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Comment by wolpoli | Hacker News Reader

> Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3.

Glad to hear that uBlock Origin will live on in Firefox.

Yeah, didn't gorhill already say that uBlock Origin will never be ported to Manifest v3 due to how much he'd have to cripple it?

That means that very soon all Chrome (and Edge) users will no longer have uBlock Origin, and Firefox will be the only way to run it officially.

This could be a pretty decent value prop for Firefox (bigger than the random features Mozilla has been pushing recently IMO)... Although I'm sure the majority of less technical Chrome users will just switch to whatever gimped, Chrome-sanctioned declarativeNetRequest ad-blocking extensions spring up to fill the void.

> didn't gorhill already say that uBlock Origin will never be ported to Manifest v3 due to how much he'd have to cripple it? I don't think that is up to date

> That means that very soon all Chrome (and Edge) users will no longer have uBlock Origin, and Firefox will be the only way to run it officially.

This sounds like a pro in my mind. I made the switch to Firefox soon after MV3 was announced. I don't regret it. I'm hoping more people follow in my footsteps and hopefully Chromium doesn't have such a stranglehold on web standards.

The typical answer I get when I say this is "but Firefox is too slow". I don't experience the issue, but that's pretty much always what I get told. No idea.

Firefox generally runs worse on Google properties like Youtube and Google Meet. I had to switch to Chrome because the performance was so poor and my last job used Meet as our conference tool.

Indeed, Google owned sites run worse on Firefox. But not too worse. I watch YouTube channels everyday on Firefox without issues.

While my experience is not the same (i use gmail, meet and youtube daily on Firefox with no issues), there's an easy solution to that - use Chrome for meet when you need to and use Firefox for all of your other browsing?

I do that on mobile, I have a heavily locked-down Fennec F-Droid for random browsing but it's awful to use Google websites from it, so I keep Bromite around only for checking my old GMail / GDrive accounts (I've moved to other providers but they're useful backups). Doesn't make much sense to bother blocking Google Analytics and friends when I'm already using a Google website.

On desktop I don't have that problem, Librewolf works fine with Google websites for me, and I have a container set up for them.

At work we're on the MS stack so instead of Chrome I keep Edge as my other browser for Azure, Office, and Teams. I have to say, the vertical tab implementation from Edge is one of the best I've seen. Vivaldi's are fancier but they're not nearly as smooth, and Firefox's Tree-Style Tabs extension can't even compare.

You describe it as an easy solution, but the easier solution is to just use one browser. Only one history record (which I use) and one set of plugins to maintain.

I've switched back to Firefox now that I no longer work somewhere that uses Google products.

I think New Meet performs a lot better in FF now, but Old Meet (with the gray action bar) had awful performance when I used it. The performance wasn't great in Chrome either, but it wasn't show-stoppingly slow like it was in FF.

It used to be true. But now firefox and chrome are pretty comparable. Although YMMV depending on the specific site. And sometimes it isn't because a chrome is inherently faster, but because a site has been heavily optimized targeting chrome, because chrome has more market share.

It's still true. They probably render websites and run JS at comparable speeds, but everything in the UI is snappier with Chrome. It just feels like every interaction with Firefox has 50ms more delay than Chrome.

It won't be anymore once effective adblocking is kneecapped.

Many users will probably switch in June 2023, as Chrome will no longer run Manifest v2 by that time.

That will be the true test of Googles changes, if they don't come up with something else before then.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/mv2-sunset/

> Many users will probably switch in June 2023, as Chrome will no longer run Manifest v2 by that time.

That's January 2023 for most users. You can only run v2 past January using an enterprise policy.

This looks like great opportunity for malicious extensions as desperate users will be looking for reliable ad blockers for their Chrome

I have a slight hope that gorhill will just remove the Chrome extension which might get users back to Firefox. It's next to useless with Manifest v3 and has been quite constricted for a while now when being used in Chrome [1].

1: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

> Ability to uncloak 3rd-party servers disguised as 1st-party through the use of CNAME record.

I always thought that would be the evolution of ads, but didn't realize it was already fairly widespread.

Maybe it's time for me to look at switching back to Firefox. I ditched them when they pushed so hard for DoH which looks a lot like ad delivery tech to me. I thought Microsoft would give users a good experience with Edge since they should be trying to gain market share, but that was totally wrong. It pushes Microsoft accounts and affiliated products super hard.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a plain, un-Googled, Chromium browser on Windows. I'd prefer something digitally signed and without extra features like Brave, etc. have.

> I ditched them when they pushed so hard for DoH which looks a lot like ad delivery tech to me.

It looks like privacy-enabling tech to me. I don't want my ISP to snoop which domains I visit or hijack DNS requests.

The untouchable foreign databroker that is Google concerns me to a far greater degree than my heavily regulated and monitored ISP whose HQ is only a 30m bike-ride away here in the Netherlands.

Firefox doesn't have Google on their preinstalled DoH provider list. You can go out of your way to configure it.

what about cloudflare?

Yes, Cloudflare is the default in the US.

Super late edit to add: Mozilla signed a contract with CF to put users' data under Mozilla's privacy policy instead of the one on the normal Cloudflare DoH service.

What's the difference between those two?

Most of the world is not Netherlands, though.

Yes I understand that's a distinctive factor, which was the reason for me mentioning it.

Just wanted to point out that different threat models and actor evaluations exist.

Do you trust your ISP or cloudflare more? In the US, I'd probably pick cloudflare too, but I'm happier with our local ISPs who are subject to GDPR and the US has been proven to be problematic in the privacy regard since the snowden leaks.

DoH does not prevent your ISP from seeing the IP addresses of the websites you visit. It only encrypts the requested url. It is not too difficult to figure out which IP addresses are from which websites and block or manipulate them.

Learned first hand when trying to visit adguard.com with DoH enabled at a relative's. Comcast's router blocked the website by recognizing adguard's unencrypted website IP address.

DoH is not really hiding anything from ISP's.

Yes. This can also be done by SNI scanning[0], which is a pretty core function of the web these days.

[0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-sni/

P.S. not sure why your comment got flagged. It seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Just one man's opinion here but on these-

It pushes Microsoft accounts

I use it on my work machine without an account, and there's no push that I could ever see. Seems about the same on that front as anything else, including Firefox. I also have a Firefox account. I do use a MS account on my personal Edge install.

and affiliated products super hard.

You would think this is a negative, but it opened my eyes and saved me a lot of money. In fact, Edge's shopping features were something I wish I had for years prior. I liked it enough that I went looking for best-in-class options, and ended up installing Honey. I now rely on both Honey and Edge's shopping features to save me money.

I would go so far as to say if I had to leave Edge and use a browser without Edge's shopping features, I'd be one of the features pulling me back to Edge.

Honey is a tracker you willingly install[1]. If that doesn't concern you, I can understand why the privacy features of Firefox aren't too appealing either.

[1] https://www.datarequests.org/blog/honey-data-collection/

Edit: When did we stop calling this stuff "spyware"? When it became widespread enough to no longer be remarkable?

I used Firefox for 19 years without wavering. Honey does require information for their services. It saves me hundreds of dollars which is very real to me. Do you use any Google products? I wouldn't cast stones from a glass house.

I keep Tor Browser installed at all times for best-in-class privacy alongside Edge. It blows away Firefox on that front.

If I wanted to make the tradeoffs for a more privacy-oriented daily browser, I wouldn't reach for Firefox in 2022. I'd use Brave.

The other day I tried to open Quick Assist to help my elderly father find out where his email was. Couldn't access it without signing in to a Microsoft account. That's not the exact situation you're referencing, but speaks to the length and breadth of the effort MS is undertaking to force you to log in to MS.

I've never used Quick Assist, first time I've heard of it actually. It looks like there's two versions, the preinstalled one and the MS Store version which the preinstalled version points you to. I've always used and recommended Teamviewer for this sort of stuff.

I can't say I fault MS on that one, but people will any way without thinking about it. They're providing a service. Teamviewer certainly requires an account.

The only pushback I saw on DoH was from network admins who want DoT so they can MITM/block it easily. Firefox lets you set the DoH endpoint anyways so you can run your own resolver (dnscrypt-proxy or whatever).

It caused a lot of problems for me, because of employees who complained that they couldn't reach anything on the internal network because firefox switched to using the default DoH instead of the system DNS. We configured the canary domain, but the heuristic for using that was pretty buggy in the beginning, and still isn't completely reliable. Sure we can tell them to disable DoH or change the DoH endpoint, but that's one more thing to worry about onboarding. And if you don't already have enterprise policies set up, then configuring that just for DoH is a huge pain.

I'm not sure what size your company is, but Mozilla adds/changes stuff in new releases fairly frequently so you may want to get on the policy train sooner rather than later if your size makes it sensible to do so.

> I always thought that would be the evolution of ads, but didn't realize it was already fairly widespread.

Once edge workers get cheap enough I wonder how we'll be able to stop ads at all. Everything but the bootstrap page could be randomized per user and all fronted by the same 1st-party website.

Think encrypt the real request needed into the url to the edge worker it de-crypts that payload and does the request. Everything except the content will look identical to the users computer.

One of the things that uBlock Origin does and Google is trying to kill is detecting and blocking ads based on content & display attributes, not just urls.

“ I ditched them when they pushed so hard for DoH which looks a lot like ad delivery tech to me. ”

Agree Mozilla’s move to enable this practically by default with just a slimy quick pop up message about privacy was weak

Setting the default resolvers to cloudflare was also weak.

They even presented the problem in a misleading way. How is centralizing DNS requests to a major provider like cloudflare improving privacy. Ohh because wink wink … Mozilla said that they got privacy “guarantees”. Your local ISP will no longer snoop but instead we will just sent all requests to one of the largest resolving services in the world.

https://chromium.woolyss.com

This seems so curious to me. "I was concerned some policy in Firefox looked a little like ad delivery, so I switched to a platform which is 100% ad delivery all the time."

But that aside, maybe Vivaldi is what you're looking for?

uBlock Origin and other content blocker extensions have 10+ Million users each on Chrome, it'll be interesting to see what happens when they eventually to cease to function (June 2023). How will users react?

Hopefully, Mozilla won't be completely inept as to fail to position themselves to capture any users leaving Chrome over this.

10 million people is pretty damn tiny when compared to the 4 and some billion internet users out there, though. Even if 100% of them moved over, isn't it just fractions of a percentage point? Why would Google care at all?

10+ million was the number I gave because it's what the Chrome store reports, unfortunately for all extensions it doesn't report a number larger than that. I don't think it's possible to get an accurate number, it could be quite a bit larger.

I've seen some suggestions that the number of adblock users could be as high as 40% of all users but that's possibly an over estimation. It's also not clear how they are collecting that information.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/435252/adblock-users-wor...

> At browser launch, Firefox will wait for uBO to be up and ready before network requests are fired from already opened tab(s).

> This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers, i.e. tracker/advertisement payloads may find their way into already opened tabs before uBO is up and ready in Chromium-based browsers, while these are properly filtered in Firefox.

Wow. I did not know this. This seems like a huge bug/problem in Chromium if you care about blocking trackers.

I'd be afraid this will leave unaware users vulnerable to copycats using the uBlock name for their lesser or even malicious extensions.

If web sites get aggressive that declarativeNetRequest no longer works well, I could see the mass migrating off Google Chrome/Microsoft Edge to alternatives, including Mozilla Firefox.

Isn't it only something like 1 in 4 people who use ad-blockers in the first place? Of those, how many actually use uBlock Origin? Also, outside FF, aren't all noteworthy alternatives Chromium at this point?

I should have said the mass of ad-blockers users migrating instead of mass of users. Yes, only a percent of people use adblockers on desktop and even less people use them on mobile, which is the dominant source of traffic these days. It might move the needles of market shares for the alternate browsers.

No, we don't have any alternative to Chromium other than Firefox and Safari. But for the Chromium based browsers, Brave and Opera do have built-in adblocking independently of Manifest V3 [1]. Vivaldi claimed that they might maintain an alternate store [1]. So all three alternate browsers have the option to offer better level of ad-blocking to get more installs. Of course, they could also decide to monetize with an "Acceptable ads" program after they gain market shares.

[1]https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-...

I wonder what the stats are. A lot of people first action on a new setup is to install ublock.. it's almost a political tool.

This is why Mozilla, no matter what profoundly stupid shit they are up to (and there is a lot of stupid shit), retain me as a customer. I bet I'm not alone in that camp.

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