This is all on top of the many other issues with MV3 that Google is pushing under the guise of "improving performance".
I'm a happy firefox user, and I'm pretty sure it was the right choice IMO, as firefox is certainly much more stable and fast now than it was before. But it was certainly a very, very rough process and left some very popular extensions broken without alternatives for months and even years before the necessary APIs were added to webextensions to bring them back.
Kinda glad they disallowed the extensions that had near unfettered access to browser internals.
And there's also a product C, D, E but when you check them out you realize they are essentially clones of product A?
Do some Google websites perform worse on Firefox? Sure, but the entire reason that's because people don't use Firefox enough i.e. some websites are worse on Firefox. You just go around and around. If the audience of HN is not able to make that sacrifice (not use some of the GOOG's website) then we deserve the monopoly of Chrome.
Other than that, I also think we need a third alternative for Browsers. Ladybird is in the news these days, and if you're a dev and care about this issue, we should all be contributing to it.
I agree about your clone comment ala Brave, and so on.
The audience of HN is unlikely to make a difference here.
Besides, we are not some political party who all need to vote in one way together. Each person individually here makes their own choices.
Personally I think making my life harder with pointless sacrifices is not useful. I ask myself, am I making this sacrifice to make myself feel good, or because I actually think it can make a change? In this case, I don't think it would make any difference and it wouldn't make me feel good so there's no utility in using Firefox, for me.
This subject - browser monopoly, and related things like OS or app store monopoly - needs to be tackled with regulation, not personal sacrifices.
The audience of HN and devs in large, are the ones who've contributed to the monopoly of Chrome. Us only testing and creating applications for Chrome led to this.
I never said that people don't make their own choice. Of course they do. My point was that if we are going to complain about Chrome, then Firefox is a perfectly fine alternative and is currently the best way to change GOOG's ways is by voting with our feet.
Would regulation be nice? Sure. I doubt it's coming though so for the moment, our only alternative to not living in a ad-infested hellscape is to use Firefox.
im a relatively happy firefox user, but at this point to say mozilla significantly mitigates googles monopoly is as plausible as when microsoft claimed that BeOS somehow mitigated theirs.
I still can't leave firefox due to multi containers tho :(
the Microsoft antitrust trial original verdict was reached in 1999 by the way (appeals kept it alive a bit longer, though, into 2001). you are probably referring to the 1990s Microsoft, I imagine.
When a website wants to load an ad, it uses javascript[0]. The website can call a function in the included javascript file and tell AdSense "hey load an ad". If you simply block the JS file the website can break due to trying to call functions that don't exist.
uBlock (supposedly, I haven't verified this) instead of blocking the JS instead replaces it with it's own version. That version just basically says "yeah sure cool" whenever the website tries to display an ad, but doesn't actually do anything.
> We could fork them back in at higher maintenance cost. No point in speculating — I don’t write checks of unknown amount and sign them, and Google looks likely to keep V2 support for a year (thanks be to “enterprise”).
For example it looks like you could use a lambda function with the Auth info pre-bound...
They've been doing false advertising for years on every channel, making consumers pay for absolutely useless products.
Yes of course, but that probably represents less than 10% of the customers (I'm being extremely generous on purpose, it's probably 0.1%) of your usual NordVPN and co.
> don't do false advertising such as Windscribe
"Stop tracking and browse privately" and "block annoying advertisers from stalking you online" proves you wrong. VPNs don't stop trackers.
> don't do false advertising such as Mullvad
"Evade hackers and trackers". Sure.
> don't do false advertising such as iVPN
Hey looks good actually, they indeed don't claim to block trackers or anything else, just change your IP / geolocation.
Lol how did you come up with 10%? Did you just make it up?
> VPNs don't stop trackers.
Windscribe (and other VPN's) can block trackers. https://blog.windscribe.com/how-r-o-b-e-r-t-works-76d6274460...
Add FoxyProxy to that list of no false advertising, please
We're also in the space, I don't think we're selling useless products, or falsely advertising.
Our customers use our proxy servers to test applications that use your IP address to show you localized content (IP Location, GeoIP, etc). We're in 80+ countries 250+ locations globally.
Being able to switch your location with a browser plugin makes it just a few clicks, and _much_ faster than switching VPN endpoints. You also get to proxy just your browser traffic (or even just traffic against a few specific domains) rather than all the traffic on your machine. So your Spotify/Slack/Outlook connections can all run normally, and you're only proxying the site you want to test from somewhere else.
This change is terrible for us. Especially so because users flipping around between different proxies is a major use case. A user needing to re-enter their credentials for each unique proxy server is much worse than just once.
[1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=113549...