Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow
theregister.com
theregister.com
I've been working towards implementing greater support for Chrome extensions in Electron which has involved reading and interacting with Chromium code [0].
- Using service workers instead of a hidden background webpage is more idiomatic for web developers.
- Forced non-persistent extensions guides developers to a better implementation which relies on less resources.
*The deprecation of webRequest's blocking behavior is what's most concerning. The implementation in Manifest V2 requires sending a message back and forth between processes with JS processing for each network request which seems to be in part why they redesigned it.
However, that optimization costs so much for innovative ad blocking technologies as gorhill of uBlock Origin has mentioned. When ad blocking begins requiring new methods of detection or filtering, it'll now be up to Chromium maintainers to implement support for it in the new declarativeNetRequest API. This is a tradeoff of performance for reduced flexibility where it is absolutely needed.
Not all features are equally important, the one seeing a regression is much more important, it's also the feature with a conflict of interest, and the conflict of interest lies in the direction of Google pushing this through over everyone else's objections.
The change happened, uBlock Origin broke for Safari and here we are several years later and the Safari ad blocker ecosystem is an absolute joke and most of it barely works or demands subscription fees (and the ones that do are certainly not worth paying for because they don't even block YT ads)
AdGuard can[1] but it’s a cumbersome process.
1Blocker had to develop a bespoke solution but it works seamlessly[2].
[1]: https://adguard.com/en/article/how-to-block-ads-on-youtube.h...
[2]: https://backstage.1blocker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-in-s...
It just uses the old APIs for blocking video.
The bulk of the blocking work, however, is still done by the recommended blocking API.
So far Apple seems happy with that.
I'd argue the same folks are ok with looting Neiman Marcus stores during some protests because "they've rigged the system and are all rich anyways"
I also don't like people doing bad things other people's property. This is why I use AdBlockers: to prevent those platforms from running shit I don't want on my computer.
We develop a Safari ad blocker [1] that works on iOS and macOS which provides performant and private ad blocking. Unlike previous ad blockers using other extension mechanisms, it also can’t see which web pages you visit. We recently released best in class YouTube ad blocking features too. The mechanisms for doing this is different, but the ad blocking results are as good with better performance.
Out of curiosity, can Magic Lassoo present a detailed list of domain connection attempts by category, i.e. do anything like uMatrix does? The thing that keeps me on FF, even on MacOS (aside from warm fuzzy open source feelings) is that I really think the extension ecosystem is the best -- uMatrix, greasemonkey and the ilk are brilliant. I like Safari's isolated private browsing mode most of the time, and I like its dev tools. But the adblock situation is just so much better on FF; it makes the web usable again whilst respecting my privacy ideals. I really like being able to say 'Thou shalt not set thine cookie and contact all of these domains via an XHR request' and the site just...continuing to work.
It's people selling you a subscription product that is vastly inferior to any free extension on Firefox (not on iOS obv) and the same discussion has been had many times before.
I mean, I don't want to be a negative nancy here, but it does get annoying with these ads that seemingly have lost all perspective of how bad adblocking on Safari truly is.
Safari content blocking (and thus Chrome v3 manifest blocking) basically works OK at blocking ads today. The problem is this is an arms race, and as the advertising agencies come up with inventive ways to evade these strictly controlled content blocks, they have no real way to adjust.
At that point we'll need to rely on Apple or Google to add new features specifically to support blocking ads. Google seems particularly unlikely to do that. To say the least.
And even if they do, there will be long periods before new browser releases are available with those features, and then the blocker developers need to support them.
Despite the fact that most of your posts on HN are ads for magiclasso, the fact remains that even most basic features (like whitelisting or blocking cookie banners) require payment.
Furthermore, you do not even come close to uBlock origin. Of course, we both know this, because it simply is not possible. Apple does not allow it. And yet, you continue to state the opposite even though it simply is not true.
On other platforms, using *entirely free* addons like uBlock, you can zap away annoying elements/bars/overlays... or enable some requests while blocking others selectively. You can block videos on some news websites, but allow javascript galleries, and do the opposite on a video site. You can block that overlay disabling right clicks or hijacking the scroll bar. Once you know that it is possible, you do this every day.
None of that is possible with your product, magiclasso.co, no matter how much money I pay you or how many ads you write on hackernews.
There's a fine line when shilling your own product here. One should be humble.
If you write: Yes, compared to other platforms, the adblock ecosystem in Safari is absolutely dismal. However, we have this product where we are doing our best... Okay...
What you write there? ugh sorry, but no.
I was always fine with _some_ ads but eventually got ublock when the internet hit this critical mass of being all ads all the time. If safari adblockers can keep the browser experience _mostly_ ad free out of the box then they are equivalent to me as an unsophisticated user at least
Does uBlock Origin also use a slow, memory and performance inefficient means of blocking ads? Yes.
Does uBlock Origin also use ad blocking ruleset that have thousands of obsolete rules that are rarely pruned, leading to the complaints that Safari only supported 50,000 rules in a single extension? Yes.
There's a lot of Pros and Cons with different products. uBlock Origin has a lot of Pros for certain types of users and it's a fantastic tool – but it's approach to ad blocking is becoming legacy at this stage. They should be planning to re-architect their approach to suit a more modern, privacy focused API that is supported by the two biggest browser makers.
Is this true? It's been a little while but last time I looked over things it seemed like gorhill implemented a rather efficient machine. I'd appreciate if you could expand on this.
Let's recap: You are worse at blocking ads, because you can not block dynamically and the user can not add rules to sites or elements. For example, whenever my favorite news site fixes its ad block blocker, I'd have to wait for you to update the block list instead of just killing the new script. This happens on the reg, and you can't do anything about it. Or consider websites who hijack right-clicking or scroll bars. Consider people who have to use usability tools to make those sites work for them, like text2speech. Your product doesn't do a single thing there.
Let's recap more: You have "best in class" ad blocking on youtube? uBlock blocks all ads, period, with 100% success, on any video site. For years now. Your product? "More or less" perhaps a good description? And best of all, you have to follow 1Block and inject your own browser addon, literally breaking your privacy promise to the user for EVERY WEBSITE THAT HAS VIDEOS. This is not even close to being a good option, but you come here and say your ad blocker is more privacy conscious when it just isn't (if it is supposed to block ads). What?
Let's move on: You can't block trackers because you cannot block fingerprinting. You only have a block list when we now know that's not enough. You can't do things PrivacyBadger does, since the EFF has already determined it doesn't work due to the new and "improved" API. You are selling snake-oil here.
So. Even without any expert features, your product is simply inferior. You can not even hold the promise of privacy, because you literally need to break it to have any chance of blocking anything on youtube. Well guess what, there are more sites than youtube out there.
None of this is news. We have been through this many times. In every measurable way the "legacy adblockers" are superior.
What IS necessary to discuss is you having the gall to come to this website and market your product with obvious falsities - things like the new API being anything but ineffective, and then going ahead and posting the refutation of exactly that point on your own website [1].
Are you even serious? I hope not.
I invite you to go through all daily commits made in uBlock Origin's specific filter lists to solve reported real-world issues[1], and find out if every single one of these issues can also be solved in a typical Safari content blocker, just as they are immediately solved in uBlock Origin.
For instance, it would be an interesting exercise to find out how many of the fixes committed between Sep. 21 and Sep. 27 inclusively can or cannot be also be fixed in a typical Safari content blocker.
* * *
I still use Safari for banking and eCommerce because its beta, but for everything else its wonderful. I even get a quality vertical tabs implementation built into the browser; can also shrink the top bar to pre-14/15 size in combination.
The browser will eventually be behind a paywall once the beta is up, but I'm all onboard for paying for an alternative to both Chromium and non-XUL Gecko.
It's not like background webpages are broken or even hard to use. It's not like everyone's clamoring for their ad blockers to use less resource or for Chrome to be faster.
There was a time when I switched to Chrome because I believed it to be superior. Now that I find the extensions I use to be nearly as important as the browser itself, I can't imagine why ad-hating privacy-focused individuals would punish themselves by using Chrome. Firefox has a few performance quirks in contrast to Chrome, but overall it's in a state where it competes in most cases. As much as I can complain about Mozilla's organizational issues, I can be far more assured that they aren't going to cause my extensions to become nerfed for A Good Reason (TM).
> It's not like everyone's clamoring for their ad blockers to use less resource or for Chrome to be faster.
some people do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28672377 - "Brave reduces the page load performance cost of its adblocker"
original article having some impressive improvement numbers.
Does anyone seriously believe that an advertising company wants to improve the performance of ad blockers? It's obvious what Google is doing.
If you want to see where things are going in the long run, look at Chrome for Android where you can't install ad-blockers at all.
I believe some people at Google want to make plugins more efficient, some want to kill ad blockers and probably a few other reasons. Obviously Google is externally (and probably internally outside of specific teams) playing up the efficiency concerns. And I don't doubt most advocates we hear honestly think primarily about that.
That said, if you claimed they got the clout and priority to do that because of the ad concerns behind the scenes, I would say "duh"
This could be an area where MV3 walks itself back. One proposal creates an Extension Worker which is a new concept like a Service Worker but better matches the use cases for background scripts. Another simply puts background pages back, but behind a permission.
[0] https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/labels/topic%3A%20servi...
Hopefully Google and others are receptive to some of the proposals made in the issues. I recognize the value of reintroducing the persistent capabilities to the SW model.
This is fair. For an ad-blocker to be effective today it needs to be invasive, and that doesn't apply to most extensions.
It is too easy to grant invasive privileges to v2 extensions for those that do not understand the consequences. Downloading a whole new browser on the other hand is a far more obvious way of implicitly granting that trust... So I wonder if when push comes to shove, a "uBlocked-Chrome" browser might emerge. To be clear, I am suggesting a uBlock integration project, not a preservation of V2 for extensions.
Which ones? HN does, but a large part of the other sites I frequent need around a second or more to load. With or without ad-blockers - some load faster with, some faster without, but they never enter the "nearly instantly" range, which (last I checked) was 0-250 ms.
>less resources
Are you an extension developer? Here is a list of issues that extension developers have with requiring Service Workers:
https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/labels/topic%3A%20servi...
Just take a look at this work-in-progress MV3 version of a fairly popular webpage-saver extension called SingleFile:
Many ongoing changes are being made in extensions and the web in general to improve security while reducing capabilities in existing applications.
At this point, for more complex use cases such as one of my own, the only hope is building your own web browser with complete control over its systems. I've changed focus to improving Electron for this reason.
Ideally, I'd like to see MV3 continue supporting the persistent context use case as well as maintaining webRequest blocking support.
Same, which is why I engage with browser representatives in the W3C WebExtensions Community Group.
Unfortunately, the status quo is grim with Firefox seemingly uninterested in standing up to Chrome and citing compatibility as the main reason for following Chrome into mandatory Service Workers.
Prior to the group being formed, most discussion regarding MV3 occurred on the Chrome Extensions Google Group [0]. While feedback was accepted and open there, I hadn't seen the Chrome team acting on it to make changes. That's where most of my pessimism on the situation comes from.
I believe the Chrome team's main motivation is removing any functionality in MV3 which would have the possibility of reducing performance in normal browsing. I personally don't have much hope that they'll be backpedaling on any changes.
[0] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensio...
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensio...
Almost universally negative feedback and ... "Thank you for the feedback", we're not changing anything.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=111474...
- Can you legally advertise a product you're not affiliated with? Is this OK by the ToS of major ad networks?
- Is it possible to target ads by user's browser?
I'm thinking, maybe we should crowdfund a public interest ad, targeted at people browsing from Chrome, with some attention-grabbing art or distracting colors, and a clear message: "Want to stop seeing this ad? Stop using Chrome, install a different browser and an ad blocker. Click here to learn more.", which links to a site directing people to install Firefox and uBlock Origin (and linking to crowdfunding campaign to keep the ad going). Alternative for A/B testing: "Don't click this ad, it costs us money."
Come to think of it, maybe someone like EFF should do that - they're well-known and reputable enough that people wouldn't immediately assume it's some weird Firefox ad, avoiding the effect being the opposite from intended.
But if done right, it has the potential to create lots of attention. An add, that wants you to see less ads, that was finally taken down by the big corporations? Very clickbait article stuff - it is just that (almost) all those news networks live on ads so have no incentive to push up this news.
Anyone else in?
PS: If you do it later, send me a mail (it is in my profile, click my username to see it.)
There's a reason successful companies like to own the supply chain (or at least as much of it as they can).
"Buying Silence
... most of these groups depended on funding from the very same corporations that they should be criticizing. Over the past years, EFF has taken millions in funds from Google and Facebook via straight donations and controversial court payouts that many see as under-the-radar contributions. Hell, Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s foundation gave EFF at least $1.2 million"
I suppose there are browsers like Brave that would be in the position to implement Chrome features, which I guess happens by default. But let's just say in the situation where Chrome implements something that doesn't show up downstream in Chromium; Brave's interests might not be in competing directly with Chrome but focusing efforts on BAT/crypto and replacing ads.
Firefox has the Simple Tab Groups extension, which works with containers. Chrome not only doesn't have containers, but its tab grouping is clunky and featureless in comparison.
???
Vivaldi is the king of features. Too bad it is so slow.
Firefox has extensions for all you need. Vertical tabs, tab groups etc
There were thousands before and what, a handful now? Firefox jumped the shark years ago, and I loved it from day 1.
I use FF/brave but no browsers make me happy any longer.
I'd pay good money to have FF back before the bean counters killed it.
Now I just see FF as something google pays to make sure barely works so they can point and say there are other browsers.
HN ilk don't represent a good target market. Can't really make money off traditionally tracked ads off of us.
FWIW, I love Chrome, still do. I've been here since those entirely useless but super viral and catchy speed test ad/vids. It worked on me. I love the debugger as a web developer, more so than Firebug.
Overall, will be sad to go. Pour one out for Chrome when the day comes.
Sadly, the only option seems to be Firefox and the niche browsers.
(I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
Note that on Firefox and other browsers that do not support "ping", Google Search still tracks which links you click on, but it uses URL rewriting. There are also extensions that block this.
If I were Chrome, I would proxy these requests securely through an innocent-looking API. I hope no one is getting any ideas.
It's probably moot anyway. We all know the direction Google/Chrome is going in. Not much we can do at this point.
Don't they vet all urls you click on for malware? :) There's one of your innocent looking APIs.
uBO is already hampered and less powerful on Chromium based browsers right now (CNAME un-cloaking doesn't happen). I imagine this will keep on happening with the advent of Manifest v2.
Not sure if gorhill will choose to maintain different codebases for different browsers.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Recent Firefox, atleast on Windows 10, is just as fast as Chrome for me. With addons like vertical tabs, adblock it has more features too.
Vivaldi is still the features and UI king but too slow for me.
Not to mention all the limitations of the Chrome browser. The continuous difference between console.log and console.dir. The former only shows you a very limited view of JS objects while the latter is what Firefox uses as the default for console.log - a full view of the object you want inspected. Then there's the inability to edit and resend network requests. The only workaround is to copy the request as a fetch request, dump it into the console or snippets, re-edit it there, and then send it through the console. Of course you'd have to parse the response in the console too instead of being able to see it in devtools.
And then there's Chrome's complete lack of proper proxy support. You could start the browser with command line flags in order to enable a SOCKS5 proxy, for example, but that requires you to close your existing browser session and open a new one.
Finally, how is it that we have nearly exact dates (2022-01-17 and sometime in January 2023) for V2 sunsetting but the dates for implementation of actual features needed to migrate away from V2 have no solid expectation date? Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? From the article:
"In the coming months, we'll also be launching support for dynamically configurable content scripts and an in-memory storage option, among other new capabilities."
"In the coming months"? The v2 sunset date is just a few months away! Why not ensure that the current feature set is fully functional and adequate to replace v2 before blocking v2 extension submissions?
- complete inability to run code from the console into the content script context
- content script errors are not shown in the console, you have to open a separate Browser Console
- overall buggy dev tools (I don't remember anymore because I stopped using them a long time ago)
The main difference between Chrome and Firefox is that Chrome feels passively (and sometimes actively) user-hostile with things like not-so-intuitive Chrome-vs-Google login and many other things that may seem trifle details but are in fact well-thought-out features with very specific purposes. In Firefox it's the opposite: I can start with containers right away, for example. Some extensions like Ad Nauseam (and many others) are simply removed from Chrome Store and if you insist on using them with Chrome, you need to re-enable them with the developer mode each time you start the browser. Why torture yourself if you can simply use Firefox?
I feel the same for Linux on the desktop discussion. I don't want Linux to become another Windows or Mac OS. The DIY always tinkering with it is a feature not a bug. It's like a car you keep for track days. Sure you work on it all the time and would not want your grandma taking it shopping, but that's not it's purpose! Of course family cars will always have a huge market share compared to track day cars. And you would not want to change that because it would mean destroying what a track day car is in the process of making it user friendly, reliable, maintenance free, etc.
Would you like supermarkets real-time adjust (=increase by 2ct) the prices on products your grandma usually buys, based on when your grandma's family car is taking the "I'm going shopping" route?
But my grandma would fall prey to mallware addons before the issues you described.
And sigh, I hope uBlock Origin continues to work — the web sucks without it. Maybe Mozilla could hire the devs and integrate it into Firefox.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Having a single renderer but multiple browsers on top of it would vastly simplify the web for users & developers, resulting in one consistent engine to develop, test, and fuzz against.
Rather than being the irrelevance it is today, Mozilla focusing on Blink development & governance would have way more impact for billions of users, rather than some obsolete and forgotten build of Firefox.
Then all it'd take is for something like the E.U. to cripple Apple's Webkit-on-iOS monopoly for Blink to take over there too.
Having multiple renderers is just a waste of everyone's time...
Unfortunately, Blink isn't openly governed. It's governed by Google, and if Google decides that they won't implement complex feature, maintaining that feature will be logistical nightmare. Imagine writing drivers for some exotic kernel, but kernel API or even very architecture isn't stable.
Brave and Vivaldi would be the Chromium forks of choice. Both implement a zero knowledge sync system of their own, for example, default to privacy friendly search engines etc.
It helps people get work done by blocking website's they're addicted to.
I've just started out on a new version, not sure what to do.
It works a bit differently to most content blockers, you can take a look here if you're interested:
Anyway, the whole point is to allow people to get out of addictive loops, to take control of how they use the web, and most people aren't that tech savvy — they deserve to not be addicted to facebook too.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/decla...
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
I thought the rules were static, I see now they can be updated dynamically — which works perfectly for my use case.
"New and existing technologies could affect our ability to customize ads and/or could block ads online, which would harm our business.
Technologies have been developed to make customizable ads more difficult or to block the display of ads altogether and some providers of online services have integrated technologies that could potentially impair the core functionality of third-party digital advertising. Most of our Google revenues are derived from fees paid to us in connection with the display of ads online. As a result, such technologies and tools could adversely affect our operating results."
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204419...
See also: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Settings#u...
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...
And there are advantages as well, such as better autoplay avoidance.
about://media-engagement according to the docs (which implies engaging with the site is required, but I don’t think it is for YouTube).
It's a lot of effort to move everything: current session, bookmarks, extensions, sync (which mean I need to move on my 5+ devices at once). I have been bitten twice -- not sure if I want to risk it again. No matter how much people are saying how good it is now, it's hard to muster up the effort to move again.
EDIT: Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. Back when Firefox was saying it's as fast as Chrome without being multi-process. They were saying that it's better. I tried. I moved. I got f*cked up. I move back. Twice. You'd excuse me if I no longer believe what the Firefox dev were saying about their browser.
You could try, and them move if conclusive? If you consider switching anyway.
Moving everything before being sure seems expensive.
And back then I was told the exact same thing I was told this time, too.
I have thousands of open tabs, managed with the Tree Style Tabs (TST) plug-in.
I have no experience migrating from Chrome to Firefox, but FF can certainly handle lots of tabs. Vertical tab layouts are very helpful for navigating them.
My limited experience using Chrome says that Firefox requires vastly less RAM to handle multiple tabs (anything more than a dozen!).
Re: Conspicuous tab consumption: If I pared down, I'd be more like 50-100 active tabs. I appreciate that Firefox remains completely usable even when I do not pare down. Chrome fails for me at about 20 tabs due to lack of usable vertical tabs layout, even before RAM becomes an issue on this machine.
I want to say this is a feature of the browser itself, but the extension (add-on, whatever we call them now) gives you a lot more control.
As for session migration, maybe an extension like 'Tab Session Manager' will help? It supports several different formats, so surely one of those formats is something that Chrome can export. That would let you move everything in one fell swoop, at least.
i.e. Use it exclusively for HN (say for a few weeks) and see how it goes.
So for this HN article. You can't use FF to try it out. You HAVE to add it to the 200+ tabs to Chrome?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bulkurlopener...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-url-opener/kg...
If Firefox does implode, it will be because of Mozilla's garbage leadership/product vision, not market conditions.
Regarding Mozilla's direction, we already have years of evidence. It all starts with Brendan Eich's resigning. Whether you agree the reasoning is immaterial; that decision lead him to start a direct competitor that is now fighting them for the ever-shrinking demographic of people that don't use Chrome. And then there's stuff like acquiring Pocket, something completely antithetical to Firefox's core values. Money-wasters like FoxOS (or whatever that mobile OS was called) that distracted from Firefox. And then lots of tick-tacky stuff like FF devtools being inferior to Chrome for years (people say it's better now, but I don't care to check it out, I've been using Chrome's for years), over-focusing on frivolous things like social justice issues. It will be death by 1000 cuts that kills Mozilla from the inside.
> And then there's stuff like acquiring Pocket, something completely antithetical to Firefox's core values.
Pocket itself isn't antithetical to Firefox's values. It not being open source is, but from what I understand they're still working on making the server open source, though at disappointingly low priority.
Pocket is Firefox trying not to fall behind on features.
And presumably from Mozilla's perspective, if it has some sponsored content giving them some non-Google income, so much the better.
There are services, of which Pocket is not the only one, that save you personal hard copies of content so you can have it available offline and keep things even if they're gone. Like a personal Wayback Machine. It's a very sensible thing to integrate into a browser in my opinion, although a lot of the Firefox fanbase, being idiots in love with the idea of FOSS donationware, are hostile to. I used to be one of those idiots.
There was a few years there they got off google in favor of Yahoo Money.
Then Yahoo mismanagement imploded that company and back to google they went
Even if I am looking for Microsoft's own documentation on some library or class google returns a better result for MS Docs than Bing does....
Been using it happily ever since (FF on MacOS). The only time I open Chrome now is to test websites I'm working on.
I wish I could find a extension that removes all motion on a page (video, js animated stuff) but I suspect that would be too difficult to do. I do use a extension that removes all color, but it doesn't work terribly well, and some UIs on websites are too dependant on color as differentiators.
The privacy disaster that's new Edge is constantly doing really good UI innovation with powerful but simple features like collapsible sidebars while retaining native UI.
Vivaldi, well, the whole point of the browser is features, and they deliver. They have three different ways to use tab stacks, for heaven's sake. And they do privacy, and aren't interested in telling me what I should see.
Brave, same. Privacy focus, try to build standalone revenue streams. They actually ship new things, if less aggressively in the UI department than Edge or Vivaldi. And they're not interested in telling me what I should see on the web.
I'd gladly use Mozilla, but they have to deserve it first by being genuinely good in terms of attitude and/or product, preferably both, not just being "not Google". By my count, product's getting worse and the attitude is complete garbage.
This rant is also more or less on point: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...
Google, Microsoft and Apple all push their browsers forward by their external footprint - Google and Microsoft cloud platforms, and all three by being the default.
Brave's building their own platform, Vivaldi a bit of the same, but also just built-in tools in the browser like a simple notetaker and mail/calendar/RSS apps.
Firefox has Pocket, which is good and a good idea, but their userbase is stupidly hostile to ventures like that, the only thing they accept is a pristine FOSS project funded by donations.
(which is actually pretty great, and I have a way better browsing experience with it that with that chrome monstrosity)
But I've been enjoying Brave. Built in blockers for ads and trackers, built in tor, and a very interesting rewards system to help content creators and honestly, so far I recommend it.
When IE6 became the engine mono culture, it was the best.
But then it stopped innovating, because it didn't need to. It also pushed moves that were only for the good of Micorosoft, since they had monopoly, trying to make the web a less open place.
It was a pain to develop for, a pain to debug, and a capricious master.
Google has shown they can be very naughty as soon as they got power over something.
Learn from history. Do not give them that power.
- Sponsored backgrounds
- Cards
- Brave Rewards icons
I understand that chrome also wants to remove the API that is used for ad blocking, which is bad.
But apart from that, what is the migration path? Will there be a window when both browsers support both versions?
Developer testing in Q4 2021 and v3 submissions early 2022.
So both browsers should support both v2 and v3 for a year.
Every time this comes up and 80% of discussions is about whether the tab bar in firefox is flat or three pixels wide instead of five makes me more depressed
No thanks.
But you’re still missing the point, this should be compiled into Firefox core, if it’s a licensing thing badge it as Firefox-non free. Not everybody cares about altruistic goals, I just want a browser that works so I can do my job, securely.
Edit: but if you don’t already see a future where ultimately open source cannot be trusted unless it comes from a trusted repo (yum, apt) then you should start preparing for that.
If every browser is based on Chromium then you're not really offering an alternative to Google Chrome because Google still own the supply chain. Not only in terms of your new browser's rendering engine but also in terms of website owners being vindicated in targeting Chrome.
The only way to offer a legitimate counterargument to Chrome is not to use Blink.
Whereas Blink gets that work for free from Google.
If you want to offer a legitimate counter argument to Chrome by using Gecko then you have to find some way to bring in the hundreds of millions of dollars of necessary funding to bring Gecko up to Blink's quality.
If you want to create a counter argument to Chrome using Blink, then you have everything you need already.
For now.
My bet is they are already planning how to boil the frog.
The bigger issue for me isn't the maintenance of Gecko; I just can't see how extending Blinks market share really hurts Google in any way. Ultimately Blink-based browsers are still tied into Google's supply chain so even if you did displace Chrome with a Blink-based competitor, Google still win.
unilaterally implementing unstable APIs and telling people on web.dev that "it's safe you can use it it's totally production ready" isn't exactly quality, but you do you.
They work beautifully for me but I don't dare to use them on machines that I type customer data, work credentials or use internet banking on.
Not because I doubt the mainteners but because Internet is an extremely hostile space - technically.
One missing patch and one exploit that snuck through one ad network and you can be compromised.
That said I'm happy to donate to see someone starting a soft fork of latest Firefox.
A good starting point could be to make a rudimentary fix for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447
I'm happy with Firefox (and Mozilla) personally but I'll be sure to recommend these if/when I hear people asking for an alternative to Google and Mozilla in the future.
Thanks for sharing.
Switching to Firefox should be a no-brainer for people who care about the future of the web.
TBH I'm perfectly happy with Chrome and using Google accounts. The benefits of my data following me around seamlessly far outweighs the downsides of Google having access to it.
Used Chrome on mobile once. Remembered why I don't.
(I am a former Mozilla employee who was there when the layoffs happened)
This is what I know about what happened there:
There were two enterprise IT teams with similar duties but different purviews. When management was deciding on layoffs, they decided to unify those two teams. Unfortunately that meant that there were redundancies.
My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs, and they have every right to be upset.
But the inferences being made as a result of the resulting tweets just weren't true: this notion that all security teams were wiped out is false. And there are now others assigned to threat management.
Furthermore, the security teams that work on Gecko and Firefox were left mostly if not entirely intact.
The entire hardening/sandboxing team was still intact: https://twitter.com/gcpascutto/status/1293519587967983616
TL;DR: Don’t base your understanding of an organization’s capabilities off of one tweet.
.tab-content {
background: #ffffff20 !important;
border-radius: 4px 4px 4px 4px !important;
margin-bottom: 4px !important;
margin-top: 4px !important;
}I still use gmail and youtube.
Search I switched to duckduckgo, no profiled results and the ! bangs is great. The google search popup when using incognito gets real annoying fast too.
They are a browser maker, and I don't remember the last time they came out with anything really exciting. Vivaldi and Brave both have, and even Brave's stock Chrome UI has good stuff like a solid tab groups implementation that Firefox just doesn't have. There are extensions, but they just don't work the same.
Funded by Palantir Technologies by the way [1]
Their ad rewards system analyses and modifies the original webcontent, replacing existing ads with their own (and who knows what other code they inject) [2]
Then there's their hidden tracker URL whitelist [3]
No thanks.
[0] https://twitter.com/cryptonator1337/status/12692014801055784...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/fe37ml/exclusive_b...
[2] https://brave.com/brave-launches-user-trials-for-opt-in-ads/
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129309#19129642
Edit: Nearly forgot about their partner promo headers that they can and do update on the fly https://laptop-updates.brave.com/promo/custom-headers
The URL modification was silently enabled by default, and the tracker whitelist and marketing headers are not configurable at all.
Mozilla isn't what it used to be, but at least they're not acting like the Russian mob.
This is completely wrong. Brave ads are shown in OS notifications.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/time-make-amends-googl...
Website blocking extensions like my Productivity Owl (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/productivity-owl/e...) would be completely pointless if you have to allow it on every page you visit.
Firefox as a browser, especially dev tools, seems better in every day use than Chrome does. I am really not sure why they keep losing users. I do remember being massive performance issues in the past, but that's really not the case today (at least in my experience)
People who got marketed to convert, and hence, the product is indeed good based on this metric.
Firefox does seem to lag behind in terms of performance, esp. on mobile. Firefox also has poorer video rendering speed i think - i get more skipped frames than chrome. I tolerate it, but many users don't.
Firefox has some difficulty being deployed in an enterprise environment (aka, an organizationally managed profile, which chrome has). This has led to enterprises adopting chrome as a primary browser (over firefox), and this may lead to familiarity which causes them to also use chrome at home.
There's a myriad of issues with firefox, and it is rooted at the organizational level, rather than the technical level, but these issues bleed down into the technical level.
I do not have this problem in Firefox anymore. I used to but i updates fixed it.
>Firefox has some difficulty being deployed in an enterprise environment (aka, an organizationally managed profile, which chrome has). This has led to enterprises adopting chrome as a primary browser (over firefox), and this may lead to familiarity which causes them to also use chrome at home.
GPO exists for Firefox now and works great, I have implemented it.
But what I actually see for enterprise customers is a move to MS Edge. The Windows account integration, control and the fact that on Windows 10 it has really good performance means there is no need for Chrome or FF unless Edge breaks (have had some issues with antivirus breaking it)
Because, number one, they keep constantly making radical UI/UX changes that frustrate and alienate their long term users who would rather they keep the "older look" which they got used to and works just fine for them, and number two, most websites are lazy so their devs only optimize for Chrome, even going the extra mile to explicitly state that "For best experience use Chrome" <face_palm>
Edit: changes in tone and corrections after getting off the bus
Cannot overstate this enough. They keep randomly changing their UI constantly, and it's especially frustrating when you have a bunch of custom CSS. I'm a bunch of versions behind & dreading updating because I don't want to spend the hours it'll take to fix my shit for their new version. I honestly hate this browser so much at this point, but everything else (i.e. Chrome) is so much worse that I'm stuck....
1. Automatically install updates (recommended)
2. Check for updates but let you choose to install them
You would think I'd choose option 2, since I don't want updates, but I tried that, and I got a popup several times a day saying INSTALL UPDATE NOW OR LATER—no way to say "No I don't !%$@ want to update!" ... so after putting up with that for a while I changed to option 1 to avoid the neverending update popups. Not at all what I want though. Talk about a dark pattern. "let you choose to install them" indeed! Not "choose whether to install" but "bombard you with update popups until you crack and choose to install".
https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...
For eg. why tf would you put a separate scroll menu on tab right click to close tabs on left or right, it saves literally 1 row. and increases every single tab change to two clicks. UI disaster!!
i hope some group forks firefox and i will happily donate. But, due to current mozilla ceo siphoning money, not gonna donate a penny.
Personally, I've gone from "customize every last pixel" to just using things the way the designers wanted me to use things. I like having flexibility and configuration toggles, that I use often, but I'm much happier now without trying to customize things for customization's sake.
[1]: https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html
Having an out of date browser is as "dangerous" to you and those around you as driving in a car with flat tires. Declining to upgrade software because of aesthetic changes seems shortsighted to me.
> I don't agree that whether something looks "horrible" is completely subjective.
Let's agree to disagree.
> I've never tried to customize things for customization's sake, if you're implying I do?
I'm not saying you have, I'm saying I have customized things for change's sake, and since I stopped doing that and being overly annoyed and fighting changes "forced" on me, I adapted to most of those changes. I dislike when customization options are taken away. But I also understand that customization comes at the bottom of priorities of developers, and that is likely the right call to make for most applications.
It is a problem that upgrades aren't always an improvement on every axis, but staying on old network connected applications is manifestly not a reasonable solution.
If the browser designers think it's so important for people to update, then perhaps they should stop driving people away with relentless, needless, irritating aesthetic changes! They're the short-sighted ones here.
You might tape over the warning light on your car's dash too, if you knew there was a good chance it would come back from the shop painted a different color and having had a racing spoiler bolted onto the trunk.
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
from https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...
EDIT: alternatively, you can install the ESR version for 91, use the userchrome link in the sibling comment, and forget about it for 18 months, wich is what I'm currently doing. And good thing too, apparently 92 broke some UI again, because of course it did.
> Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) is an official version of Firefox developed for large organizations like universities and businesses that need to set up and maintain Firefox on a large scale. Firefox ESR does not come with the latest features but it has the latest security and stability fixes.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switch-to-firefox-exten...
chrome gained a lot for two reasons, it was a hell of a lot better than firefox and they advertised the crap out of it.
Firefox has caught up significantly since then but doesn't have the advertising
the adblock debate will push a lot of users back to firefox and it feels like the ui is in a much better place than it was
People don't want to do custom CSS, they have to in order to get the workflow back that they had last week. It's annoying and a lot of work. Firefox changes probably cause >3% user attrition every single release.
Not anymore. There are github lists documenting everything you can do with css in firefox these days. And I don't think the answer to your workflow being disturbed is to nuke the entire thing from orbit and built it back up on another platform, that sounds a lot harder than skimming these github pages.
Prior to their rewrite of everything in version fifty-whatever, I could just drag-and-drop all this stuff into a single toolbar, but when they decided they knew better than me how I want my browser to look it all got 100x harder to get the layout I want.
In addition to this single-toolbar layout I have some easy stuff like highlighting the background color of "View background image" and "Copy link location" and I think 2-3 other things in the context menu a dark purple so that I misclick less often (this particular change is actually amazing and I highly recommend it!).
And I make the URL dropdown suggestions constrained to the width of the URL bar, not 100%, because I find the context switching of hiding the entire webpage too jarring when they're that wide. And I also hide a bunch of random buttons here and there that I find useless; I'm not sure what they are at this point because they've been hidden for so long...
Oh! And my highlight color (in URL bar, etc) is bright magenta (otherwise my theme is dark mode). Just because I like it. :) I use that in Sublimetext too, though I don't do that in every text editor/IDE.
A decade ago it was very easy to make Firefox look like you wanted, even without extensions (if you weren't opinionated about aesthetics, just position and functionality.) Every UI change since Chrome was released has been a regression, and more obnoxiously, each change has been locked in with user adjustment actively prevented or made prohibitively difficult, even for programmers.
They could at least offer a consistent interface to change the UI. Instead they demand the flexibility to make UI changes without having to maintain an interface, while using that flexibility to claw back more and more flexibility from their users.
today non of these extensions exist and similar things are a joke by comparison lacking the large userbase and years of refinement.
then i also frequently have no idea where most of the interface buttons have gone.
i still use it but im far from locked into the ecosystem.
Cannot confirm at all. I do not know any feature in ff dev tools I am missing in chrome, but the other way around lots of it.
Mainly: editing and saving directly in the debugger!
Could also be my ignorance, but I regulary do debugging in FF and it works, but way less efficient.
Meaning I browse with FF, but work with chrome.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...
Chrome tells you the used font for a single element on a pretty generic level, e.g. "Lato — Local file" or "Lato — Network resource".
Firefox Inspector has a Fonts tab that lets you list all the fonts used on a page. It tells you a more specific font name, e.g. "Lato Regular", the relevant @font-face rule and also the font URL if it's a network resource.
Hum... Firefox does that. I know because every time I mistakenly start saving I ask what is the point of it. But well, looks like it's useful for somebody.
Also, how can I edit code? It is non editable for me.
I believe you can activate it on the main build too, but I don't know how. Anyway, if you are debugging code, I highly recommend the developer version.
1 - That is a different configuration of the same code as the main build, for web developers. It's not for developing Firefox itself.
Chrome's devtools have been superior (faster, more reliable, more featureful) for years near as I can tell (and everyone I work with). I am curious what makes you feel firefox's devtools are better.
I test on Chrome, and I personally don’t think switching is that big a deal that some commenters make it out to be. It’s just as fast as Chrome or faster, the UX is similar enough not be stalled for long if you need to switch. It’s really worth a shot!
compared to chrome, firefox no longer has an edge. Chrome's restrictive addons is what made firefox stronger.
But ever since firefox removed the old XUL style addons, their utility has drastically dropped against chrome. I was very angry at their poor choice, as some really excellent, but unmaintained addons no longer work.
I put up with firefox, just so i can give them some boost (whatever that might amount to), but obviously not that many users would sacrifice their browsing experience for such purposes.
Firefox should be the premier customizable browser, with more addons than chrome. Instead, firefox chose to copy chrome. Thus, it is forever relegated to being second.
I'm using Firefox nightly and I have to jump through hoops to get the extensions I want. Far too complicated for most users I'm sure.
But firefox's value add is their addon system - even if it is old, and difficult to use. It enabled some really great addons that weren't possible in the new replacement (as a simple example, the DownThemAll was rewritten using this new api, and it's shadow of their former self).
Firefox should have paid the cost to maintain the old legacy system, and replace it only when the webextensions api is sufficient to replace _all_ functionality (which, of course, won't because webextensions evolved from google trying to kill off addons https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/ ).
But it's been years now and Mozilla's only solution is to switch to nightly.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/async-panzoom-apz-lands-in...
Also, Firefox 79+ on Android (August 2020) performs significantly better than older versions, despite having lost many features in the rewrite. The current version might meet your expectations.
(The 2017 update did not do it for me)
And the frustrating thing is that this used to be a problem even with the previous iteration of Firefox on Android, i.e. it seemed somewhat understaffed and had some surprising bugs (e.g. under memory pressure it would suddenly and silently stop remembering your current tabs) and missing functionality (it didn't remember your scroll position if the app was killed, you couldn't reorder tabs in the tab list) that were only fixed after years, and even then quite a few times only through outside contributions.
And now the rewrite means that all of this has been thrown away and judging from the current development speed it'll take once more years until we sort of get back to where we used to be.
Also, most non-technical people use the default browser that's installed on the OS whether that's Safari or Edge.
When manifest v3 kicks in and we'll see the true ad horror that's the Internet today without ad blockers, maybe then we'll jump to a more privacy first browser. Until then nothing will happen.
I ported one of my extensions to v3 and while the process was not completely trivial it did not took more than a few hours, in my opinion the change is worth it this makes extensions more secure.
As far as I know Firefox is also moving to v3, maybe not enforcing it for now, but they will probably deprecate v2 at some point.
v2 also already differs in some ways in which Firefox thinks it makes sense. I'm not scared at all that they're gonna deprecate webRequest.BlockingResponse in favour of declarativeNetRequest, which is the specific API function that adblockers rely on. After all, that function has nothing to do with security, best you could argue is that it's related to performance due to filter lists becoming absurdly long.
Filter lists are as long as they are because that is the amount of domains that have demonstrated an interest in harming our security (and for many people, online privacy _is_ physical security). Filterlists are blacklists, not whitelists, so they only grow when well-known entities play foul.
The thing is uBlock Origin is just so important and trusted that these restrictions shouldn't apply to it. The functionality of uBlock Origin is just so fundamental and unambiguously pro-user it should be integrated into the browsers themselves. Conflicts of interest prevent that unfortunately but the fact remains that browsers without uBlock Origin installed cannot call themselves user agents.
uBlock Origin should just get access to everything so it can do its job as well as it possibly can. For everyone else, there's the standard APIs.
I certainly hope so. I showed Firefox and uBlock Origin to all my friends and they loved it, especially the fact it blocks YouTube ads. Lots of people simply don't know about this.
No, they won't. You can still log requests however you want. The only difference is you can't modify/stop it. So the privacy concern is pure BS.
If this doesn't work, then there's no point to the new API.
The webrequest api didn't got removed completely, only the part for modify/block request.
Only ad blockers will stole your data and others that logs them however they want will log them nicely? What world are Google's team lives in? Are we even on the same time line?
Can you confirm the new declarative APIs work as intended? Maybe they do restrict extensions. I agree that it's pointless if they don't remove the older APIs.
America's top search engine and America's top internet ads company has the America's top browser and pays to be the default search engine for America's top cell phone?
A depressing number of users use the web via the Chrome search bar on their phone, and even if they use a browser they go even to familiar sites by googing them.
https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
I wish they did, and just cared less about all the other features that were missing from gecko (but that's just be being selfish and not wanting to build out native stuff myself lol)
1) There is an integrated ad blocker. It's very convenient because I don't have to worry about adblocking plugin is bought out and is compromised, I don't have to figure out if my uBlock is supposed to be "origin" or not, or if I should go for adGuard or something else. There is no risk of adblocking breaking because of the changes in plugin API.
2) Integrated optional ad network that by default distributes money based on your web usage, but gives you control over spending your ad income. This is the coolest thing about Brave and I really wish it would succeed, but, unfortunately, it's very unlikely without very wide adoption and I just don't see that happening
3) Not developed by Mozilla. That's nice since I can't ethically support them.
I have no opinion about 2.
3 is fair, but I have similar objections about Brendan Eich.
On desktop it is less useful. But probably still better privacy vise than Edge or Chrome.
About mobile adblocking, doesn't Firefox android have ubo and a few more addons?
Firefox on android is noticeably slower for me than chromium based browsers.
Brave's browser ID is more ephemeral, it's not hardware based and doesn't persist across restarts, search suggestions are off by default and the default engine is DDG/Brave, and their sync service is end to end encrypted.
Edge is a good product, but not if you like wearing tinfoil hats. If privacy is no object, Edge is probably the best.
1. Actual features like tab groups which Firefox killed.
2. Likelihood to actually add features. Firefox used to have unique features I liked a lot, like keyword searches synced via bookmarks, but this is set for deprecation and was removed from mobile. I don't remember when Firefox last gave me a new feature.
3. Adblocking on mobile while not being Firefox, which is interestingly rare.
4. Not being developed by Mozilla. Mozilla's increasingly vehement about woke political activism, and after the tech companies booted Orange Man out of the Internet, Mozilla came out in no uncertain terms saying that they'd like politically partisan platforms to decide what I see on the net. I'd used them for years and promptly noped the fuck out. The organization may be for privacy, but they don't seem to care about other important things, or rather care about them the wrong way. I want my browser maker to make a good tool, not to tell me what to think. Mozilla feels more interested in the latter than the former.
5. Brave focuses on building an alternative foothold on the web, not just providing a browser. A lot of the other browsers' footprint comes from associated web and hardware platforms and the resulting integration conveniences. Brave has a big focus on independent revenue streams, which I like a lot even if I'm not really a fan of the crypto stuff.
Firefox lacks that to a large degree. They do have Pocket, which is good, but their userbase is essentially hostile to Pocket because they have some idiotic pipe dream about a donation-funded, pure and moral FOSS project. Meanwhile Firefox the company is moralistic, not moral, and funded by Google.