Google ramps up its campaign against ad blockers on Chrome.
  • Google is transitioning Chrome’s extension support from the Manifest V2 framework to the V3.
  • This means users won’t be able to use uBlock Origin to block ads on Google Chrome.
  • However, there’s a new iteration of the app — uBlock Origin Lite, which is Manifest V3 compliant but doesn’t boast the original version’s comprehensive ad-blocking features.
  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’d just like to reassure everybody that you can quit using Google Chrome. I switched to Firefox a year ago. You can switch to something else too. Give it a try.

    Wait, I don’t need to nudge anybody. After all the ads start invading their browsing experience I doubt anybody will need much prodding.

    • Jimmycakes@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      Nobody that cares about seeing ads is still on chrome. I bet they don’t lose more than 8-10% market share in a year even that is probably super high

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Easy to understand. People don’t like change.

        Despite 25 years in IT, and knowing better, I only recently switched back to Firefox. I expected a fair bit of hassle, and I won’t say the transition was seamless, but I was astounded.

        Those of us in the know aren’t doing any good circle jerking ourselves over our superior browser. We need to get our friends, coworkers and relatives engaged. And that should be easy if we contrast our ad-free experience with theirs.

        • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          On that note: Anyone wanting the same look and feel of Chrome without ads should try Brave. No add-ons or plugins necessary.

          • Maestro@fedia.io
            0·
            1 year ago

            Yes. You can install extensions on firefox mobile just like you can on the desktop version. IIRC it’s the only mobile browser that does this.

            • maccentric@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              0·
              1 year ago

              The Orion browser has rudimentary support for Firefox extensions. UBlock origin seems to work for me. Best I’ve found for iOS

              • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
                0·
                1 year ago

                From what I understand, it’s mostly because they’re forced to use WebKit, and building a compatibility layer to make the existing addons to work within iOS constraints on top of WebKit would need a significant amount of work.

                My guess is that Mozilla is waiting on the engine restrictions to be lifted, but so far that will only happen in the European market with their alt stores.

          • Orbituary@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            Mull is a Firefox fork with even more privacy features. There are others that I’m sure people will chime in with.

          • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            Only on Firefox Android.

            As far as I know, Safari is the only browser with Adblock on iOS.

            • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
              0·
              1 year ago

              This is true, however, Firefox focus has a built in blocker that’s pretty good, and the Orion browser for iOS actually supports Firefox extensions (even though it’s built on top of safari), and is also pretty good. I run bothe Firefox focus and Orion with ublock on my iOS devices.

              • Eggyhead@fedia.io
                0·
                1 year ago

                I just installed Orion thanks to this post and I’m really impressed. I usually stick to safari, but I’m going to sit on this for a week and see how I feel about it.

                2 quick questions; Do you know if it’s possible to get YouTube videos to run in PiP on iOS/iPadOS? And is there a dark mode for the app’s interface?

                • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
                  0·
                  1 year ago

                  Yes, you can do pip, you need to first expand the video to full screen, then tap the screen to bring up the on screen controls, and you should see a pip button in the upper left of the video.

                  Orion doesn’t have a dark mode that I’m aware of, though it mostly respects iOS dark mode (with annoying exceptions). Though with firefox extensions, you can install dark reader, or you can install the dark reader iOS app, to get dark mode on all websites.

                  Edit: I’m not certain that dark reader iOS app will work with orion. I don’t use the app, I use the firefox extension with orion.

            • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
              0·
              1 year ago

              Also third party browsers on iOS are forced to use a janky slow WebKit WebView instead of the accelerated WebKit on Safari.

              In the EU, things are different and third-party rendering engines have been forced upon Apple, so people there may have more options.

            • H4mi@lemm.ee
              0·
              1 year ago

              I use Firefox Focus on iOS. It blocks quite a bit without addons.

        • Zahille7@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 year ago

          I personally enjoy Ecosia. They’re the ones who plant trees whenever you use their search engine, and while not the best, at least their mobile app has a built in ad-blocker that imo seems pretty decent.

        • Mog_fanatic@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 year ago

          I tried but for some reason certain websites can’t play any videos on Firefox without buffering every like 5 or 10 seconds for a few seconds. It happens on 100% of videos on YouTube and like 50% of videos on any other website. It’s super annoying, so back to chrome I went and I guess I’ll stay until ublock bites the dust and I have to move.

          • Kallioapina@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            Thats Googles fault. Firefox has an user agent switcher -addon. Flip it there to appear as Chrome, and suddenly Youtube bufferring problems drastically lessen.

            Also if you are in EU, consider making a complaint about this assholish and anti-competetive behaviour to your country’s competition/trade authority. Also EU’s, if you feel like being an extra responsible EU citizen. These assholes at Google need to be fined to extinction.

          • PopShark@lemmy.world
            0·
            1 year ago

            I just wanted to drop in to say I do the same!! Especially on iOS where regular Firefox is kinda so-so (but better than Safari) Firefox Focus meanwhile is King

          • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
            0·
            1 year ago

            Hopefully it will break badly enough to move people past their inertia so then there can be a more serious competitor to Chrome, or maybe even multiple competitors to Chrome.

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I’ve always used Firefox on every other device I own, but now I need to do something about my Chromebook.

    • _bcron@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Firefox with NoScript is better than any adblocker I used. It blocks the ‘disable adblocker’ popups alongside ads and most sketchy shit in general

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        0·
        1 year ago

        You can basically use uBlock Origin as NoScript (or I think ScriptSafe? or did they change back?) if you put it into “hard mode.”

        I personally like “medium mode”. I guess I get why they hide it behind several obscure steps, but I feel like they should advertise it more. It’s a nice middle ground. Still breaks every website the first time you go there but meh. Small price to pay.

        • Makeitstop@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 year ago

          It’s definitely more of a hassle than most people will want to deal with. But I still prefer to have it and selectively enable things as needed, because quite frankly I’d rather deal with predictable hassles of my own making than be bombarded with new bullshit every day due to ever worsening trends in enshittification.

          • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
            0·
            1 year ago

            Tip: its not better if you know its to much hassle for most people. But dont let that stop you from posting your ideas. The more power to those that such is not a hassle.

            • Makeitstop@lemmy.world
              0·
              1 year ago

              People have different tolerances for these kinds of things. Some people never bother to even get an ad blocker. Some won’t touch settings no matter how simple. And some want to tweak and modify endlessly.

      • icosahedron@ttrpg.network
        0·
        1 year ago

        iirc some hardened firefox configs, including arkenfox, recommend using ublock ONLY. other privacy extensions like noscript aren’t worth using because ublock replicates all of their features plus more

  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    1 year ago

    All the webdev companies’ across the planet at their sprint planning in a few weeks: “So, shit, we finally need to support Firefox correctly.”

    • Chozo@fedia.io
      0·
      1 year ago

      Nearly 3.5 billion people do.

      “Does anybody still use [literally the most popular product in its industry]?”

        • Chozo@fedia.io
          0·
          1 year ago

          I deserve ads because Firefox won’t render any of the web apps I use for work? Damn.

            • Chozo@fedia.io
              0·
              1 year ago

              Firefox breaks Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, Jira, and several other internal/proprietary platforms I use. Many of our tools are integrated into each other (sometimes on the backend through the API, sometimes on the frontend through an iFrame), and Firefox really doesn’t play nicely with these interactions. Either it doesn’t like the fact that our apps are accessing multiple sites at a time and throws security errors, or it just doesn’t render some parts of the page properly, making them unusable.

              For instance, one ticketing tool we use is completely inaccessible in Firefox, because the page breaks after the header and loads the rest into a 10px-wide column that stretches for miles. Works fine in Chrome, Edge, and even Safari somehow.

              Some of this could be fixed by using these platforms with their out-of-the-box software which may be more compatible with Firefox, without our modifications. But our mods are there because these integrations drastically improve our workflows, so that’s unfortunately not a feasible option for our business.

              A lot of this is due to Firefox having stricter standards, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe our developers should make our tools more standard-compliant and that might be better in the long run. But until then, I gotta use what works.

              • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
                0·
                1 year ago

                Firefox breaks…

                (Long unnecessary nonsense that isn’t applicable to anyone else)

                Maybe our developers should make our tools more standard-compliant

                lol. So who broke it?

                • Chozo@fedia.io
                  0·
                  1 year ago

                  (Long unnecessary nonsense that isn’t applicable to anyone else)

                  I was answering a question that was asked directly to me, genius.

            • ShortFuse@lemmy.world
              0·
              1 year ago

              Firefox, unfortunately, has been lagging behind. Safari is close to surpassing Firefox if they haven’t already. Safari really made a big shift for actually implementing web standards around 16.4.

              • No HDR - relevant for me because I mod PC games for HDR
              • Dropped PWA on desktop - even Apple went full 180° and embraced it now on Mac OS X. Chrome really gets a good push from this from Microsoft constantly helping push more app manifest stuff since it appears one of their goals is to render more things over Edge PWAs (eg: like the title bar), and resort less to having to use electron.
              • No masked borders - can’t do custom element borders like corner cutting or perfect squircles. Rounded edges only

              Chrome is still the absolute best for accessibility. Neither Firefox nor Safari properly parse the aria labels when it comes to how things are rendered. Chrome will actually render text in accessibility nodes as presented on screen (ie: with spacing). Safari and Firefox only use .textContent which can have words beingmergedwhentheyshouldn’t.

              Chrome also has Barcode and NFC scanning built right in. I’ve had to use fake keyboard emulators for iOS. Though, Chrome on Mac OS X also supports it. Safari has native support for Barcode behind a flag, so it’ll likely come in the future. Barcode scanning is still possible with Firefox through direct reading of the camera bitmap, which is slower but still good. There’s no solution for NFC for Safari, but if Chrome ever comes iOS, that would possibly be solved. I believe Face Detection is similar, but I’ve never used it.

          • ravhall@discuss.onlineBanned
            0·
            1 year ago

            I’m so elite because I choose to use a browser that respects my privacy lol.

            Thank you, I guess?

    • BobGnarley@lemm.ee
      0·
      1 year ago

      I always wondered about this and how all the ad blocking apps have complete access to every webpage you visit.

      • Hexbatch@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 year ago

        Yea, that is what gets me too, when I look at the blockers to use; Ad blockers have access to all keystrokes, forms and pages. They have access to my banking and other codes when I use them .

        While I am sure the more popular blockers do not abuse this, and the code most likely checked line by line. It’s still possible for a handful of mistakes to allow supply chain attacks or a dozen other things to happen.

        It worries me, so I don’t use them as extension and use security elsewhere

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    Firefox is a very nice experience. If you’re still hanging onto Chrome, I strongly suggest you at least try Firefox. I suspect most people have very little reason to stay with Google products.

  • mindlight@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    If you want to avoid ads it might be a good idea to not use products from a company which primary goal is to make money on ads…

    But hey, what do I know…