We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the …
I have been using a fork of Firefox called Floorp and so far pretty happy with it. Chrome and any variant of it has essentially a monopoly on the browser and Firefox will just follow what Google says anyway so I wouldn’t recommend native firefox. It would be nice if Safari(WebKit) was more stable and available as an alternative.
Anyway: https://floorp.app/
Hardened Firefox, here I come.
For people who want to keep using Chrome, disabling auto-update works for me.
Never updating your browser again is a pretty bad idea when it comes to security
Can we ban bot-posted articles with incomplete body text?
Who’s a bot?
Explain your methodology for posting this post, including any edits made to the original post.
What are you a captcha?
I wear many hats. You failed, BTW.
I wear many hats. You failed, BTW.
You dweeb.
Seriously. We don’t need bot bullshit on Lemmy.
This is the start of the slide for Reddit is just going to be worse here because there are fewer controls to actually detect and do something about bots.
It blows my mind that there are major companies that are actively, and very publicly- working their asses off to undermine the interests of their own customer base. And not only are they still are enabled to exist- they’re profits are constantly growing. Which means, despite their nefarious and intrusive updates to their services…. People are eating it up!
Nothing will change until people do the work.
Take YouTube for example:
They have screwed people over time and again. From their content creators, to those that enjoy watching them. Yet- those that hate it so much would seemingly never organize themselves to boycott their services on a level that will ever hurt them.
So they continue to do it unstopped.
Nothing changes until something changes. It isn’t ever easy, but if you want it to happen badly enough, it is always worth it.
All it takes is for someone to stand up and take the reins!
(I cannot be that person as I have pretty severe ADHD and will probably forget that I wrote this come later this afternoon)
Well said. Also maybe you forgot you wrote the comment by the afternoon, but it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to finally research more into adhd for better managing it, so thanks!
Hate to break it to you, but you are not Google’s customer. Don’t believe me? How much did you pay for Chrome?
This move is in fact being made with their actual customers in mind.
You’re correct, but your argument is bad. I also paid $0 for Linux.
Sooo… those that buy ads you mean.
Can I just add a different perspective on this?
My dad is really old (like early baby-boomers), and I am basically the in-family tech support when the home computer starts acting strange.
Well, right after google rolled out this update, my dad clicked on what he thought was an online shopping link. It was actually an ad for a toolbar add-on. Queue like 6+ hours trying to uninstall that add-on and the bundled software.
I never had to worry about that in the past with him because I had u-block origin installed. Now I need to find something else that can run quietly in the background. And probably a better antivirus.
I think you mean cue, not queue.
Nooooo, but MV3 is all about security!
This is how I know this is bullshit. I was reading the article and thinking "So, let me get this straight. The ads aren’t the security risk. It’s the ad blockers!"
Sure. Pull the other one.
You could leverage Kitbogas software in relation to scam/sketchy download protection.
Paid and closed source with a proprietary license.
Buy a Raspberry PI, install PiHole or AdGuard, change router DNS, and you are good to go. Yes, not perfect, but doesn’t rely on a browser extension that can go extinct next time the browser decides it is time for a change.
Or just do what I do. Use Firefox and only keep Chromium around for those few sites that work better in Chromium.
… or use Firefox and migrate their bookmarks.
I recently switched back to Firefox, and almost immediately ran into an issue where I couldn’t log into Dropbox. It took me far longer than I’d like to admit, to realize that Firefox as the problem. I popped into edge and logged in immediately no problem.
I’m still gonna will with Firefox, but it’s annoying that it doesn’t work all the time.
This is part of Googles strategy. Ever since the Chromium engine took off enough and everyone else fell behind they began introducing more and more changes that merely benefits them, with less public debate or proper communication (or even adherence to common standards). Last thing I remember, aside of manifest v3, was them killing off JPEG XL as it was a competitor to webp and webm (which they control). JPEG XL was actively worked on and would’ve probably turned out better before they killed it without any previous notice.
Given Googles dominant market position, their influence and everyone wanting to cut corners wherever possible sometimes Firefox support is just ignored.
tl;dr It’s not Firefox’ fault. It’s Google’s sabotage.
Ah I see, it sounds like I’m saying it’s Firefox fault. No I definitely agree, chromium is the largest market share, and gets the most support, and doesn’t always follow standards, so some websites will have compatibility issues if they don’t specifically focus on Firefox support.
It’s just a sucky situation.
Uhh, that doesn’t seem normal at all. Is this a default config? Any extensions in use?
Fresh install of Windows 10, fresh install of Firefox, fresh install of Dropbox.
I was trying to log into Dropbox to authenticate the app, but every time I got to the part where I had to enter my 2fa it would say it was expired. I grew concerned that I was hacked and it was changed, but trying it on my old computer it worked fine.
Then I said fine, I had accidentally paired my Dropbox account with my Google account years ago, so I guess I’ll use that. So I logged into Google, and then clicked sign in with my Google account, and I got stuck in a loop where the page was refreshing everything few seconds.
The page would load, it would say “signing you in with your Google account”, then it would say at the top in red letters something like “sorry, you haven’t signed in recently enough to do that, please log in”, and the entire page would refresh and start the loop over, “signing you in with your Google account” etc etc. I left it go through several cycles, it was never gonna work.
It was about then that I guessed that Firefox might be the problem, and it was 🤷♂️
The only non standard thing about my config, is that Windows is inside of a VM. That could very well be it too? But edge was also in that same VM, and it worked. I only used edge because I’m trying to keep the VM light, so I didn’t install chrome for a one off thing.
I don’t know why I got down voted in my earlier comment, I’m not pooping on Firefox. I honestly want it to work, and am still going to use it. But the facts are facts, I literally just ran into this issue yesterday 🤷♂️
That’s what I ended up doing. It was a weird conversation though, telling him that if it seemed like some website wasn’t working, try it on chrome and it just might work
You’re awesome!
Is there any organization out there that could actually promote an “Acceptable ad standard”? Like, maybe even something within web specs?
A long time ago, ads were slightly irritating, rarely useful, and considered a necessary evil for gently monetizing the web. We’ve had this slow evolution to draconian tracking nightmares that are genuinely dangerous and often written by malicious untraceable actors. I almost feel like we could pressure back towards decent ads if there was some standard by which they only received basic info about the user, showed basic info about a product, didn’t pollute the experience or ruin accessibility, and were registered to businesses by physical address with legal accountability for things like false advertising.
That is…perhaps a vain hope though. It’s just hard to picture futures where all websites run off of donations or subscriptions, because advertising is fucking hell now.
Google would never push this because it would cost them money in the short term, eg, next quarter.
They can’t have that.
You mean like https://acceptableads.com/ which is only supported so far by Adblock Plus (and its parent company)?
The problem is until there is some kind of penalty for being too annoying or too resource consuming, it will always be a race to the bottom with more, worse ads. As people add ad blockers to their browsers, the user pool that isn’t running them begins to dry up and more ads are needed to keep the same revenue. This results in even more people blocking them.
Two of the things I had hope for on the privacy side was Mozilla’s Privacy-Preserving Attribution for ad attribution and Google’s Privacy Sandbox collection of features for targeting like the Topics API. Both would have been better for privacy than the current system of granular, individual user tracking across sites.
If those two get wide enough adoption, regulation could be put in place to limit the old methods as there would be a better replacement available without killing the whole current ad supported economy of most sites. I get that strictly speaking from a privacy perspective ‘more anonymous/private tracking’ < ‘no tracking’ but I really don’t want perfect to be the enemy of better.
Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:
- It’s made by an ad company
- The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
- There are no standards on privacy invasion
uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.
The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.
I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.
Kids, remember, Google is an advertising company.
Brave will still support manifest v2 AFAIK.
Brave also has its own blockers built in. All of which, I’m told by this article, are still not as good as uBO.
Whatever. Just use Firefox for your daily driver and only use Chromium when absolutely necessary.
Or don’t. It will become obvious which browser has the better blocker.
This argument is covered in the article.
Is duckduckgo chromium based?
I don’t use it, just curious.
Unluckily, yes.
There are only 3 independent browser engines left: Firefox, Chromium and Safari. And Chromium derives from Safari, so the only true alternative is Firefox.
Eh, Chromium’s Blink and Safari’s WebKit diverged quite some time ago, I think it’s fair to consider them separate engines at this point.
There is also Goanna / Pale Moon: https://www.palemoon.org/
Gecko, blink and webkit
There is also a developing project Ladybird (with homebrew libweb), although it is far from production-ready.
Yes, of course there are more projects. KHTML itself was a different engine (which Apple took, modified and re-released with the name of Safari). I just mentioned the only three “complete” and production-ready engines.
I might try uBlock Origin Lite, then if it doesn’t work very well then maybe I’ll just use Firefox
I guess Google are betting that only a small segment of power users will switch to Firefox, while the mass of ordinary people won’t be bothered enough to switch.
The mass of people don’t use any ad-blocking at all.
Just use Firefox already
This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.
If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.
But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.
Yet another reason to never use Chrome
for personal needs
I think Brave said they arent affected by this
Why would anyone use that browser though? Besides all the rounds of shit it went through, the CEO seems like a nutcase. First he does anti-lgbt political donations, not just once, and has to resign from Mozilla among outrage after only 21 days as the CEO. Then he tweets uninformed shit about covid and has his staff remove criticism on reddit. Sounds like a real champ.
I mean I write Javascript, also his crestion so theres that.
I know some gay people who love Javascript and its always funny to remind them what the original creator of Javascript did
Does he currently get money if you use JavaScript like the Brave CEO gets for his products?
It’s addressed in the article. The brave CEO has stated they will continue to support manifest v2 as long as the needed code remains in Chromium. He made no promises what happens when it is removed, though (“I don’t write checks of unknown amount and sign them”)
So that means they are just supporting it as long as it is easy to do, and that they are not brave enough to fork chromium.
Nice pun 😄👌🏻
They’re already a fork of Chromium… Also it doesn’t matter much since they use the Google extension store, which disabled uBO.
You could probably install and handle a manifest V2 extension by installing the xpi file manually. But as a developer, the users who would actually do this is a small fraction of the previous user base.
So how do you justify your limited manpower to be spent on that increasingly obscure user base? It may as well be removed anyways at that point.
And guess how soon Chromium will break compatibility with v2…
Ha! Ha! The browser name is “Brave” and yet they all have nuts the size of raisins!
Opera GX has promised to keep MV2 in their code. So I’ll just keep using that until I see something different. The other thing is that Opera GX has built in ad-blocker which is pretty much on par with third parties.
Firefox is not the “great browser” you think it is. It has had its fair share of fuckups and failures over the years, like laxed security certificate updates leaving users in limbo.
Google didn’t come and just out do Firefox. It was the other way around, firefox fucked themselves with poor management and failure after failure, and people left. Chrome was the new boy in town, and that is why firefox is where it is today.
Also, I would never use firefox, if I do need an alternative browser renderer, I use WATERFOX which is far more privacy compliant than firefix ever has been.
Opera GX has promised to keep MV2 in their code. So I’ll just keep using that until I see something different. The other thing is that Opera GX has built in ad-blocker which is pretty much on par with third parties.
I couldn’t find a source for either of these claims. Can you help me out?
Doesn’t opera gx have horrible privacy issues?
yeah but it’s GAMER so it’s okay
brave i think has that too which is a controversial browser as well waterfox is a great browser tho.
here are the reasons you shouldnt use opera or even operagx btw: https://rentry.co/operagx and braveHoly fuck, I knew about Brave, but not Opera… I’m glad I never even tried it.
When was chrome or chromium safe?
Bloated memory hole in the last 10yrs.
The way it goes about Sucking up resources convinced me to switch to Firefox completely long ago.
Yes it was performance that first got me to switch too. But now I have plenty more reasons.
Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on, because I’m personally very bored with my kids’ schools and related services sending out emails and forms with links that simply won’t open in FF but are clearly expecting Chrome or Edge where they work fine. Yes, this is on the lazy developers, but if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups then this is the stuff they must fix.
Yeah, unfortunately the next step will be sites rejecting “unsecure” browsers because they want the ad money.
This is going to get worse, not better.
It’s pretty trivial to just use an alternate browser for the garbage sites that don’t support FF.
Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on
Care to share some examples Firefox has trouble with? The only issues I have with websites is due to my aggressive use of Noscript.
There’s some streaming video sites that deliberately block Firefox. It used to be that Firefox didn’t support the necessary web standards, but now it does. The site put up blocks telling you to use Chrome, and never got around to taking them down.
What you’re talking about is webcompat and is a very complicated issue. Also I’ve talked to some Mozilla devs who gave me multiple examples of Chromium rendering something wrong, and they’d have to intentionally break Firefox to render it incorrectly too, just so the end user would get a more consistent experience. Of course these issues happen more and more when things are only tested for one browser.
Maybe there could be some sort of compatibility flag in Firefox which detects non-standard pages designed for Chrome. We could call it… hmm… something like Quirks Mode?
This is Chromium monopoly. At this time instead of W3C standards, Chromium itself becomes the standard.
I just want my modern codecs to function. Why can’t I play .mov or h264??
I can’t think of a single example where a web page doesn’t work on FF.
if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups
Lol. I remember when FF was the most popular browser.
I just need a „install as app“ Feature in Firefox, that is not as pain as the webapp Manager app we currently have
On mobile it’s the three dots then the install button that has an image of a cellphone?
What do you mean “install as app”?
There was a point in time where Firefox had the most market share? When was this?
Around 2009~2011 if I remember correctly. Back then it was either IE or FF. Then Chrome came on the scene with their fancy marketing ads and blew up very quickly to overtake FF.
At the time FF felt bloated compared to Chrome, so Chrome was like the fresh new and faster alternative.
Slack calls disabled for firefox users, but if you change the user agent to chrome it works…
Almost like it does work on Firefox but for some reason they don’t want you using it. Honestly it’s so damn weird, why do that? Is there some incentive for them?
I encounter this very infrequently. I think I only have 1-2 examples at work. It’s not a huge deal for me to spin up a chrome for those one or two occasions.
Just make an electron out of those sites 🌚
Sounds interesting, care to expand?
The only concrete one I can actually recollect is generating a quote from our quoting tool in Salesforce. I just ended up running my 100+ Salesforce windows in Chrome because it has a good feature where you can name each window so I can see which customers I’m working on in the taskbar. It’s good to have those cordoned off from my normal browsing anyway. So this one doesn’t bother me. For everything else I use Firefox.
I used this prompt
I want to create an electron app for linux of a third party webapp
How would I do that?
And chatGPT gave me a good instruction, will try that out. Apparently, you only need node, electron and the javascript like this:
const { app, BrowserWindow } = require('electron') function createWindow() { // Create the browser window const win = new BrowserWindow({ width: 800, height: 600, webPreferences: { nodeIntegration: true } }) // Load the third-party web app win.loadURL('https://www.thirdpartyapp.com') // Optionally remove the default menu win.setMenu(null) // Open DevTools (optional for debugging) // win.webContents.openDevTools() } // Run the createWindow function when Electron is ready app.whenReady().then(createWindow) // Quit when all windows are closed app.on('window-all-closed', () => { if (process.platform !== 'darwin') { app.quit() } }) app.on('activate', () => { if (BrowserWindow.getAllWindows().length === 0) { createWindow() } })
I still don’t know what this is though? Something Linux specific?
Electron is a tool to bundle a website and a interpreter for that website in an application. That works on many platforms. Official discord desktop app, for example, is an electron app, spotify as well.
I recall I didn’t get some sites working on Chrome either, when Firefox fails me 😅
This is also true. The majority of the time when something doesn’t work on Firefox and I try to go to Chrome, it doesn’t work there too 😂
Can you send me an example? I don’t think I ever really encountered those sites and I use FF almost exclusively for ~20 years.
Its a frequency of use thing, and also some required sites. Examples are sites hosted by schools, government, or workplaces.
Although most people using Firefox aren’t aware of spoofing the client to look like chrome, so that might need to be talked about more.
That all said, I don’t have problems with any required usage, the only ones I have an issue with are on my phone, using mull, some sites payment forms won’t load or work correctly. Taco bell is pretty bad for that and then the app wouldnt work either for a while. I also run grapheneos though so its hard to say what’s the cause there.
Hm, okay. Maybe it’s just a US government page thing then. Here in Germany firefox is still at 20% and used to be the standard browser until 5-6 years ago, so maybe pages are still optimized for it here.
Okay that’s fine, but when websites are effectively writing
if user_agent_string != [chromium] break;
It doesn’t really matter how good compatibility is. I’ve had websites go from nothing but a “Firefox is not supported, please use Chrome” splash screen to working just fine with Firefox by simply spoofing the user agent to Chrome. Maybe some feature was broken, but I was able to do what I needed. More often than not they just aren’t testing it and don’t want to support other browsers.
The more insidious side of this is that websites will require and attempt to enforce Chrome as adblocking gets increasingly impossible on them, because it aligns with their interests. It’s so important for the future of the web that we resist this change, but I think it’s too late.
The world wide web is quickly turning into the dark alley of the internet that nobody is willing to walk down.
As a developer, I can foresee websites using features other than
navigator.userAgent
to detect Chrome, because it’s easy to change its value. For example: for now,navigator.getBattery
is available only in Chromium, and it doesn’t need permissions to be checked for its existence throughtypeof navigator.getBattery === 'function'
(also, the function seems to be perfectly callable without user intervention, enabling additional means of fingerprinting). While it’s easy to spoof userAgent, it’s not as easy to “mock” unsupported APIs such asnavigator.getBattery
through Firefox.
What to do when the site is not compatible with Firefox: Alt + ←
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If your site doesn’t work on Firefox your site doesn’t work. As web developers your job is to develop applications for the web not for one specific browser. This goes double for essential services.
My job requires login to most internal websites via Microsoft Azure AD SSO using Kerberos authentication using passwordless, smart card auth.
This switch happened this week. Up until yesterday I was 100% Firefox until this.
Firefox for MacOS is not able to do this. I spent an hour or so looking for solutions. Chrome on MacOS also doesn’t. Safari does and now I have to fucking use Safari FFS.
Check some of Firefox’s
about:config
flags. A number of years ago I enabled something related to Kerberos for my previous company’s (simpler) Microsoft SSO on a Mac, it may still be available and enough to work for you.I did. Unfortunately for the Mac it’s a no-go. It was a good 10 year run :(
Or use Edge
Why do you hate me
Just tryna save you from the failed abortion that is Safari
Could be worse. You could have to use Chrome.
I read this in my history and for a second thought it was in response to my other comment, which also is true
Internet Explorer has entered the chat.
Eh, I’d still take Chromium anything over the dumpster fire that is Safari
“ugh just use a normal browser”
- everyone
That’s some BS. You and i both know that Chromium has the largest share in the browser business, so it makes sense from a development perspective to develop websites that will reach the most people. It’s on Firefox to optimise their browser so that it can run these sites as well.
On the same line of thought, we should remove sidewalks and bike lanes because cars use the road more
That’s a pretty crooked line of thought
A single company shouldn’t be able to dictate how the web works.
But they said they wouldn’t be evil!
Shit. You got me there. Carry on I guess.
Well too bad, because that’s how things are
Wrong again, sparky.
Nope
Doesn’t really matter to a regular user, in that case it’s"Firefox doesn’t work"
Firefox can’t fix all the broken sites in the world, but they do investigate issues reported to https://webcompat.com
You can help by reporting sites that don’t work for you.