Hacker News Reader

Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

If chrome limits ad blockers and provides some way to unambiguously determine whether or not you’re chrome that cannot be spoofed, i wonder if sites will explicitly start blocking Firefox and other browsers.

View on HN

Sites will for sure use the Web Integrity API(1) to blacklist "unsafe" user agents exactly the same way macOS blacklists apps from "unsafe" developers.

1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...

Yes. That’s very likely actually.

Right now, Safari being the only game in town on iOS is basically the only reason why websites don’t exclude non-Chrome browsers already. Now if Apple ever supported this in a way that broke or deprecated adblocking, I’d probably seriously consider switching to an un-Googled Android phone. Until then, though, I’ve switched to Firefox on my desktop computers and use Safari on mobile and am pretty darn happy with the adblocking of both.

That would seem to fall afoul of antitrust regulation.

It sure would, we hope. But we have to keep screaming about WEI and similar proposals until Google stops being an asshole. Pressure must be kept up.

I remember when I was young thinking it would be impossible to out-asshole Microsoft. Ah, the innocent days.

This site works exclusively with IE6.

Probably you could always be able to install an adblocker as an “unpacked extension” if they’re banned in the official chrome extension store.

I thought it was a matter of chrome not allowing manifest v2 extensions anymore, which wouldn't resolve this.

Didn't browsers decide to block unsigned extensions back when Microsoft decided to automatically add the silver light extension to every browser on the system? I think at least for Firefox you have to download the nightly build to bypass the signing process. Side loading extensions Google doesn't want you to have will probably be as painful as possible.

Goodbye websites that block Firefox, I won't miss you !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com