Keep uBlock Origin in Chrome for another year by enabling Enterprise policy | Hacker News Reader

Keep uBlock Origin in Chrome for another year by enabling Enterprise policy

ghacks.net

51 pointsspeckx55 comments

If this matters to you it's far more productive to stop using Chrome.

If I recall, I think the same thing is going to happen to the Microsoft Edge browser, which is built on chromium, which is a real shame because this could've been a point of differentiation for them. Windows has always asked me to switch from Chrome to Edge without giving me a compelling reason. This would have been a compelling reason.

I've been a Firefox user for years—it's more than a suitable replacement for Chrome. You can also use adblocking extensions on both mobile and desktop.

Firefox is the perfect privacy middle ground between Tor and Chrome for general browsing.

Never understood why so many seemingly hate it. Obviously work demands Chrome but I haven't installed Google products on my personal pc for a decade.

Funny but where I work Firefox is default (one of FAAN)

It became cool to hate it because Chrome was originally snappier, plus it was made by The Google, which many used to worship.

From what I can tell, there is very little reason to hate Firefox more than Chrome today.

That “there is very little reason to hate Firefox more than Chrome” is hardly a compliment.

>From what I can tell, there is very little reason to hate Firefox more than Chrome today

Firefox is considered by experts to be less secure than Chrome, is one reason.

Here are some reasons: 1. Firefox is supported by Google because otherwise there will be a monopoly and Google doesn't want to be called a monopoly.

2. You can't donate to Firefox development. You can donate to Mozilla Foundation who owns Firefox. But there are no guarantees that your money will go to Firefox development. Mozilla spends money left and right, including luxury life of management, and only a fraction goes into Firefox development. Mozilla could allow direct donations like they did with Thunderbird but they woldn't.

3. Mozilla Foundation acquired an ads company in 2024 and afterwards released "privacy preserving ads measurement" feature which is turned ON by default. There was a great discussion here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312

4. Firefox is also switching to manifest v3 and thus crippling ad blockers.

For these reasons I'd prefer to avoid Firefox, it's no better. I can only hope that https://ladybird.org/ or some other will get enough funding and talent to make a real alternative. Sending prayers and donations to ladybird for now.

Your point 4 is incorrect:

> Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future. And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manif...

While Firefox will also support v3 they will not break v2.

Switched to Brave recently over this.

Brave doesn’t have the political agenda of Mozilla. I have no idea why this comment is downvoted

The Brave ads cryptocurrency stuff was/is a turn-off for many. That'd be my guess regarding the downvotes, anyways. As well as the Brave redirection to affiliate links left a sour taste.

I use Brave everywhere and just ignore the ads stuff. Just use it as a browser.

For me, at least, it's not so much the crypto ads in of themselves that puts me off Brave. The issue is that they are a manifestation of Brave's fundamental problem: It's a for-profit endeavor based around offering a free product.

The money has to come from somewhere.

All other browsers have some kind of reasonable story behind the investment made into their existence (yes, even Chrome). Brave doesn't have any, and if the crypto ads stopped paying the bills, there must be something else that comes around to do so. Frankly, I wouldn't trust anyone who's put in that sort of situation with a piece of software I use to access anything important. Doubly so if crypto is a load-bearing component of the current status quo.

Brave is based on Chromium, so it's not a reasonable choice if you're trying to avoid this change.

Easy for the Brave CEO to say they keep ManifestV2 support while these enterprise flags in the Chromium codebase are still present. Once these flags are removed, and the code is removed, and then the internal APIs to support the ManifestV2 code is removed it becomes a whole other thing.

You can try to keep the code, but every upstream code change becomes more painful to integrate. It is going to cost more and more, requiring more and more expertise with the Chromium codebase, like it is some kind of technical debt. Not even counting the potential security issues you can introduce by keeping the code alive, with Brave being a target that is large enough to matter for hackers but perhaps too small for security researchers.

AFAICT there is no way to set this on a Chromebook though - and since Chrome is embedded into the OS using Firefox is really painful in comparison. I guess I will have to use uBO Lite.

edit: There is apparently a way to set it by enabling Developer Mode, but Developer Mode is itself really annoying - it shows a popup screen every boot.

Or maybe don’t use a Chromebook.

It was gifted to me...

I've been running ad blockers for 15 years now at least, but I seem to recall really annoying pop-ups being a part of Internet advertising too, and they happen more than once per boot.

It's true that in normal use you don't reboot a Chromebook that often, and developer mode offers other advantages as well. And apparently it is possible to "neuter" the screen https://web.archive.org/web/20170711043202/https://johnlewis.... Probably the only real solution long-term...

There is also uBlock Origin Lite.

I haven't tried this, but you should also be able to apply enterprise policies with Chrome Enterprise Core[1]. As if you are centrally managing a bunch of Clients, but it's only your one Chromebook of course.

[1] https://chromeenterprise.google/intl/de_de/products/cloud-ma...

You need a Google Workspace account - personal doesn't work. Which is admittedly only $6/month on the starter plan, but signing up just to get uBO working seems a bit much.

A .reg file with this works to extend ManifestV2:

  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome]

  "ExtensionManifestV2Availability"=dword:00000002

Where do I put this .reg file on my Chromebook?

When you open/run a .reg file, it updates your registry, usually preceeded by a warning.

Adding the text below to a text file, saving and running it as a .reg will create and add a value of 2 to "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome key

Alternatively, you could do this manually by pressing the Windows key, type "run" (without the quotes) and enter, type "regedit" (without the quotes) and enter, then navigate as far as you can to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome key

You may find there is no "Chrome" key and will need to create it, as well as creating ExtensionManifestV2Availability

--------------------------------------

  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome]


  "ExtensionManifestV2Availability"=dword:00000002

Apologies, I should have written Windows(-only) registry.

I'm glad Google is doing this - even if it only takes away 0.01% of users, it's still good.

If any new fork of chromium support manifest 2 forever, while maintaining the other upstream updates, that will be my go to browser. May be Opera can resurrect.

I salute you for your bravery, I can't even make myself comfortable with the idea of switching from Firefox to Librewolf, never mind "any new fork" of a browser. The security implications are just too severe - malicious code, lingering vulnerabilities, project abandonment, etc.

It's real bold of google to double down on these bad faith changes while also trying to get me invested in their AI offerings at the same time.

Keep uBlock Origin forever by switching to Firefox.

Too slow. Not a serious alternative

Not according to benchmarks and my personal experience it's not.

That may have been true five years ago but it's not true today.

More like 10 years ago.

How on earth is it "too slow"? What are you doing in the web? It loads web pages. What's the difference, fractions of a second? Enjoy no ad-blocking.

Too slow will be Chrome infested with ads.

To a browser without ublock? Tail wagging the dog if you ask me.

[citation needed]

A browser which lacks serious adblocking cannot be a serious option for me, no matter how fast it claims to be.

Firefox user that haven't used Chrome for 6 years, what am I missing?

Visually Chrome now look more like Firefox, really, thin tabs with declining borders have been substituted by thicker one with vertical border. Practically if feel faster on the same iron, and it's more rigid in user UI change, for instance you can't have Tab Center reborn and hide the tab-bar because you are on a large screen and you like to been able to read comfy all tabs...

For the rest... They are essentially equivalent even if under the hood there are many differences.

Mostly sites complaining they don't recognize your browser and disabling features (this is mostly a blessing).

Nothing, other than you can't debug JavaScript as easily as with Chrome or Node.

Mostly that FF has ~36k extensions (January 2024) [1] and Chrome has ~112k (June 2024) [2].

[No doubt, total count of extensions isn't the most important number and there's a long tail in both counts of very small user bases, but this paints the ~3x picture in a broad stroke.]

Of course, since FF migrated to WebExtensions in 2017, theoretically most Chrome extensions can be ported to FF with minimal changes [3] — practically speaking though, not all of the big ones actually have, or the FF equivalents to some of the most useful Chrome extensions are far less polished.

And also, if you're developing front end web apps for normal end users, most are still on Chrome... over the years, I've experienced an unfortunate number of sites that should work across Chrome/FF/Safari actually break because of things like the developers not even testing in browsers besides Chrome given its dominance. I'm not encouraging that by any means, but the reality is that it still happens.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Add-on_(Mozilla)

[2]: https://github.com/DebugBear/chrome-extension-list

[3]: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/porting-...

Also works on Android!

As a longtime Chrome user, I just switched to Firefox because of this. Everything seems fine so far. I just wish Mozilla would invest some time to polish the UI a little – it feels a bit dated and rough.

It's funny you mention that, as they have the largest upgrade to the UI in the current nightly build. There was a reddit comment with some pictures.

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1epkgh5/latest_nig...

Nice! I hope the sidebar can be disabled (I'm not a fan) but everything else looks much better.

The first response to the second comment says how.

I think that's the last thing they should be spending time on. In my list of browser priorities, security, speed, memory all are much higher.

Minimal UI is best, especially since buttons don't have man pages.

Moving to firefox seems more practical at this point

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