Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did
theverge.com
theverge.com
It's a great demonstration of how Chromium's open source nature is something of a technicality. Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google, you're eventually going to wind up living with Google's decisions whether you like it or not.
I'd use Brave if someone made a fork with all the BAT token stuff removed but I haven't seen one.
I go through a 5 minute ritual every time I reimage/build a PC of installing Brave and disabling all the garbage on it. It's worth it to get Chromium compatibility and speed with uBlock Origin.
But I might have a look at brave for the 1-2 sites I still use chromium for because they don't work with firefox properly (especially Microsoft 365 of course, as usual).
I would easily pay 60/yr for firefox though if Mozilla would let me. I'm not donating to the foundation, they waste too much money on stuff that doesn't matter. I don't want them to be an NGO, I just want them to make a good browser :)
However it is a nice idea, I would love a firefox mug or something. Microsoft has lobbied our company to remove firefox and chrome from all computers so we must use edge everywhere and it would be a nice passive-agressive move for me to have firefox merchandise everywhere. I work in IT so the people that decided this shit are around me.
It's not something I'd pay for though. I'd pay for firefox but not another chromium browser.
Now, on Linux there’s also a setting in regular Brave which allows you to uncover per-feature switches to disable offending elements and retain some, which is the way I use it, to avoid having to reinstall Brave. I’m guessing this isn’t available on Windows without getting a licence?
Regardless, Zen is still the better main browser, particularly on Linux... but Brave is a fine second choice IMHO.
Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.
I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.
I worked on multiple projects modifying Chromium and V8 a decade ago, and the GP matches my experience exactly. Absolute mountains of dev time just tracking the latest release and what we wanted to do wasn’t limited to one module or subsystem.
No, but maybe this highlights that it's never accurate to conflate "open source" or "free (as in speech) software" with end-users having power over the people providing resources to the project.
And then they complain about Safari.
Had it been today, and Google would have no issue pushing for PNaCL.
The only projects which have a hope of maintaining MV2 compatibility are those who are a hard fork of an earlier version of chromium or a totally different engine.
To my point: The article mentions that Opera still says they will maintain MV2 for as long as it is “technically reasonable.” Mark my works, Google will find a way to break Opera’s MV2 patches that makes it too hard to maintain.
The main thing that is affecting adblockers with this MV2/MV3 change is the ability to dynamically block requests themselves rather than have to give a pre-computed list of patterns to the browser.
We're talking about hooking into right before http requests go out and make them fail here. Let's not pretend that maintaining this capability is out of reach for any serious fork if they actually cared. Let's also not pretend it's more than a few hours per month of dev time per month to maintain it (and most months it will be 0 hours).
And before you ask: Yes, I have worked extensively with chromium's codebase when I worked for a kiosk company.
Microsoft repurposed Google's adware in Chrome into Edge telemetry/spyware to feed your browsing directly into windows telemetry to watch everything you do, they wanted that back when IE lost the war.
Google already went evil and set the precedent removing adblocking capabilities, now Microsoft can just blame them and feed everything you do into Bing for ad money as well as telemetry/spyware without you blocking it, that's effectively double-dipping all in on stupid windows users.
iCloud private relay is only available for iCloud+ users. It cannot be enabled by default, and is not, even for iCloud+ users BTW.
iCloud private relay is a novel dual-party VPN-like technology where neither party involved gets to be able to track the user, says Apple. Yes, it requires trust to believe it, but I tend to think the company the size of Apple would not go around throwing statements like these if they weren’t true, at least to the best of their knowledge, especially since privacy and trust is literally one of the core of Apple businesses… They would be lynched if it were proven that this is false.
Finally your comment was posted after the person my comment was directed to answered a perfectly reasonable answer!
Well, there it is. They are lynched.
Mozilla receives the vast majority of its funding—roughly $400 million annually from Google
Mozilla has made announcements regarding transforming Firefox into an AI-heavy browser and have started alienating longtime open-source supporters
Massive salaries paid to Mozilla Foundation executives.
Firefox is a joke because it's no longer a users browser. Rather than it just being a browser it's now a VPN, Ai and other.
I give it two years before it starts shoving advertisements.
Stop getting your news from corporate propaganda and the outrage mob.
I'm not sure how the new AI stuff works as I never enabled it, but apparently that's there, too.
Mate, It's even bundled with FreeBSD releases which is as far from corporate propaganda and outrageous mob you can get. I use FreeBSD.
With every new install of firefox requires you have to remove: sponsored content and news from tabs, Pocket. It asks you if you desire to use Mozilla Ai and many other Mozilla third party shite.
So maybe it should be you who needs to open their eyes. Reformat your OS and reinstall Firefox and then tell me it doesn't come with shite.
These buttons get a little bit more darker to where the buttons are so little they hide. Hidden in obscure locations wasting my time to get on with my day.
Somebody who has already made their money needs to fork the thing and put it into an actual public service nonprofit, rather than another creepy branch of the nonprofit-military-industrial complex. Not somebody whose CEO came from Voice of America, WeWork, Wikipedia, Northrop-Grumman, the NSA or some bank, talking about how much they need to innovate and create strategic partnerships. Instead, get somebody who wants to make and maintain a safe, minimal, light, modular browser that works exclusively for its user, and whose components can be easily be included in other projects.
Nerds used to know how to computer, is what i'm saying.
HR prefers brogrammers who can fast talk.
Microsoft's current privacy statement also says "Depending on your settings, this browsing history is sent to Microsoft"
Edge allows to sync history (as Chrome and Firefox also do). Given that functionality, what else do you want them to say in their privacy statement..?
If we lose Firefox the web is going to be a worse place to be in.
(There's a steelmanned form of their argument - that Mozilla ought to be held to a higher standard than their commercial competitors - which you might think would speak in favour of LibreWolf and the like. But those who complain most forcefully about Firefox often turn out to be Chrome / Opera / Brave users)
But if offered enough $, I fear it will join that no-bocker bandwagon.
```cmd winget install Mozilla.Firefox ``` Should always work out-of-the-box now.
irm https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/firefox_versions.json
iwr "https://download-origin.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/$v/win64-EME-free/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%20$v.exe" -OutFile Firefox.exe
start Firefox.exe
Firefox is pretty great. But IMO they have some poor ux defaults that make it unappealing to random people who simply want a browser.
With their anonym acquisition and the "privacy preserving" attribution stuff they now have an active interest in advertising.
I’ve been using UBlock Origin Lite on my iPhone for a while, and that works great, keeping itself updated from EasyList and allowing for custom rules.
In some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse. Sometimes you have to flip it into “complete mode” (and give it full access to modify the current site) to get good blocking.
I don't how this is supposed to be a demerit given that the v2 version had full access to every site you visit. Safari just made that more explicit.
> Nobody knows any other difference unless they are an extension developers or worked on making the Internet a worse place.
MV3 comes with a ton of security improvements over MV2, a side effect is the perceived weakening of ad blocking extensions but the benefits outweigh the cons.
MV2 effectively allowed a permanently open RCE pathway.
The browser itself should ideally be handling ad blocking as it’s more effective and efficient at it (Brave, Vanadium, Trivalent).
Safari has already been on an MV3-like extension system for years yet only Chromium draws ire. I mean they got flack at first but it died off and now there’s no real difference.
"The fox himself should ideally be guarding the henhouse"...
I mean, you do realise that google has a conflict of interest when it comes to blocking ads, right?
It's all theoretical. In practice, uBlock Origin Lite works amazingly on MV3. In my experience, it blocks all the ads. And I've been using it for a while now.
>Edit Comment history suggest these kind of replies is the point of the account, maybe it is true maybe its not
Also, do you understand the distinction between "in theory" and "in practice"? Because nothing you have written so far suggests that you are understanding the main point I'm making.
And if you're going to attack the quality of my comment history, perhaps consider the fact that I have over 80,000 account upvotes, virtually exclusively from comments instead of submissions. I've never once had to mention anything like that to anyone else on HN, but I've never once had anyone else try to impugn my reputation the way you are either. Perhaps you might want to review the guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
You could have found that link in 30 seconds on Google if you actually wanted to know
Thank you for the link. I am already extremely aware of that FAQ. I was asking you for a link because that FAQ does not say what you think it says. Allow me to directly quote:
> If I install uBOL, will I see a difference with uBO? Maybe. Maybe not... It's very possible that the sites you visit do not require any of the filtering capabilities specific to uBO, in which case you won't see a difference.
Now do you finally understand what I am talking about the difference between in theory and in practice?
It turns out that generally for people, they "won't see a difference" just like the creator says. From the very link you provided. Because the additional capabilities of UBO aren't required 99.99% of the time. They make no practical difference.
Are we finally done with having this conversation here?
Also the amount of configurability is extremely reduced. I personally need that because I use custom lists to reduce websites to just a list of headlines (similar to hacker news). Removing all the highlights, polls, other crap I don't need.
I mainly use Firefox anyway so I use the real ublock origin.
I don't particularly notice, but my wife was getting frustrated last night when she was looking for recipes, an ad network was blocked at the DNS level, and despite local ad-blockers, every recipe site she was visiting was redirecting her to a "please disable your ad blocker" page.
I find being advertised to so annoying there's no way in hell I will spend my limited time on this planet willingly consuming an ad.
Watching ads simply isn't something I'm willing to consider. Like if the transaction was "have someone spit in your face and in exchange you get a how-to video and they get paid based on the amount of spit you get in your mouth", I'd feel similarly about that business model.
Really how do people put up with that shit??
Having said that YouTube is so enshittified in other ways too (screaming thumbnails and titles, sponsors which need sponsorblock, random AI clickbait videos) that I rarely feel like watching it at all anyway.
I never had genAI tracks being suggested on YouTube Music. Though it might be a factor that my account predates genAI music.
I assume one requirement for getting genAI tracks is being initially fine with hearing music from random channels and also hearing music produced after 2022; if one only cares (for example) about pre-2020 very well-known music they're probably going to be safe.
Web Brower with ad-blocking setup can still have advertisements leak through. When it does and it still does after three refreshes, I just don't watch and move on.
I will always be a sunk-cost for Google.
I tend to skip those, although map men's are good, but I also tend to prefer those who don't have ads.
Excuse me. I take it you don't read any mainstream news (NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ, WSP, etc etc).
I do wonder if we haven't seen the effects of an MV3-only web yet. As in, once the vast majority of browsers lose MV2 support, will ad networks evolve to get around the limited MV3 capabilities? uBlock Origin Lite might be good enough for you now, but how about in a year or three?
yes, google pushing hard "download real browser" for years on their main page didn't have anything to do with it… oh the benevolent monopolies doing what's best in user interest! /s
With an adblocker..
Why would you need yt premium with an adblocker?
It's easy, we use FF :-)
I use FF on my phone, tablet and TV too :-/
No. See:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...
>The chrome.declarativeNetRequest API is used to block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules. This lets extensions modify network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content, thus providing more privacy.
Running unbound or a pi-hole on your network doesn't preclude that.
Your devices talks to the gateway/router/pi-hole on the network, who will then use your chosen DoH providers for upstream requests.
only Firefox is left which is fine by me
Firefox seems to be the only reasonably mainstream option for proper ad blocking.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1urieed/com...
I'd been using it solely for GMail / Google Drive / etc. at work, for whatever improved compatibility a Chromium browser might provide over Firefox, which I use for everything else. I got the warning that UBlock Origin won't work, and I immediately ditched Vivaldi. I'm sad about it, I think Vivaldi otherwise is a good browser.
MV3 DNR redirect is notably lame though, instead of replacing the response it generates a real redirect which breaks for example replacing the service worker response. But could MV2 webRequestBlocking replace the response? Well of course not.
So far I'm able to block everything I want, but I mentioned replacing the response body because this is the only way I could modify or even inspect the service worker.. I think this vector could help circumventing ad blockers, but again - it would only matter if there were ads I'd not be able to block.
When it comes to distribution, firefox sucks because I can't even run my own extensions there, my distro doesn't package firefox developer edition so signatures are required. In contrast, Chrome let's me load unpacked extensions without any problems.
Just observe this thread. It's a tribal moment, an occasion for a consumer to reassure himself that he has the right philosophy, uses the right product and rightly hates these other things that deserve to be hated. The fellow believers can upvote each other and downvote any empirical observation which threatens the faith.
Even when my Intel Arc B580 has its drivers freeze the browser, I can just kill the GPU rendering process and it picks back up with no data loss, whereas with Firefox I had to restart the whole thing. Seems related to video decode, changing ANGLE backends or whatever in the browsers didn't really help and disabling hardware acceleration makes the experience suck more than it otherwise should.
If not for that, I'd still probably be on Firefox fully, despite Mozilla not exactly being the most sane of companies, though maybe trying to fund developing a browser and a whole org is a bit crazy as it is.
Brave was okay but nothing special. Maybe I should look at Vivaldi again, but it's an odd position to be in, when upstream is pushing changes on you, so it probably doesn't matter what they do or don't want to support long term, same as with every other Chromium derived browser.
Bummer about Chromium fucking over people who dislike ads.
>and it picks back up with no data loss,
>whereas with Firefox I had to restart the whole thing
about:processes > kill the GPU process without having to restart Firefox.
I will try it out the next time when I jump back to Firefox!
Not sure why it doesn't show up under Task Manager as clearly as Edge's does.
Isn't Brave okay?
There's something toxic about Brave I'm not getting; I can tell you it's incredibly effective as a tool to block ads, scripts, and tracking. What am I missing? It's tracking me? The project owners are mean? There's something nefarious in the codebase? I have firefox and Brave, and both are 'OK', and better than Chrome or Edge which I only use for work. In the past I was told after being downvoted for mentioning Brave that the founder is controversial. Is that it?
Sure it is. I use both Brave and FF (FF more than Brave, TBH).
Brave's builtin adblocker is pretty great as well.
In there are a bunch of Youtube related blockers (including Shorts), that I find work really well. Mobile Brave also lets you lock/screen off your phone while a YT video continues playing, which is a killer feature for listening to podcasts.
I found myself becoming addicted to YT Shorts, and Brave's filters totally solved my problem.
Brave has its own downsides too, but at least the browser seems pretty effective at blocking ads and tracking junk.
The reason is that V2 opened the door to some fairly nasty attacks. "This extension can read everything you enter on any form". There were some extensions that did exactly what you're thinking of.
I suspect that nobody will make a browser that lets a plugin do that any more. It's easy, but on closer reflection, would you do it?
uBlock Origin lite is V3 and is still supported
In uBO Lite, it's called "Create a custom filter" in the popup panel.