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Comment by michael9423 | Hacker News Reader

"This will be followed gradually in the coming months by the disabling of those extensions. Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension."

Soon, more than 50 million users of uBlock Origin will have their extension deactivated and directed to "alternatives" chosen by Google. This will be the end of an era where users still had control.

gorhill, probably understandably, refuses to update uBlock Origin to comply with V3, as a result he will use the majority of the userbase. The name of his new extension, "uBlock Origin Lite", will also not help with adoption.

I wonder whether it would be a wise decision by gorhill to replace uBlock Origin with a V3-compliant version when V2 is phased out.

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> This will be the end of an era where users still had control.

Google land never had it. The land with choices is called Firefox, and yet people still believe that it's a slow, bloated, supports-nothing browser.

Google does the advertisement part well, it seems.

For facts: see https://arewefastyet.com

They can say whatever they want on that site. To me Firefox feels much slower and it's not just placebo. I suspect it has to do with poor multithreading. I still get hangs or slow responsiveness of the entire Firefox chrome because of a single misbehaving tab. I can also see that some media sites (e.g. di.fm or SoundCloud) use more CPU when playing media.

Well, with 211 tabs open for a couple of weeks, I neither get CPU spikes, slow tabs, or a misbehaving chrome.

This is not on a cutting edge PC. It's a core i7-7700.

Firefox's soft spot is DNS response speed. If your DNS is slow, Firefox is slow. Otherwise it's indifferent from Google Chrome speed-wise.

I don't need 211 tabs open. One tab is enough to notice the difference.

I get everything you mentioned for Chrome. Especially if I open the Meta store for Quest apps.

Doesn't happen with Firefox.

It's almost certainly just placebo. I've been using firefox next to chrome for years and it's completely unnoticeable outside of a handful of Google-specific sites (YouTube, mostly)

Agreed. It's not just a placebo effect, it really is slower. People often don't notice this because they use relatively high-end machines. If you're skeptical, try running it on a low-end laptop or a Raspberry Pi. The difference is like night and day.

Have you used Firefox recently in 2024 ? I had switched permanently to Firefox in early 2023. But, even in late 2023, there were issues with "misbehaving tabs" are you put it. However, now in mid-2024, everything is butter smooth. A fair number of pending issues were fixed in Firefox over the last year. Including a 25 year old bug!

A lot of Firefox contributors rolled up their sleeves over the last year. Chrome is FULLY in the "Enterprise Spyware" space now with the glaring introduction of ad topics over and above community objections. The need for an alternative cross platform browser that is not corporate and ad-controlled has solidified.

I've used Firefox for at least five years. I switched to Vivaldi (which is Chromium-based) about two weeks ago and the speed difference feels liberating.

It was never so black and white. If we define control as the ability to configure the browser as one wants and its extensibility then I'd agree that Firefox did have far more control until the Quantum update where it was gutted, while some Chromium based browsers like Vivaldi are feature rich and have features Firefox doesn't (only now approaching a quasi-equivalence with the pre-Chromium Opera before it too was gutted).

I still no longer use Firefox as a main desktop browser due to the features I loved no longer being possible and never getting equivalents, despite using Firefox as a mobile browser and every other day on desktop for other purposes.

However due to the Manifest v2 phase out some of the more useful extensibility on the Chromium side is being removed (outside of say backporting like Brave but we'll see how long that will last), so one may have to consider alternatives if need be.

> The name of his new extension, "uBlock Origin Lite", will also not help with adoption.

Honestly until actually looking at it earlier this year I assumed the Lite version was just a somewhat pared down version but people should really look at the screenshots[1]. It's painfully mocking of the change with an intentionally kids-drawing-like UI and seemingly zero configurable settings outside of three sliders.

Edit: typos

[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home

It seems to me that this is not a honest attempt by gorhill to actually adapt uBO to V3. Rather he wants to ridicule it.

Adguard is working on an actual replacement of their Ad-Blocker that comes as close as possible to the V2-version:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adguard-adblocker-m...

I can understand his frustration. uBO will lose what makes it special, the ability to serve as a wide-spectrum content blocker. He wants to make a statement.

I have a fear that even if this was done in jest it could actually make it more popular among normal people...

I don't know what your guys problem is. uBlock Origin Lite works just as well as the normal version.

Well no, the problem is precisely that it can't work as well as the normal version. There may be merit to the claim that it's good enough for your uses, but that's a different claim. (Ex. last I'd heard it can't handle CNAME cloaking.)

It could be state that uBlock Lite works fine for what it actually does, but it “only works as well as the normal version” if you ignore the features that uBlock Origin has which it simply does not.

And those features make uBlock Origin much more effective. With Lite, filter lists can only update when the extension does (delaying new filters which stalky advertisers will use to their advantage as they can update faster than the extension), some filter types not supported, no element picker and other options for crafting your own filters, no external filter list support, …

> This will be the end of an era where users still had control

This will be the beginning of an era where Chrome is no longer the browser used by the overwhelming majority.

> uBlock Origin Lite

This guy has two incredible gifts: writing amazingly awesome adblockers, and picking increasingly-awful names for them.

I salute you, sir!

Ignoring that uBlock Origin isn't a good name to start with, uBlock Origin Lite seems perfect for a cut down version of it.

This is why I do not use any chromium based browsers. Firefox is a solid browser with none of this interferance by a monopolistic advertising company.

Firefox receives funding from google.

In 2022, 81% of Mozilla's revenues were derived from Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google

Use LibreWolf instead.

Having Firefox alive helps Google beat the monopoly charges, presumably

That is very likely the one reason, which means that although Google needs Mozilla to stay afloat for their "See, your honor, we're not a monopoly!" ridiculous argument, they still have a huge leverage to literally force Mozilla to keep Firefox behind.

I wonder if everyone calling Firefox as "Google Firefox" could somehow compromise that narrative.

> they still have a huge leverage to literally force Mozilla to keep Firefox behind.

I wonder if that was part of the reason Mozilla chose to lay off the entire R&D team that was working on their next-generation browser engine that would solve some pretty long-standing issues?

Anyway, building a browser is hard and expensive work, and it was probably a mistake to move away from getting one in a box at Best Buy for $50.

> Use LibreWolf instead.

What's the point when it's literally just a reskinned firefox? What's keeping Firefox alive is also keeping all of its derivatives alive.

Derivatives of Firefox can take or leave features that Mozilla is pushing. For example Pocket isn't in LibreWolf. Google and Mozilla have less influence over what derivatives do - well that's my hope anyway. It's still not ideal. Can you recommend any alternatives that have good fingerprinting resistance and are not Chromium / Gecko / WebKit based?

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