PSA: How to keep using adblockers on Chrome and Chromium | Hacker News Reader

PSA: How to keep using adblockers on Chrome and Chromium

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This solution will work for exactly a year. That's how long google gives enterprises to migrate to manifest v3.

Source: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...

I suspect it'll actually work much longer and just become more obnoxious to enable in a year. A complicated workaround that placates power users so they stay on Chrome but that most users won't bother with is perfect.

This seems like it's too hard to tell friends/family.

Is the go-to now just 'install firefox'?

i would always tell them to install firefox. this is mostly for developers and tech oriented people who need to keep chrome around

If I need to keep Chrome around for development, I'm not using extensions on it, and I'm only visiting the sites I'm developing.

If you use things like Apple Business Manager and you're not using a Mac, it only works on Chrome.

If Google leaves a boolean switch in Chromium to keep V2 enabled then I assume most if not all of the third party Chromium-derived browsers will just flip it to true by default. That's easy for them to do, the hard part is if Google strips out V2 altogether and leaves the downstream browsers to patch it back in.

Even when it's stripped out entirely, it will be easy to add back in. The changes (that adblockers care about) are just a few if statements changing the conditions under which synchronous inspection of web requests are allowed. Manifest V3 still allows them. But only in limited circumstances which are unsuitable for ad blocking.

There will be a switch available ... but only for a period of time before the functionality is completely removed

And apparently, as per this post, only available to folks who are savvy with the command-line.

No, use a chromium derived browser, like https://github.com/win32ss/supermium.

Or use firefox, it will always support adblockers.

No kidding, thanks but I do use Firefox. As for Chrome, the writing is on the wall.

It's not so shiny any longer.

I consider my non-technical friends/family technically dead. They're lost souls you can't help, like Elizabeth Swan looking down at her father's ghost on the boat. We can't help.

Freedom and privacy are luxuries only available to those nerdy enough to use Linux. The rest are prey/prisoners/peasants to the technofeudal overlords.

After the XUL removal debacle a number of years ago, I can't trust Firefox to offer a suitably flexible and capable extension system over the long run.

While some people will claim that those changes were necessary, the impact was still very negative for the extension developers and users who were affected at the time.

The numerous other user-hostile decisions made by Firefox's developers certainly don't help repair the trust that was lost then.

If this is about trust, Google is by far less trustworthy. Firefox is a flawed option vs. a shitty non-starter option.

why do you think that? mozilla is not without its controversies and google basically owns them

This guy is complaining about "XUL removal". Google is the linchpin and progenitor of surveillance capitalism.

Were the poor decisions made by Mozilla engineers or by Mozilla Corporate Executives? Mozilla has never paid engineers particularly well; in the past engineers joined mostly out of a duty bound to philosophical alignment.

> This seems like it's too hard to tell friends/family.

It's an opportunity for someone to write an "adblock fixer" app for the non-technical market.

I don't understand why people want to teach others how to cope with an abusive relationship, instead of telling them to leave.

You can't just send them a .reg file and tell them to double click on it and hit ok?

Just tell them to use Edge. It's the worse you can do to Google.

It's also the worst you can do to your friends and family.

Why edge instead of Firefox?

On macOS it actually uses less resources, and you can use Chrome extensions.

On Mac? Just tell them to use Safari, why install twice the same browser?

Search defaults to Bing?

Finally some news that makes me think the Firefox has a glimmer of hope left.

Same here, I’ll be switching to Firefox today after hearing this news.

What has been holding you back so far? It seems strange to me that so many normally quite pro-privacy, pro-FOSS, Google-sceptical people are still using Chrome to this point.

I would like to have privacy but understand that’s nearly impossible in reality. I was using Chrome mostly due to inertia, but not being able to block ads is unacceptable to me. I do most of my browsing on iOS Safari these days, but use Chrome on my work computer.

I’m unfortunately handcuffed to google due to gmail, switching seems like a monumental task and google is going to get my personal data whether I have gmail or not from AdWords, etc.

Every app there are gets worse and worse -- aka Doctorow's enshittification

So people will just take the sudden deluge of ads in stride and move on. Chances of this moving people to Firefox is slim.

Almost every adblock user will move to firefox. They didn’t install it out of boredom, cause that’s non-trivial.

I mean it is trivial, but the world fights over defaults now and there are people who only use defaults and complain when they change.

So yeah, they will move. Download an app, import userdata, reinstall extensions and blog about this hacker-news-level journey.

> reinstall extensions

I've done this journey. This step is exceptionally difficult, sometimes impossible. https://github.com/exile-center/better-trading

And it's even more difficult because I can't find a link to the original store page from an addon within firefox so I can't easily share my findings. https://i.imgur.com/zh2M9YA.png I do not see a link. Perhaps fixing that should have been a priority for Mozilla instead of a bullshit alt generator but it's AI so of course it's got priority. Instead of doing everything in their power to grow their market share ... spreadfirefox reboot when.

First recommendation would be a pihole running anywhere you can run it, but if you don't want to or can't do that, you can use Steven Black's ad list to create a hosts file to DNS sink ad/bad networks locally:

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Isn't DNS-level blocking strictly less capable than even the nerfed Manifest V3 filtering API? V3 can still block at a more granular level than nuking entire hostnames AFAIK, even if it's not as granular as V2.

Specifically, the ability to block specific URL patterns in addition to just hostnames.

DNS blocking gets you 90% of the way there, though. (And the only way to block your smart fridge from phoning home)

Yes, I didn't intend to suggest it a replacement for a strong ad block but if v3 neuters it for those who don't want to or can't swap browsers.

Also a big benefit of DNS level blocking is it can block telemetry other unwanted network traffic (unless connection by IP or some other wizardry), for instance how often my TV attempts to phone home.

First recommendation would be Firefox.

>key was added and will presumably stay forever

Nope, it will be removed after 1 year. There is a chance they delay it depending on how much the enterprises complain, but so long as all their big clients are migrated I doubt they care about the long-tail.

There's a good chance that whoever is driving this change within Google gets promoted/retires in less than a year, and then it gets left in limbo forever like so many other TODO():'s in the code...

I switched to firefox one year ago. Works fine!

Question: Is it possible to run ad blocking at the OS level rather than in the browser? Requests to ad servers just never leave your PC? traffic from ad servers just never arrives at the browser?

A common approach is to mess around with name resolution. Many operating systems have a hosts file that can be modified. You can do DNS on your own computer. Piholes are a variation on this where people usually use a separate machine to handle DNS requests for their entire network. If you cannot change the DNS for your computer/device, some people use a VPN. I believe this is how things are currently handled on Android.

This approach is less flexible than the filtering you can get from a web browser. On the other hand, it can be used to filter DNS requests from all software. With something like a Pihole, you can configure the Pihole and (maybe) your router, and it will work for all devices on your network.

On Android there is AdGuard which runs a VPN locally to block ads. It can also parse SSL traffic if one installs an SSL certificate but I don't like the idea very much. In the end I just use it as a light adblock for unencrypted traffic when I don't use Firefox.

You can use the hosts file to block ads.

https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Look up technitium dns

Too bad the HN Flamewar detector removed this post from the homepage. The content is interesting, the comments are pointless bickering over browsers

Serious question, why is anyone still using Chrome? It's so user-hostile and basically spyware at this point, it boggles my mind that anyone would intentionally install spyware on their computer.

How do you make sites that are only whitelist certain browsers to work under Firefox? Is there an app, extensions etc anything?

For some handful of sites I have to keep a Chrome install around

1) User agent switcher.

2) Report those sites to https://webcompat.com/, and/or to Mozilla (who have an evangelism team to reach out to those sites and get them to stop doing that).

I just keep a Chrome install around and when a website seems like it's misbehaving I just fire it up in Chrome.

It's a bunch of baggage to have around, but it's useful for other stuff. Like when you hit your monthly limit of free articles you can just fire it up in Chrome and now you've doubled your monthly free limit!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-st...

Sometimes this might not work, in that case try a different extension or different user agent strings. I had to go through a few before I found one that worked.

How many people are gonna do all this to get an adblocker working? How long is this workaround gonna be allowed by google?

What excuses remain for sustaining the chromium monopoly that allows this shitshow, and for using chrome and chromium derived browsers instead of firefox?

firefox is still the best browser.

i do wish! firefox has web features missing that i need on a daily basis, and their developer team seems wholly uninterested on working on them at all

Which features do you mean?

I don’t know whether FF lacks these features, but I’m using:

- webpage splits

- search by image

- go to non-<a> url in bg tab

- open in new tab in a virtual sub group rather than just to the right or at the end

- tabs retain width on close until mouse goes away (helps with closing series of tabs)

- bookmarks open in new tab by default

- last tab doesn’t close the browser

- gestures and toolbar customization

That’s in Vivaldi, I probably forgot a bunch of features that feel natural but may have no FF counterpart. Tbh, looking at FF settings, there’s basically none. You can’t miss features that you never had, I guess.

most people don't use those it would be silly to add them to firefox unless it was an extension.

Half of it is ergonomics so basic, that people wouldn’t even mention as a feature.

With this reasoning you could remove tab rearrangement, open in new window and similar “most don’t use” features.

What features?

Like what?

“I like this pot, but it just keeps getting warmer and warmer. Does anyone know where I can get some ice packs or something?”

“No, I don’t want to jump out. Stop telling me that!”

Or just use Firefox.

everyone should just have a pihole

Pi-hole and other DNS-based ad blockers are a lot worse than even Manifest v3 ad blockers, so they aren't any alternative.

Use Adguard

Brave.

Imagine still using Brave in plain 2024.

Just stop using Chrome FFS.

Or maybe stop supporting Google's quest to monopolize the web and use (and test against!) LITERALLY ANY OTHER BROWSER

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