Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes | Hacker News Reader

Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

zdnet.com

571 pointssnaky248 comments

The problem at this point isn't whether chrome will disable it... It can be added back, probably fairly easily as google intents to keep it around for "enterprise" anyway, so it's probably just gonna end up changing/removing one if-statement. If not, then the code already exists and has to be merged back in.

The problem is distribution of the actual extensions, as Vivaldi kinda pointed out, as the other browsers mostly rely on the Chrome Extension store. If Google really decides to pull the plug here they could start rejecting extensions using the old, removed-from-Chrome APIs. And then what? Each browser such as Vivaldi, Brave, Opera has to implement their own app store just to host the old-API ad-blockers. And implementing such a store is a major feat. And the walled garden strikes again.

Vivaldi already indicated they might create a "limited" store, meaning not a real store open to the public, but one where they list hand-picked old-API extensions such as ublock origin. Of course, innovation is still stiffed as you in such a "chrome-store + limited vendor store" scenario cannot just develop new extensions using the old-API because you'd have no chance of getting listed in the chrome store, and essentially no chance in the hand-picked limited vendor ones.

You can install extensions manually. You have to be able to because otherwise you wouldn't be able to develop new ones.

Walled gardens for extensions is also a big problem. Maybe web browsers will finally be forced to give up that control because of all this. Personally I would like at least user freedom to choose extension stores for themselves.

yeah this commitment inspires little long term confidence since the ecosystem is heavily chrome-centric

I've already moved everything to Firefox to test out waters before moving all my relatives.

My gut feeling is that Google won't pull this stunt with chrome, this is some kind of scare mongering or a PR tactic, I dunno.

It doesn't make a logical sense because if they are banning the ad-blockers, it means they accept that chrome is largely used by power users who can install these blockers (otherwise, what's the need?). But they should realize that a power user who installs an addon can just as easily move to another browser like firefox/brave. And the PR repercussions will ensure that a lot of newbies will leave too (because they usually follow the power users on youtube) which will essentially kill the advertising income that they wanted in the first place?

Maybe think about it in a different way. Right now, there is a kill-switch within googles primary product that could essentially destroy their business model.

This is not about google wanting to harm the current power users. It is probably the idea that someone could come along and destroy their business.

If such an extensions goes mainstream that could seriously harm them.

They may also want to get rid of paying Adblock Plus money for their highway robbery.

Now that I think about it, getting rid of ABP may be the primary reason for this move. They have to basically pay a third party to get access to their own users.

Either way, the battle is not over the power user minority, but over the average user.

The idea is to make the API just powerful enough for the most annoying ads to disappear. Most users would probably be content with this. They will probably make it so they won't lose all of their power users. I think what they really want is increasing the amount of works it takes to have full adblocking functionality to the point where the average user has no access to it.

The idea is to make the API just powerful enough for the most annoying ads to disappear.

In other words, to block ads on third party networks but leave Google ads alone. That's a bold move these days, when antitrust regulators are putting big tech under the microscope.

yes, thats probably the plan.

well, anti-trust these days is just a buzzword, in a legal sense it is defined in a very strict way, and the cost for companies to anticipate an anti-trust ruling is way higher than just pushing their own interests.

With 66% market share and countless other browsers available, the only question for antitrust when it comes to browsers is if users have equal access to browsers, not whether google supports ad blocking.

I think they will make sure that the ad blocking capability does not explicicly favor google ads.

>countless other browsers available

You know that's wrong. There's Chrome, Safari, and Firefox that support most things and which most people actually use; Internet Explorer is dead and Edge is becoming Chromium; and Brave, Midori, and Vivaldi are also Chromium.

There's also Lynx, Links, w3m, Dillo, and Netsurf, but very few people use those and ad-blocking isn't much of a concern there, because they don't enable JavaScript necessary.

There are around 10 more prominent browsers and lots of smaller forks, which is enough choice in the context of anti-trust.

ABP is compatible with the new API and will not be affected.

See: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/declarativeNetReques...

This is API that ABP can use. But with the new API the rules list will be limited to 30 000 rules vs. for example 42 000 EasyList is using, and an update to the rules will require a full update of the plugin.

See also comments from gorhill: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...

You do link the comments, so just to point out "will not be affected" isn't true for many reasons...not just the reduced ruleset. Details are in those comments. It will be a lesser product all around.

ABP released a statement to german news site golem.de, saying that they "prepare for the worst case".

This means they anticipate Google to target the Acceptable Ads program.

Originally I thought 30,000 rules wouldn't be enough to cover things, but according to this research, only a couple hundred rules are enough to block >90% of the ads: https://brave.com/the-mounting-cost-of-stale-ad-blocking-rul...

So maybe there's another limiting aspect of the declarativeNetRequest API I don't know of.

90% of the ads right now, but its trivial to design adtech so its only possible to block a tiny percentage of everything with only 50k rules.

(register 50k domains, use 50k different subpath/subdomains and mix content+ads on something like youtube where you cant wholesale block youtube, etc)

>ABP is compatible with the new API and will not be affected.

Thats just false. Every adblocker using webrequest will be affected, including ABP.

> getting rid of ABP may be the primary reason for this move

This makes no sense to me.

ABP is already publishing a version using a declarativeNetRequest-like API, it's in the Mac App Store[1], so clearly it's not going to "get rid of ABP".

Google benefits from ABP and AdBlock[2] being the most used content blockers, as they do not block Google ads by default, and do not block trackers/data miners out of the box.

If Google (rightly) deems content blockers as unavoidable, it sure would want people to install the ones which are not blocking its ads and trackers by default.

* * *

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock-plus-for-safari/id14...

[2] The two most-used content blockers as per Chrome Web Store.

You are probably right, although a low number of rules will also affect them as their acceptable ads program is based on the fact that they block everything else. I still wonder if they can continue to offer that program with 30,000 rules only. My idea that they target ABP came from their arbitrary 30,000 rules limit.

As I have written elsewhere I consider ABP and AdBlock as "infiltrated" by Google, so they definitely want to see the rigorous blockers disappear first. Should have made that clearer in the comment.

The Safari version supports "Acceptable Ads". I counted ~17,000 rules[1] which includes exception rules. Also, keep in mind cosmetic exception filters are not implemented through the declarativeNetRequest API.

(Edited for accuracy regarding rule count)

* * *

[1] https://gitlab.com/eyeo/adblockplus/adblockplussafarimacos/t...

Wow, ok that means 30,000 definitely won't be an existential threat for them.

It's been my assumption that with a little bit of scripting, EasyList could be pruned to land within the 30K without too much trouble. As you have more experience in this fields though, do you have any thoughts on how viable this approach would be, and if the 30K limit will be a problem in the end?

Doesn't any finite length list that is only able to be updated when the addon is updated mean ad networks can use a random string with more combinations than the size of list to defeat all ad blocking?

Yes, that seems plausible.

Maybe it's just me, I use ABP and I'm fine with it. I don't mind adds in general .. I mind annoying and experience breaking adds.

If I land on some page where annoying adds still get past ABP I close and never visit the page again.

> it means they accept that chrome is largely used by power users who can install these

You're making a very big assumption here. Last I checked people who blocked ads counted in the hundreds of millions and the number was growing rapidly.

Some old stats I found with a quick search:

https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/

> 615 million devices now use adblock

11% of the global internet population is blocking ads on the web

Adblock usage grew 30% globally in 2016

Mobile adblock usage grew by 108 million to reach 380 million devices

Desktop adblock usage grew by 34 million to reach 236 million devices

I think its gotten to the point where power users go around to all their non-power-user friends and install ad blockers for them, at least I do in our office. The reason this is so successful is because it takes 5 seconds to go the the chrome store and add ublock origin. Convincing my non-power-user friends to move to firefox would be significantly harder. Google's goal is to remove the severity (and effectively the ease) of ad blocking for non-power-users.

This had been happening for a decade or more based on anecdotal evidence - so much so that I had to double-check then change my intranet app at a previous smaller company (2008).

The new thing is Google valuing their profits over the wishes of a large population of their users.

This hits the nail on the head.

This is how big companies lose their way and get eaten by smaller companies. We all think Google is invincible because of their technological monopoly, but the problem of having to grow forever due to the way public markets work necessitates product evolution or squeezing blood from the stone. The real monopoly is philosophy, not technology, and it's so, so, so easy to lose the logos/pathos/eros high ground (and thus the philosophical war).

In Google's case, their innovation has never been able to eclipse their original sin: advertising. As long as your god is ads, you will make compromised product decisions that are not in alignment with your users. This is part of why I actually hope FB's currency takes off because maybe they can stop worshipping at the altar of click revenue.

Who am I kidding, it's just another revenue line-item on the 10K.

...logos/pathos/eros...

Did you perhaps mean ethos?

I tend to think of ethics as a subset of logic with a side of pathology, whereas love (eros) is a singular category.

I guess if I had to really sort it, I would only talk about love and power, in that order, but I think it's more addressable to speak in language people already kinda get.

But no, I specifically meant eros, not ethos.

I may be poorly informed, but why is firefox difficult? I switched a year ago and haven’t really noticed anything different...

It's difficult because the icon looks different and the look-and-feel is minimally different. Nothing of substance but people "dun wanna".

GP wasn't saying Firefox is difficult. GP gave a specific example of how it's easy to install an ad blocker on a system that's already running Chrome for someone else; no need to convince them to change browser, no need to tell them to double-click a different icon.

How is Firefox any different in that regard?

It's exactly the same, go to the Firefox add-on store and install uBLock Origin.

>It doesn't make a logical sense because if they are banning the ad-blockers...

To be clear, you can still block ads under Manifest v3. I don't know where this idea that you suddenly won't be able to block ads came from, but somebody is being dishonest about it.

Ad blocking capabilities are limited and there's no API to implement advanced rules like media size limiting. For example manifest v3 has no way to implement the full EasyList.

That's true on both counts, but less of a concern than you might be thinking. EasyList can be slimmed down significantly without losing any blocking. Media size limiting is a more interesting use case, but probably not why most installed adblockers in the first place.

Chrome isn't "largely used by power users", it's used by 60+% of all web users[1] which means it's largely used by nontechnical users. Power users will block ads somehow, whether by changing fork or changing browser or running a PiHole.

However, over 300 million users run adblockers[2][3] and it's probably a fair assumption that most of those users are relatively nontechnical and only run them because they're very easy to install.

I think this push is just to add a tiny bit of friction into the process so that 'casual' adblockers stop bothering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...

[2] https://whybytes.com/ublock-origin-vs-adblock-plus/477/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin

Opera does not use chrome web store: https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/

They do have their own store. However, Opera's add-on store is not a great experience. I'm not sure what's going on there, but I know of at least one company where they submitted a new extension to that store it took them around 6 months(!!!) to approve it.

It was easier to self-host the add-on for people who want it, so that they can download it from your website.

We need a third party extensions store.

We need companies to stop promoting the Blink monoculture and helping Google pull stuns like this as a result.

These companies helping Mozilla getting Servo into shape would be a really good idea, which is why they won't do it.

I know of at least one, F-droid.

Given that Firefox has now also moved to using WebExtensions, the Chromium forks could just rely on http://addons.mozilla.org as their “store.”

Firefox add-ons have a different namespace and some additional APIs that Blink does not support. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

And Firefox add-ons return promises instead of taking callbacks like Chrome.

Why wouldn't the other vendors band together and make a single, non-Google chromium extensions repository? If anyone from Microsoft is reading, this would be an excellent opportunity to give Edge a leg up on Chrome.

I suppose an extension is easier but as browsers can be told to go through proxies, an extension isn't necessary for adblocking. A 2nd process on the machine, a change to the browser (set localhost and a port) and you're done. Someone did something similar and called it Dan's Guardian IIRC, but that's all it was.

That's how I run mine, a local (and very ancient) version of squid blocks everything. It won't be as flexible but it works.

That doesn't work as well for https connections where you can only block on domain name, for which any DNS/VPN-based blocking works just as well.

Usually proxying can work for https connections - by letting the proxy terminate ssl. But then you really need to trust the proxy's ssl implementation, and it probably also breaks standard security ui like viewing the cert.

Definitely it has its problems.

The SSL implementation is the least of your problems. You’d need to have a private CA on your system that creates certificates on the fly. How do you secure that proper. You’d also have problems when reporting SSL errors between the site and the proxy to the browser because from the browsers PoV, the connection looks good.

I don't think so, AIUI. The page is decrypted by squid to serve it, so security is irrelevant.

Also it can match on regular expressions <http://www.squidguard.org/Doc/expressionlist.html>

If I'm wrong about the first point, please clarify. Web/HTTP is really not my area so maybe squid receives and passes stuff through entirely as a blob, if https is used.

Edit. What dgoldstein0 wrote suggests I do misunderstand.

Popular ad blockers have features like dynamic heuristic based blocking, right-click to block element, one click whitelist, etc.

As an example - app stores for android. Each manufacturer makes it's own and for years they are unable to cooperate.

It is funny, on the paper I should love this idea but as an app developer the last thing I want is more code coming through the OEMs.

Sadly Google is essential in keeping their shitty hacks at bay.

The problem you described actually happened with Firefox and Firefox forks not too long ago. Mozilla kicked out all traditional Firefox add-ons from their repository to "replace" them (note: they didn't actually replace the vast majority) with chrome style webextensions. Firefox forks were forced to implement and run their own add-on hosting system and API, and navigate the complex legal waters of re-hosting the add-ons if they wished to continue having access. One notable example of this is the Pale Moon browser. But it all turned out all right. The PM add-on "store" works great and is reliable.

It's not beyond the capabilities of efforts like Vivaldi or Brave to do the same as the Pale Moon team.

Ironically Firefox killed their extension API to be compatible with Chrome's extensions. Now they probably don't want to be compatible with the new Chrome API.

> Ironically Firefox killed their extension API to be compatible with Chrome's extensions.

This is misleading. They deprecated the old API primarily to be able to do multi-process and get rid of XUL.

As well as to expose a stable extension API (no more XUL extensions breaking randomly on every browser update) and to enforce any sort of security boundary/permissions system.

Note that this was done after two prior failed attempts to rewrite the CSS engine for multithread in C++: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/02/rewriting-a-browser-compon...

Its sad to lose DownThemAll and the plethora of othwr XUL extensions, but having performant multicore support is critical given the shift to having many cores (as single thread performance improvements become uncommon).

Which honestly makes sense. Komodo is one of my favourite editors, but Christ working with XUL is painful!

> get rid of XUL

XUL is still used by the browser itself.

I recently used the webRequest API in Firefox and it is already more robust than the Chrome equivalent. For example, you can write stream filters to process request responses. No so in Chrome, where you have no such capability.

And how many add-ons are updated and maintained specifically for Pale Moon - especially compared to the number of add-ons for Firefox for which that is the case?

Because that is the danger for the Chromium forks too - that nobody will bother with their forked store.

opera already had its own app store

Opera blocks ads wihout the need of an extension. It's just a setting.

Well internally it shows as an extension, you can check yourself. Didn't use to, but does now.

You are right, but my point was that the feature doesn't depend on the Chrome extensions store.

Business-wise, I would love to own an app store, and exercise control, and (eventually) cut myself in as the middleperson on for-pay software sold through it, as well as paid placements and ads.

All of the other browsers shouldn’t worry about store nonsense, just ship u-block by default and enabled. Fight fire with fire.

The reason that no browser does this is because that's the easiest way to go from "some sites are broken in this browser because no webdevs care to test with it" to "many sites are broken in this browser because webdevs deliberately go out of their way to break it". It's the nuclear option that a browser like Firefox would only go for (in the climate of the current web) if things got truly desperate for them. It's why, for example, Firefox didn't start blocking third-party cookies until Safari did it first: it gave them political cover to do so (and Safari can do whatever it wants because it's the only game in town on iOS).

Isn’t one of Brave’s main selling points that it itself is an ad blocker and doesn’t require a third party extension? Something about removing ads from pages before they even make http requests.

I hadn't considered the ramifications to extension distribution. If Google's Chrome extension store chooses to not host extensions that use the webRequest API, other Chromium-based browsers will need to maintain their own extension stores or users will start installing unvetted extensions from shady third-party websites.

Since Firefox support WebExtensions now (or will soon get it) which are very close to Chrome extensions, it wouldn't be unthinkable for all non-Chrome browsers to use Firefox store instead of the Chrome one. I think Mozilla could even be convinced to open it up as an "open web extensions" store or collaborate with others to build a new one. They certainly have the infrastructure and experience to run one.

Uh, Firefox already supports WebExtensions and it is like common knowledge. Mozilla barely has the experience to run a sync service, and even that is a disaster.

I don't think Firefox Sync is a disaster. In fact, it's the opposite. They managed to handle the service pretty well.

not originally. when sync first came out, and for a while after, it was a dumpster fire.

that being said, it is load better now.

Mozilla supports WebExtensions since 57+ afaik. Not sure about this if there are some differences in implementation and API's between Firefox's WebExt and Chrome's.

MDN has a page documenting differences in API support between major WebExtension browsers:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Each browser such as Vivaldi, Brave, Opera has to implement their own app store just to host the old-API ad-blockers. And implementing such a store is a major feat. And the walled garden strikes again.

How about "app store as a service?"

They should team up for the good of all, and create a communally owned fork of Chromium that they all contribute to, and a marketplace. That way the ensure their ecosystem can thrive outside of Google's kingdom.

Brave has it's own ad blocking builtin.

This is an excellent opportunity for Microsoft to distinguish their Chromium-based Edge from Chrome. Leave the webRequest API intact, ensure that these adblocking extensions are available from their own store, and invite other Chromium-based browsers to use their store instead of Google's.

This would be a very funny inversion!

2004: M$ is so greedy, Google is so pro-user.

2019: Google is so greedy, MS is so pro-user.

i used opera for a while, and, while i liked it, it had a glaring bug in Windows 10 that jist didnt go away in the year or so i was using it.

that being said ...opera already has their own extensions store.

Damn Google! This is so short sighted. People/everyone just installed Chrome on whatever systems they could find and that's how Chrome become so prevalent. Not because it was a superior product, not because of technology but because everyone was anti IE. Google is painting Chrome into similar corner. In a way, this is a good indicator of decline of Google. Revenue not through innovation but by coercion

I think that's rather revisionist. At a point in time Chrome was way better than not just IE, but way better than Firefox. The performance was leaps and bounds ahead.

I’ve been using both Firefox and Chrome since they came out and they have always felt near each others performance. It would be interesting to see some data on the subject.

arewefastyet.com used to show benchmark comparisons between Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It seems to now only show Firefox's performance across a slew of benchmarks. However, the old metrics are still available on the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20110901000000*/arewefastyet.com

One huge advantage Chrome had was it's multi-process model. This was back in the day when stuff like Flash would often nuke your entire Firefox session.

Firefox has had this for years.

But it didn’t until years after a chrome did

At least on Linux, I've found Chromium to be dramatically more responsive than Firefox every time I've tried switching (since about the time Chromium became usable on X11). Firefox still drops frames for me, which I find to be exceptionally jarring; and in combination with a UI that I'm not really that fond of, a backlog of basic standards compliance issues that I've been burned by as a developer (and as a user), and generally less-useful built-in fine-grained script and cookie controls, it's never really made sense for me to use Firefox.

Now I use Brave, and it's cool, it also encourages you to use interesting stuff like IPFS Companion, which I didn't know existed for Chromium until I switched to Brave.

I think even if Google ruins Chromium, it'll continue in the open somewhere else, and still be better than Firefox at the things that are important to me.

As someone who kept bouncing between Firefox and Chromium for quite a long time before finally settling with Firefox, I think that's the case only for light workloads with not a lot of tabs open. I was switching from Firefox to Chromium because Firefox was getting slow, but after a while of my normal usage, Chromium wasn't just getting slow - it was getting unusable, so then I switched back to Firefox (and the same cycle repeated after a while). But yeah, right after refreshing the browser profile, fresh Chromium felt a little bit faster than fresh Firefox. I don't think that's the case anymore.

I remember Chrome being way better than anything else at the time. I switched from Firefox to Chrome during that period because it was just so fast and lightweight in comparison. I think it was also the first time mainstream users had access to features like tabbed browsing, which was truly novel at the time.

Firefox, Opera and IE7 had tabbed browsing years before Chrome was released.

Chrome was the first to give each tab its own thread, which helped prevent rogue pages from bringing the whole browser down (not completely, but it was a dramatic improvement).

Firefox had tabs. Chrome's selling point at the time was that its tabs were process-isolated. Crashing one couldn't bring down the others. Which was a common Firefox experience.

>Not because it was a superior product, not because of technology but because everyone was anti IE.

>>>I think that's rather revisionist.

I agree with the sibling comments that remembered the past differently: Back in 2008, Chrome was actually the superior product -- for both users and developers.

- Chrome had a better partitioned process for each tab. IE and Firefox 3.x didn't so they often crashed on buggy web pages or bad Javascript. In Firefox, that would also take down all the other tabs one had open which obviously frustrated users.

- Chrome with V8 had the fastest Javascript engine at the time. This translated to faster UI on Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc.

- Chrome had a built in PDF viewer which was convenient. In IE, clicking on a pdf link triggered a disruptive "Save file as" prompt or if one had Adobe installed, it would launch Adobe Reader which was a jarring UI experience. (Also add that Chrome included ability to print to PDF. To duplicate that functionality in IE required buying the full Adobe Acrobat Professional for $300 or installing a similar PDF printer driver such as Bullzip.)

- Chrome had very good dev tools included. With Firefox, you had to install the Firebug plugin which was slower and buggier

It's fascinating how Google's recent controversy has caused widespread amnesia of Chrome browser's real technical advantages in 2008.

Chrome had a built in PDF viewer which was convenient. In IE, clicking on a pdf link triggered a disruptive "Save file as" prompt or if one had Adobe installed, it would launch Adobe Reader which was a jarring UI experience&

Good points for the most part, but not that one. A shitty JavaScript .PDF viewer is a much more "jarring UI experience" than launching an external viewer that I intentionally installed for just that purpose.

What Chrome actually did was bundle a well-regarded viewing plugin on windows. The "shitty JavaScript .PDF viewer" was a Firefox innovation.

> - Chrome had very good dev tools included. With Firefox, you had to install the Firebug plugin which was slower and buggier

I remember very well that after I made the switch to Chrome, I still used Firefox for all my debugging purposes and web-development. Firebug was way ahead of Chrome Dev tools.

Firebug is dead though. They merged it with Firefox Developer Edition but it still isn't the same thing.

Chrome still has the fastest start up times from what I've seen.

That's because by default it keeps running in the background when you "close" it.

I think this is the revisionism to be honest.

Chrome became as widespread as it did because it was bundled like crapware with installers for various pieces of software and they plastered scare-mongering banners all over their service telling people they had to use Chrome to get the correct experience, or deliberately gimping their own services on other browsers.

Chrome may have been the better browser at release, but simply being better did not get it to where it is.

There was always Firefox. When Chrome first came out I tried it. It didnt have plugins therefore no AdBlocker so I went back to Firefox cause pop ups are super annoying. Then when it did have addons it had a crappy adblocker that wasnt effective at all. I never went back to Chrome except for as a secondary browser. Firefox has been my main driving browser since the mid 2000s.

> People/everyone just installed Chrome on whatever systems they could find and that's how Chrome become so prevalent. Not because it was a superior product

This statement logically does not make sense.

People installed Chrome => Chrome was a superior product. Although, now it isn't anymore.

Revenue not through innovation but by coercion

Power corrupts. When did Google find they had the power to force people to do things? It started with some beneficial, "thou shall not." Power corrupts, however. Was it around 2011?

Because anti-IE? I doubt it was the driving motive for much people. People usually switch to something because it's better or at least because it's cool and popular.

I switched to Opera because it was so much better than anything in 2000. Then I tried Firefox because a friend switched to it and I sticked with it occasionally as it was becoming better and better and cool extensions emerged. Then I switched to Chrome because Firefox became so slow it was driving me crazy (yes, I always use obsolete hardware) and Chrome was ok (it lacked functionality I loved in Firefox extensions but I could tolerate this).

Now I actually am increasingly anti-Chrome because I don't want Google's monopolism and dictate so I feel like I want to switch back to Firefox and guide friends to do so but Firefox is still notably more slow than Chrome although not as slow as it used to be. I hope Mozilla guys are going to keep on improving its performance.

Why not try Opera again? As the joke goes, both Opera users are happy.

You can even run Chrome extensions if you install this extension: https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/install-chrom...

Brave is good† and probably if Google tries to close down the Chromium open source project, a lot of resources will just instead go to whoever maintains the biggest open source fork.

† except fine-grained cookie blocking is a bit broken compared to stock Chromium (only works properly if you always allow first-party cookies, which I also want it to ask first about), script blocking is about the same.

People were anti-IE because IE was vastly inferior to other offerings. Firefox had been making steady but slow progress as tech-savvy folks would install it for their friends/family.

Chrome came out and it was even better than Firefox on speed (javascript especially, with v8), reliability (process isolation, websites would freeze all of your tabs if not your whole computer at the time), and usability (unified search/url bar). And it had Google marketing behind it, meaning non-tech folks knew and loved the company making it and don’t rely on their tech-savvy friends to hear about it.

> Not because it was a superior product

Pardon? For years it was the best option out there. Its dev tools are still the best imo.

I tried opera a while back, and while it's fast and looks good, it has a new tab page with "recommended" sites that you can't turn off - I tried, but it's protected by DRM (opera will refuse to start if the file doesn't have a valid digital signature).

So if I'm going to switch browsers because of privacy/advertising concerns, it's not going to be Opera.

Current Opera doesn't even allow to customize mouse gestures. The browser that once prided itself in its feature richness...

I mean... at least it has mouse gestures. Hard to knock it for being not feature-rich enough when it has a feature no other browser has by default (except Vivaldi, which has Opera lineage).

Sure, however:

a) This built-in feature is way below the standards trivially achievable via extensions in Firefox, Chrome etc.

b) It's a downgrade in relation to what Opera itself used to offer in the past (and then, if I recall, got so stripped of functionalities it didn't even support bookmarks at some point).

I don't see anything like that in new tab page. I have only searchbar and thumbnails for pages I like to visit. I'm on Mac, do they have different versions of new tab page for other systems?

The new tab page has a list of bookmarks you can customize. It starts off with some "recommeded" sites in there, but you can just remove them once and they never come back. The only thing you can't remove from the new tab page is the Google search bar, which never really bothered me. Either way, it seems like you're implying that Opera will populate the new tab page with sites it chooses, but that's just not the case.

Plus, the search bar isn't just limited to Google, it respects the default search engine selection.

Opera does allow you to remove the Google search bar (actually, it's not tied to Google).

Go to browser settings -> advanced settings -> Start Page.

This is what I use https://i.imgur.com/GpF0sQt.png

Thanks for the tip!

I just wrote a blog post on how to replace the new tab page altogether if that is something you are interested in: https://blog.nahtnam.com/p/my-new-favorite-browser

It is highlighted in the "new tab page" section

Opera is owned by Chinese company.

Hey! I hope this isn't breaking the rules (self promotion) but I wrote a blog post on how to change your new tab page: https://blog.nahtnam.com/p/my-new-favorite-browser

It is described under the "new tab page" section. I can't really comment on the privacy/advertising concerns but I do know that Opera providers a VPN for you (who know what they are doing behind the scenes) and have their own adblocker built in.

I tried, but it's protected by DRM (opera will refuse to start if the file doesn't have a valid digital signature).

Not too long ago, that situation would just cause someone to crack it and share how, or at least a patch.

Then again, that was also a time when there was an actual choice between browsers, and not just "Firefox or WebKit/Chrome(/ium) shell."

I feel like things would be easier if Firefox could be embeded in another browser just like chromium can.

Let Google cripple their browser for themselves, and Mozilla provide the good and strong de facto browser engine.

What is currently stopping its adoption? Iirc there were several browsers based on Gecko engine. Is it drm?

Firefox is probably still a legacy mix of XUL, cpp and migrating to rust. I'm pretty sure chrome is easier to adapt.

XUL was replaced quite some time ago.

There is still some XUL components/code floating around, it's being replaced and reduced with each release.

Hmm, TIL. I was under the impression this work was already completed.

XUL is not supported for extensions now, but has Firefox's UI really been fully rewritten in HTML yet?

No. If you open the browser console and type `window`, you see:

    ChromeWindow chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

Visiting this link is funny by the way.

Does this complicate having a standalone Gecko though? Surely browser authors could write their own UI and embed Gecko inside without touching XUL.

>XBL stats update :

>* 28 bindings (9.33% of original bindings)

>* 10517 lines of code (21.02% of original LOCs)

https://twitter.com/mozxbl

Yes, apparently I was wrong. Thanks for the additional data.

Unfortunately, Embedded Gecko is not supported anymore... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...

However, the new Servo engine will be embeddable.

They're at least working on making that as easy as possible on Android: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components/

As I understand it, that should also make it relatively straightforward to switch between Servo and Gecko, as a developer. But I'm not an Android dev, so take that with a grain of salt.

I haven't seen this talked about here but... last I checked Mozilla was in majority funded by Google royalties. What's their plan of aligning their income with essentially directly attacking their funding source?

They’re not attacking anything - I don’t think ad blockers block search ads, which are embedded into search results - and Firefox royalties have always been for search.

> I don’t think ad blockers block search ads

Of course they do.

uBlock Origin doesn't block search ads on DuckDuckGo.

Edit: Never mind; just had to fiddle around with the filters.

I guess Google could still be interested in being the default engine in Firefox even with ads and tracking blocked, since it would slow down alternatives from spreading.

I would be more comfortable in Mozilla not being founded by Google though.

> Let Google cripple their browser for themselves

Web developers can also help here by making the UX slightly worse for Chrome users, e.g. by showing more ads.

"This site best viewed with..."

I was thinking more of:

"Extra ads for Chrome users: ... Want less ads? Use ..."

Bonus for putting the extra ads in a pop-over div.

That makes no sense whatsoever for a business owner.

Not all websites are businesses.

We want less dark patterns in software, not more

> I feel like things would be easier if Firefox could be embeded in another browser just like chromium can.

Completely agree. I made my own little browser (with ad blocker built in to the network layer) using CEF simply because there was not an easy to use FF equivalent library.

I don't see how Chrome's new anti-ad blocking isn't seen as anti-competitive, considering Google basically runs the ad business on non-Google sites, etc. Sure, Facebook and Amazon also serve up ads...but Google is by far the company that is hurt the most by ad blocking. Then at the same time Chrome is essentially blocking "intrusive" ads by default...and by intrusive they basically mean non-Google ads that have the same CPC and CPM model Google has.

It is absolutely anti-competitive garbage, and you should be prepared to see more and more of it (and increasingly anti-consumer iterations if it) until people wake up and start demanding that their political leaders do something about it.

“Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story.

Google never said they were blocking ad-blockers. It was the hyperbole Firefox crowd who used some post by Raymond Hill from the creator of uBlock Origin as a reason to start another "Switch to Firefox" campaign.

However, Hill admitted that adblockers aren't going away and it is just a proposed change in the WebRequest API to make things more akin to Safari to help adblockers operate in a standard in speedy way.

Mozilla on the other hand did expose a bunch of users to ads and malicious sites recently though when they didn't renew a certificate and didn't push out a fix for over 24 hours in which all addons were disabled in their browser and the configurations were lost as well.

Can you link to the site where he says this?

https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/chrome-may-get-faster-ad-block...

I said:

> Ad blocker uBlock Origin “can no longer exist” if a proposed change to Chrome goes through.

First, I never ever referred to uBlock Origin as an "ad blocker", so the article is wrong there. Second, I specifically point out that uBlock Origin can no longer exist, not that "ad blockers" can no longer exist.

uBlock Origin isn't an ad blocker?

> Hill admitted that adblockers aren't going away

I didn't "admit" anything -- I never made the statement "ad blockers are going away" in the first place. If you want to argue I did, please provide a specific source supporting this.

You're right that this is potentially anticompetitive, but

    “Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story.

I've never heard libertarians say that. Rather, they say that consumers have the potential to regulate companies if they choose to do so, by voting with their feet. We should do so more often than we do; when there's a free market (monopolies are not free markets) it feels pretty good to tell a company to go screw themselves.

Personally I switched back to Firefox when Chrome tried to force login to my Google account, and I haven't missed a thing (other than some dev tools, e.g. websocket inspection). Firefox Quantum is really good, and their bookmark sync has replaced my previous usage of the now-defunct Xmarks.

“Companies will regulate themselves” is libertarian orthodoxy, and suggesting otherwise is ahistorical and silly. (But then again so is libertarianism.)

I switched to Chrome years ago. Recently I switched back to Firefox.

It's changed dramatically. Speed, security, and stuff that you can't do in Chrome, like extensions like Facebook Container.

To me this isn't about Chrome Vs Firefox though. It's about the benefits of a healthy marketplace for software, and the dangers of near monopolies to consumer choice.

The world is changing. People are starting to care about things they didn’t before. I think the pendulum is swinging towards privacy and I like it.

This one[1] and the likes will prevent vast majority of ads, regardless of which browser you have chosen to use this morning.

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...

Except mobile browsers, arguably the most critical place where you need blocking to get any kind of reasonably decent experience (load times, viewable area, battery life, etc.).

Extensions like uBlock target people who don't want to bother with editing hosts files and keeping them updated.

I use such a host file on my android. There's even apps to manage them.

Needs a rooted device though.

That has the added benefit of removing ads in all apps, because when they can't be loaded, generally not even the empty widget shows.

You can use Blokada who block with DNS system without rooting.

That uses a VPN internally though, which comes with a decent amount of overhead.

See my comment above, you can use https://www.nextdns.io/

You can sign up at https://www.nextdns.io/ and then you can block ads at the DNS level. Simple to do, and updated, and without the overhead of running a local VPN.

I think that's a reason why DNS based ad-blocking is as effective a solution as any, though easily worked around against (I see that Amazon's android app is able to show ads despite DNS blacklist).

Mobile chrome did not support ad blocking extensions last time I checked

Mobile Firefox does. How is this not better known?

The best mobile Firefox feature never marketed by Mozilla at all.

I don't think it is certain to stay, as they seem to avoid commiting to the extension capability in their future Versions of Firefox for Android.

So AFAIK it might be that they want to get rid of it.

That isn't true.

It would be great if you were right, but I don't think you are. Do you have sources?

I got the idea from this [1] reddit comment made by someone with an Mozilla Employee flair:

> [...] There is not yet a concrete plan (feature) to bring Web Extensions to Fenix. That does not mean it is not going to happen. It does mean we have some things to figure out first.

and this [2] github issue where they state

> Not for MVP, will look at it for further versions

I fear that what they'll want to figure out first is whether not implementing them will hurt adoption.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/b4bhzs/will_firefo...

[2] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/574

First of all, I am a Mozilla Employee.

Second, in that very github issue that you linked, look at this comment: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/574#issuecomm.... Also, transition from Fennec to Fenix won't happen until feature parity. The MVP is just that, the MVP.

Finally, GeckoView does not use the WebView interface, specifically because we want to build richer experiences than the WebView interface offers.

> transition from Fennec to Fenix won't happen until feature parity

Thank you for the reply. It's really good news to hear that full extension capabilities will continue to be supported!

I was worried by the very comment you linked, as "users will get the experience they expect" sounds carefully crafted to not say anything at all.

A chromium fork named Kiwi supports extensions on Android! Thanks to this I can play youtube music in the background and have the fastest possible browser on Android. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...

> The browser is not fully open source like open in open source. It is a common myth and misconception about Kiwi Browser.

https://github.com/kiwibrowser/android/issues/30

There's NewPipe at F-Droid for youtube music in the background and so much more.

Yep, but it's not only Kiwi. There is zero full open-source Chromium browsers for now (with reproducible builds, that's why no Chromium on F-Droid)

There's Chromium build at Bromite repository, but they both might be not exactly reproducible.

Firefox on Android supports extensions, including uBlockO, and it works perfectly. It can be set as the default browser and voilà, no more ads ever.

Agreed. My point was playing with hosts file is definitely not something easy on a mobile, or something most people would want to bother with. Especially when it comes to adding exceptions and getting some sites to work.

For computers and Android devices Firefox and uBO are far more capable solution than DNS blocking, at least when it comes to browsing.

I am writing this comment from Android Firefox with uBlock origin installed on it.

On iOS, you can use DNSCloak[1] which has recently been open-sourced[2]. You can either setup a DNS server (DoH or dnscrypt) somewhere that include these filters, or you can use in-app Blacklist functionality to block domain (although it needs domains only-type of block file, instead of host file, but converting them is quiet trivial).

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-client/i...

[2]: https://github.com/s-s/dnscloak

I use PiHole and firewall to manage adblocking at home, and uBlock on every device that supports it. uBlock is a far more effective solution than DNS based ones which is why I prefer to install Firefox+uBlock on Android than use hosts file.

I'll give DNSCloak for iOS a try, thanks for the recommendation.

If you use an Android browser that supports the Chrome Custom Tabs protocol [1] such as Lynket [2][3][4] it's possible replace the Chrome tab that appears when you click/tap a link with a completely differently browser such as Brave or Firefox (inc. Focus, Nightly or Preview). [5]

By doing this you inherit the features of the replacement browser like ad-blocking and tracking protection.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs

[2] https://github.com/arunkumar9t2/lynket-browser

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=arun.com.chrom...

[4] https://medium.com/@arunkumar9t2/introducing-chromer-2-0-a-b...

[5] https://i.vgy.me/EWrVFa.jpg

I, for the first time ever, uninstalled chrome/chromium from my computers. It pains me because I liked it overall, and firefox isn't happy with my 2009 laptops.

Maybe chrome devs mistake will be the air gap that creates a new leader from another group.

FF and Safari were the only browser that worked well on my 2009 MBP ... until FF went multi process, and then started using too much ram. Today I think its total ram usage is worse than Chrome.

Memory usage used to be a lot better than chrome, but I'm under linux, maybe on macos it's different, also I stopped caring about it so maybe it got worse.

You could try setting it up to use fewer than 8 different processes?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

I got a new computer recently (old one died), and because of this change I will not install Chrome on the new computer. I’m planning to use Edge for anything Google-specific like Google Docs or Sheets, and Firefox for everything else.

Unfortunately, my wife has a Chromebook and it’s hard to convince her that her very cheap, almost-disposable laptop should be replaced with something more expensive just to avoid Chrome. (And no, she did not want me to install Linux on it - sigh.)

Buy a second hand machine. I just grabbed a 3rd gen thinkpad x1 carbon for a neighbor and the thing is a ferrari compared to any laptop I have. 390$. Probably less than 300$ for a less thin model (x250~)

Can't she install Firefox from the Play store?

I really don't understand why security concerned people use Google's product in spite of knowing that Google steals everything and compromises user's privacy.

I think you are confusing security with privacy.

As far as security goes, I trust Google way more than any other site to handle my credentials properly, follow security best practices, use the highest level of encryption where applicable, keep servers up to date and patched faster than anyone else, etc. Outside of Google+, I can't remember the last time there was a major security incident at Google, when they happened, the impact was minimal (contrast this to say the Apple Cloud leak which led to the infamous "fappening", the Marriot leak, the Equifax hack, Target, etc). Breaches and 0-days happen, but as far as I know, Google is going to be the best it gets when it comes to security.

Now when it comes to my privacy, no. I don't trust Google as far as I could throw them.

> contrast this to say the Apple Cloud leak which led to the infamous "fappening"

This breach was not due to missteps or problems with security on Apple’s part (though Apple has had issues with security lapses, notably passwordless root login on macOS which was never reported to have been exploited [0]).

In the instance of “The Fappening”, the breach that lead to the exposure of iCloud data was “revealed to have been gained via spear phishing attacks”. [1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/29/macos-hig...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_ph...

I wonder if that is sustainable as features are built on top of the new system and their codebase diverges further and further from chrome as a result.

Google said that the adblocking would still be available for entreprise customers so it should be as simple as flipping a switch. Maintenance should be easy if that's true.

I think they'd simply be maintaining separate sets of backported code, since Enterprise Google Chrome won't be open source.

WebKit/Blink is a mixed LGPL/BSD licensed project, with KHTML and other KDE developed parts being LGPL. Google likely can't keep most of their patches stripping support secret.

Well, an enterprise would have to ask for the source code to Chrome, wouldn't they?

Well,they never asked for Microsoft Explorer/Edge code.

Only KDE, Apple, and Google can enforce it through their own licenses.

Google never said they were removing ad-blocking. Not sure where you are getting your information.

I won't worry about that. I'm guessing this effectively creates a fork of Chromium that does not have the anti-ad blocker changes in question, which Opera/Brave/Edge will use instead of the main one.

On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?

I've been using Firefox for 6+months now as my primary browser. Once used to the slightly different UI I've not noticed any difference in day to day browsing.

Only complaint - and this is my fault for enabling it and not a Firefox issue - is that if I used a container for Google, reCAPTCHAs are a huge huge huge pain in the arse now and take many attempts to pass. This is (I guess) because the Google cookie cannot track your general web usage (since your google cookie is in a container that only works on google domains, rather than general web properties) so it is harder to distinguish you from a bot. Also the dev tools are not as nice, but that is a niggle.

Try https://www.startpage.com/

Works as proxy for Google Search. No captchas, very customizable. Could never live with the Bing based crap results of DuckDuckGo.

Whatever DDG does to Bing, it makes it worse. I recently switched from DDG to Bing and the difference is colossal - 95% of the time it’s as good as Google.

But non-proxied Bing results are still far worse than Google, so I chose StartPage. :)

Oh DDG gas been my primary search engine for ages now. Highly recommend DDG. No CAPTCHAS there - it is just on random other sites that use reCAPTCHA that are a pain now as I believe (I don't know for sure) that Google relies on your Google cookie(s) that they have associated with your account - if you have sandboxed Google then there is no "normal" browsing history to check so you look like a bot. Annoying, but not really a big deal.

I don't think having proxied Google search results will solve the reCAPTCHA menace since you presumably won't get the Google cookie(s)? If Google still cookie you when using startpage then that kinda defeats the point surely?

> I don't think having proxied Google search results will solve the reCAPTCHA menace since you presumably won't get the Google cookie(s)? If Google still cookie you when using startpage then that kinda defeats the point surely?

Let me be clear. I'm not taking about SOCKS proxies. In this context I'm saying that both DDG and StartPage are acting as anonymizing proxies for Bing and Google.

Search for the "Buster" plugin. It uses the sound captcha to automatize the process. Works great, though sometimes the sound option is "not available", but those are the least in my case.

This might be sustainable for a couple of months but Google will keep on developing chromium with the assumption that those APIs aren't available and maintaining and back porting patches will not be sustainable in the long run. And we've seen Opera and Edge shying away from too much work with their own webengines, why would it be different this time?

I'm not sure how the architecture of these browser projects work, but is it too difficult to stub out the non-existent APIs in their forks? I'm hoping it's different this time because this is a topic people care for... but I can only hope.

Maintaining a fork takes effort and this effort grows when the codebases diverge from each other. If the affected code is at a busy location in the source code then other changes can also affect it which makes maintaining the fork harder in the long run.

> On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?

Not sure why power users ever left Firefox as their default browser when surveillance tech came along. I sure didn't. Firefox was always the more competent and customizable browser. Happy to see users returning. Among other things, the current "Welcome Chromium/Chrome users!" megathread in the Firefox subreddit[1] seems to indicate there's something going on. :)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bvh4pq/welcome_chr...

I flicked between multiple browsers at work since the Chrome news dropped. Having used Chrome for many years.

Firefox always had and still has an issue which can cause up to 2x page load times when used on Mac with scaled mode. Fascinating bug report but ultimately impossible to cope with at work!

I’ve actually landed up using Safari (I rarely use dev tools) and pleasantly surprised by it.

I never understood the appeal of Chrome over Firefox in the beginning.

It was faster, especially for JavaScript heavy sites... Which is the majority of sites these days it seems.

It took a couple years at least for FF to catch up. I would say for most sites Firefox is now at least as fast while using less RAM.

Now the problem is that Google web apps are tuned for Chrome, so users will complain their gmail is slow on FF.

> Now the problem is that Google web apps are tuned for Chrome, so users will complain their gmail is slow on FF.

I've heard this argument often, but it does not really resonate with me well. I've always used Gmail in Firefox and never noticed it being especially slow. I just tried it now and emails open seemingly instantly when I click on them. It feels quicker than ~100ms on average and certainly not slower than 200ms even for the occasional large email or hiccup. I just don't see how this can be used as a reasonable metric for choosing a browser.

I switched because CPU usage on Mac OS was so much higher under Firefox than Chrome. I tried so many different things, following suggestions in Bugzilla, HN comments and just about every site I could find through DDG and Google. Nothing worked, and usually when I bring it up people dismiss the complaint with "it's better than it used to be", "it's not that bad" or "it's just you". But I'm not the only person complaining (or being dismissed outright).

To be clear, it's not pegging any core at 100% or anything so extreme. But it causes my laptop to heat up and my fans to kick in very frequently - something that almost never happens with Chromium/Webkit/Blink based browsers. If I primarily used a desktop, I wouldn't even have noticed, but a warm lap and constant fan noise makes it unusable for me.

Safari was out because I needed to run multiple browser profiles concurrently (something Firefox and Chrome support readily).

I've recently switched from Mac OS to Windows but my experience (as recently as a month ago) with Firefox leaves me feeling that it's the less mature implementation with an over zealous fan base ("it's not us, it's you!").

> Not sure why power users ever left Firefox as their default browser when surveillance tech came along.

On any Firefox thread on HN, search for “macOS” and you’ll find several complaints. In my case, I could live with most of Firefox’s problems, but not the lack of AppleScript support.

I'm writing this from Firefox to test if it's still unusable on Mac. It's not that bad as before, to be honest. But for some reason now I can't synchronize it on Android... hopefully after another few years I will be finally able to switch over to it.

I switched to Brave.

I'm not switching to Firefox.

I never left. Firefox, even for its warts, wasn't run by a adtech company. I knew this would happen sooner or later. And now, the thumbscrews tighten.

Now yes, Moz://a has done some dumb stuff.. But so does many others. Still its the best we have.

I think Google will find people switch browsers more easily than they think.

There was a time when Chrome was not ubiquitous. Even non-technical users can be convinced to click on a different icon to access the Internet if it results in a better experience. That's how we ended up with Chrome after all.

> Even non-technical users can be convinced to click on a different icon to access the Internet

Google put a lot of effort in convincing those users, by plastering Chrome icons in their products and saying it was the supposed way to access the internet "safely".

It's not as easy for others to do the same.

I don't see that as a problem. Sure it takes effort, but especially since Google has the feature in their enterprise version, it shouldn't be too hard to just turn it on.

Regardless, I'm sure a company like Brave or Microsoft can handle the engineering necessary to keep this working. You don't have to fork the whole thing.

AdGuard will not be affected by these changes - https://adguard.com/en/blog/chrome-api-comment.html

Apples and oranges. AdGuard is a third party app that runs at the system level. Not the same thing.

The main question is how long they will do it. Now it's easy, but google can move the locker deeply inside. If anti-ad-blocker changes will needs 1-2mb patches every release, they will just give up fast.

My worry is that because Chrome has become a standard of web-browsing so even after such decisions taken by Google, people would not switch to other(better) options.

I looked around but I can't figure out if this affects extensions like Tampermonkey. If not, writing an adblock script for that seems like an alternative.

When Chrome did this they quickly highlighted how much control they have over what people view. Privacy focused open browsers will gain marketshare because of it.

What did Chrome do exactly? Cause they never said they were disabling ad-blocker extensions. That was the grapevine effect from the Firefox crowd.

I was referring to this, but it looks like there was an update to the article saying that it might not block everything https://www.tomsguide.com/us/chrome-block-ad-blockers,news-3...

What about Microsoft Edge Chromium ?

Good news :D

If you don't control the browser you downloaded, do you control the OS you chose to install? Can Microsoft ban Google Chrome from even running on their platform? Where does the 'user gets to decide' line end and the 'vendor knows best' line begin?

So not only is Google introducing this change into the Chromium codebase, but it sounds like they aren't putting it behind a Chrome-only compiler flag. And if you're satisfied with Chrome as-is then too bad because the GoogleUpdater will automatically update Chrome and is harder to kill than a cockroach, and Chrome will give you an annoying popup 80-some days after that version's build date telling you to upgrade Chrome even if you have managed to block GoogleUpdater.

Tried Opera on Mac OS - half of toggles on the Settings page is not rendered - "Pref not found for element SETTINGS-TOGGLE-BUTTON in SETTINGS-APPEARANCE-PAG". It was so epic trash - removed instantly. They obviously don't test it on Mac OS.

Tried Vivaldi - render sites with errors (some images missing). 0 plugins installed. Not acceptable, removed.

Brave - I really hate person who run this project and how he is trying to sell his product by "if you hate google as much as me, use Brave", while using Chromium.

So, for now I don't see any Chromium-based alternative.

Edge Chromium maybe? I've been using it and have no complaints...

Yeah, testing it right now :) Thanks for the reminder - it's easy to forget MS has a browser for Mac :)

Works absolutely great!

> Tried Vivaldi - render sites with errors (some images missing). 0 plugins installed. Not acceptable, removed.

Not sure what version of Vivaldi you used when that happened, but using Vivaldi every day on multiple workstations with different OS's without any issues I can only urge you to give it another try.

There is only one version I found on their Download page, 2.5.

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