Switching to Firefox, Concerned with UBlock Origin Changes | Hacker News Reader

Switching to Firefox, Concerned with UBlock Origin Changes

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56 pointsasadkn20 comments

I recommend others to switch to Firefox on their Android devices as well especially since you can install add-ons like UBlock origin. A couple years ago it was almost unusable, but this past year they have really stepped up their game and I haven't used Chrome mobile since.

But if you still want a fast Browser , try Kiwi Browser. Perf optimized chromium with build in adblock and night mode (100% black Websites on my amoled screen)

Hopefully more people do. We can't let the web become dominated by Chromium or we'll be back to the days of "This site only works in IE6! Please change your browser to the ONE that we support / tested with."

The one add-on I'm going to cling to for the rest of forever is the Google search link fixer. It makes clicking on a result instant.

Have you considered using DuckDuckGo or do you just prefer the results Google provides?

Duck duck go is terrible. I give it a try frequently, and it is the default search provider on my phone, but most of the time I get useless results and have to either do it again with google or give up and try searching the history on my desktop for what I needed. I don't know why PLAIN TEXT SUBSTRING MATCHING is so flipping hard. Yes, I know spam exists, but I would prefer a dumb search to a smart but useless one.

Looking at my own webserver logs, I often wonder why ahrefs or majestic do not start a search engine effort. They crawl me as often as bing or google do, and could easily get a foothold with a "less is more" approach to search.

Haven't used GS in years. In many cases, substring-matching is a far superior search tool. Multiple reasons it might not be available (cycles for one), but it'd be great to have a second, 'advanced search' layer (like e.g. archive.org and worldcat have) available.

Agreed that DDG's 'helpful guesses about what you're looking for' generate about 50% bad results when you know EXACTLY what you want, and so you're stuck shaping your terms with pluses, quotes and minuses. Price to pay to avoid Google worth it to me.

You know what, you nailed it. I do not want helpful guesses from a machine. :) I liked them better when garbage in made garbage out and people knew not to trust the machine blindly.

Wow. I didn't notice it happening, but I've become previous-gen tech...

There's more to a search engine than crawling. Actually storing that data in a system that permits real-time searches based on arbitrary keywords is fairly expensive. Those services are only interested in creating a page link graph, which is a lot cheaper to operate.

I think the reason Google does this is to prevent the site you're landing on from knowing what you searched for through the HTTP Referer header.

I vaguely recall the `rel` attribute value "noreferrer" on the anchor element producing this behavior; is that not the case (any more)?

That's graduated into Referrer Policy, more or less, but it should still work.

That header is the user-agent's decision, I consider it an anti-user feature. Google (like most search engines) wants to know what you clicked on.

That's correct. Google uses Referrer-Policy [1] to prevent the full referrer from being sent to the destination website. The transition page is purely for tracking. The ping attribute [2] is meant to replace that transition page eventually, but it needs to be ubiquitous and equivalent in terms of features before Google switches to that method.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#...

These changes to the Chrome API haven't even happened yet and it's unlikely they'll ship in their current state.

What makes you think it's unlikely? The Chromium team seems unreceptive to the idea that e.g. `webRequest`'s ability to block a request entirely is a security/privacy feature, and instead views it as a bug to be fixed.

I haven't seen anything in the discussion thread that makes me think the Chromium team might decide to change course: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...

I read through that whole discussion the other day and thought this was the best comment:

Is a browser something fundamentally under the user's control, or is it something fundamentally under the corporate entity's control?

Asked in a poignant way, is Chrome my agent, or is it really just an agent of Google?

By directing my browser to someone's website, am I necessarily giving up all permission to a (well-placed) cabal to take over my computer and do with it as they collectively wish? After all, detecting of ad blockers or objectionable behaviors done via extensions remains perfectly feasible: if you don't want to show me your content under my configured extension regime, you aren't forced to.

Until other browsers offer a proper built-in UI for managing multiple profiles as a first-class citizen, there's little chance that I'll switch from Chrome.

About once a year I give another browser a try for a few weeks. I go all in, utilizing whatever features are unique to the browser instead of trying to use it like Chrome. But I have yet to find anything that compensates for the loss of easy profile switching.

Unless Firefox adds a built-in profile switching UI or Chrome becomes literally unusable, there's just no way I can justify switching. The loss in productivity is too significant.

In case this helps somewhat, Firefox has a CLI triggered GUI for profile management and switching, which will let you run Firefox in multiple profiles concurrently:

firefox --no-remote -P

Recently switched back to Firefox after a ~4 year stint with Chrome. Was previously almost exclusively Firefox but eventually surrendered to the tide, not to mention FF wasn't in great shape at the time. Have been super happy switching back. FF + TreeStyleTabs (reunited with it finally) + AutoTabDiscard + Multi-Account Containers has made me a very happy camper.

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