The end of uBlock origin for Google Chrome? | Hacker News Reader

The end of uBlock origin for Google Chrome?

ghacks.net

239 points_pgmf107 comments

Great time to switch to Firefox if you haven't already. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

And before you even begin to complain about it being "too slow", "slower than Chrome", <other statement of the month>, tell us that after you're running Chrome without an ad-blocker.

And even if it really is still slower by some miracle - this is a community containing world-class software engineers. Donate some of your time to bring it up to speed. Pun intended.

And while you're at it, I can highly recommend trying out tree style tabs. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

If you do decide on using it, I recommend editing the browser so it doesn't display tabs on top, so the tree style tabs is the only place your tabs are located.

I cannot emphasize enough how big an improvement this has been to my browser experience, once I got proffecient with it.

Aah why did they complicate tree style tabs. I tried once again to use it after they changed it but I'm not going to create some userChrome.css file on all my systems to hide the native tabs, and the plugin looks stupid now with some big "Tree Style Tab" header :( Why doesn't Mozilla just implement this natively. Do that Sherlock thing! Its just a super feature. I want to do Prefences->Show Tabs as a Tree, get it synced, and just never use Chrome!

Also try out container tabs. Firefox supports running multiple containers (isolating your cookies etc between), and the extension means you can open different tabs in different containers. For example instead of using multi-account login for Gmail, I open personal Gmail and work Gmail in different containers. I have a container just for banking, and there's another container extension to isolate your Facebook

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

I’ve switched when the rumors about Google’s intentions started surfacing, and my only regret is not switching earlier!

"And before you even begin to complain about it being "too slow", "slower than Chrome"... "

That was undeniably true, though ages ago. Probably those thinking along these lines didn't run Firefox for some time.

A ton of code has changed in the two products and since about two years Firefox has filled the gap then surpassed Chrome. And BTW even if Firefox wasn't faster than Chrome (it is), I would happily trade say a 20% loss in speed with a close to 100% gain in privacy.

> a community containing world-class software engineers

Sadly they don't seem to have world-class managers

Doesn't matter how good you are at doing the thing right if you're not doing the right thing.

Funny how that applies to Chrome.

Page-loads in chrome are usually really slow if you have an adblocker. ABP runs a bunch of JS on every load and the page load performance goes from being seemingly instant when the mouse button is released to having a noticeable delay. Sure, this is isn't really noticeable when the page already have a noticeable delay, but it sure slows things down for pages without a bunch of tracking and ads that blocks rendering.

Hasn't ABP been known for poor performance? If I recall correctly at some point they were hiding ads with a ton of CSS

Reddit, Firefox, Pixel is noticably slower to render, scroll or click than in Chrome.

Old.reddit.com or especially i.reddit.com solve speed issues related to that site...

But yeah as a Firefox user it still lags behind safari and chrome for speed. I don’t use Adblock either...

I do use adBlock. Other sites are fast. But those sites that are JS heavy just to render lag.

Mapbox and Hangouts as well - both products I use on a daily basis. I'd say Mapbox is about 20% performant in comparison to Chrome, and Hangouts w/video chews up 50%+ CPU utilization.

Switched some short time ago. And could not be happier. Love the UI, the addon ecosystem, the bookmark manager. And the philosophy behind it.

I tried switching to Firefox for two months. It's just so rough around the edges in ever way. I wanted to like it. Really.

I've been using Firefox for several years. Switched from Chrome after Quantum released. I've had the opposite experience. I have not had many issues and the performance is great.

One thing Firefox recently did was overhaul their GPU acceleration code (webrender) - it makes a massive difference in rendering speed and is faster than Chrome in many situations, though it needs to be manually enabled on some machines.

Webrender defaults to off in most configurations still.

I'm curious, when did you try switching? What OS were you using? Do you have any examples of rough spots?

Roughly two months ago. Windows and Android. A few things that make it very tough for me:

Autofilling. Chrome is just so much better and it's something I have to do a lot for my business. I'm always buying random parts from random places and a lot of them don't have the best-designed forms. Chrome handles them much better. There's just so much friction removed when you don't have to type all your info, especially on a phone, or pull out your credit card. I now have my credit card number memorized thanks to having to do so so much with Firefox. I had the same credit card for years, but with chrome I so rarely had to actually pull it out that I couldn't have told you more than the last 4 digits.

Chrome's built in password management is just better at picking up logins and passwords too when forms aren't designed really well.

I get a lot more performance issues with Firefox. I have to force close it sometimes. Never happened with chrome. It's not super frequent by any means but it happens.

Lot of websites don't work in Firefox and I have to open them in Chrome which is likely not Firefox's fault the majority of the time, just developers not testing in Firefox, but still quite annoying to me.

I had all these same issues as well except I run Linux. Tried to switch to Firefox 2 months ago, used it for about a month before going back.

In addition to the issues above, I noticed terrible battery performance on my laptop and the fans would frequently spin up even with a single tab open.

True this. Autofilling just doesn't not work at all in Firefox for me. Chrome's was great.

Not parent but in my case at least Twitch consumes twice as much memory to stream a video in Firefox as compared to Chrome, and still manages to stutter more. But it is possible it could be something to do with my extensions (uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere) since they're installed on Firefox but not on Chrome.

Agreed. Twitch is nearly unusable in firefox. I have to view all channels in 480p to keep it from freezing constantly. It still freezes occasionally.

For twitch.tv I highly recommend the 'Alternate Player for Twitch.tv'[0] extension for both Firefox and Chrome. It runs a million times better in both browsers.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitch_5/

Tried it out and its like night and day! Thanks man

I feel like Twitch is equally responsible for fixing these stability issues.

Chiming in with a simple example:

Two finger pinch zooming on a Macbook stutters enormously in Firefox and is much smoother on Chrome.

I use this feature all the time and it's made switching to Firefox difficult.

Another example:

I'm not a fan at all of how Firefox handles displaying huge amounts of tabs. Tiny arrows to scroll your tabs left and right is really a disorienting nuisance and I much prefer Chrome's system of making tabs smaller. I'm sure there's a way to change this, but I'd rather stay on the default path that they're actively iterating on and improving.

Just tried installing Firefox on my mac and pinch-to-zoom doesn't even seem to be enabled by default. I had to insert 4 obscure config values in the right place [1] to get it to even start working, and as you say it's very jerky. It jumps in 10% increments, rather than being a smooth transition.

[1] http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011032210281240...

> And before you even begin to complain about it being "too slow", "slower than Chrome", <other statement of the month>, tell us that after you're running Chrome without an ad-blocker.

I run Brave without an adblocker and have found it to be much faster than Firefox (with adblocker and pi-hole).

Also, as someone whose startup has both Chrome and Firefox extensions, I have to say the Firefox reviewers (who review releases and hold up the process — not end user reviewers) can be hugely annoying, and we deploy there as infrequently as possible. As a result, our Firefox customers don’t get all the latest bells and whistles. Wish it weren’t that way, but the process takes months!

Edit: clarified the annoying reviewers are not end users reviewers, but the people who suck up months of time for every minor update, making confused complaints about our code, and even UI implementation.

> Firefox reviewers can be hugely annoying, and we deploy there as infrequently as possible.

Maybe, just maybe, they're sick of you because you ignore their platform?

To clarify, I mean the people who review (and hold up) releases, not our end users. We wish we could release more rapidly but are discouraged from doing so by the months-long process that results from any tiny update on Firefox.

Does Brave have something like uMatrix?

I don't think I could use the modern web without it.

Brave is an ad blocker

Is that really true? I thought Brave was a novel ad sales platform that allows users to bid against ad companies for user time. It's inherently wrapped up in the cryptocurrency ethos (trying to inflate a Token) which will not really lead to profit for users, but for a founder.

Brave has add blocking features but isn’t an ad blocker. I think it’s useful to compare for speed base vanilla brave to other browsers with and with addons.

Yep, just pointing out that one cannot defend Firefox as the best just by saying Chrome requires and adblocker. There are other browsers, like Brave.

And for the record, I used Firefox for decades, up until last year. I just spend too much time in my browser to use anything other than Brave, given how much time it saves me.

Does it have time saving features?

Have you tried it? It is insanely fast.

I haven't. Will give it a go.

There's a question mark in the title of the article, which is kind of very relevant here.

The last sentence of the article starts with words "While it is certainly possible that the stable extension update would be allowed by Google".

Google has already expressed their intention to stop supporting ad blocking extensions with Version 3 of their add-on manifest. So the writing has been on the wall for awhile, they're just turning the screws now.

Manifest v3 supports adblocking.

In the same way the Soviet Union supported freedom of expression.

Can you name anything specific that v2 can do that v3 can't? And how important is that to actually blocking ads?

Ad blocking is the only thing that makes the web bearable. I hope the extension rejection was a mistake or over something unrelated to blocking functionality.

Nowadays ad blocking isn't even enough anymore. It feels like every website with news articles of any kind has some scrolling, autoplaying video embedded into the site, sometimes even with audio enabled. Unfortunately I haven't seen a blocker for that because it's not considered an ad. It is definitely more annoying than most ads, though.

You can block both video and audio from autoplaying in Firefox by going into about:config. It works. But in Chrome AFAIK you can only mute the audio and not the video from autoplaying.

You can stop video from playing as well in Chrome settings. Either globally, or on a site-per-site basis.

If you dig through the options, you can prevent videos from auto-playing.

Chrome is removing the API that uBlock (and others) use, so adblocking is completely going away soon (the new API has limits that render it useless).

On the other hand, the GDPR has made tracking diminish a lot. It’s just time the web became bearable, and that could have a synchronous effect on Google’s decisions.

Well no, instead you get a giant banner saying "will you please accept these 10 billion trackers we've installed?" With some websites you can't even say no (which mind you is against GDPR) but who's gonna sue them?

One good thing with the giant banners is that they make everyone more aware of all the tracking going on.

I do sometimes just leave the site instead of clicking the single "I Agree" option.

This is probably a good thing. Google is declaring war on adblockers, uBO is their first target but not their last. Tech savvy people are going to end up dumping Chrome en mass. Chrome has dominated the browser market by being so good, but development of non-Google browsers is about to become exciting again, and everybody benefits from that.

Firefox development has hardly been boring: Quantum (Rust) & container tabs (and some big improvements to Dev Tools, I understand). Not a new development but addons on mobile is pretty damn cool.

I recently switched to Safari on Mac. Safari has a native content blocking mechanism (on Mac and iPhone) which works quite well without giving the extension open access to the page content. It works simply by a JSON file that describes the blocking rules, and doesn't require running any third-party code on the web page.

So far, I've not missed any features of Chrome except opening accidentally closed tab again. You might want to change few settings though: "show full urls" and "show favicons".

Apple Pay also works remarkably well, just click "Pay with Apple", and the authentication request pops up on your iPhone, requesting Touch ID / Face ID.

I've not seen anyone implement the new "Sign in with Apple", which automatically generates burner email addresses, but that's another reason to switch to Safari.

Also, one feature which I like is the automatic generation of strong passwords.

For the record, Chrome is switching to the same content blocking mechanism (declarative blocking) as Safari is currently using.

I do personally think this lends some plausibility to Google's assertions that they're doing it for performance reasons rather than to make adblockers worse. It's not like Apple's doing it for the ad revenue.

> I do personally think this lends some plausibility to Google's assertions that they're doing it for performance reasons rather than to make adblockers worse.

I don’t know that I buy this.

Chrome has a bunch of restrictions that Safari doesn’t, which make ad-blocking in particular impractical.

Safari has, iirc, a hard 100,000 rule limit per blocker rule list. 1Blocker splits itself into 7 such lists to have enough room for all of the rules needed to be effective.

Chrome has a hard global limit of 150,000 across all extensions. Multiple adblock authors have indicated that’s probably too tight.

Safari also lets content blockers reconfigure rules on the fly, so I can add a rule or make an exception for a site as I browse as a user.

Chrome requires the lists to be totally static and pre-approved by reviewers. Change a rule requires resubmitting the extension for reapproval.

All-in-all it looks to me like Chrome’s changes are designed to look like what Safari does on the surface, while actually adding onerous new conditions that effectively cripple the effectiveness and usefulness of adblockers.

Safari’s blocking isn’t limited to a small number of blocks like Chrome’s

uBlock doesnt only block. It:

    shims/redirects some known trackers for their benign versions

    rewrites incoming resource on the fly

    injects custom javascript

    injects/modifies CSS on the fly

Neither Safari, nor manifest v3 allow that.

> uBlock doesnt only block. It:

> shims/redirects some known trackers for their benign versions

Well, all content blockers for Safari that I have used block trackers.

> rewrites incoming resource on the fly

Pure interest, may I ask why it's needed?

> injects custom javascript

> injects/modifies CSS on the fly

AFAIK injecting custom JS & CSS is available for Safari extensions, it's just that Safari Content blockers don't have them. (So that you can just only use content blockers, or you can opt-in to enable the ones that also inject JS. 1Blocker uses injected JS/CSS to add custom rules by pointing to DOM elements in-browser.) And that's a good thing(TM) IMO, so that non-technical users can't get faked by malicious extensions that injects malicious scripts.

Safari still doesn't display favicons on the Favorites bar, which is really annoying.

What do you mean about the closed tab? Just click cmd-shift-t.

It used to be Cmd-Z, interestingly. I kind of liked that. Haven’t tried in a while, has it changed to be in line with other browsers now?

Both works. I personally prefer Cmd-Z, as it feels like a natural choice, but Cmd-Shift-T also works when I'm editing a text field like when I'm writing a comment now.

It seems I just didn't look for it in the right place. Thanks.

I really like Safari. Underrated browser. Unfortunately it lacks one feature that _to me_ is a dealbreaker: a way to have multiple identities/profiles.

Opening the same page in different private tabs accomplishes this. Private tabs are completely isolated. This is how I use multiple accounts.

This is true, but personally I've often found that this also prevents me from forcing a link to open in a new tab (via cmd-click) and have that new tab share cookies with its parent. Clicking on a link with target=_blank does work, though, which actually makes it more annoying that cmd-click does not.

Wow, that's crazy! Was actually going to take a look at Safari, you've saved me some time!

A lot of people are probably only reading the headline and assuming uBlock Origin was removed from Chrome Webstore, but what actually happened was a version update to the dev extension entry was rejected. We have yet to see if this is just a flake, but reading the issue it seems gorhill intends to just see what happens next dev version.

Talks about ad blockers prohibition in Chrome are here for a good half of the year. So there is a rather large possibility it's beginning.

I work for Google so I am biased.

However, I think most of that debate surrounds Manifest v3 is misleading. I’m not a huge fan of Manifest v3s limitations, but it’s basically the same limitations as Safari as far as I understand, and the justification does make some sense. So I am hoping that things will work out. I don’t know about any other things that would impact adblocking on Chrome.

Personally, I am happy with Firefox on desktop, and Safari on iPhone, and I don’t think there are any threats, perceived or actual, towards adblocking on those platforms.

It's an older rule[1]. It does technically apply here, but it's not a great look that they're only enforcing it now.

If Gorhill needed to, some of that extra functionality could be moved out into a separate extension. uBlock has done this before with uBlock Origin Extra[2]. Most of the extra features (eg. remote font blocking) aren't a huge deal, in my opinion.

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2013/12/keeping-chrome-extensions-...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-extr...

Why doesn’t “blocking” just mean blocking?

I shouldn’t need separate extensions to each block css, JavaScript, fonts, cookies, pixels, etc.

Remote fonts can be used for tracking and fingerprinting (hence why private browsing modes aren’t private).

Am I missing something here?

> Remote fonts can be used for tracking and fingerprinting

Isn't it the reverse, local fonts can be used for fingerprinting?

(There are some snags with remote fonts — rendering bugs/exploits — but they're not exactly low hanging fruit anymore)

EDIT: I see what you mean by tracking. If the fonts are loaded with a third party script, this is indeed a problem. If the font files are served by a third party directly (without some intermediate script), this could be remedied with an extension that strips headers. It would obviously run afoul of this only do one thing rule from Google, the company that once attached Google+ to its search results.

Actually, my Creative Director and I have noticed some Google Fonts have changed over time, producing significant enough (read: negative) changes to the UI of clients’ experiences we have out there that we decided to start downloading and storing them locally to lock in state (and for perf, but that’s another topic). The average user who comes to the site once will never notice it, but we have.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it were a hidden vector of some sort, but I haven’t put effort into digging into it.

I worked in a few AdShops for few short projects when I had to leave electronics for some time after my last employer in Canada was unable to secure a new work visa.

All and every were very very aware how adblocks can block double digits of their revenue with each new release, and it was considered an issue of existential importance. C-levels had weekly conference calls on dealing with adblocks.

In one of those companies, a senior was calling Google, and was pretty much receiving directions like "you can get around this block if you randomise this part of URL," "next months we will change this and that API, this will give you some breathing room."

Google is well aware of UBO, and for years tried to covertly subvert it.

AdBlockers are the modern Anti-Virus. It's the same cat'n'mouse game. The next step will be isolating "sponsored content" in news articles and educational content.

dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21231493 - this one just links to the comments section

Chrome has the user share and momentum to do whatever they want at this point, and since the majority of end users are unaware of developmental & software details and will continue using Chrome, their overwhelming user share will mean developers will continue to develop for Chrome whether or not they like the direction the browser is going. While ad blocking is the most widely used extension functionality remember that there are other adequate replacements in the Chrome store. Most users are probably already using the more popular (numerically) ones and even if every Chrome's uBlock Origin user migrated to another browser it will probably not make a significant blip on the radar. Only a corporate rival can challenge Chrome at this point and practically the only one who can do so is Microsoft's Edge team, and they will most likely establish a duopoly with Chrome instead of holding out for the sake of user freedom.

Fixed: https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/dgoymg/warning_ubo_...

> Hey all, I'm Simeon, the developer advocate for Chrome extensions. This morning I heard from the review team; they've approved the current draft so next publish should go through. Unfortunately it's the weekend, so most folks are out, but I'm planning to follow up with u/gorhill4 with more details once I have them.

If this keeps up I might just give up and stick to Links2 or something for my daily browsing. There's Firefox for now but I'm really increasingly pessimistic about the state of the web.

Personally I'm more attached to uBlock origin than I am to Chrome.

Given the situation Chrome should not be called Web Browser anymore. User Tracker seems better category.

“how do i sideload my own extensions onto my web browser” is a really weird sentence to say out loud.

With v3 implemented there will be nothing to sideload.

Very easily in Chrome.

The double standards are getting way out of proportion here:

The functionality of the advertising browser is a bundling of functionality as well: one one hand the browser functionality to let the user browse and view what he wants, and on the other hand the functionality that lets advertisements and trackers function on the user's browser willy nilly.

So we have a functionality bundler (Chrome) demanding a lower level unbundler plug-in (uBO) stop bundling it's unbundling features together, while the only reason the latter exists is because of the organised bundling at a higher level...

Solution: Firefox.

So the endgame is probably that we have to switch from "adblockers" to "contentallowers": Filter everything and whitelist content?

Google Chrome only allows to install extensions from there web store, his would be the end of uBlock Origin for Chrome

Even if I am a Firefox user I don't see a sense in using Chrome. The 'features' that Chrome can but Chromium cannot are these that we everyone love:

* DRM * Centralized extension managment

Switched to Firefox on Android just to have a luxury of ad absence, will do the same on a desktop the moment uBO turned off by Chrome. There was a day or two when all extensions stopped to work because of some certificate expiration - it was a horrible experience, never again.

Will it still work in Edge chromium?

The credge people on Twitter have been engaging in adblocking discussions, but credge currently uses the chrome store.

It currently uses the Microsoft Store, but it -can- use the Chrome store.

https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/insider-addons?hl=en-US

Damn! I've recently switched to a Chromebook as my daily driver, so Chrome is my only choice of browser available.

I hope this is a mistake, since I can't imagine browsing the web without uBlock Origin.

You can always install any extension outside of the store by enabling the developer mode in Chrome.

With the new manifest V3, it’s sounding like this won’t be enough sometime in the future

You can also install Crostini and install Firefox inside the container.

Mozilla is the real hero here. GO with the good guys!

Never stopped using Firefox. Chrome came from Google, the conflicts of interest were obvious.

Chrome is still one of the best browser for the time being, but if uBlock will ne be available anymore, it’s time to change, Firefox most likely.

Chrome might be "one of" the best. If so, Firefox is definitely another.

More "The end of Chromium for not being able to run uBlock Origin". Running a browser without a functional ad blocker is like running around without vaccinations - you're bound to catch something nasty.

I used to use Chromium and Firefox side by side but stopped doing so when they started acting up in this way. When I need to test with Blink I use Vivaldi (which still supports uBlock Origin), Firefox otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com