Google's Chrome Browser Starts Disabling uBlock Origin
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
Fight for an internet where we're not exploited.
I’m not making fun of tech illiterate people either. We are all more vulnerable in some parts of our lives than others. Maybe a giant internet tech company won’t abuse you like it abuses people who don’t know much about computers, but big chemical industry may abuse you and kill you early through environmental pollution.
We must recognise that there are many people vulnerable to different kinds of abuse through destructive business practices in pursuit of growth (“rot capitalism”). And if we don’t have a culture of protecting the most vulnerable, someone won’t protect you in areas of your vulnerability.
The problem here is that when Joe Sixpack buys a Windows PC and starts it up, there is no "Google ball" on the taskbar: there's an icon for Edge, Microsoft's own browser that's included in Windows. Chrome is nowhere to be found. Joe only sees Chrome when he goes to a Google site like YouTube and gets prompted to install it, and goes through the steps of doing so. Joe could just as easily install Firefox, but he doesn't, perhaps because no huge website like YouTube is encouraging him to.
But then Microsoft isn't in the advertising business.
How can we the expect Joe to "do the right thing" when his tech-friend uses Chrome too?
"but that one website I need to use once a month doesn't work in Firefox" - fine, from a techie it seems too much to ask to just use a different browser once a month.
With a twin process that attaches to search and background cross references your every action with the web "just in case" it comes up later.
As another commenter mentioned, too, Edge is Chromium-derived. The manifest v2 will soon (2025) be deprecated in Chromium, which is not that different from the Chrome deprecation. In Chrome, v2 is still technically supported until further notice, even in the newest Canary builds. It's just that plugins using v2 will require manual installation. All in all, it looks to me like 2025 is when v2 will be properly dropped on Chrome and Chromium.
I see the desktop usage percentages are 65% chrome, 6.5% firefox so I guess others do too. I think it's mostly a lack of hassle thing. Chrome usually just works and lets you read your website without moving the interface around or crashing etc.
What a dystopia.
This Google breakup is only going to destroy Mozilla entirely. Brave will survive as long as it can piggyback on Chrome development, and by getting bribed/paid by advertisers to have their ads shown instead of blocked. Ladybird can survive because it's all-volunteer, but it's not even close to being a viable browser for regular use, and with the limited development resources it has, it's questionable it will ever be really usable for general users.
The real winners of this "antitrust" action will be Microsoft (who can then dedicate more resources to Edge and make that the new IE6.0) and Apple. There will only be two browsers you can use in the future: Edge (Windows-only) and Safari (Mac/iOS-only). Other browsers will wither and die since you won't be able to use them for your internet banking and various other tasks. You'll just get a message like we did back in 2002, saying "this browser not supported, please install Microsoft Edge or Apple Safari to continue".
The justification seems easy - "fund us so your citizens don't need to depend on foreign ad companies and US-based tracking to access local and national services."
Make sure any parts which are dependent on Mozilla infrastructure can be re-hosted by other providers.
Have releases which are fully free software, with reproducible builds, which can be audited to ensure privacy protections.
And commit to legal agreements to preserve those protections.
The countries in turn can require that services in those countries must support Firefox, or perhaps specifically ESR versions of Firefox.
I know Schleswig-Holstein is moving to LibreOffice and believe some of that includes funding.
That I don't know of more is besides the point, which is have they tried?
They haven't lost their funding from Google yet, and the case ruling was only what? a week ago? Did you expect them to see into the future and predict this turn of events or something? I imagine they're very busy talking about this stuff right now, but 6 months ago they probably weren't too worried about suddenly losing their Google funding because of government action.
The countries can also trade that support for features that might not be in the best interest of its users, such as introducing closed blobs to the code, "benign" trackers that allow government oversight of surfing, breakage when using VPNs, etc.
People could fork those browsers if the code is still open, but look at how many people use Floorp, or Vivaldi.
I feel it's akin to government support of journalism.
Firefox can be bound to enough different sovereign funds which explicit reject it, so they can't be controlled that way.
By "fully free software" I deliberately meant to exclude closed blobs.
I also deliberately did not say mandate use of that browser, only that use of that browser is acceptable.
I mean, Naenara, a Firefox fork, shows your dread is easily possible by even a third-world country. It doesn't take all of the EU to pull it off.
The US already has government support for journalism, both with special legal protections, and in some cases with direct funding, as with NPR and PBS.
I knew where you were coming from re: fully free software. My concern was more how its sovereign donors could influence that.
I didn't know about Naenara. Checking it out.
And yeah I agree about gov't support for journalism, but in the case of NPR (I work for one of their member stations), when large entities like X decide to label them "Government Sponsored" or whatever it indicates that there are some who see a conflict of interest. That could carry over to browsers.
If that's a conflict of issue, then having a paltry 40 sovereign funds would also be an issue.
It's also blowing smoke, as a single man, Murdoch, owns hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets, but the single owner of an entity which is too small to be considered a DMA gateway doesn't care about the details.
It's very unlikely that any break-up would result in Chrome floating off on its own.
Don't recall who or where but it always stuck with me.
But Google isn't alone. The pressure to show the 25% YoY growth means you need to do worse things than your competitors or die. If you don't poison the river, your neighbor will and you'll starve to death next year. It's the Saw movie, but for corporations.
The pressure to grow the stock price never stops, and next year Google will have to invent something else, something even more morally depraved.
ChromeOS is already (albeit a different) thing
No need to block when you are not the product
full disclosure: I am wearing my free kagi t-shirt right now
Something is very wrong here
I switched to Firefox a few years ago, when Chrome would only play Youtube with 480p resolution. Too bad, the Youtube/tv interface was slick.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1cjbsmj/youtube_on...
- Change your default search engines.
- Uncheck the Firefox ads and remove commercial stuff.
- We all convince Mozilla to refrain from enshittifying Firefox or abandoning it, somehow, because ads are the main reason people hate browsing the internet, so if Firefox becomes a safe haven, Google will stop giving it money to stay alive.
I think they were just waiting for the inevitable. Instead of cutting off the competition and risking an antitrust lawsuit due to their browser monopoly, they simply waited for an antitrust case on their search engine monopoly to force their hand.
The courts have failed to realize the obvious consequences of this.
Aren't "we" trying to do it for a long time already?
Firefox isn't all flowers and sunshine either, but at least it's not Chrome, where I can't run an ad blocker anymore.
Absolutely unacceptable Alphabet
To me the developer should update the current v2 version with the new approved v3 version. Yes, is worse but at the end of the day is better for those 40M of users [1]. I'm speculating but I think he don't want to show defeat, maybe some ego is involved there.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
In the end there are alternatives, like using Firefox. Saying the developer ‘should’ do something when you admit that something is worse than what he has going now is super weird.
Personally I think if Google wants to kill their browser engine for everybody who hates ads, we ‘should’ welcome it, because it will hopefully cause Chromium’s browser dominance to fade at least somewhat, and Google’s monopolising position in terms of browser market share is what enabled Google to make this Manifest 3 decision in the first place.
Not surprisingly, uBlock Origin relies heavily on features in V2 to perform it's functionality. It could probably be rewritten to use V3 but it's not a simple "Hey ChatGPT, make all this code into V3 compliant code." It will require a pretty fundamental rewrite.
Google made common sense improvements to the way extension work for safety and performance. Were they sad that uBlock Origin stopped working? Probably not. But I highly doubt it factored into the need for the V3 changes.
Focusing on the tech is a red herring.
If only there was some middleground between "no remote code execution" and "breaking the entire paradigm of adblockers".
The statement that they could be "rewritten" to anywhere near the same effectiveness is straight up disinformation. There are years and years of coverage of this issue that contradict you. The debate has nothing to do with the level of effort for rewrites. This is a hostile decision by a company with a directly adversarial relationship to adblockers.
There are explicit limitations of V3 that make it not able to be as effective even if rewritten to be compliant. uBlock Origin Lite exists; it can't do everything uBlock Origin can.
There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then services won't host the content, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy the services they use in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make their own service work or investigate the long list of alternative platforms.
This is an ad network using another unrelated product (chrome) to enforce its market dominance.
Currently at least 50% of online ads are outright illegal in most parts of the world.
Nobody is morally required to have their legal rights violated to get information. Period.
source?
I'm not seeing the "unwritten social contract" when I look up something on Wikipedia, or download an old textbook or manual or something off Archive.Org. I don't remember seeing advertising on either of those services.
On the other hand, the act of visiting someone's website with advertising they do get some remuneration automatically. And it inspires them to put more advertising on, and more intrusively.
That's going to be annoying.
No, it wasn't: it was on what I would call "the ignorance system". The vast majority of users were simply too lazy or ignorant to install ad-blockers. Ads made money because most users had no idea they could be blocked, or because the users just didn't care. Hang around non-technical people and talk to them about this and you'll see: many users just don't see what the big deal is, while others will admit to finding the ads annoying but don't even know it's possible to block them easily.
However, this is slowly changing, as 1) word spreads about ad-blockers, which isn't just word-of-mouth, but all these news articles lately probably help too, and 2) the ads get more and more annoying and intrusive. Remember how everyone wanted pop-up blockers 20 years ago when those became so popular with advertisers? It took a while there too, for word to get out about the ability to block pop-ups, but eventually it became the norm and was even built into browsers because the pop-ups were SO annoying and even destructive.
>But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service
Yes, they should, if they want to. Contracts require two parties to agree to something, and there is no such thing here. You can't just come up with a business model (e.g. pop-up ad supported website) and then claim there's a "social contract" in place when you just implemented this unilaterally.
The REAL social contract that's in place is the HTTP system the entire WWW is built on, where you send a request to a web server and it sends a response. What you do with the data you receive is up to you. It's absolutely no different than watching a TV show (in pre-DVR days) and then muting the volume or leaving the room when the commercials come on. Or better yet, in 2002 buying a DVR and just skipping the commercials.
You do have a point that a lot of services are funded by ads, and depend on enough people seeing these to sustain operations financially. But that's a business model chosen by these companies; they're free to choose a different business model if too many people start blocking ads. If people block ads, it's their own fault anyway, for making the ads too annoying. Back in the days of banner ads, almost no one cared about blocking them, because they just weren't that bad, just like no one really cared much about all the ads in newspapers. But that wasn't good enough for the advertisers. They brought ad-blocking on themselves by their own actions.
And against the mute button?
And against the VCR?
And against DVRs?
When I buy the newspaper I don't read every ad in the paper. I might even skip an entire section of the paper. If you have the money you could even pay someone to clip out the articles and get no advertising at all.
History therefore 1) provides strong evidence that the unwritten social contract you are thinking has a clause that people are free to do what they can to avoid advertisements, and 2) shows that pro-advertising people will try to guilt trip them over exercising that clause.
Just like you are doing.
Nope nope nope.
The only “unwritten contract” (aka “my rights”) is that if you display something publicly (on the web or otherwise), I can choose whether to look at it or not.
If you put an informational poster on the street next to a billboard, I’m free to:
- ignore the billboard
- take a photo including only the poster and look at it later
- get someone else to take a photo of just the poster and send it to me
- get someone else to look at the poster and summarise it for me
- etc.
When you put something in the public sphere you give up control of it. If that deal doesn’t work for you, find a new business model.
In fact, as a society, we ought to protect ourselves better and ban most or all forms of passive/unsolicited advertising. So not only is there no “unwritten social contract” that requires us to accept ads everywhere, there’s a moral and ethical imperative to fight to reject ads.
The site is owned and operated by someone, and there are costs associated with its operation. It’s not the same as a billboard on the roadside, since you have to actively go to the site to read its content.
A more apt analogy is to a store, where you can freely walk into the store and browse whatever you want. Some stores might require a membership (Costco/NYTimes) and others might let anyone in, with distributors paying the store for prime real estate of their product (Walmart/CNN).
In either case, these stores may use Bluetooth/WiFi technology to closely monitor you when you go to their stores, and they may set requirements against masks to anonymize your activity in their stores.
I’m not anti-adblocker by any means, but we have no choice but to accept preventions imposed by site operators, and if we accept terms of service that include not utilizing adblockers while browsing their sites, we may be subject to whatever legal impositions they apply.
good will has been eradicated.