Hacker News Reader

Comment by phito | Hacker News Reader

I hear so many people IRL complaining about this. I tell them to switch to firefox, that the adblockers still work there, and they still won't switch to it because they are "used to chrome". I really feel like google won this battle. People will through a lot of abuse just to maintain their habits.

View on HN

Wanted to note that uBlock works on Firefox mobile browser too - it is excellent.

Only the Android version has uBlock just fyi. Also, I've never been able to watch movies on a plane with Firefox mobile.

AbBlockers work on iOS too. Safari/WebKit has no plans to deprecate Manifest V2

I don't doubt you are incorrect, but that's a response for a different conversation altogether.

You said "only the Android version"

iOS users are able to download browser extensions as well. They just have to be for WebKit. Which there are plenty of.

The iOS version of Firefox uses WebKit under the hood (for now at least)

There is also Firefox Focus. Been using it on iOS since it came out a few years ago.

It integrates as an ad blocker for Safari, so I don't actually use Firefox itself (since as you mentioned, all browsers on iOS are just a wrapper to Safari anyways).

I just browse using Safari and ads are blocked by Firefox Focus. Pretty neat.

I would say that IOS AdBlocking is significantly less effective than that which you’d expect from a Desktop adblocker (and presumably android, so I’ve heard— can only speak for iOS though). My little brother likes to watch Anime on his iPad through some bootleg Crunchyroll equivalent (the kind of website that uses a .to domain, you know?), and I’ve tried my absolute damndest to defeat the hyper-intrusive ads and scripts served by that site so he can watch his Naruto or whatever without having his poor innocent eyes bombarded with salient requests from hot singles in our area.

No luck, and not for lack of trying. I’m not entirely certain what feature is missing in WebKit that results in the hamstringed adblocking capacity, but it’s definitely much worse than you’d hope for. You can get adblocking extensions on iOS that will block ads on most websites, but when it comes to the truly shady ads that do not even try to masquerade as being legitimate, iOS falls short. It’s likely something I could handle on the DNS layer if I wanted to dedicate a day or two towards, but I’ve similarly travelled down that rabbit hole to no avail as well.

The adblockers still work on Chrome though.

Pretty sure people are figuring out to switch to uBlock Origin Lite and ads -- including on YouTube -- are still being blocked just fine.

For now. Advertisers now know ways to bypass all blockers for Chrome.

They "work", but not well.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Until those things don't work any longer. Slowly the frog is boiled here.

They will continue to "work". Both v2 and v3 allows extensions to block elements from the DOM. However, only in v2 can they modify actual network calls. With v3, those network calls will still be made. Which means you are no longer protected from tracking and your web browsing experience is once again being slowed down by the loading of ads even if you don't see those ads

As I replied to your other comments, this is false. v3 block the network calls. They are not made. You are protected from tracking and nothing is slowed.

They can still block elements from appearing on your browser but in the background the network calls are still being made. That means you are no longer being protected from tracking and your internet is once again being slowed down by the loading of ads

That's not true. The requests themselves are blocked:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...

Lol yeah with a max number of rules being 50

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

But declarativeNetRequest is the alternative to the webRequest API which Chrome is removing. Using declarativeNetRequest means you have to rely on static rules instead of the dynamic logic that the webRequest API allowed. This is extremely trivial to bypass. So much so that it's basically nothing at all. Especially when you take into account the max ruleset sizes

Also in Chrome (and Chrome only) any images or iframes blocked are simply collapsed

330k, not 50 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

I try to assume good intentions, but at this point you seem to be simply trying to spread misinformation, and I don't know why.

The maximum number of rule sets is 50, not rules, as your own link clearly and unambiguously states.

The actual minimum (not maximum) number of supported rules is 30,000:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

In reality, Chrome supports over 10x that. And UBOL doesn't even use/need the minimum, sticking to around 17,000.

Thanks for the correction. you're correct it's 50 rulesets. Originally the limit was 5,000 rules but it seems the Chrome team backed away from that

Regardless it doesn't change the fact that these are static rules. It's trivial for anti-adblockers to dynamically get a url that is not in a ruleset. Without the dynamic logic that is allowed by the webRequest API we are completely dependent on static rulesets that need to be updated by updating the entire extension itself

The size of the rulesets is a distraction from the fact that adblockers can no longer run dynamic logic to filter web requests and block tracking

Right, google knows not to turn up the temp too fast, else the frog might jump out!

People didn't switch from IE to Chrome because it was better.

They switched because it was MUCH, MUCH better.

(And was part of the ecosystem, profiles, bookmarks, passwords, etc.)

---

For better or worse, no such disparity exists currently.

Well said. It also wasn't worse in any way. It was strictly better.

Firefox is definitely better than Chrome in some ways, but it is also worse in others. Notably performance and integration with Google's password manager.

They switched because Google bundled invisible Chrome installers in other software that would not only make its browser the default, but also invisibly steal IE clicks.

A move that was widely celebrated at the time.

Source?

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/w9fd1g/new_compute...

Must say it's really hard to find who might have paid for a bundled installer. Filezilla I remember had a lot of those and some forum threads will mention a specific "offer" they got, but there's no listing anywhere, and it's not in the source code history because they were (so I just read) dynamically fetched from advertisement servers upon launching the installer. Searching the web for Google Chrome bundling (phrased a few different ways), you get mostly present-day results about how to install Chrome or how to bundle it as sysadmin in a Windows group policy or something. This is the one thread I found where it sounds like computer manufacturers bundled it, but if there's many more then I'm not sure I'd have found it

GP said:

> Google bundled invisible Chrome installers in other software that would not only make its browser the default, but also invisibly steal IE clicks.

An anecdote from someone who "bought a second hand laptop off ebay" and found Chrome preinstalled isn't relevant.

They did a fresh Windows install though, that wouldn't normally keep any software they previously had on there, but yes it's the best reference I could find. Feel free to find a better source yourself, I've tried

Must say I read over the bit about invisibly stealing IE clicks. That's obviously nonsense, Chrome was never malware

I remember it being IE -> Firefox -> Chrome.

From where I was sitting, Firefox grew from word of mouth. Friends old friends, or simply installed it for them and said “trust me”. And people were shamed for using IE.

Over time Firefox started to feel more bloated, and Chrome was new, lean, and fast.

Chrome then went through its own bloat phase, and now this.

Browser monopolies have toppled before, through various means. I see no reason why it can’t happen again. Currently Apple is pretty much single handedly keeping Google from having total control, by only allowing WebKit on iOS.

I have a feeling people would be more likely to switch to a new player than to run back to an old one they left once before.

Posting this from firefox: most enterprise tools are only tested under Chrome, and many will break with no recourse when used on firefox.

And it's worse with extensions. For instance right now the OneLogin extension is dead on firefox, and while it's a crappy service, it's cheap and enterprise friendly...so employees in the contracting companies will only be able to log to corporate resources through Chrome.

It's not as hellish as the IE6 situation was, but boy we're pretty quickly approaching it.

In the end sighing and going "stupid Google" is a lot easier than changing even the smallest of habits.

People also seem to think switching over is some kind of involved process for some reason.

What's in Chrome that they are so used to? I use Vivaldi, Chrome, Firefox on every day basis, and can barely see a difference.

Bookmarks, history, generally historical reliability, and (biggest reason for me) password manager.

I rarely have to type/remember passwords anymore on Android or web and it "just works". I know there are password managers out there that ostensibly handle the password-saving thing and are browser-agnostic but when I tried it in the past I had issues on some sites and, when it did work, it felt clunkier.

People say similar things about Google Search, and a few times I've tried not use Google Search but every time I've tried it's become clear that the reason I use Google Search isn't just habit, but that it's the best search engine for most queries I perform.

I've had a very different experience with browsers though... I switch browsers pretty often and with ease. I genuinely can't get my head around why someone would continue to use Google Chrome if they're unhappy with how they're treating their users. The UI between browsers is 99% identical. The most annoying thing about switching browser is just having to spend 10 minutes setting things up, but that isn't going to exceed the annoyance of having to see ads constantly for months or years.

There's really no good reason not to switch browsers. Your habits are not going to change between browsers. Unless you're a Chrome power user and using some very niche features in Chrome there is very, very little difference between Firefox and Chrome for the vast majority of tasks.

Well, today mostly yes. But at the same time, I've been an Opera user (if not fanboy) for a good decade, until they ditched their own engine and basically started from scratch with chrome as a base. It lost 99% of its features overnight.

I really struggled to switch to anything else. Firefox was definitely the most customizable, but finding extensions to replicate every feature of Opera, and properly at that, was a never-ending nightmare.

Only at that point did I realize how vital a browser has become for everyday tasks, and as a power user, how much you get accustomed to it. Maybe not if you're just running stock Chrome or Firefox with two extensions, but Opera was so feature-rich that I didn't ever install a single extension but needed about a dozen on Firefox to try and mimic it. In the end I just stayed on Opera 12 until it wasn't even funny anymore. It must've been about two years. Eventually so many sites broke that I just switched to Firefox and only installed uBO and greasemonkey. It hurt but over time I just gradually forgot what using opera was like. Sometimes I think back and really miss it. Some of it is just nostalgia by now, but the struggle switching was real.

i keep seeing some people pretend Vivaldi is the new opera, made from the same developer.

did you give a try, is it even remotely comparable ?

I don't remember when I tried it for the first time, but I did like it much better than the new opera. At least they were adding new features much faster. It was still different enough and lacking (to me) important features from the old opera. I still have it installed today as the fallback for the exceedingly rare case that some site doesn't work in Firefox and I really need to access it. But I have to admit that I didn't really bother to evaluate it properly in a long time. An ex colleague doing webdev just recently told me it's his primary browser as it has some nice things to make his life easier that were just more cumbersome to set up in chrome. I just gave up and accepted that at least by using Firefox I'm fighting the engine-monopoly of chrome/blink. ;)

Debugging on Firefox has always been awkward with sourcemaps. The sourcemaps load late, so breakpointing is hard at load time.

While JS debugging seems to be a bit slower, I find their HTML/CSS debugging tools far superior to Chrome's. Neither browser engine is great for the whole package, but overall I really prefer Firefox when it comes to dev tools.

The Stockholm Syndrome.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

It's not so much 'Chrome won' as 'Firefox lost'

I still have no idea why Firefox/Mozilla think they need to compete with the other browsers. None of their '10 Principals' is "win the browser wars"

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

I tried to switch to Firefox - but it lacks one feature that's particularly important to me: the ability to use a site as if it was its own app (so, not inside a tab, but with its own window and own icon in the dock).

I went back to Chrome, re-enabled uBlock for now, and will probably switch to the lite mode when it is completely removed.

Not only google seems to won this battle but ad industry as a whole. Youngest generation is nowadays so much conditioned to advertising disguised as content or being the content they won't oppose it.

I've been telling my IRL non-technical friends to use Brave. By far the easiest migration path, literally is Chrome, but with with a good built-in ad blocker and uBlock Origin. I've long since understood that any browser that I would use should be treated as an anti-recommendation for normal folks. I can already see the "but the crypto thing" and yeah, I don't love it but it's so out of the way that I don't even know how to turn it on in Brave if I wanted. Getting people weened off of Google Chrome (tm) is better than trying, and failing, to get them on the "ideal" browser.

Edit: Instead of downvoting actually try convincing a normal person to switch to Firefox and see how well it goes. I've been recommending it for 10+ years and they're all still on Chrome. But in two days I have 4 new Brave users.

If one of my friends kept pitching cryptoscam shit to me I’d stop talking to them in short order. I suspect your IRL non-technical friends feel similarly.

At this point the backlash to crypto is more ridiculous than the actual crypto scams.

It's used to steer people away from Brave because it's the lowest hanging fruit. Individuals can hide their true political motivations for trashing the browser.

Literally the first thing anyone who recommends Brave says is to avoid the stupid crypto thing, myself included. Look Firefox doesn't exactly come up smelling like a rose here, when you recommend Firefox you have to tell them to turn off the ads in the new tab page, ads in the URL bar (https://imgur.com/a/EXtzhg4), and Pocket, in Brave the crypto thing is opt-in.

You have to take the CEO's philosophy into account when choosing technology tools unfortunately.

I personally dmd Eich on Twitter during 2019-2021 ish. He's opposed to censorship, tracking, government lockdowns during COVID, and authoritarianism.

That is exactly who you want running your browser and search company if you wish to use an open Internet. It's anti chat control, anti governments choosing which apps it's citizens can install, it's free speech for all, including "hate speech". Open and free wild West Internet culture.

> He's opposed to […] government lockdowns during COVID

> That is exactly who you want running your browser and search company

Yes. “Does the CEO have strong opinions on public health? Are those opinions based more on public health fundamentals or is it vibes?” is the first line of inquiry I pursue when I am looking to download a program on the computer

No. You don't want someone who believes in vaccine passports and lockdowns running your browser if you truly value an open and free internet with roadblocks to tracking, fingerprinting etc.

No CEO or developer is going to respect to software/hardware users if they believe that user should also use health verification software to go about public spaces. These are incompatible philosophies.

Exactly. When you want to use a program on the computer you want to make sure that the CEO of the company that makes it is very vocal about things completely unrelated to the computer. Like would you take your car to a mechanic who doesn’t post about the keto diet? Absolutely not. Would you buy a quiche from a man that does not have a dedicated page to perineum sunning? No one would, it would be insane to even consider such a purchase. Such a baker would be ostracized abd run out of business overnight

Because a keto diet wouldn't have anything to do with using an open internet. My examples, think free speech, absolutely do.

The connection between car maintenance and diet is exactly the same as the connection between the inclusion of ublock origin support in a chromium fork and public health policy during a pandemic — they are both fully and completely disconnected with no overlap whatsoever in any meaningful way _but_ they are things that make some folks very happy when they can point at a thing and say “This means this person is a member of my in-group of good-opinion-havers”

I think it's a good sign when someone making a browser is so uncompromising on the principle of individual autonomy and lack of central control that they're still up there dying on that hill even when they're wrong.

It gives me confidence that there will never be a situation where some issue is of such grave importance that they feel like they must leverage their position and compromise on it, for the safety of children of course. Because we know what's best for you. Bleh. It reminds me of the libertarians who oppose seat belt laws. Like you're wrong and so you shouldn't be in a leadership position of the DoT but you believe so strongly that institutions shouldn't get a say in your life that I think you would do great if I tasked you with health insurance reform.

I like that forums user hnpolicestate saw Brave mentioned and found opportunity to start talking about vaccine passports and within three posts we have gotten to how libertarians should be in charge of health care.

This is the vital, vibrant discourse necessary when selecting a web browser

> But in two days I have 4 new Brave users.

What happens when adtech decides this is a problem because the hoi polloi have arrived? Have you thought about that as you're cluing in normies?

My only motivation is to help my friends who got the "uBlock Origin is no longer supported" notification get their ad blocking back in a way that sticks. To me that's the most important thing. Any what ifs about the future can be addressed then.

The browser that is a literal drop-in replacement is the best way to do this. I think it's cool that other browsers are trying new things but now isn't the time. People have to be be in a place where they want something different in order to accept change. All of them got the notification while trying to something else and "install Brave, import, move Brave to where the Chrome icon used to be, and continue with what you were doing" is alarmingly effective.

Running uBO and Shields at the same time isn't a good idea, generally speaking. Pick one and go with it.

It's learned helplessness, laziness, bordering on cowardice.

I use Firefox as my main browser and it's not a viable alternative to Chrome if you have the very common usage pattern of keeping tens of tabs open.

What? Why? That's me, I use FF.

You can't see all 50-70 tabs on a normal 27" monitor; Chrome will squish them almost indefinitely, and Firefox forces a large minimum tab width that makes the tab bar scroll forever and then you forget half the tabs you have going and everything's bad. I tried to switch and stopped because of this. I'll hang on until ubo really stops working, I guess, and then try to figure something else out.

There's a alternative: the dropdown menu with all tabs.

This doesn't fix the "you can't see all your tabs by just moving your eyes" problem, does it?

I use Firefox as my main browser and having "tens of tabs open" is something I do and there's zero issues with that.

I regularly have 200+ tabs open in FF, no idea what the parent is talking about.

Right now I'm at 181 and it's still buttery smooth.

Goodness just install a tab session manager.

How big is your monitor? I can only see about 10-15 tabs on my 4k monitor before Firefox starts scrolling them off the screen. I regularly have 2-3x that on Chrome before tabs stop showing up.

I have 54 tabs open right now. The Sideberry extension lets you view them in the left sidebar. They're nested so that collapsing a root tab will also collapse all child tabs. There are also super tabs (Sideberry calls them "Tabs panels") so you can switch between entire groups of tabs.

I constantly have way more than that open. On mobile it's also over 100 tabs.

I have no problem with hundreds of tabs on Firefox.

There is a "tab count" extension. Install it only if you want to learn some awful truths about yourself.

You don't need an extension. Right-click on a tab and "Select All Tabs". Right-click again and it has the option "Close 1,122 Tabs". Your number may be smaller.

That only works if you've got a single window open. For myself, I keep ~10+ windows open, with then ~8 tabs per window. Note this is only practical on a tiling window manager. Anyway, the tab count extension may still be the way to go.

Firefox works great with dozens of open tabs. The only thing Chrome has going for it is tab groups. Firefox has Tab Style Tree, which is a decent substitute.

Tab groups landed in Firefox Nightly 3 months ago,[1] I‘d expect them pretty soon in the release version.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1938187

Oh, amazing! Thanks for sharing

I was using Firefox exclusively for years, but when I sold my Macbook and bought a Thinkpad and installed Linux on it, I grew pretty annoyed by Firefox.

Specifically, I couldn't view my 360 videos or photos on Google Images or Immich at anywhere near acceptable performance. The videos, recorded at 30fps, would get maybe 5fps. This was weird, because I have a fairly beefy laptop, it should be able to handle these videos just fine (especially since my iPhone handled it just fine).

After a bit of debugging, it appears that there's a bug in how it's writing for the shader cache, and as such there was no hardware acceleration. I found a bug filed about my issue [1], and I didn't really feel like trying to fix it, because I didn't want to mess with Mesa drivers. I just installed Chromium and that's what I'm using right now, and it worked with my 360 videos and photos absolutely fine.

I want Firefox to succeed, but that really left a bad taste in my mouth; it's not like it's weird to want my browser to be hardware accelerated.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1921742 Looks like it might be fixed now, or at least they figured out it was an issue with Mesa

Surely this is hyperbole? I usually have hundreds of tabs open on firefox.

751 tabs open right now and growing.

Firefox copes fine. Me? Not so much (:

751 tabs open is just ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

Use some kind of tab session manager addon, and start organizing things - no need to have them all open concurrently.

I use the Tab Groups Addon on Chrome.

757 now.

I used to bookmark everything into Diigo. Then their Firefox extension stopped working... and I haven't got a cross-platform, cross-browser process up and running again.

Is there a tab session manager that does that, and lets me send tabs from my current session to another session? E.g. I'm on my "Writing C for a hobby" session and quickly search for something cooking related, and then need to send that to my cooking session?

757 is too many though. If nothing else, if you couldn't find an extension that works, you could just use different browser profiles, or save the links in text files. It's just so ridiculous to have that many open when, without any doubt, you don't need them open all at once.

I use tab session manager on firefox. It doesn't easily let me shift around tabs inside a session, if I want to combine sessions I have to open both and save as a new session. It does allow duplicating and trimming tabs from a session though.

If you need better session management capability, you could probably get an LLM to extend/fork an existing extension to add what you need with about 30 minutes work.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/

Searchable. Works with sync. Stores the tabs as bookmarks.

EDIT: and recommended so it gets vetted by Mozilla.

1,740 tabs open right now on my wife's Firefox and it seems to be operating just fine. Sounds like something's wrong with your Firefox. I recommend a refresh which can be found under about:support

what the hell is she doing with 1740 tabs ? :)

10, 20, even 30 i can understand. More is the equivalent of forgetting to empty the kitchen trash can and still filling it until the smell is horrible.

someone got to tell her there is a cross on the right to close the tab.

I keep 100s of tabs open for months in Firefox. Chromium regulaly crashes after about 10-20.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com