uBlock Origin Has Been Disabled | Hacker News Reader

uBlock Origin Has Been Disabled

ublockorigin.com

31 pointsaryan1440 comments

The link goes to the normal uBlock Origin landing page, which contains no suggestion that anything has been disabled... It contains, among other things, some details about how some functionality is reduced in some browsers due to Manifest V3, is that what the title is getting at? Regardless, "uBlock Origin has been disabled" seems like a falsehood, unless there's something I'm missing?

A couple weeks ago, chrome updated, and forcefully disabled any extensions that didn't conform to the new standards, and displayed a popup to the user that they had incompatible extensions that were disabled.

Would've been nice of either the title or the linked content to mention any of that

Not the page title, works fine in some browsers.

Chrome Canary just killed uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2 extensions (119 points, 4 months ago, 62 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757178

About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (182 points, 6 months ago, 45 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41140185

In June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin will be disabled in Chrome 127 (143 points, 1 year ago, 52 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361758

Why do people still use Chrome? At this point every argument for switching to Chrome from IE back in the day now applies to Google Chrome.

Because 1) Google pushes it hard with their extremely popular web services, and 2) it feels more snappy than Firefox.

I mean I use Firefox, but any time I have to open Chrome for whatever reason, it just feels like the UI is responding a handful of milliseconds faster than Firefox, even on very powerful hardware.

Peer pressure

I was recently at a local IT meetup, a majority of us were senior developers. And a topic took turn to browsers and Chrome at some point, so of course I've had to voice my two cents about Chrome monopoly and Firefox :) . A few guys were genuinely surprised and asked me "You are using Firefox?" as if it was something unthinkable. To me this was incomprehensible. I'm using FF on Windows since beta and FF on Android since its release and I'm baffled why doesn't anyone else (well, advertising is the answer of course).

I use it. It works well. The new lens thing is cool. You really have to spend a while scouring tech forums to find out how you are a sinner for using it.

Yes, it obviously works well. I use it occasionally too. The question is why, culturally, there hasn’t been the same push towards something else when all the reasons we migrated off IE now apply to Chrome. Maybe Google permanently won the “browser placement on the internet’s homepage” game?

I'm saying all of this as a FF diehard since before it was named FF... right up until today. I'll use FF until they pry it from my fingers.

Back in the IE6 vs. FF days... IE was inferior in every way. IE was crashy, had no tabs, pathetic/hostile developer tools, insecure, poor support for open web standards, etc.

But today?

The difference is that Chrome is really good, with great developer tools. It's a great user experience.

FF only really wins in terms of better extension API (allowing things like uBlock Origin) and the "moral superiority" of not being created by an advertising company, and serving as a bulwark against a browser engine monoculture. And among real privacy diehards, they're probably using something like PiHole which makes uBO perhaps superfluous for them.

But it doesn't out that even developers who should know better apparently DGAF about those things.

There's a huge amount of ads/annoyances/3rd party embeds/etc. you can't block just using DNS. PiHole complements uBO but isn't a replacement for it.

Yeah that's mostly my thinking, IE6 was a pain in the neck that deserved to die. (no 8 on this list https://www.pcworld.com/article/535838/worst_products_ever.h...)

Chrome is fine.

Firefox is kind of mixed. I use it sometimes. One of the things everyone recommended was tree style tabs so I got those and was kind of amazed that to make them look ok you are supposed to get some custom css in your editor and send it to some obscure folder deep in the file system. And now the appearance has changed because some update worked differently with the hacked together css? That seems kind of clunky. Though maybe I'm doing it wrong.

The containers thing is cool.

How do you feel about Google effectively controlling the web, since they control the browser with overwhelming market share?

Is that a factor, or...?

From the browser point of view I don't really worry. I do have various other browsers and such like if Google were to be annoying. Their browser share has dropped from a peak around 90% to more like 67% I think.

I am a bit wary about their dominant position in advertising, though people still google stuff and see google ads if they use other browsers.

    Their browser share has dropped from a peak around 90% to more like 67% I think.

Those browsers gaining market share are based on Google's engine, though.

That still gives Google de facto control of the web, or at the very least control of web standards.

Those companies building atop Chromium can maintain their own forks of the core rendering engine, but that is a very heavy burden indeed, and Google can always decide to move off of Chromium onto their own private fork and leave everybody else on their own.

Firefox's keyboard shortcut for new incognito tab is objectively wrong (Cmd+Shift+P vs. Cmd+Shift+N). It turns out that even if you're one of those weirdos that configures his web browser, it's impossible even for you to change it because Firefox has a separate shortcut for "Reopen Closed Tab" (Cmd+Shift+T) and "Reopen Closed Window" (Cmd+Shift+N) instead of just having one, which is even dumber. If I close the last tab of a window and press Cmd+Shift+T the right thing to do is just to do nothing? Really?

No one at Mozilla will ever have the conviction and power to fix this design misstep. I had a bunch of other reasons typed up but finding out that this will be wrong forever is actually enough for me.

I hate ads more than anyone and I'll switch if I'm forced to but Firefox is just a bad knock off of a browser forever playing catch up with the real thing. But I'm glad someone's doing it.

I have been using AdGuardHome on two raspberry pi nodes and it is the best filter I ever had.

2,320,452 DNS Queries

117,334 Blocked by Filters (5.06%).

Top blocked domains:

    eu-mobile.events.data.microsoft.com 45,3543 8.65%
    euc-word-telemetry.officeapps.live.com 7,573 6.45%
    metrics.icloud.com 6,475 5.52%
    4...13.us-east-1.prod.service.minerva.devices.a2z.com 4,351 3.71%
    euc-excel-telemetry.officeapps.live.com 4,141 3.53%

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

Then it seems unlikely you've given ublock origin a real try. Not only can you just use the adguard filter lists in ublock origin, but DNS-based adblocking is and has been increasingly insufficient. What ublock origin can do is a strict superset of what adguard can do, and will perform better as you avoid sending out network requests at all.

I use NextDNS with almost all filters enabled. It blocks about ~30% off all requests.

Yet it can’t block anything from a hostname that also serves regular content (that is, without also blocking the regular content). A good example is YouTube ads. I’m also a happy NextDNS user, but I don’t browse the internet without an adblocker extension.

The linked page doesn't say anything about this, but it's true. I just restarted Chrome and it turned off uBlock Origin. However, it was easy to ignore the warning and turn it back on.

Can you explain this? Is it just a warning message? Does uBlock Origin extension still work in chrome browser?

When I restarted Chrome, it showed me a warning that uBlock Origin was disabled because of.. something about compatibility. I then went to "manage extensions" and clicked the button to turn it back on. Chrome said something to the effect of "Are you sure? That's an incompatible extension, so maybe don't turn it on." I clicked on "Turn it on anyway" and it's been fine since then. If I restart the browser again, uBlock Origin stays on and works fine.

Thanks. That's a huge relief. The internet - well, the internet as seen through chrome - is unbearable without uBlock Origin.

I had to change a registry setting for Chrome that controlled the policy of manifest versions for extensions.

It's become common practice to implement unpopular changes in a way that can be reverted, at first.

Later, the change will be forced on all users.

For example, the Windows 11 hardware requirements were extreme enough that some of the then current computers sold by Microsoft didn't meet the spec, but there was a temporary option to bypass those requirements.

> Microsoft makes its stringent TPM 2.0 Windows 11 upgrade requirement "non-negotiable" — potentially leading to the single biggest jump in junked and unsupported Windows 10 PCs

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...

Google is following the same playbook here. At first there is a workaround. Lster,it us removed.

I generally use Firefox but uBlock Origin still works on Chrome 133.0.6943.127 for me without any warning or intervention.

I do have developer mode already toggled on which might make a difference?

Not on Firefox :)

Also, this should have (2024) in the title

I have not used chrome since... 2017?

I've been entirely fine all that time.

And things work just great in Firefox.

Good for you

Indeed... Today, Chrome simply removed uBlock Origin (and Redirector, which I use regularly in development). That's the last straw... Besides, I don't see how I can surf the web these days without uBlock Origin.

I haven't been following this multi-year saga closely because my test is simple: as soon as I see an unwanted ad in Chrome, I'm out. Haven't gotten there yet.

Working fine on FireFox. Can someone from Chrome Confirm?

Brave Browser works (Chromium)

uBlock working fine on Chrome.

There seems an implication that Chrome will stop manifest v2 and then users will have to switch to uBlock Origin Lite.

Personally I'm not going to worry till that happens.

Karma farming?

Google Chrome has been disabled.

works on Brave Browser

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