Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users | Hacker News Reader

Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

9to5google.com

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From the author of uBlock on this:

What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do.

This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3:

In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.

The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business.

The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...

Indeed, almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. The fact that Eyeo has >150 employees tells us something about the amount of money to be made from ad blocking. Although they have only published the numbers from 2016, it seems they are quickly approaching around €50 million yearly revenue, with almost 50% of pure profit. For Google this Acceptable Ads Program may be more than a 100 million dollar business.

The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google's own software to eliminate their core business model.

Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved.

Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.

Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users.

In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads.

ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users.

Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don't see the stuff they recommend to you.

The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user.

ABP/Eyeo is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.

Welcome to the point when even free market people will no longer defend your monopoly, Google.

The number of egregious examples of their centralization backfiring against the freedoms within the day-to-day life of internet users keeps growing bigger at a seemingly exponential rate.

The barrier for competition may be high but history is littered with examples of giants withering under their own decision making. Nor will they forever be immune from antitrust laws.

Even if you decide to believe that Google is doing this for the "right reasons" (improving performance for instance) it should still be a huge red flag. Due their conflicting business model they have no incentive to improve the adblocking interface later on. You can therefore expect the adblocking capabilities to degrade every time they can come up with a reasonable reason to do so while they'll never take the time to actually come up with a better solution.

Switch to Firefox people, it's not perfect but at least it's not Chrome.

uBlock should really just instruct users to "switch to firefox for a fast, up-to-date ad-blocking experience"

"The deprecation of the blocking ability of the WebRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome."

In the same way a company trying to determine what a user looks at on their computer screen is a privacy issue, this is too. Those filters should be private.

AKA the old bait and switch! Well I've been needing a reason to finally make the full switch to firefox ( the containers were already compelling )

I say this all the time when this kind of thing comes up.

Please use Firefox!

Even if it's worse. Even if its slower[1]. Even if it doesn't have that one feature or bug fix that you personally consider really important. Just use Firefox anyway. Find a workaround. Suffer whatever it is you dislike about Firefox because in the end if we don't act as individuals against the chrome monopoly then google are going to own the web and we'll suffer a far worse period of monoculture than the IE6 ever was.

If you can't go all the way, going part of the way is still valuable. I personally have chrome installed still because there are a couple if internal sites at my work that have problems on Firefox, so I use Chrome for those but Firefox for everything else.

Firefox for Android is also solid browser, and as a bonus you don't see any AMP stuff.

If you're a website/app maintainer, check for compatibility in Firefox.

It's worth supporting Firefox to keep the web the way it should be. I know they make mistakes sometimes, but we need a viable alternative or it will be too late.

([1] I don't think it is, it's made soild improvements in recent years, but lots of people seem to have their own specific issue they hold dear against it)

I switched to FireFox I think about a year ago.

I prefer Chrome for sure. It full screens video properly (which I need to automatically trigger turning off f.lux), it seemed faster, it does spell checking of form fields.

I'm sticking with Firefox though as these features aren't much of a hindrance compared to the increasingly shitty behaviour of Google, and one benefit is that my Macbook Pro (2014, max spec), doesn't run out of resources and stop responding anywhere near as often as it used to do.

> it does spell checking of form fields.

So does FireFox, other than Form Fields where else would one need/use spellcheck? I wonder what's been done to yours so that it doesn't.

I switched from Vivaldi back to Firefox within the last year for the same reason. I'm growing tired of Google and have been moving away from them piece by piece for the past year.

I prefer the customizability of Vivaldi but Firefox has been fine. I can't think of anything that is a thorn in my side at all. In fact, 99% of the time I can't tell a difference functionally, but I'm not a typical web browser (I disable JS except on trusted sites).

I think for the general population they wouldn't notice much difference between chrome and firefox.

I switched to Firefox on Android just to avoid AMP and it turns out I like it more than Chrome.

Firefox just runs so slowly compared to Chrome on my 2015 MBP. I have zero extensions and it's a default install. Such a bummer too. ( I use Firefox on my desktop PC though. )

what do you think about the new Edge browser from Microsoft, its based on Chromium. So you would get most benefits of chrome but its from Microsoft, which personally, I trust more than I trust Google.

> but its from Microsoft, which personally, I trust more than I trust Google.

Wow, how the worm turns.

I installed the beta for macOS and I'm not happy about it.

It installed a daemon that updates Edge even when the browser is closed. Even if you delete the .app the daemon keeps running and when there is a new update it downloads it and installs it.

There are no settings to change this intrusive behavior.

I sent feedback and complained on Twitter. Apparently the team is looking on it.

Do we know how much the new Edge will phone home to Google? What about raw chromium? Alternatively, are there settings you can change in Chrome to prohibit it talking back to G?

I think, this situation is the same as when you tell people to "vote with your wallet" as to not spend money on the inferior product when the issue is clearly far beyond where people can freely decide this.

Edit to add: Not defending Chrome. I've used IE and Edge since IE9 came out because I saw this thing coming. And I promoted other browsers all the way. Didn't help. I am not moving to Chrome ever and will try and avoid the Chromium Edge as long as I can as I'm not a stranger to sticking with a strange browser choice :)

I'm just saying that maybe something else should be done about Google's browser market share.

Except there's absolutely nothing inferior about Firefox nowadays. I switched about a year ago, and I don't miss a single thing from Chrome.

  Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the   
  capability to block unwanted content, but this will be 
  restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome.

Never heard of a paid version of Chrome before! Can anyone elaborate on this?

I gotta say I'm kind of glad Google is doing this. It will force me to finally abandon Chrome, something I should have done awhile ago.

Googler here, but I do not work on Chrome and I’m speaking on a personal capacity.

I believe this is a misnomer. The enterprise deployment stuff I’m aware of in Chrome/Chromium is accessible by any user, as far as I know, and in the past I’ve used it to force private browsing on always for my own personal usage.

That said, I switched to Firefox when Quantum came out and haven’t looked back. Mozilla has done some annoying stuff over time, but imo the browser itself is really solid, and with some tweaks is very good.

I don't believe it's accurate to say it's "accessible by any user", the net effect of the policy will be (over a time span of months or years) to limit ad blocking only to the most technically capable users who understand how to do what you describe.

Moreover, extensions that continue to use this behavior are required to adhere to manifest v2, and support for that manifest will likely eventually be deprecated. Chrome blocked the store from serving and updating manifest v1 extensions after a deprecation period.

Google rapidly deprecated version 1, from Chrome 18's release adding version 2 in March 2012 to blocking updating in March 2013, to removal of all extensions that had not updated from the Chrome Web Store in September 2013.

If Manifest v3 follows a similar trajectory, Chrome is on a path to remove uBlock Origin from its web store in 2 years.

One of my favorite things with Firefox is the ability to “edit and resend” requests in the browser devtools. I’m sure there are plugins that do something similar on chrome/chromium. But I use it all the time and my colleagues are always blown away when I show them this.

People were predicting this as the Chrome endgame years ago. It's playing out exactly as everyone cynically expected.

It's time to eliminate Google from your life as much as possible if you haven't already. Too many wake up calls. They are not a tech company, they are data monopolists. Stop giving them your data.

> Never heard of a paid version of Chrome before!

Is there such a thing? The "paid" part comes from the article's gloss, not from Google. I could see it instead being "this is a switch you can turn on in Group Policy."

They mean Chrome extensions installed via gsuite - Google's enterprise management system. Ie - you can have managed Chromebooks and force install extensions. A lot of school's use it for web filtering.

This is essentially not true.

Content can still be blocked with extensions, but it will be more difficult to handle large block lists.

See this comment from the author of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...

Check out Ungoogled Chromium, it's pretty great.

Perhaps the elusive Google Ultron.

Brave user here, 1/10 the CPU and memory usage and built on the same tech. Welcome!

This kind of crap is why we need to be cautious in allowing Google too much control over web standards, including AMP and their not-iframe element (portals [1]). Whilst the engineers mean well when creating them, Google's main objective is to make money, not to make a better web.

At the moment you have awesome projects like Project Zero [2], but how long till they start strategically handling exploits for monetary gain? Contrast Project Zero to Project Dragonfly [3]. Nobody should be relying on them being good actors.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-launches-portals-a-new-...

[2] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/

[3] https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/26/technology/google-dragonfly...

Not only is this enough to get me switching back to firefox, it's enough that my next laptop purchase won't be another chromebook

the internet without an adblocker is simply not usable for me.

Agreed. This is making me reconsider all of the Google services and products I use.

If google moves forward with this we should all start randomly clicking on ads until advertisers start to realize that they're basically throwing their money away on advertising that doesn't work :) Let's hit 'em where it hurts.

Serious suggestion: Disable JS. I find the net practically unusable with it enabled. It's like getting stuck using Windows for something.

Checkout surf (webkit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20023287

Manifest V3 still supports ad blocking. I don't know why so many in this thread think it doesn't.

I'm glad I already made the switch to FireFox. I only use Chrome to access Google apps, because for some strange reason they work a lot better in Chrome...

The only thing I miss is a Session Buddy equivalent. When my computer crashes, it's nice to be able to restore all my tabs and windows, and also it's nice to be able to close a bunch of windows when I travel and then go back to my tab state from three weeks ago.

Firefox has session restore, which also works when the browser is closed abruptly. Is it now working for you?

I use a Firefox addon called Session Boss. It might be what you're looking for.

Former Session Buddy user. I'm using Session Sync and it's pretty neat. I think Session Buddy UI is still better and Session Sync needs some improvements (such as selecting multiple tabs in a session simultaneously). However, once I got used to it, I didn't miss it at all.

In addition, I like the integration with Firefox Bookmarks. It creates a folder "Session Sync" and stores sessions as sub-folders. So, if anything happens, I still have them as simple, curated bookmarks.

> I only use Chrome to access Google apps, because for some strange reason they work a lot better in Chrome...

DOS 2.1 ain't done until Lotus won't run

There's also Tab Session Manager, which I've been using with great success for hundreds of years!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...

This impacts you if you're on FF too... if this works and Google is able to monetize Chrome more directly than FF then FF is going to have less development resources.

It's not exactly sessions, but you can bookmark all open tabs (perhaps into a folder called sessions/worktrip_boston), and then later "open all as tabs" using that folder.

I find this useful when researching a particular thing, and wanting to save the resources for later. Sorry I can't remember the exact menu items, as I'm on Firefox mobile and it doesn't do it.

This is malice. Plain and simple. I will remove the last remaining installation of Chrome from my workstation.

It's still good that I can run Firefox on Android but we have to make Chrome the new IE fast.

> we have to make Chrome the new IE fast.

Microsoft has literally done that already: https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/

I don't get it. I've used Firefox and Chrome for years. Firefox is easily as good and capable as Chrome. The barrier to switch from Chrome to Firefox is almost non-existent. Is Google counting on the majority of people not being knowledgeable enough or motivated enough to switch browsers?

It's not "as good." I've tried every release of Firefox for the past decade. On Linux and Mac the video performance is noticeably worse than Chrome with significant frame drops, lag, and tearing. Yes, I've tried enabling/disabling hardware acceleration, flash, and all sorts of other flags and options, but the two are still incomparable. Furthermore, even with the quantum update Firefox is still slower for general web browsing and usage than Chrome. I've measured both dropped frames and load times to confirm this.

I've been trying to force Firefox (latest Firefox Developer Edition) upon myself yet again for the past week, and aside from performance problems which still seem to exist on the Mac (initial rendering of pages is slow), some things just annoy the hell out of me:

- Search results are not highlighted on the scroll bar, which means no information on grouping at a glance, and can't just scroll to the relevant part. I have to go through matches one by one.

- Font rendering is subtly broken as always. A specific example is font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums, which seems completely broken at least for -apple-system (.SF NS Text); as a result a data aggregation site of mine which I read all the time looks awful, larger numbers may be narrower and vice versa. (Oddly, font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums seems to work for "Fira Sans" on MDN; I haven't found another font it works on.)

- With developer tools open, pages are really slow.

I'm probably forgetting something else.

(I should add that I also forced Safari upon myself, which is a shitshow, problems too numerous to list. Until Google completely removes ad-blocking capabilities I need, Chrome is simply the best there is.)

I've been using Firefox for the last two weeks or so. It's fine, but noticeably slower (on a 2018 MacBook Pro) when opening new tabs and especially dragging tabs into new windows. It also seems to get stuck resolving DNS sometimes, which is probably an artifact of the corporate network, but Chrome doesn't have that problem.

Firefox isn't quite there.

How about a sane Profile manager? This is something I use heavily on Chrome. The "about:profiles" UI doesn't cut it.

Also when I use Firefox on my non-work Fedora machines (and this is going from Fedora 21 to 29) it seriously chews up memory and CPU. Facebook (yeah, I know) is rendered unusable after about 30 mins. And as other post(s) have pointed out, video playback can be a bit janky. These machines aren't slouches either, i5 ~2.5Ghz 4th or 5th gen, 8GB RAM, SSD, and dedicated graphics cards.

I'd love to switch, but these are things that are deal breakers.

Yes, I'm pretty sure this is what they count on. Everyone who is knowledgeable or motivated enough, did already change. The rest obviously didn't so even if a part of those will change, they can keep on pushing it through bundling or advertising to regain a part of them. The bulk will just stay. This is the "internet program" for them.

Google Chrome (desktop) does not contain ads/"suggested content" on the New Tab page. For that reason alone I'll continue using Chromium on desktop until they actually pull the trigger and remove/neuter uBO.

From my experience, it seems that those who used the Internet in it's earlier years before and around Firefox 2 dominating the scene, have a much, much easier time going back to using Firefox again. Whereas those that first jumped online with Chrome was dominated, simply will never switch.

Unfortunately, my Firefox on Ubuntu just keeps claiming more and more memory until it runs out and freezes the system.

I don’t want to use Chrome, but I still wouldn’t call that very great.

>or motivated enough to switch browsers

Yep, to be honest this is probably me. I use UBo, but I'm willing to make do with less effective rule-based blockers as long as the most obnoxious and intrusive ads are blocked.

it's not true even if some wish it were. Firefox isn't as performant, has fewer extensions, and is less polished. not to mention Dev tools are inferior (but typical users don't care about that).

I am not surprised. If you look at the direction in which browsers have been "evolving" (or perhaps devolving...) especially over the last decade, especially after Google first introduced Chrome, the message has been pretty clear: gradually hide and remove functionality that helps users take control of how they consume content, and silence opposition by explaining that it's "for your security".

Chrome isn't the only guilty one here; it just happens to be the most user-hostile, maybe because it started the trend (good example being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7329855), but all the other ones have made similar decisions. Firefox made extension signing mandatory (many people think Mozilla is benevolent, but that doesn't mean their views will continue to align with yours), and more recently IE, which could be said to have been the last reasonably popular browser with a per-zone configuration and site whitelisting/blacklisting feature by default, was deprecated for the far more dumbed-down (and now becoming even more Chrome-like) Edge.

But as long as you can still install a custom CA and set a proxy server, you're still in complete control over the content your machine receives; there have been many changes to frustrate that (first HTTPS, now DoH --- to protect, not just from attackers, but you), but it is still possible to MITM and control your experience. There's been a strong opposition to them ostensibly for "security" reasons, however, the way things are going, you will give up your freedom and security.

(I'm a long-time Proxomitron user. It's far more fine-grained than DNS-level blocking, although I also use a HOSTS file, and I can do more than just block. The best part is, it works for all browsers, even the ones embedded in other apps.)

As always, I think it's appropriate mention Brave here. They are very much going in the opposite way of other browsers. They've now for a long time had features such as being able to change scripts/third party cookies/tracking/etc on a per site basis with a single click. As an example, you can get rid of all bait and switch paywalls (such as NYT) by simply disabling scripts. In Brave that's a two click change - Lion Icon -> Toggle Enable Scripts button.

They've also added features like built-in TOR support. Right click a link and one of the context options is 'Open link in private window with Tor'. You can then change 'identities' (Tor exit node -> IP/country) with a single click as well. Absolutely awesome for geoblocked content or even just seeing what users from other countries would see. Kind of fun to play 'Google Roulette' and perform the same search from various places around the world.

And obviously there's built in ad blocking and all that good stuff. It's like a Chrome that runs absurdly fast (in part because all the rubbish is removed) and has put privacy as a #1 consideration. Of course the downside is that, as mentioned, it uses Chromium as the renderer. If Google starts bringing this stuff over to Chromium, which is probably a non-zero possibility, that's going to pose major issues to browsers like Brave.

Incidentally I was also a long time Proxomitron user!

Here are browsers that aren't just 'not Chrome,' they are better.

Brave: https://brave.com/

Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Maybe it's unfair, but I can't help but think of Brave as just a scheme to push their cryptocurrency. They're removing the website's ability to monetize and replacing it with their own system. That seems gross.

I love Brendan, but if Google's browser domination concerns you, use Firefox or Safari. Using Chromium browsers leaves Google firmly in control.

The original creators of Opera have been building out Vivaldi for a while, which has the specific design goal of being a browser for power users

https://vivaldi.com/

Does the webRequest API deprecation also impact Chromium, and therefore Brave as well? Brave seems like it's willing to backfill in changes to Chromium, but I'm wondering how this impacts the browser overall.

I use Brave as my daily driver (with Shields Up and uBlock Origin), but I'm not sure what the actual impact will be when it comes.

The only thing I'm missing on Firefox is when I am on my Macbook, is that fling when using my touchpad. It's essential to any MacOS app and it feels weird not to have it. I'm used to it on Linux and Windows though.

Brave still uses Chromium. I already use Chromium.

Personally I use and can recommend ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

This is not entirely surprising. There is a reason why mobile Chrome, unlike mobile Firefox, never allowed extensions in the first place.

I mean, mobile Safari doesn't allow extensions, and only recently allowed content blockers. Safari also has essentially the same model that Chrome wants to adopt:

> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn't have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles Content Blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, Content Blockers have no knowledge of users' history or the websites they visit.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...

I see a lot of comments saying to switch to Firefox, or people saying they're already using Firefox. This is fine, but I don't think people should be totally comfortable with this. Switching to the one other choice still leaves us in danger of the whole web being controlled by a few programs. We should encourage other browser projects as well. I've seen some cool browser projects, but mostly they use webkit still. I'm not sure what you call that part. The core maybe. We need more browser cores. I think this[1] is one, I encourage people to share more that they know of.

[1] https://robinwils.gitlab.io/articles/sbcl-browser-engine.htm...

Also, Mozilla is largely dependent on Google via their default-search arrangement, so even if it's not Webkit/Blink based, Google still has significant influence.

They call it the rendering engine

Another big issue is that if chrome makes it difficult to disable ads such that 99% of chrome users aren't able to do it, websites may simply choose to block Firefox as it would be easy to do so without losing a large part of user base while making sure no users are blocking ads. Right now there are far too many users using ad blockers.

That is rich!!! There are far too many companies selling my private information without my consent. As long as companies can sell user information, it is only fair for users to block access to such information.

If that happens then ad blockers will just also change the user agent to say chrome.

Blocking a user agent? Oh no, whatever shall we do? Thankfully, we can still just change it, though I suppose a really insidious web site could use feature checks.

This should be good news for Firefox and Safari. I'd be interested to hear from Gorhill on whether uBlock Origin works with the Content Blocker API for Safari and if not what needs to change to make it possible.

Safari has essentially the same content blocking model that Chrome wants to adopt.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...

Currently Safari complains that uBO will slow down your browser. But it still lets you load it.

I just switched back to Firefox after using Chrome since pretty the day it came out. I switched after updating to 74 and noticing how many features I depended on were removed. I originally intended to just revert some of the changes (using Chromium on Linux) but I decided that amount of work was silly. Switched back to Firefox. After this news, glad I did.

Which features were removed in 74?

The only particular thing I can find is that hyperlink auditing can no longer be disabled. I doubt this is what you meant when you said features you "depend on".

Google never wanted to have these adblock extensions on their store in the first place, it just turns out that when chrome was released and had zero market share they had to make this huge compromise to gain territory in the browser arena and eventually overthrow Firefox and the competition. And when (not if, when – it will eventually happen) they do that I will jump off from the Chrome bandwagon.

"When" they do that, it will be because they have judged that they have, by then, thoroughly extinguished all competition. If you (the royal "you") want there to exist an alternative browser to which to jump to when the time comes, then consider making the jump today, when your influence might still make some small contribution to the competitiveness of the browser market.

For what it's worth, I've had a great experience with firefox for the past year (since quantum convinced me to give it another chance). All though, it recently basically factory-reset itself. Signed out of sync, extensions gone, custom settings gone. Any one else have this happen?

It's also got a weird memory leak, which I think is related to the pdf viewer. Never really checked in detail or tried to measure.

Yes!!! I've had this happen several times, and it's incredibly annoying! I was just about to comment on this issue before I saw your post (as a "this is a good opportunity for Firefox but they still have some seriously irritating bugs").

It seems like my entire profile (about:profiles) got switched out several times with a brand new one. Exact same symptoms as you - bookmarks, custom UI tweaks, extensions, etc. all gone (basically consistent with creating a new profile yourself). For a regular user, I think that only needs to happen once for them to uninstall and never come back.

Most of the time I've been able to restore it to my old profile, but one time a file was corrupted and I had to start from scratch again. It happened before the extension signing fiasco, and those two things combined led me to explore new options (Vivaldi, Chromium, etc.) although those didn't pan out for me so here I am, still on Firefox and crossing my fingers hoping it won't happen again.

Perhaps relevant: I do have Nightly and Developer Edition installed alongside the regular version. I used to use Nightly as my daily driver, but switched to the regular version after the first time my profile got messed up.

If you're talking about the issue Mozilla had with add-ons at the beginning of May, yes! Everyone did, haha!

All my other settings seem fine, however.

The new version that just came out added a new feature where different channels (Release, Nightly, etc.) have different profiles, and for some people it seems to have not picked the right profile for the channel they use. You can try looking at about:profiles. Your old profile might be in there, and then I think you can switch back to it.

Yep. Can confirm this exact experience from an update yesterday. Dislike.

Firefox has been doing a few rather questionable things. They had the Mr Roboto add-on which was pushed out to advertise a TV show, they stuck ads in the "Recommendations" [1], they proactively destroyed peoples' bookmarks when they dropped support for RSS, they dropped support for RSS (because, apparently, a decentralized way to track website updates is anti-Google), and they destroyed a lot of useful add-ons.

I basically can't trust them anymore.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/7/17326184/firefox-ads-spons...

Modern firefox is an awesome experience. The only reason I use Chrome is because the dev tools are that good.

Don't forget there is a Firefox Developer version that includes additional devtools.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

Do you have some reasons you prefer chrome dev tools to FF? I consider FF to have the more featureful devtools, for example the sheer amount of stuff under the styles tab, you can tweak fonts in browser.

I do remember back when I used chrome there would be new `console.x` features that were chrome only from time to time, but after I switched to FF I never really looked back

A good time to suggest everyone here commit to using FireFox and DuckDuckGo. You can manage, even with any initial bumps. It’s ok.

I will start doing this.

Yeah, I made the same switch a few months ago and thought I'd need time to get used to it...

Nope, they're perfectly functional systems. Just browse and search.

Netscape -> Opera -> Firefox (in beta) -> Chrome (early beta) -> Firefox

I've been a Firefox user throughout - never made the switch to Chrome.

But here's what worries me, what I'm wondering now: As far as I'm aware, Mozilla/Firefox tried to follow Google for extensions, deprecated their own API for Google's/Chrome's instead.

How likely is it that Mozilla will further "follow the spec" so to speak, doing a change like this for compatibility or whatever?

Seems unlikely. It's in opposition to Mozilla's clearly stated stance toward privacy.

In addition, their reasons for deprecating their old extension API was purely technical. Even then, they were extremely conservative in their deprecation timetable, waiting long past when the old API was massively harming performance. But once they made the decision to replace it, it made sense that they would choose an existing API as a base, not make a separate incompatible API.

But do note that, while Firefox and Chrome share the same base extension API, Firefox has APIs Chrome doesn't. It's reasonable to believe that this new deprecation will just become another thing that Firefox has and Chrome doesn't.

Chromium / Blink is open source, we should be doing everything we can to get as many users using non-Google Chromium browsers. We really shouldn't be having to worry so much about Google's conflicts of interests. Brave and Blink-based Edge are looking to be better and better options.

Another is UnGoogled-Chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Would love to see this latter option becoming something that appeals to a very large, mainstream market rather than just a few techies.

Another excellent browser that users should be switching to:

https://firefox.com

Chromium is still controlled by Google. Exhibit A: this ad-blocking API issue, where Google decisions will affect all Chromium browsers. (Sure, they can maintain patches against upstream, but over time that becomes non-viable.)

If Google's behaviour concerns you, you need to use Firefox or Safari.

I'm also very fond of Vivaldi, and I intend to switch one of these days.

It would be especially nice if we can get the Vivaldi developers to fork Blink to keep the old API around.

I’ve been hesitant to agree with calls in the past to break Google up, but now it’s time. This is Google choosing what’s best for their investors over what’s right for the community. This is Google doing evil.

I recently setup Pihole as the DNS server for my entire home network and said farewell to my Adblock extensions. It's glorious.

DNS / domain based blockers are entirely too coarse in my experience. There are plenty of cases where an ad or a tracking script comes from the exact same domain as real content. A real ad blocking extension can match only parts of the URL, or block certain file types, etc. Ad blocking extensions can also do CSS to clean up the page after blocking the ad, or "display: none" ads that for some reason can't be blocked any other way.

My fear is something like pihole may end up being a temporary stopgap; it can only help with DNS queries that go through it, and so it too may end up in the same position as chrome + ublock origin. For instance, if chrome decides to use a trr or dns-over-https and removes options to change it.

Sub-optimal for laptop users who might connect to various networks (home, office, the coffee shop) throughout a single day.

> Firefox is available on all platforms (including Chrome OS via the Android or Linux app)

Maybe this is a viable solution on brand new chromebooks, but on my Acer R11 both Android apps and Linux containers run pretty poorly. I use an Android app as my password tool just fine, but trying Firefox was a rather poor experience. And the linux container just dogs trying to do anything.

I have Ubuntu loaded on via crouton (to use tools like GIMP or actual VLC), but if chrome gets rid of ad blocking that removes much of the point of ChromeOS for me entirely.

I run Firefox on my Chromebook in Ubuntu via Crostini, works pretty well and appears right next to native ChromeOS apps on the screen.

I'm starting to question whether it was such a good idea to make web browsers virtual machines (for Javascript or WebAssembly apps).

It makes web browsers big and complex. I know both Chrome and Firefox are open source, but does that really matter so much when the codebase is so big and complex that only large and well-funded organizations are able to develop it? I'm not sure if it's realistic anymore for a few guys to get together and create a web browser (including rendering engine) in their spare time.

This centralization can lead to censorship, as we're starting to see here.

We also end up with a mono-culture (well, not quite there yet, since there are still at least 2 web rendering engines), which is horrible for security. The Irish potato famine is good example of what can happen when you have a mono culture. These days, you often have to let strangers execute code on your computer, if you just want to read an article or look at some pictures.

And this pops up on the same evening that Google chooses to roll out unblockable advertising in Android System App "Duo" in the form of an unsolicited video message from Virat Kohli, apparently the lead player on an Indian cricket team?

Way to work that Lily Tomlin "Ernestine" vibe Google.

Edit: also, "Oh, we're so sorry that our 'security' update is going to gut something that users love but our accountants hate (for anyone else). This is completely an unintended consequence."

Definitely time to ditch Chrome, but also even more of a reason to set up a PiHole https://pi-hole.net/

It saddens me that Pi-Hole is pulling a mere $1,700/mo on Patreon.

There must be just way too much friction for a user to say, yeah, charge me $1/mo please.

I've thought about using pi-hole but wonder about ads being served from the same domains as the content providers. Is/has this been an issue at all?

Can you help a newbie understand why I'd want to use this instead of Firefox + uBlock Origin? Seems like a lot of extra maintenance overhead...

I've been meaning to give Firefox another try; I haven't used it actively in years, and this is a good prompt.

And after a couple hours....

....Firefox is pretty impressive! I'm actually going to switch to using it as my "daily driver".

Now they are at the position where they can make the users dance to their tune. Im quite not sure if any decision makers at Google have a glance at HN on whats the reflection on their decisions. They just know that users are hooked to their platform all around (Search, Android, Chrome, Maps, GPay, GMail, etc.,) and they can decide where to be a dictator and where to be a humble servant. In the end, all they care is how much data can they harvest & how to use that data to be more relevant for their service offerings (advertisement). Monopoly at the best level! Also, when Google gives a statement/blog post on their decision, it becomes a news for media & HN. But, the reverse doesn't happen; whats the reaction across different blogs/media/HN doesn't get much visibility.

I mean, no. It's easy to swap browsers and ad-infested pages are broken pages.

You have just described business. A for-profit corporation is explicitly required, by its fiduciary duty to shareholders, to do what you are describing.

I think it's time for Microsoft to rethink their decision to base Edge on Chromium.

It's a painful decision, to be sure, but the Microsoft team has to make a decision here: fork or adhere. The immediate benefit of forking and not following Chromium on this change is obvious. However, the cost of the fork will grow over time and it will be in Google's interest to deprecate and replace all of the infrastructure that supports the webRequest API to make it maximally painful to maintain the functionality in a fork.

On the other hand, had Microsoft decided to base Edge on Gecko, they wouldn't be working off a forked codebase whose owner has a perverse incentive to make the fork as painful and expensive as possible.

How many engineer hours, months, years are going to be wasted just shoring up features like this?

Why wouldn't they just patch that part of the code? I'm seriously surprised though Microsoft didn't build an adblock in IE much earlier, that would have stopped google in the tracks.

Is there a good way to convert chrome saved passwords/history to firefox? Thinking I'll switch back to firefox.

I don't know how current this is:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-chrome-firefo...

This is why my 1password subscription is totally worth it!

ffpass works. https://github.com/louisabraham/ffpass

Well, now is as good a time as any to switch back to Firefox. They've managed to come out of a long stretch of mismanagement, technical debt and security issues to a much better place.

Running Chrome without adblock is a security risk. Google has turned a blind eye to malicious ad behavior for their own profit, and this is going to lead to infected corporate networks.

They dont care. That's your problem not theirs. Which is why I want to see more data protection laws in the US. I want to give them problems.

Now that's an advantage my non-tech family and friends will appreciate if it gets implemented and ad blockers stop being efficient in Chrome.

I'll install Firefox, they will see things are better and the switch is done. No need to talk about Quantum, freedom, etc.

Mozilla should be sending one of those cakes to the Chrome team.

Have fun cleaning out Chrome if you are around again and they didn't even realize that it came along some other software...

We need a chrome install blocker...

The new Chromium based Edge suddenly got a whole lot more relevant. I certainly won't use Chrome if I can't have an ad-blocker!

Did you miss the part where these Google decisions affect all Chromium browsers?

Why wouldn't you have an adblocker? Manifest V3 supports ad blocking.

For those of you not familiar with what is being proposed ...

Chrome engineers want to replace the ability to block any request with a standardized ad-block functionality based on a list of provided rules and inspired by Safari. In other words the ad-blocking functionality becomes built-in.

However this facility excludes dynamic capabilities that plugins like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger need.

Also I’m speaking with first hand experience in this field: the ad-blocking functionality provided but Safari sucks and can be easily fooled. That there are publishers that don’t implement anti-ad-blocking measures, that’s only because they either don’t have the resources or because they don’t want to piss off users.

And at this point uBlock Origin is by far the most aggressive extension out of the popular ones and the nightmare of advertisers, not only because of its capabilities, but also because it doesn’t have a commercial entity behind it.

It is no accident that Google is hitting these extensions.

Switch to Firefox folks. The grass over here really is greener ;-)

Today it is, unfortunately history has shown that trusting Mozilla is also foolish.

Well I guess using a browser made by an ad company isn't a good idea after all.

One of those turning points when techies start recommending friends to use a different technology and in a few years that technology wins?

In this case, Firefox again.

I hope that this makes browsing with Chrome so bloated with ads and tracking that it is faster and efficient to browse with browsers that allow users to get rid of unwanted cruft. That may be the selling point to switch from Chrome in the future.

bait + switch.

I've been going back to Firefox for 6 month now, both on desktop and mobile. I'm a developer so I still need to use Chrome for testing, but I'm never going back to it as my main browser, for obvious reasons. There is an obvious conflict of interest going on here, and I'm not going to give Google any more money.

Firefox works fine now, didn't get any issue whatsoever. It used to be slower than Chrome, yes, but it's not true anymore and it uses way less memory than Google's browser.

That's why I don't trust Google with anything, Golang, Goggle PAAS, whatever, they'll go full Oracle in a few years, mark my words.

For work stuff I rely on multiple profiles for different client work (I use about ten of them...so far) and so I stick with Chrome.

If Mozilla didn't have such a demented mechanism to operate with multiple profiles then I'd happily switch from Chrome. This is a feature that should be upfront in the UI, not hidden behind about:profiles and it's generally janky UI and behaviour. This needs to be a first class citizen, not what feels like some half baked afterthought.

Have you looked at the multi-account containers feature? I think it would do what you are looking for, and it's not restricted to google profiles.

I switched to the Brave Browser a few months back (learned about it via Coinbase Earn). Its a great alternative to chrome with solid ad-blocking & I got $10 out of it.

I did the same a few weeks back, and the ad blocking's been great. Hasn't behaved any different from Chrome + uBlock.

Brave is built on Chromium just like Chrome. You are basically using Chrome.

So... is this the real reason why Google developed Chrome? So they can play the long game and eventually prevent ad blocking from harming them?

This makes sense from the viewpoint that google is entirely beholden to their shareholders and has to maintain their insane growth. That doesn't make it ok.

It's a shame all these companies follow such a predictable pattern. Any resources to help actively ungoogle? I've switched search, email, and browser so far, and will be pushing everyone I know to avoid. Long time coming.

I propose we create a new browser fork due to this issue and back it by the main ad block developers.

The other issue is that Chrome on mobile doesn't support extensions.

They tried to away with not having ad-block on mobile this way. No extensions means no ad-block.

Let's just have a new browser based on Chrome that supports mobile + extensions and ad block and tell Google they can go pound sand.

How about Brave or Dissenter?

Edit: I've just been informed this will effect all Chromium browsers. My goodness.

To gorhill and all the people working in real privacy protection: Thank you, I love you all, keep up the good fight, we rely on you!

Why exactly would anyone use the "enterprise" version of Chrome over the regular one, or vice versa?

As far as I can tell, it's the same browser...

https://cloud.google.com/chrome-enterprise/browser/download/

It's mostly a thing for companies that deploy Chrome in their images and want to retain control over it (group policies). It's not for your common end user.

Schools use gsuite to force web filtering chrome extensions on their managed Chromebooks. Thats what they mean by enterprise customers.

With this news it seems Google just gave everyone a reason to use the enterprise version...

I found this post highly editorialized. Here's the actual response if you want to understand the context, instead of simply seeing bits and pieces with a journalist's spin.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...

Also, the headline seems mostly incorrect. The gist of it, as I understand, is that Chrome is enforcing a migration from the webRequest API to a new declarativeNetRequest API. The latter API doesn't currently have all the capabilities of the former, which is important for context blocking extensions. However, features are still being added and the team states that they are interested in more feedback from extension developers.

And if those features happen to never be implemented?

I really think it is a bad practice to force adoption of a new API that can't fulfill the same functions as the previous one.

Nobody would be here talking about this if they just made the new API without breaking add blocking (useful add blocking), and then forced people to move.

Even more so given that it looks really bad when your main goal is to serve people ads.

I'm tired of major corps doing this with their APIs, either the new API is a drop in replacement for the old API or you're doing shady shit in the guise of "it's coming! soonish~"

This sounds like a wonderful gift from Google, to Mozilla.

As you're deciding what browser to move to, consider using two browsers: Firefox for any sites you need to log into or otherwise identify yourself, and Tor Browser for everything else. I've been trying this a while, and it works pretty well.

Will this change apply upstream to the entire Chromium project?

I'm not a fan of antitrust as a tool to punish tech companies, but I think there would be great benefit in cleaving Chrome off of Google. The tension between Google's business model and what is good for users is just too great.

So, in the new Edge, they could still support this?

Would be a good point of difference for them.

I use Firefox with NoScript and found that leaving most domains disabled by default eliminates nearly all ads. I have to fiddle with enabling a few domains on a new site, but if the site is one of those where it uses a million 3rd-party "X as a service" domains, I just leave.

This is the reason I quit using DigitalOcean: every page on their web site required me to enable 5 new domains in NoScript. Other VPS providers just required 1 or 2 enabled.

Or, if the site is coded so that it only works after enabling ad-looking domains, I leave. Vote with your feet folks.

Clearly this is the line for me: let's sue them for abuse of their dominant position, and get them toward antitrust lawsuit/procedure.

It's maybe not gonna fly in the US but definitely workable in Europe.

>> Just remember to unblock sites you wish to support financially.

The way ad networks function, is unblocking a site you want to support any different at all from unblocking everything?

Yes and no. With uBlock you can allow ads at the site level, the problem is that half the reason to block them is the tracking they do, even if I like I site I don't like it enough to unblock google's spyware.

Between pihole, firefox and addons, I see no ads. The way the ad industry is going, they will at some point prevent people from blinking.

A big thank you to the developers at pihole, mozilla and the plugin devs.

I wonder what MS will do with Edge(Chromium)?

I've been using it for couple of weeks now as a secondary browser to Brave (separate sessions etc) and it is looks and behave like a normal Chrome.

Hope MS fight this.

This is a big opportunity for MS to keep this functionality as a side-patch that's maintained and applied to every new version of Chromium they use.

You could always run pi-hole on your network, no extensions needed https://pi-hole.net/

Chrome is faster! Yeah but FF blocks ads, trackers, analytics and social media buttons. Basically half of the shitty internet. That saves some time I would think.

Will these changes affect the pure Chromium? I really don't want to move to Firefox, all my settings, auto-fills and stuff is in Chrome, and Chromium seems like a better alternative if it still supports ad-blocking. I know that Firefox has improved a lot over the years, but I still have a few too many issues whenever I try using it, whereas Chrome and Chromium "just works".

How will this affect Vivaldi and Chrome-based Edge? It's a worrying thing unless Microsoft and Vivaldi can provide a safe alternative.

Is this a chrome API or chromium API? For the later case we have Chromium Edge(https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com), which is just as good! If it's chromium API then Microsoft may actually end up taking a fork off chromium codebase right away and decide to keep that alive.

All the more reason to use Pi-Hole. Works with any browser, incurs less overhead than an extension, and Google can't stop it.

This is a good move by Google to promote Firefox. We should use this opportunity to inform laypersons about Firefox and the freedom it provides with ad blocking (which includes protecting oneself from malware too).

Mozilla should use this for a PR move (even though the bulk of its revenues come from having Google as the default search engine in many geographies).

DNS-based and hosts-based blocking should still work.

https://pi-hole.net/

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...

I've been a Firefox/Safari user for a long time now because of concerns about Google, but I don't really get what this outrage is all about. As I understand it, Chrome is moving to the Safari rules-based model? Can someone explain why this is such a bad thing? It's not like Chrome is stopping all ad blocking.

Hoping Microsoft keep the APIs enabled on the new Edge-ium. Solid browser. If they port it over to Linux (they're already doing OSX) and keep the APIS required for ad-blocking enabled I see it picking up speed very quickly.

Opera has it built-in to the browser so I think they'll be safe too.

Wonder if this will apply to Chromium or just Google Chrome?

Might be a silly question, but is the block list per extension or is it a global block list? Ie, if each extension can have 30k rules, and the current block list requires 70k rules, could there be 3 extensions, 2 with 30k rules and 1 with 10k rules? This would surely be an inconvenience, just wondering

That's it, Getting myself a pi-hole.

This just means that ad blockers will need to work with a natively-installed proxy.

Remember, with https you can install a certificate and man-in-the-middle yourself. This is how tools like Fiddler and Charles allow inspecting and debugging HTTPS.

In this case, a natively-installed proxy can deny requests to blacklisted domains.

At the end of the day, it's their browser, their rules.

The only way this could be changed is through (EU?) law, but i'm not sure what would be the basis of such law. It would be like forcing every car manufacturers to implement free HEPA air filters in their cars.

This is the final straw for me, I just installed firefox and changed it to my default browser.

This will probably get lost, but Raymond Hill confirmed that he will keep developing uBO and uMatrix for Brave (and any other Chromium-based browser that exposes access to webRequest) after Chrome deprecates webRequest for non-Enterprise users.

more reason to use the Brave browser instead of Chrome. Essentially the Chrome browser without the Google bindings. Use the crypto features or not, it has been working for me and my mac runs way more cooler when i had been using Chrome.

Well, I find this to be great news! Now I have a great way to convince my non tech friends to switch to Firefox. "It lets you install a thing so you don't see ads anymore, unlike Chrome where you have to pay for it"

This is great news for Firefox.

Not if you want hardware acceleration support in Linux. Not that most Firefox users care about open source operating systems.

Apparently, some misguided folks seem to think there is room for more than one browser in the world, and a non-Google one to boot. If you smell the scent of roasting flesh, those heretics are being burned at the stake.

Will this affect just Chrome or will browsers built on top of chromium also get manifest V3? If so, I assume they can implement the old web request API themselves to keep as blockers working?

You could fork Chromium, but then Google will prevent you from watching videos like netflix and amazon online, which means no one is gonna use this browser

I think this is a positive thing. Somebody has to accelerate FF popularity, and this is a start of a big push. Combination of this and FF efficiency equals more users on FF.

So, hey, thanks google :)

That's ok Google. You may not force me to look at your stupid advertising. Plenty of decent browsers out there that take my privacy seriously. You just shot your selves in foot

Time to try the new Edge!

New Edge is Chromium, the change will apply.

Google is in a position to disrupt ad-blocking in Chrome (via webRequest API) and on Android (via DNS over https).

This makes both mBlock Origin and PieHole obsolete. Where do we go from here?

Firefox?

Can't use ff on linux unfortunately. It has this weird bug where it clicks on the first item automatically if I right click on anything. It's a super annoying bug.

I'm having the same problem on macOS. Might be HiDPI related as I run on non-standard settings (1.5x scaling).

I just modify etc/hosts with this file:

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

The only place I use Chrome these days is http://localhost:x000 for Chrome Dev Tools.

I actually enjoyed the original Google search result ads, a tiny text based thing that would side on the right side of the results...

Going as planned I presume.

Step 1: Enable "Built-In Ad-Blocker"

Step 2: Disable all other ad-blocks from store for some reason

Step 3: Allow only ads from Google ad-network

> Step 3: Allow only ads from Google ad-network

They can't do that, this is an anti-trust lost case for them.

Can't suggest pi-hole enough for a small personal network. Happily donate to them. On a larger scale, I am not sure...

Is this applicable to chromium too or just chrome? Would like to see how Microsoft approaches this with their new browser

Firefox Quantum is pretty good now. I've switched back recently and rarely use Chrome now as my personal browser.

Every time when I see Google is advancing into this bs, i donate some money to mozilla foundation to counterbalance.

How is the FireFox experience on OSX these days compared to Safari? This is 100% a nail in the Chrome coffin for me.

Let's all use the web browser made by the world's biggest ad company, what could go wrong right?

I wonder if it will be too difficult to maintain downstream patches for Chromium that reverts this change.

Edge is looking more appealing now. Although PiHole is still the bomb because it also blocks in app adds.

google slowly showing it's grip with it's android 'open' model falling over and it's chrome now going corporate... :')... soon you will need to pay-per-search not to get only advertisements and nonsense results. enjoy your internet ppl..

I wonder how many regular people even use adblockers or would care, enough to see a migration soon?

I don't get it. Is Chrome not open-source? Can't we create a fork that keeps that API?

Chrome itself is not. Chromium is opensource. That's what Brave, Edge, and what ever others are using.

https://brave.com/

Slightly off topic, I'm finding it very disingenuous that people in this thread(and any other threads that come up about Firefox) have actually had significant performance issues with Firefox. No bugs that are noteworthy, sans that fiasco with the expired certificate that disabled addons briefly.

I've been using Firefox since "quantum" on both my MacBooks(one of which is old AF) and on Linux. I've yet to have problems playing video, streaming, or anything of the sort. I keep tons of tabs open. I just can't really say anything wrong about Firefox at this point.

It was once the case that Firefox had significant disadvantages in contrast to Chrome, but now the only reason I have to still keep Chrome installed is when work forces me to use some Google-proprietary page that doesn't work in other browsers.

If you had problems with Firefox 2 years ago, try it again before bringing up performance when people are considering it as an alternative to deleting Chrome. The more people who uninstall Chrome, the better.

"Disingenuous" has become a way of insinuating astroturfing, which the guidelines ask HN users to refrain from. Please don't do that here. If you have better information than other users, that's great, but please simply provide it, so we all can learn. Attacking the other users' integrity poisons the well, and is mostly a cheap side-effect of the irritation we all feel when encountering views we disagree with.

Real astroturfing exists, of course, but is far rarer than insinuation. If you or anyone are genuinely concerned you might be seeing it, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Firefox has significant performance and correctness problems.

* Multi-second UI jank/freeze (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1546847)

* HTTP2 is broken, infinite-stalls and internal errors surface if you upload enough files (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1540574)

* WebGL is very slow on Linux (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1010527)

* High CPU on Linux even when in the background, possibly due to frequent polling (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508427)

These are just a few issues that I'm directly involved in and suffer from every day, and into which I've sunk over 100 hours profiling and reading code of, simply because they make it an absolute pain to use.

I just switched to Firefox today after a few years hiatus, and I agree that it is hugely improved, and rendering speed is at least on part with Chrome if not faster. They've done a great job with it, and the dev tools seem greatly improved in the developer edition as well.

The issue I have with firefox on both Linux and Windows is not speed, but stability. I think it's the process model. Windows freeze if I open too many tabs, and is an issue I've not really had much with Chrome (though it had its own issues). I've noticed it a few times today as well. I wonder if that's the speed issues people are describing?

With that said, removal of ad blocking is a deal breaker for me and Chrome will no longer be my default browser.

Firefox has several experience-breaking bugs for me.

One where on websites that don't explicitly set their form background to white, which is the default on most browsers, Firefox paints them the color of the user's desktop theme, even when the theme is dark. Black text on black background. This bug had been known about for almost 20 years and is marked "won't fix" because the devs still assert that universal user theming of websites is just around the corner. The bug manifests on mozilla.com

Another is that hard refresh sometimes flat out doesn't work. I'm a developer who occasionally makes changes to frontend code, and sometimes Firefox just decided that it's just going to cache everything and ignore what I tell it to do. Ctrl-refresh, shift-refresh, clear cache, all do nothing, I have to killall firefox and restart the browser to get my updated web page to show.

I've had significant performance problems with Firefox recently. It's always felt less snappy than Chrome, but it got much worse these past few weeks -- every time I try to close a window, it would freeze with a busy spinner for 3+ seconds, often 5-10 seconds.

I did a profile refresh last night and I think it's resolved the primary issues (despite retaining all my extensions). If it hadn't, I would have seriously considered switching to Brave or Chrome.

Ideologically, I believe it's very, very important to support Firefox, and I also think the work they're doing with the Stylo, Quantum, etc. is very exciting, but performance issues with the UI itself got me off of Firefox for years once before, and almost did it again recently. (The first time it happened it was shortly after they started using sqlite, and I suspect that both of these instances were sqlite/profile data issues.)

From my own personal experience, UI speed (partly influenced by "bad" profile data) is the area where Firefox is failing, and the only thing that keeps me from unabashedly telling everyone I know that Firefox is better (user-experience-wise).

I did say I have performance problems (in addition to other rendering/UX problems) in this thread and I did say I've been forcing Firefox upon myself just this past week, in addition to numerous attempts in the past.

That "you've yet to have problems" means I'm "very disingenuous" for pointing out that I did is simply ridiculous. This is borderline ad hominem and I call guidelines violation.

That a sibling implying that we're somehow paid by Google to clean up their PR mess is plain insulting.

I use firefox as my daily for a few years now, I switched for panorama view, and almost switched back to chrome when the extension was broken, but stuck it out until it was fixed.

Quantum improved it, but I still have lots of issues with Firefox on Linux. To name a few: (For reference I'm running Firefox 67 on NixOS, xmonad, no DE, 7700K, 64GB RAM, RTX2070, only extensions I use are uBlock Origin, Panorama View, but I've run into all the problems below in safe mode also)

* Still slower than Chrome if you use lots of tabs and windows (generally 100+ on 3 windows depending on current jobs). It's much faster than it used to be but I can't deny when I have to switch back to Chrome for some things, I'm surprised at the (slight) speed difference.

* Visual glitches with lots of tabs the tab bar will occasionally spasm, sometimes all the text will disappear etc.

* Sometimes a window will just stop working. All the tabs are still there, but they all show blank white pages, new tabs are also blank. Different windows will work and a new window will work. Restarting firefox, the same window will be all blank pages. The only solution I've found is open a new window and copy the tabs you want to save one by one to the new working window.

* Bunch of websites just don't work in Firefox. In particular several of my governments payment portals don't work in Firefox on Linux but work fine in Chrome.

* Sometimes I get crackling audio from Firefox that can only be fixed by restarting pulse, never had it happen in Chrome.

* Some streaming websites choke firefox out, for example ufc.tv PPVs are sometimes entirely unwatchable in FF, the audio and video fall out of sync after a few minutes, sometimes it can makes other tabs sluggish. Never have a problem with Chrome, will usually just open a chrome window to watch live streams.

I chalk most of these up to Linux weirdness, but I do quite often find myself annoyed at FF considering its running on a moderately well specced machine, and its literally the only app I run regularly that gives me heartache.

That being said I've stuck with FF over Chrome and still prefer it for various reasons and recommend people try it. I just disagree with the idea I see floating around that there's nothing wrong with FF at all and its just as fast and stable as Chrome. It's not been my experience.

I use both Chrome and Firefox daily on Mojave, and see significant performance differences between the two. My understanding, based on reading[0] and experimentation, is that this may be due to use of display scaling on macOS. Turning this off does help, but makes using external 4K monitors difficult (for example).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054395

People who have different experiences or preferences than yours are not 'disingenuous'. You're hardly going to convince anyone to try FF by calling them liars.

I've been using Firefox since Quantum, too. The one place where I consistently run into problems is the debugger - it's much slower than Chrome's, and sometimes it gets stuck with a "Loading..." in the source view that never loads. I use it... But sometimes I get frustrated enough to fire up Chrome to debug something.

I have never had any performance or memory related issues with firefox, on a modest xps 13 9343 with 4gb ram. In fact, with regular usage, firefox rarely exceeds 2gb usage, and cpu usage is never an issue. Though I have tweaked my firefox quite a bit, I don't think the core issue is with the browser technology. The technology is fantastic and computers are fast. Rather, I see it is a combination of two things: poor web browsing habits (tabs open, websites visited) and the ever-increasing badness of "modern" websites.

I have been using Firefox, and only Firefox, on the desktop since before Firefox 1.5 (released in 2005) and Firefox has had plenty of performance issues over the years and still have some. The performance issues still reaming after the Quantum release are mostly caused by shitty websites who only optimize their crappy code just enough for it to work in Chrome. A couple of culprits which slow down my browser significantly are Trello and Twitch. Another issue is that 3D acceleration does not work well on Linux so it is disabled by default and often cannot be enabled without compromising the stability.

Before Quantum on the other hand I had to regularly restart Firefox since it seemed to slow down over time and hog all of my CPU no matter if I had many or few tabs and no matter if I closed tabs so I am not surprised many got burned by Firefox and how it could not handle today's bloated websites until Quantum. The UI also got jankier and jankier the more CPU Firefox started using.

Chrome probably has had its own performance issues but I cannot comment on them since I have not used it much other than on mobile.

I use Firefox as my primary browser. I still have performance problems. Today this happened. After a long session using 5-30 tabs at a time, and devtools variously open, Firefox sometimes completely locks up for tens of seconds. This is on Windows 10. It happened maybe 3 times today. I've never seen it happen on chrome ever. This is a recent high-powered machine with fast (for a laptop) everything.

Yep, this. If you the reader are using a Chrome-based browser and find Google's behavior disconcerting, you need to switch away, now.

I've been using Firefox every day on the same mbp 2015 with the same addons for almost 4y now. It might be uBO, but either way: FF drains battery. The Energy tab in Activity Monitor is very clear about it. When I switch to Safari (also uBO, fwiiw), fans stop spinning, the browsing experience feels like I upgraded to broadband and I get 2h more out of a charge.

Before quantum, during quantum rollout, since quantum, doesn't matter.

I've just accepted that slightly increased privacy comes at the cost of being plugged in to the mains. That's fine, I accept it, but I hope it's hardly disingenuous.

I tried Firefox again right when quantum landed, but at the time there was a significant delay in opening/rendering pages compared to Chrome - as in 4-5 seconds to open Reddit compared to 1-2 seconds on Chrome (this was in macOS on a 2013 MBP with both browsers running uBlock Origin) and an hour of troubleshooting and following tips on the web yielded no improvements - I don't know what's disingenuous about that...

With this latest change to Chrome it's probably time for me to give it another go. I'd love to switch, but the experience needs to be roughly on par.

There are still issues with Firefox but you are correct about people maybe not knowing. I tried it a few years ago before the speed update and it felt unusable. Nowadays it's a little more sluggish than chrome on certain things (JIRA for one) which perhaps is just a result of people optimizing SPA for chrome.

It is VERY important for people to give things a try with and without a proper ad blocker. Any browser gets WAY slower and buggier when it has to deal with the nutty page takeovers with autoplay videos and javascript running.

Yeah, I have been using Firefox since 2007. I don't experience any crashes or bugs regarding performance or usability. But I have been facing issues with websites which don't work at all or developed with only Chrome in mind. And I have been facing this issue enough times that whenever I see a problem, I have to reopen the site in Chrome to confirm that Firefox is not the problem. I think this is a major problem, and as developers ignore Firefox or any other browser, web will be unusable without Chrome.

My issue with Firefox is essentially one bug where they refuse to fix. In private mode, previously closed tabs are, for some reasons, restorable. This doesn't happen for Safari or Chrome.

Just started Firefox and opened a popular local website. - the browser address autocomplete felt like I am waiting, while in chrome when I type few letters it shows suggestions like literally instantly - when I hit enter the website is loaded fast, but still slower than chrome. Like 2,3 times slower. In chrome it is loaded for like < 1 sec definitel, for firefox it is like 2 sec.

Closed Firefox and tried this again couple of times. Both issues are still present.

Edit: I have uBO installed on both.

My one issue with Firefox is the disk usage. Running on an internal SSD, the entire browser still slows to a crawl for 30+ seconds upon opening, regardless of the previous tabs open (although if a video is there, it takes even longer).

I've done all the tweaks and configurations found online, and nothing has made a marked improvement whatsoever. Not going to switch, but it's incredibly frustrating.

Facebook is a step by step strategy on MacBook Pro, starting from Servo launch. Here's a ticket https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

I'd love to get back to FF, but I have no idea how could that release with current state of things be allowed. Does your MacBook have Retina display?

Firefox lost its only advantage when it deprecated its more powerful extension APIs in favor of WebExtensions.

Slack is quite laggy in Firefox compared to chrome. It’s annoying enough to make me switch back to Chrome.

I only keep Firefox around as a back up for when there's a one-off website that doesn't work properly with Safari. Otherwise Safari is my default. It just performs better than anything else on OSX/iOS.

Is there a way to fix the scrolling? That rubber-band effect is horrible. Usually people get mad when websites screw up scrolling behavior but here you have an entire browser doing it and nobody seems to mind...

The first Firefox Quantum version broke on my work laptop and I never managed to work out what it was. It probably interacted badly with some corporateware, I don't know, but it would just crash on start.

Linux is a third-class citizen for Firefox and its very obvious. Not only is the rendering performance and responsiveness subpar compared to Chromium, but even very basic things like XDG spec support have still not been implemented after sitting on bugzilla for more than a decade.

To me, its incredibly ironic. On one hand, it makes sense for Firefox to focus on Windows because that's where most of its users are. On the other hand, what's the point of using Firefox in such a privacy-hostile OS filled with ads, telemetry, and tracking?

I did give Firefox a _serious_ exclusive try for the past two months. It's terrible for heavy websites. Clickup, PivotalTracker, JIRA, Zeplin - the browser just chokes on these sites and get janky. On Chrome they are butter smooth.

I don't know what to do. I want to use anything other than Chrome, but I also want a sane workday and not have the browser jank my day up constantly.

I would use Brave but they don't have a proper sync system yet. I switch between my imac, macbook pro and macbook air throughout the day, I need sync to be there.

I currently use Firefox, and recently (likely owing to multi-processing) Firefox eats up 2G of RAM for me[0]. I have ~700 tabs open so that may be a factor as well. Other than this the browser works great for me, and I have always used Firefox as my main browser.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/O8vvwUC.png

Firefox doesn't even properly support hardware acceleration in Linux.

There's also non-performance issues to be wary of Firefox. The Mr Robot surprise extension installation is something Mozilla said will never happen again, but lost them some trust. Not that Chrome is much better in that regard

Do not discount the fact that Google will pay highly for PR on this platform.

There’s a lot of bias in this article title. I’m kind of disappointed in them for it. “Complex ad blockers” would have been just as informative but without the blocker-favoring tilt.

Bonus irony for realizing that a properly configured blocker as they’re favoring with this title would reduce their site’s revenue, being both JavaScript and ad-heavy.

What a jerk move. I hope enough users are outraged by this to force them to rethink it.

what is "enterprise users of chrome"? Does this mean paid GSuite accounts?

Ditched Chrome a few years ago and switched to Vivaldi. Couldn't be happier.

Vivaldi builds on top of Chromium. All Chromium browsers will eventually receive these extensions changes as well unless they fork their codebase. Most of them support extensions via the Chrome Web Store though which means they'll need to adopt Manifest V3.

I switched over to Brave (chromium skin) and I'll never go back to Chrome.

That's okay, I switched to Firefox (+uBlock Origin) a while ago.

Does this include "Chromium" browsers as well like Vivaldi?

Well, glad I never started using Chrome instead of Safari on my Mac.

This is what I needed to finally abort Chrome altogether.

Well I'm done with Chrome then, Firefox it is.

and hopefully this shall be the high water mark of the chrome browser. rise firefox, rise!!!

Google is not what it used to be

every day i'm happier that I've changed my browser to firefox last year.

Bye bye Chrome...it was good while it lasted, although you have become a bit of a resource hog in recent years.

iridium is another chrome based browser without some of the googleisms.

Does this affect Chromium?

Easy. Just use Firefox.

I wonder if a browser Monopoly could bring an antitrust lawsuit against Google.

Abusive. Monopoly.

Awesome. Mozilla should be happy. Let Chrome die.

Surprise!

How long until Google starts threatening to disable your account if you're detected using a 3rd party ad blocker?

Essentially building a paywall around their services, where receiving their ads is the subscription cost.

Is this a realistic extrapolation of the direction they're moving?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...

If you are not using/contributing to firefox, you sold yourself short.

Unfortunately, Firefox’s resistFingerprinting is nowhere near as good as Safari’s. I still use Firefox on Windows, though.

It's such a shame Microsoft thought it will benefit more from piggybacking on the Chromium monopoly over building its next browser on top of Firefox.

If Microsoft would have donated only 50% of the Edge browser development budget to Firefox, Firefox would be in a much better position in the future to compete against Chrome.

Now, I fully expect Google to end its search contract with Firefox, or pay them much less, too, since it won't feel like it needs to fund its competitor anymore.

I guess my Chromebook will not be running Chrome.

Yeah, it's time to unscrew the write protect screw.

I'm wondering how Firefox for Android manages on ChromeOS. For now it's too slow on Crostini. But my cheap Chromebook is not performing well with both Crostini and Android containers. So straight up Linux should be hopefully better.

It's certainly harder for my old Tegra K1 Chromebook.

When will this actually kick in? Just wanna know how much longer I have on Chrome.

Wait, will Chromium have the same problem?

Yes, this is a Chromium change.

Okay so is Chromium safe? Can I switch to that?

Do you need permission? Just cause Firefox users have turned into the new hipster Mac fanclub doesn't mean you have to join them.

Is this effectively paying to remove ads? That is a compromise I'm willing to make.

Ugh. Now I'm going to have to switch my passel of family members, neighbors, and friends who rely on me for tech support over to Firefox.

Not that Firefox isn't going the same way eventually. Firefox crippled the ability for real customization with Firefox 57 and it's only gotten worse since then.

Pale Moon exists if you want the old school Firefox add-in capabilities

I'm confused about the difference between what people are saying here, and what chromium is working on. Referring to the email discussion of the feature: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-exte...

" It's really unfortunate how many people seem to be commenting here without understanding what the proposed changes even are. To be clear:

1. This change _IS NOT INTENDED TO GIMP AD BLOCKERS_. Rather, it is designed to make them faster and more secure. (Yes, even despite the limitations that might impact uBlock.)

2. The new proposed content blocking API _is not final_ and can/will be changed.

3. Threatening to switching to Firefox is not helpful and _WILL NOT CHANGE GOOLE'S MIND ABOUT THIS_.

If you don't understand this, please refrain from commenting as you'll only be decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio in this thread and thus making it more likely that the entire thread (including those who are expressing actual legitimate concerns about the limitations of the new API) gets ignored.

If you want to help:

1. Explain a specific use case that the new API can't handle (including a technical explanation of _why_ it can't handle that use-case)

2. Suggest constructive changes to manifest V3's API that will improve its capabilities _while still adhering to the stated goals of manifest V3_

3. If you can't do any of the above, please refrain from commenting so you don't just make things worse

Sorry if I sound aggressive. It just really frustrates me when constructive technical discussions get hijacked by large volumes of unconstructive, uniformed comments. It makes it way harder to get real work done. "

I know the anti-google bandwagonning is strong, but seriously, I doubt most people actually tried to understand what is being changed here, and it's sad.

This reads just like propaganda, frankly. It doesn't say anything firm, denies reality ("won't interfere, except it will impact uBlock"), etc. Also, according to the article, Google has since confirmed that it isn't going to budge, at all, on any of the issues that the comment you quote (which was from January) is addressed to.

It's not something I would put any credence in if my app or org depended on it.

Don't yell.

1. Explain a specific use case that the new API can't handle (including a technical explanation of _why_ it can't handle that use-case)

The maximum number of rules is 30k, which will break HTTPSEverywhere (I'm assuming you don't need that explained).

Suggest constructive changes to manifest V3's API that will improve its capabilities _while still adhering to the stated goals of manifest V3_

If Google wants me to do work, they can pay me.

There was a time in the past when Google would have deserved the benefit of the doubt with changes like these. That time is long, long gone.

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