uBlock Origin is no longer available on Chrome web store
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Assuming it was deleted, does HN change parent comments if parent was deleted? - that's misleading.
I didn't comment on firefox at all.
It sure looks like you replied to the wrong comment by accident.
> Assuming it was deleted, does HN change parent comments if parent was deleted? - that's misleading."
That's not possible as far as i know; What is possible, is that the original commenter EDITED their comment to a different text, soon after they posted it.
If Mozilla proves unviable we’ll move from Firefox to the next entity that isn’t hostile to their user base or make one that isn’t.
At this point your (multi-platform) options are:
- Chrome + its kin
- Firefox + its kin
The shift you'd make is from Firefox to something based on Firefox / Chrome... then you wait and hope that Ladybird actually gets somewhere or that the Servo engine doesn't take another forever to mature... and someone builds a browser around it. I'd call that mighty slim pickings. Especially considering how beholden the downstream browsers are to the upstream ones, particularly for smaller projects.
Ensuring I still have PiHole or NextDNS to block ads at a DNS level, I'd use Safari with any adblock extension.
Failing that, I'd browse the compatible web with a TUI browse in terminal.
Failing that I'm reading books and taking notes on paper or in Vim. No internet for me.
Another thing for me is that popups annoy me. If I get too many modals pop up on a page, I get emotionally frustrated. This is quite common these days with some websites– all it takes is one GDPR cookies modal and an AI chat popup in the bottom right corner– and that's already way more frustration than my brain can handle.
To be honest, I think uBo almost become a cult (which is nothing wrong, to be clear). It has lots of very opinionated development progress happened/happening to it, and most of them are irrelevant for majority of users (even the "power" users). And if I dare to say, it's at the cost of its UX.
For example, a few years ago, uBo disabled the ability to "greenlight" a domain (i.e. adding a whitelist dynamic rule) by simply clicking in the (advanced) popup. The official reason is that it's the most misused features, which is true, but it makes legitimate use of it (to whitelist a 3rd-party domain for a specific site because otherwise the site is broken) very inconvenient.
And if you ask about it, they (people in related forums like reddit) tell you "well you should never use it. NOOP should be sufficient. If not, the rules are wrong and you should report to the rule author(s)." This is cool but it didn't solve my immediate problem that a site I want to visit is broken by uBo.
I learned later, again from uBo subreddit, that you can double press ctrl to temporarily enable this feature back -- which is more than enough for me -- but how the hell do you even discover this?
And I never remembered what the two columns for adding dynamic rules are supposed to be -- since there is no headers.
I spent a year trying to use Firefox after being a chrome user for well over a decade - I eventually switched back when Mozilla started adding the same tracking features that chrome started out with years ago. Mozilla seems to be going down the same path, albeit several years behind and slowly. After that I just didn’t see a reason to not just use chrome if I’m going to have to neuter tracking bullshit anyway since it’s still much more performant than Firefox.
V3 complaint UB exists (UBo Lite) and works plenty fine save for what even I (as a power user) would call power user features. It’s very annoying that Google is going down this route, and I really want Firefox to be the better browser, but I just don’t think it is yet. During my year of usage you definitely can notice the performance difference and the inconsistency in certain webpages.
Which is this now removed post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1fhsai3/rest_in_pea...
That had the title "Rest in peace" and contained this image: https://i.redd.it/ng75ptntl2pd1.png
Which is a screenshot of the uBlock Origin page in the Chrome Web Store, displaying the message "This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.": https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
OP likely copied the this share link first and then manually replaced www. to old. . But shared link never worked with old. prefix so it broke.
Reddit may or may not want to kill old.reddit but this isn't an example of it, inb4 people are going to take this opportunity to soapbox about it.
Also, note that there is an enterprise policy that can enable Manifest V2 extensions through June 2025 [2].
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
[2]: https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#ExtensionManifestV...
It does the same basic content blocking with no permissions required. Then you can opt-in sites for it to do more blocking, including I believe opt-ing in all sites for what appears to be the same blocking as regular uBlock Origin.
Positive side: faster, fewer permissions by default, more control over permissions.
Negatives: less blocked by default, requires opt-in for more blocking.
This is also about not getting sucked into an unwanted environment managed by Google.
Checking my Chrome extensions, uBlock origin is gone.
For example, some years ago here in Norway a fairly popular site got their ad network exploited to serve an exploit which installed malware that hijacked the pages of the largest bank. When you think you sent money to your kids or paid a bill, you ended up sending the money somewhere else entirely.
So for me, it just isn't worth the risk, and I won't surf without an ad blocker.
>This extension may soon no longer be supported because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.
I found https://docs.plasmo.com/itero but haven't used it - it seems to provide a downloadable installer that installs and maintains an extension on testers' systems via policies. Unsure how well it works though, or if anyone's deployed it.
There are so many things wrong with the state of affairs with the MV3 rollout that it's hard to know where to begin. If there's a silver lining here, perhaps it's that there will be renewed attention towards finding workarounds to the walled garden.
It is about money too obviously. I just think the general public is unaware what ads and ad network control over your online experience actually can accomplish.
After seeing aspects of it weaponized against me, the impact it has on someone unaware of the technology and psychology involved honestly seems like a danger to the public itself.
This may sound extreme if you have not experienced it.
Ads to me are merely a nuisance, and annoys me, rather than impact me in any dangerous way. Of course, i will do my utmost to remove it from my life, but i cannot see it be called a danger to the public. Calling it such will actually diminish the importance of other public dangers, such as lobbying, monopolistic corporations etc.
Disregarding reality, this is already quite subjective and depends if you trust sites more than your browser addons.
Tracking doesn't seem to be a relevant threat to those that defend this "evolution".
Also disregarded is the shitty situation of mobile OS that disempower otherwise quite powerful devices that Google would like to extend to web browsers.
Yes, you can fully construct a hypothetical situation where manifest v3 can be an improvement. Just like chastity belts shield your from STDs.
The same bunch of bullshit can be extended to ideas about "web integrity". I think it is time that people stop being idiots about it.
Firefox and Brave are fine as chrome alternatives. Google search is dying a slow death. We need a viable alternative to YouTube.
I dread Google getting a new lease on life through Waymo.
That was when I swore off them as much as possible. Not because "poor Microsoft is hurt" but because they showed the kind of power they could flex on others. I only use them for the occasional youtube video, nothing else.
The thing that made Google evil at that time for me is when they introduced Google+. Before they launched it, you could sign up with fake names and they didn't care. G+ changed that. Nowadays they're making it impossible to register without a valid cell phone number.
I also have been using Edge as my main browser in Linux (it's vertical tabs have no match for my usecase) .
I do find uBlock Origin to be better than Brave's built-in blocker.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
Victims' posts get downvoted to invisiblity because it's reddit.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1evqxed/delete_this...
The problem is discoverability and UX. I believe, in chrome profile management is another menu option. In FF you have to use about:profiles or start Firefox with a specific command line argument.
Unless you know about it or are actively looking for the feature, there's no way to know. If you are coming from Chrome, this unfortunately leaves the impression that Firefox doesn't support profiles (a must have feature for some).
It doesn't even hint or show up in settings search. It is as if they don't want anyone to use/know about profiles.
Unless there's a way to create containers that also disable extensions in their context I will always need multiple profiles.
edit: never mind, I wasn't awake, see reply.
FWIW on Windows this works fine for me. I run two different profiles. I get two separate taskbar icon groupings, they stay together and collapses independently.
Must admit I've not used multiple profiles on my KDE install yet.
It's been far too long since I set it up, so I forget if I had to duplicate the application, if you do mine uses these settings:
Firefox Profile Manager
firefox
--new-instance --ProfileManager
If you right click on the Icons-and-Text Task Manager Settings, the Behavior tab has TWO options for Group: behaviors [Do Not Group] (I prefer this anyway) or [By Program Name] which I take to mean the executable. I'm not sure if it follows symlinks, but if that's an issue you can probably make a script to hardlink instead. A couple firefox-profilename applications that point back to firefox should work. You can even make a custom version of the launcher that invokes with a specific profile ID rather than selecting one.
As a further set of asides:
Firefox please 1) It'd be nice if firefox renamed it's arguments list to prefix it with the selected profile ID as the first item.
KDE Plasma please 2) It would be great if the grouping thing could be expanded to E.G. consume the program name + first two tokens of the arguments. Maybe with a customization per group.
KDE mega _please_ 2.b) Or even just to call an external program with a window ID handle and have it write back a string that's used as the group 'name'.
Will have to test using multiple profiles using the same executable.
However, if the same "trick" works on Linux, perhaps it could be exploited by Firefox creating a separate executable that launches a specific profile.
We do that with our application, using the "self-extracting zip trick", ie appending data to the executable that is read during start-up.
Though it'd still be many times better if Firefox made it easier to tell which profile was associated with a given process (prefix the argument list as if launched with that). ALSO if KDE's task list supported improved flexibility for group categorization. It wouldn't even need to run an external program other than once for each new window created.
Don’t know of a keyboard hotkey during launch for this, I keep a separate desktop shortcut to run w/ the profile manager. You can also make shortcuts to run with a specific profile.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/CommandLineOptions#-Profile...
It met all my needs for multiple profiles. I use it to have multiple concurrent sessions for different sites (eg: one AWS account/role per container).
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Where I work we are required to have 2-3 Microsoft accounts for security separation. Account containers makes it possible to interact with virtually unlimited profiles all in the same browser window. No need for in-private browsing or multiple widows of chrome or edge, it just works. When you have it configured just right it's a thing of beauty.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
Could uBlock implement V3 without losing its functionality?
Google is an ads company. uBlock Origin is making them lose money...
> Could uBlock implement V3 without losing its functionality?
No, that's why everyone is angry and a ton of people switching to Firefox, to keep using uBlock Origin as it is, since Firefox still respects the V2.
Yes, with some minor caveats. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
no. V3 has some limitations on how many urls gets blocked, and has to be submitted ahead of time iirc.
It is high time the tech commmunity strongly encourage their friends and family to switch to firefox enmass.
And this is part of it. Maybe releasing manifest v4 with prominent forks would lessen this purely marketing move by Google.
Another idea is, for the filtering system to operate a shadow DOM or an entire browser (like a selenium driver) that renders everything unfiltered. But the browser the user is using only sees filtered content. That way, it would become significantly more difficult for advertisers to detect the AD is being blocked. This could be done in a local sandbox and optionally in a cloud sandbox. Outbound network requests from the user facing browser can be blocked or filtered.
Or, just use Firefox. but I doubt Mozilla can resist doing the same thing, given the anti-trust issues Google is facing.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1fhsai3/rest_in_pea...