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Comment by perlgeek | Hacker News Reader

They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.

Indeed, manifest v2 support alone is a killer feature that will keep me on FF as long as they support it.

It definitely helps that it's also a great (though imperfect) browser.

The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.

Fines aren't a way to just buy your way out of obeying the law. At some point if they persist in monopolistic activities then they will get broken up.

I don't think the FTC prioritizes that right now

I don't think they've prioritized that ever in recent memory, or they would have already been broken up a long time ago.

The last time that happened was almost half a century ago afaik. I highly doubt Big Tech entities will get broken up in our lifetime

There's penalties other than fines for abusive monopolies.

Fines are only the slightest punishment.

I can't remember the last time a monopoly got punished properly

Yes, although they can't go all in on that because it doesn't help monetization...

Have you tried Brave?

Brave is adware.

Technically, both Chrome and Firefox are adware too, since Google's main business is ads, and Firefox/Mozilla get a lot of money from Google to display Google as a search engine in Firefox (an ad :) )

Firefox doesn't sell BATs, in-browser notification ads, or new tab takeovers. The closest you can get is a pinned site in the new tab page (new installs only) and ads in Pocket, or whatever they're calling that new tab thing these days.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/solutions/

https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/

Calling Firefox adware is a stretch at best, and disingenuous at worst. Adware doesn't mean that the software survives because of one advertisement that that user can turn off.

Only if you opt-in to that misfeature, last I checked. It's opt-in, not opt-out.

I don't know, Brave says it's every third new tab. https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/

Looks like I'm getting a ProtonMail ad every few new tabs. I never noticed because I've never looked at the new tab page. Doesn't noticeably slow it down to have the ad there, luckily.

So, to reiterate: Brave is adware.

The new tab ads can be disabled with 2 clicks.

I love how quickly the goalpost moves from "No ads" to "Only opt in ads" to "Ads can be disabled with two clicks."

Quit coping and just admit it, Brave is adware. If you like it, that's cool, totally your choice. It's fast, performant adware. But it's adware all the same.

Firefox has ads in the same places.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy

whataboutism gets you nowhere. Brave is still adware.

As is Firefox, and Chrome.

So really, there's no point in singling it out.

It's strange you're so adamant to label Brave adware while dismissing concerns that Firefox engages in very similar "adware" practices.

It might be adware but I’ve actually never noticed the ads!

Also it’s the only browser on my phone that I can use to browse the web without ads…

When we're talking about reasons to switch browsers, then saying they both have the same behavior is not whataboutism. It's extremely important context to the complaint.

Been running it since 2021. The adblocker is simply great. A d keeps getting better.

and*

It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real alternatives anymore.

Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum

What’s the current licensing mode? Can they fork their own version at that point in time and develop it open source ?

No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the resources to maintain a web browser engine.

But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat. Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers. Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But they kept something like it in Android. And they will try again.

Chromium uses the BSD license. Google could take Chromium closed source tomorrow without needing to change the license.

A few years ago. Crashed constantly and didn’t support tagging bookmarks.

Never crashed once for me.

I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently (as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin

Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh

I've found it a bit like "what car did you drive in to work with today" in that any typical current and working car is not going to be a stark difference to a high end car in terms of how fast you get there... but you'd definitely notice a piece of crap with a donut, broken heating, and screeching brakes causing you problems if that's what you were comparing instead.

I.e. I can count the number of times I said "wow, uBO Lite didn't make this site usable but loading up Firefox with uBO and it worked fine" on one hand. At the same time, if I ever look and compare how much is actually getting blocked, uBO is definitely blocking way more. Doing a side by side compare of dozens of sites it becomes easier to see minor differences I wouldn't otherwise have noted, but may not have mattered as much.

I commented about this a few weeks ago here about this, but essentially: v2 allows you to block things you can't see, but you still probably don't want, like folks hiding cloud analytics behind CNAME cloaking to allow it to appear as a first-party site rather than Google Analytics, for example.

You won't "feel" this in your day-to-day browsing, but if you're concerned about your data being collected, v2 matters.

Does it not still suck at blocking YouTube video ads? As in, you get a delay before videos start playing.

That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it only happens very rarely.

I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.

I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first introduced it.

I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And reloading the same video multiple times show consistent behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.

I don't even have this issue with uBlock Origin Lite on mobile Safari. I'm fully browser-based on mobile for YouTube these days. No ads, no delay.

There are a lot more Manifest V2 only extensions than only Adblockers.

How's that work for you on Android? Firefox on Android with uBlock is the huge win.

I have a device wide adblocker

Doesn't work for Prime Video ads. Tbh I don't mind that too much.

chromium-ungoogled works perfectly fine with "extensions that can do real ad blocking" ;)

Ungoogled Chromium is maintaining Manifest V2 support in the fork?

AFAIK Manifest v2 is still part of the chromium codebase, and there is an intention to continue supporting it, depending on how difficult that turns out to be.

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