installed for some colleges Adblockers because the said some of the ads where anoying and after i did in the following months one after another wanted me to deactivate it again because they could not figure out to visit some websites. As i offered them to show them how they could get around it they just denied. "that is to complicated for me." So yeah. Normies do not care and even worse adblock blockers work.
Not to mention that Youtube and Chrome are run by the same company.
there are many reasons to prefer chromium based browsers, security being one of them
am not saying that firefox is inherently bad, but that there are valid reasons to use something else. I know that this is considered a hot take on lemmy but it needs to be said
On balance, though, since most people go almost exclusively to well-known, uncompromised websites that are legitimate and also trying to harvest data, privacy protections are more important. Defend against the attacks you know are happening and all.
Besides, most attacks are social engineering these days, and even the most secure browser on earth won't defend against that. The recent flurry of high profile YouTube account hijacks was accomplished via malware that stole session tokens from both Chrome and Firefox.
Tbf every time is the best time to switch to Firefox
I would gladly if their Android app wasn't filled with bugs and performance issues on my phone
It's bad on Android, but is good on desktop
i've been on Firefox in the last 8 years. i don't even know what's going on in Chrome and other browsers lol.
Same... I don't understand the appeal of Chrome. I think they used a new java engine like 10 years ago and beat Firefox in a handful of benchmarks, and then Firefox conclusively and irreconcilably trounced Chrome a few months later, never letting up a bit.
I remember when they released Firefox Quantum. Too many tabs was never a problem again.
I mean I tried to download the official minecraft client for debian and was not able to on Firefox.
Microsoft disabled the site on non Chrome browser
This sounded weird to me, so I just tried it. Running Firefox on Kubuntu, I just downloaded it with one click from here.
Just tried it myself and it doesn't have any issues at all. It seems like it might be an issue with something else on your end.
Though honestly I'd strongly recommend against using the Official launcher as it has been known to introduce bugs and in general has poorer support for mods. I prefer the MultiMC forks like Prism, which don't have the bugs the official one does.
user agent switching is fortunately not too difficult to do.
Remember when Firefox started dealing damage to IE's insane monopoly, and then Chrome came along and shanked them both?
I hope Chrome finally eats dirt after basically becoming knockoff IE 2.
Literally every new HTTP standard is coming out of Google's dev team. That is not a good thing.
As long as Chrome was convenient people preferred it. Now that they are showing their true face and squeezing it in favor of being more ad-friendly I hope people realize there are better choices.
I’d largely like to agree. My main issue is as others have said, some websites don’t work on Firefox due to Chrome basically being the standard. It’s annoying. And I do think people should still switch and try their best to stop using Chrome. Because IF we could get to a point where Firefox has a larger audience than it already has, the problem may end up stopping due to developers having more of a need to make sure their stuff is cross compatible with other browsers.
I've been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time. Sites that don't work in FF are very rare. If it's something I really need to access, I just use chrome/edge for that particular site. But as I said, it happens rarely, and there's an easy way to work around it.
That’s fair. Firefox hasn’t sprung up too many issues for me either. But it does occur and occasionally adds some annoyance if it’s a site you need. For me especially Firefox on IPhone is annoying to work with at times. Which is why I have other browsers on my phone as well. But for desktop, generally works fine.
some websites don’t work on Firefox
Are you sure? Is there a list of these websites? I've been primarily using FF for a decade and haven't encountered any.
Unfortunately there really are websites that don't work in Firefox. Not a nice list, but issues should be reported here: https://webcompat.com/issues?page=1&per_page=50&state=open&stage=all&sort=updated&direction=desc&q=label%3Abrowser-firefox usable
Personally, I have been using Firefox for years and will continue using it.
Firefox also has a builtin list of overrides at about:compat
I've ran into a few in the last year or two. I also can't flash things like ESP32s (ESPHome) using Firefox for some security reasons, but this is fine as I'd rather be safe than sorry with my main browser.
Almost every web developer I've met tests if their site works in Firefox and other browsers. The problem is when websites (aka Google sites) deliberately design their sites to not work in Firefox to get people to switch to Chrome
Ive had website that require chrome work perfectly fine in firefox when I switch my user agent
Ive had website that require chrome work perfectly fine in firefox when I switch my user agent
I've been using Firefox since the beginning. I do not understand any of the complaints people have about it. And I cant remember the last time I visited a website that wasn't compatible with it. It was definitely before the pandemic and probably longer before that.
I agree, run Firefox as your main and then a privacy focused fork of Chromium as your second if you need it for specific website.
Personally I barely ever encounter issues with websites running FF.
This is probably the way to go imo. And make sure that it can’t run in the background either. Since at least if your computer is anything like mine. Gotta shut that chromium based stuff down to have enough ram to actually do much lol.
Can you list the websites? I feel like this issue is sufficiently rare to be inexistent for the vast majority of users.
People always say “MUH WEBSITE BORKED ON FIREFOX” and never give examples.
This is not as nearly as bad as the old days of IE6's tyranny. If anything, we should stick to FF now that the situation is still bearable - before it becomes completely unbearable.
Which sites are you referring to?
They’ll never tell because they’re not telling the truth.
As someone who used to do web design when there were around 5 different rendering engines, I found having multiple browsers to design for was often a good thing. You could easily build something that worked 90% of the time on the primary testing browser, and hit a wall trying to fix the remaining bugs, but then testing in a different browser would reveal something obviously broken with your solution, and once you fixed that, would fix some of the minor quirks you were having a hard time solving in the primary testing browser. 5 was probably too many engines, and I'm thrilled to see Trident (IE) in the grave where it always belonged. But if you aren't testing in multiple browsers, you're making your life harder, not easier.
You can file web compatibility bugs on bugzilla.mozilla.org or webcompat.com
There are different ways how bugs are fixed. But someone might reach out to the page itself, find and fix a bug in Firefox or change the web specification if the incompatibility arises from ambiguity around the feature definition.
Firefox can also ship an intervention, basically injecting code into certain websites to fix broken ones.
Some incompatibilities can arise from missing features in Firefox, the web constantly evolves and the Devs sometimes don't catch up. But bugs might still help, as high compatibility-risk features might be implemented more quickly.
I use Firefox. If a site doesn't work depending on my OS I use Edge, Safari or Chromium.
Am I the only one concerned Google may try to pull a fast one and block Mozilla from using the Widevine DRM?
Time to boycott widevine and insist websites switch to an open standard ... (though honestly good luck with that, Google might very well win that battle)
Not that easy since the W3C mandates everyone use Widevine or something similar. There was such a shitshow over this that the EFF pulled out of the org.
Google has the internet by the danglies via this little whatsit and the W3C can do nothing about it, because Google accounts for a sizable amount of their funding, and dropping Widevine/EME would break everything.
If you are concerned about things like PWAs like I was, try it out anyway. PWAs require a bit more setup, but are a lot more flexible in Firefox. For example, PWAs with http connections have a huge banner in Chrome, and just an icon in Firefox. Everything I've noticed is that firefox is just as snappy as Chrome
I thought PWA’s didn’t work on Firefox. That’s good to know, because I’ve been using chromium specifically for PWA’s.
Same here, I tried the PWAsForFirefox extension a few years back and found the setup to be too much of a pain in the ass compared to the Chromium forks. I tried again around 9-12 months ago when Manifest V3 drama was making the rounds and found the extension had been overhauled and that's no longer a problem. As a bonus each PWA is a self-contained browser instance, so performance is improved when only the PWA is open, and extensions are per-PWA. So I can run only Purple Adblock on my Twitch PWA, or only uBlock for Youtube, etc.
Why would I use a PWA on the desktop?
I mainly use them when I want something windowed but without tabs taking up space. Like monitoring my solar panels
Aesthetic and productivity. Which are good reasons.
Let's say you access your company ERP system through a PWA, or the HR system. You want to alt tab back and forth to it like a regular app. You're checking supplier data on the web and entering it on the system. It's a lot easier to do so if your ERP is an app. But if it's not available as a native app, PWA is a good alternative.
It's weird how lots of devs treat chrome as a standard, even though when developing I have a lot more issues with Chrome browsers than Firefox browsers
Well the market share is the whole story when it comes figuring out whats the standard
I haven't had any issues with browser compatibility since IE. Occasionally Safari might have some CSS issue, but it's been probably 10 years since I had any major issues with browser compatibility. Html 5 and CSS 3 tend to work across all browsers without issue.
I think devs go chrome first and then adapt the site to firefox.
Because Chrome rendering and dev tools are effetely superior to Firefox. That's why.
I'd disagree on Dev tools. Both are really great and useful. What I'd say is that Firefox may have less support for external debugging, but that's more others choosing not to do Firefox debugging
Firefox is my daily driver, but oooh how I miss native tab groups like they have on most chromium browsers right in the tab bar. Extensions like simple tab groups just hit differently and are inferior...
Are there any settings you can tweak in the about:config page? That's how you have to enable the compact tab size, which is annoying.
I feel you. STG is the best addon I could find, I tried Floorp but it just was not the same thing.
I totally agree. Especially now that you can save the tab groups like bookmarks (experimental flag in chromium)
It would be nice to spend one day on Lemmy without seeing a half dozen posts telling me to switch to Firefox nor 100 comments on every post that's even vaguely browser-adjacent about how ever since they switched to Firefox their life has been nothing but joy and rainbows
May I interest about about switching to Arch Linux instead?
I'm using arch and Firefox. But I keep chrome as a backup because I also have a ton of nest devices... Is your mind blown?
If it makes you feel any better (it probably doesn’t), the same article was on reddit too. And hackernews also had it hit the frontpage.
People who are on an open source reddit alternative like open source software and an open internet, holy shit!
Switch to Firefox now OR ELSE (you'll miss out on the joy and rainbows)
Start hanging out in different communities.
Make those other posts.
I'm using Firefox basically since it came into existence and my life is depressing and sucks. But at least I can browse the web without being tracked so hard by Google and others while trusting on an open source project whose first priorities are its users and not profit.
agree, no matter what communities you browse, you just get repeatedly hit over the head with the same 5 topics.
I didn't switch to anything, I simply never stopped using Firefox as there was no pressing need to do so.
Holy crap yes, honestly I get so tired of these firefox posts. I only get a Lemmy once a week or so now just cause every post is literally just how bad Chrome is and why you should switch to Firefox. XD
You are free to filter instances, communities and users.
The people who know what UBO or a firefox even is is the vast minority. Google could single handedly completely fuck over the free internet and a majority still wouldn't give a fuck as long as they get that sweet sweet one click convinence. The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options. They just want their shit to work, privacy and daddy google violating their basic human rights be damned.
Oh and also some websites make it a huge pain in the ass if you aren't using chromium. I think its a bit of a conspiracy but could be wrong.
Also stop shilling firefox and start shilling Librewolf
is librewolf on mobile?
Nope only desktop. FF on mobile does have UBO available to install and I hear they are making plans to have all desktop addons be available on mobile at some point. I use kiwi browser for mobile. It is unfortunately chromium based but lets you install all the desktop adds from the chrome store including UBO
The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options.
Doesn’t this apply to most things? Phones, laptops, desktops…and cars, refrigerators, garage door openers, light bulbs, etc etc
This "article" is an ad lol
The irony is real
As if Mozilla was profiting from Firefox.
Any numbers from Mozilla about increase in usage or anything?
uBlock Origin
Why settle for less anyway, Firefox all the way
Why settle for less
Because I'm a tool.
I switched from Chrome and it was seamless. After a few weeks I didn't notice any negative difference.
It's a shame that Firefox is still heavily reliant on Google. It's not chrome but we really do need some competition in this space that doesn't feed the monster and is also not safari lol.
Without this fiasco, i would've still use chrome. Yeah, now i use firefox.
I used to use edge. Switched to Firefox and started using duckduckgo out of protest after my pal got screwed over by Google products
While I largely agree with the options that Tuta provides, I think the article could've been more succinct and to the point if they condensed all the Firefox forks like PaleMoon and WaterFox under one category. Also, I'm not sure if Brave should be on this list, not just because of their Chromium foundation but also because of their use of cryptocurrency, something I consider very suspicious and unsustainable. Finally, I question whether DuckDuckGo should be on the list. True, they are more private when compared to Google and all, but aren't they limited to what they can block through their contract with Microsoft? I remember hearing/reading something about that.
Brave is even worse. The people behind it donate to an anti LGBT org.
The best time was always.
why the Freenet logo and not I2P? Freenet is not designed with privacy in mind, unlike I2P which literally stands for the Invisible Internet Project.
How Freenet declares itself as a replacement of WWW and Internet, while what is does is delivering WWW sites on the Internet...
pushed up glasses
It motivated me to finally set up pi hole in my old raspberry pi I wasnt using, so there's that
doesn't help with youtube ads unfortunately
Generally no, but I've noticed a couple of times where it said "1 of 2 ads", 1 ad played, there was a pause, and it went back to the content.
I try to use Libretube on mobile
A mix of things helps. For most, pi hole/adguard home covers you. For YouTube ads there are a large number of addons and extensions that still cover that. (I actually pay for family premium out of Turkey for various reasons.)
On TV you’ve got iSponsorBlock which can both mute and auto skip (when the skip button becomes available) the ads when they come up, with the added benefit of being able to skip in video sponsoring/ads. And it doesn’t even need to be running on your local network.
There are solutions, just gotta dig around a little bit.
Last I checked, Firefox had also been switching to Manifest v3 because they're also combating the tide of add-ons that pretend to do something useful, but actually steal your information. They asked uBlock at least a few times how they could build Manifest v3 in a way that'd be compatible. Instead of the browser asking about each URL, thereby giving the add-on access to personal information, uBlock could tell the browser what to block. uBlock's answer was always, "No. That's not good enough. Give the add-on access to URLs." It seemed to me like every time uBlock was approached, they turned to news sites to complain and IIR, the feature that would have given uBlock some functionality was removed from v3 because if nobody's going to use it, why build it?
I wonder, now that uBlock has conflated the discussion of, "How much should extensions be able to see and modify URLs you're visiting?", with, "v3 is a war on ad blockers!", how quickly Firefox will move forward with v3, if at all.
I think a lot of people don't realize what a gaping security hole extensions can be. Back in the 2000s, I'd install almost anything that seemed useful without realizing the amount of data that goes through them.
I haven't been using chrome ever since they remove AdNauseam from the web store with no justifiable reason.
They just took it off and kept it that way because there wasn't sufficient backlash.
In my former job, I had no choice but use Chrome due to work rules. If I couldn't have installed uBlock at the time, it would have killed me. So I hope for people like me, there's at least an adblocker that has a small chance of working in Chrome.
I'm curious if "must use browser X" is a deal breaker for many people.
Would you quit a job for forcing a specific browser?
For me it was the OS. We agreed, when I started my job, that I would use Windows but that I would eventually switch to Linux, which I did a few months in. If they wouldn't allow it, although agreed upon, I would have left - which I did anyways, but for totally different reasons
Considering, the mobile browser also has addons and will gain hundreds more in a few months. It's a no-brainer.
This. Youtube is getting progressively more annoying (my train to switch on PC), but what pushed me was Dark Reader on mobile.
I use Firefox but there are web apps that just plain do not test on it. Office 365 is one of those and Word is basically non functional...more than normal.
For me it's the opposite. There's a few sites that have a lot of problems with chrome but work all fine with Firefox. But then these pages are also a good decade old
I can't even log in to Lemmy properly on FireFox for mobile. And many drop down type selection boxes across tons of websites also do not work on either mobile or desktop versions of FireFox; this one irritates me most, because this was an issue years ago when I first was using it before Chrome existed and one of the reasons I originally switched to Chrome over FF at that time. It's been over 10 years and still hasn't been fixed.
for anyone wondering, there's already a manifest v3 version of ublock origin available from the same developer.
Yes but ubol (ublock origin lite) , is limited in what it can block. It may or may not affect users, depending on how they had ubo configured.
See the author's FAQ:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)
as long as you set it to 'Optimal' or 'Complete' it's going to be able to block YouTube ads for example. that's the main thing I missed while trying out dns adblockers and as such it's definitely not too limited for me
I only install UBO and never configure it, so perhaps UBOL will be fine
I wonder how handicapped it is
I like how they mention Internet Explorer.
Internet explorer was the shit in 1992. That's only 30 years ago, not everybody is quick to switch. 😜
There's also an icon for Navigator, and none for edge. LOL
Maybe they needed an image that was out of copyright?
I'm trying to make the switch to Firefox, but I'm running into some issues. The main one being, I travel internationally a lot for work and rely heavily on chrome automatically translating every web page I visit. Is there a way to have this on both my desktop and mobile (android)? When I look at the available extensions there are like 15 available... Thankfully one of them is uBlock Origin
Firefox does now have built-in page translation that runs offline. While it's not the best one out there it only needs to connect to the internet once to download the translation data.
I know they recently put the feature in the desktop, did they dobit on mobile too tho?
FF doesn't do that I think. There are addons that u can use for it though.
Is that moon a browser?
I think it's that :
I briefly used a version of that on a legacy application that needed flash, because it still supports it.
You are correct. I used it on older hardware due to how thin it is, but it has less manpower than more popular forks, so rendering of bloated websites, some of them needing their own workarounds coded in, can be slow and wonky. E.g. Xitter run, well, like xit.
haha what a cool recurring post
I've started making the switch. The only thing that's holding me back fully is the google search function. I just don't get as accurate results on Firefox as I do on Chrome
I like Firefox as default browser, but if i need something more secure i choose FireDragon
You're telling me people actually still use chrome?
They are. In fact, they make up 60 plus percent of world-wide browser users.
Don't forget that Chrome is Android's default browser.
And that's a problem
I don't want to
Man goes into icecream store, yells "I don't want icecream" for no reason. More at 11
I would love to use Firefox, would switch in an instant but the browser feels so barebones. I'm using Vivaldi and that's how I think Firefox should have been, tons of options and features. Don't want to install extensions that might be sold to the highest bidder.
As a user of Seamonkey - which you'd know as Mozilla, the app that Mozilla the company ditched for being 'too hard' - I have to say no. While I trust they're not as evil as Google, I don't trust them to do the hard part of actual software maintenance.
Nope. Brave with its builtin adblocker is more than enough. I'd dare to say that any browser with builtin adblocker is going to be more than enough.
p.s.:
"Yeah, but the guy donate 1000 $ to some anti-LGBT org years ago", "yeah, but the referral stuff", more crap bullshit, etc... Don't care. It's fucking browser, not a religion.
What is with the almost constant ads for Firefox on this platform? It seems every other day I'm blasted with some "Chrome bad get Firefox" article.
I get it, Firefox is great, we know. Beating a dead horse a bit at this point though.
The /c/technology community is the place for things like this. If you wanted to see less you could block the community.
it's because it's literally the only non chromium browser that's a viable alternative. At this point there are literally just 2 options for browsers: chromium based, Firefox based. That's pretty much it.
Yeah, lets switch to questionable ethics company number 2 and shady finances.
- https://12bytes.org/the-mozilla-monster/
- https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla
I used to use Firefox as my primary browser and sometimes even recommended it, but after all those articles I started digging a bit and doing research on what the browser calls and does and I was bit horrified. What I really don't like about this Mozilla situation is that tech people tend to see them as the "all savior Mozilla" while, in fact, they’re full of shit.
If you do care about freedom and your privacy use LibreWolf or Ungoogled Chromium.
What are these sources, but yes, LibreWolf is the way to go
If you do care about freedom and your privacy use LibreWolf or Ungoogled Chromium.
Neither of which are mentioned in the article, for some reason.
There's so many post about Firefox. Mozilla should throw some money at Lemmy devs for free marketing.
Is it surprising that a userbase for an open-source online forum with no ads are advocates for an open-source browser that can remove ads?