EDIT: Apologies. Updated with a link to what gorhill REALLY said:
Manifest v2 uBO will not be automatically replaced by Manifest v3 uBOL[ight]. uBOL is too different from uBO for it to silently replace uBO – you will have to explicitly make a choice as to which extension should replace uBO according to your own prerogatives.
Ultimately whether uBOL is an acceptable alternative to uBO is up to you, it’s not a choice that will be made for you.
Will development of uBO continue? Yes, there are other browsers which are not deprecating Manifest v2, e.g. Firefox.
They should update the Chrome extension to tell people to download Firefox instead
Imagine if Google’s decision to do this to fight adblockers results in them losing the lead in the browser war because everyone switches to other browsers.
Dreaming is one thing, but I remain skeptical. Tech people always seem to vastly overestimate how much the average population will react to tech news. Most people don’t care. They should but they don’t. In addition to that, use of Chrome by businesses is heavily entrenched. The IT guys probably hate it on a personal level, but it takes a lot to make business bigwigs change direction away from a “trustworthy” big company like Google.
The vast majority of people aren’t even going to know or care. A lot of people will probably just continue on even when their adblocker becomes less effective. Of course the type of people who use adblockers are also more likely to wonder why their adblocker suddenly became less effective and then switch to a browser where it’s more effective.
It takes a lot to change the inertia that already exists. People have been predicting the rise of the Linux desktop for at least a decade now and it still hasn’t really caught on.
I mostly agree, but lets remember
use of Chrome by businesses is heavily entrenched.
So was internet explorer
And we had it like forever.
“like” being a very important word in that sentence.
Chrome was backed by Google, a multifaceted staple of the Internet ecosystem and rolled out with a ton of marketing behind it.
I remain skeptical that Firefox could plausibly overtake Chrome. The mere word of mouth of tech enthusiasts simply isn’t enough to make a population majority proactively switch.
The thing that finally got businesses to finally get off IE wasn’t from the browser being worse than every other option. Heck, it wasn’t even because it was a decrepit piece of software that lost it’s former market dominance (and if anything businesses see that as a positive, not a negative).
What finally did that was microsoft saying there won’t be any security updates. That’s what finally got them off their ass; subtly threatening them with data breaches, exploits, etc. if they continue to use it. I don’t see google doing this anytime soon, at least not without a “sequel” like microsoft had with edge.
Tech people are niche but over time we will pre-install what we consider “good” on our grandmas, dads, moms, friends, etc… PCs
The older generation demographic continues to shrink, while it seems the great majority of Gen Z and A are perfectly happy to use whatever ecosystem is built into their device. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t want better software, merely being realistic about the choices of populations.
@TheImpressiveX
Maybe you should update the title, since it is factually incorrect.
Thanks, fixed.
ive gotten almost my entire friend group using either the same fork as me or the original firefox, they all used chrome before. all because google was dumb enough to overstep some peoples boundaries.
if you don’t mind, which fork are you using? I got my sister to switch to firefox too.
I use waterfox. They are independent again since last year and their big thing besides privacy is that they carry over a lot of stuff from Firefox that was scrapped with the proton design.
not the original commenter but FLOORP, BABYYYY!!! let’s go let’s get this floorp action come on floorp is the best reign supreme for a thousand years floorp woooooo
You’ve watched a lot of Rick and Morty haven’t you
n… nuh uh
IIRC the Google crackdown was supposed to happen this past January so Chrome users are lucky they got some extra time to switch.
I only use Firefox and have for the past few years. Yesterday I tried to schedule an appointment to get my oil changed at the dealer but was unable because the process on the site just flat-out breaks on Firefox. This is not a complaint about Firefox, but the fact that Chrome is so popular that some websites only work with Chrome. I don’t have a Chromium-based browser installed (besides Edge, which I’ve never opened intentionally) and I despise being on the phone (which is why I was trying to schedule online in the first place), so I just didn’t make the appointment. I’ll go somewhere else to get my oil changed. Sorry for the rant but it was extremely frustrating.
Man, you never worked for a large corporation that that had internal web based apps that only work on Internet Explorer and refused to update it.
I worked somewhere like that back in the 2008-2010 time frame. Thankfully, there was a extension, I believe the name was “IETab”, that would spawn a new tab in Trident (IE’s browser engine). So you could set certain sites to launch in one of those tabs and everything else would use standard Firefox. None of the people I supported were any the wiser. They just thought everything worked in Firefox.
Granted it was only that seamless because Windows already had that rendering engine built in. There are some extensions that do something similar with Chrome, but because of more modern security standards and whatnot you have to install extension helper applications which is gross.
Chrome is so popular that some websites only work with Chrome.
It’s the Internet Explorer problem all over again, but this time from an even more invasive company.
The more people choosing non-Chomium browsers, the better. Keeping them popular enough that most sites have to support them is the only way to preserve what little agency people still have on the mainstream web.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask
This addon will work if it’s not letting you
I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Not necessarily. The problem is often that chrome JavaScript implementation can be ever so slightly different from FFs. Or just that the web devs wrote fragile code that is barely working on chrome and doesn’t work on other browsers, where they failed to test.
Worth keeping around at least
Out of principle, I refuse to pretend I am not browsing with Firefox. 🦊❤️✊ Let website statistics show! And I will boycott sites that break due to not testing on multiple browsers!
I thought like that until youtube started intentionally slowing firefox identifying clients. As soon as I changed my user-agent to match chrome’s the speed was back to normal.
Lol I blocked all but essential JS on YouTube with NoScript and never faced any problems at all. Videos load just fine without extra penalties.
That works until it’s your bank or credit card website. I cannot use Capital One’s (CC) “pay bill” any longer.
Weird.
Super annoying to have to fire up chrome (brave) to pay my CC bill
Change banks
Luckily it hasn’t come to that for me yet. But I have reported issues with my bank’s website to them, and it had been fixed.
Adding to this, Firefox’s JavaScript is much more strict than others (which I love). As a web developer I prioritize testing it in Firefox because it’s helped me find bugs other browsers just plow through.
Personally I use Safari daily and the number of websites that are broken due to poor security (but function fine in Chrome) is alarming. Chrome doesn’t even check content type on
<iframe>last time I checked.I tend to agree with you. Normally if something doesn’t work in firefox it makes sense, but less often is that the case in chrome.
I am fascinated by the idea of a web developer choosing to use Safari, honestly, though. Can I ask why? For me, the hesitancy of adopting new web standards, the lack of a real extensions, and lack of support for non-Apple OSes… combined with lots of random bugs that I only ever see so often in Safari, I absolutely loathe that browser. And I feel like being a web developer conditioned me to feel this way. And then there’s the business practice concerns (Apple selectively supporting new web features with the intention of keeping native apps seen as superior, because it makes them money)… but even ignoring this, I’m a Safari-hater through and through. It feels like Internet Explorer 7 vs Firefox to me.
On iOS I have to support a few major versions of Safari back and it’s nightmarish at times. For certain featuresets, you absolutely cannot assume things will probably work like you can with FF/Chromium browsers and it makes me so ragey sometimes. I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to workaround an issue in various Safari iOS versions, and it’s not the first time I’ve been in this situation.
I’m curious – what versions of Safari are you required to support on the job?
Personally
This was my poor attempt to mean “as an end-user.” I just love that it’s tied in to the Apple ecosystem and the UI is so much cleaner than other browsers.
I’ve tried to make the switch to others but they always feel very clunky. I love Firefox to death but it looks awful (at least on macOS). I’m not a big extension guy because I’m filtering DNS and IP traffic at the network layer — if we’re talking about ad blocking, tracking and the like it doesn’t make sense to only protect against it in the browser, as apps tend to send traffic to the very same domains as the websites.
I actually hate the trend of apps being nothing more than a wrapper around web applications. It comes off as lazy development, and I miss native apps (regardless of platform) instead of these creepy wrappers around web applications. So I actually have to agree with Apple there.
As for browser support, my team works on an internal-only app and our security policy doesn’t allow outdated browsers, so there’s no hard rules when it comes to browser support.
I use a lot of extensions for a lot of various reasons. Privacy and ad blocking are only two of them. For development purposes, UI preferences, making common actions easier to access, disabling website features I don’t like, re-enabling ones I do, the list goes on and on.
I’m a bit confused about your app vs web comment. What I’m saying is that instead of allowing the web ecosystem to evolve at an organic pace by keeping up with the rest of browsers, apple puts their thumb on the scale, choosing not to support things, so that installing an app works better. This isn’t a matter of comparing ways of building a downloadable app, it’s a matter of them guarding against users quickly accessing a web app without needing to download something from their store (which provides them with profits). They even make money on free apps now!
The entire state of the web is held back because iOS is so popular, and Safari is always behind on feature support especially on iOS. And it really irks me. Many times every browser we support will support a really nice feature, except safari. And sometimes even the latest safari doesn’t support something even though the others have for years!
You are lucky not having to support old versions of Safari. The latest safari is always somewhat reasonable to support but Jesus… try supporting anything of complexity on iOS 14. So painful.
Are you sure that it was Firefox itself? I find the few times something like that has come up, it was because of extensions (like adblocl, actually).
Delta’s website started blocking me due to using Dark Reader, apparently something about detecting that the contents of the page were being altered. And another site worked fine when I disabled unlock; I assume because it was blocking loading some .js that was actually being used for something other than just ads.
As far as I can tell. After disabling all extensions it still didn’t work.
The best action ublock origions devs can take is drop support for chromium based browsers and retract ublock lite from the chrome webstore.
I was hopefull for something more than just a wiki page on github. adding a banner to chrome’s add-on menu is way more powerful and far more reaching than what they did
i crave decisiveness like that. it would make me so happy if that sort of behavior became the norm.
too many corpos getting away with murder because they are more convenient than their competitors or because switching is too hard
Not quite on topic, but: This past week developers at my company have been slammed by the Chrome DevTools debugger freezing when you hit a breakpoint. There’s been no tracked bug and no timeline from Chrome on a fix. It’s been a little bit of a lesson in having just one browser engine.
Understatement, I know, but I find this so annoying, and it certainly feels malicious.
I was just commenting the other day how ridiculous it is that google search results literally serve up malware to people via paid ads. My neighbor was running into issues where her computer kept getting “infected” and a full screen scam would take control, blaring out a loud message that her computer was infected with a virus, that it was infecting microsoft’s servers, and she had to call them now to fix it.
After investigating, I found out that these types of scams are stored as blobs on Microsoft’s cloud service, but the links are spread via ads in google search. When I tried searching for the exact search terms my neighbor was using on my own devices and my own network, I found out that google was serving me the exact same ads, aka sponsored links. They look like legitimate results for things that people search for, like showing what appears to be a link to Amazon when searching for a product, even the links will say “www.amazon.com”.
Obviously I told my neighbor not to use Chrome and suggested some browser alternatives. I installed uBlock on all the browsers (including chrome) just to be safe. Then I showed her how to tell when things are ads, even when they are deceiving, and to never click on ads or sponsored links under any circumstances.
But it’s definitely infuriating that they are serving up malware in their ads, don’t respond to reports in a timely manner, are getting people caught in scams that they allow to advertise on their network but then somehow object to people managing those risks by blocking ads from untrustworthy sources, like google.
I just did a cleanup on someone’s computer that got this. They actually called the number and got scammed out of their whole life savings. The usual Indian scammers.
I just got firefox yesterday, cause I noticed youtube started baking unskippable ads into their site.
I’ve been using LibreWolf on Desktop and Mull on Android. Basically more securely configured versions of Firefox with the proprietary telemetry and some other stuff removed. Takes some tweaking to get certain websites to work that need more access than they should or use Certificate Authorities that don’t have working OSCP servers.
If any site doesn’t work you can try this official addon Chrome Mask. If it works with it on you can report it Mozilla.
Edit: a bit of context:
Thanks for sharing the extension! I just got some passkeys and they just weren’t working on several websites for Firefox (looking at you Azure) but that solved the issue immediately!
Be sure to report a bug to Mozilla regarding those pages!
I"m going to try that extension to see if it helps with a couple of websites. So thanks for the recommendation!
If it does help be sure to report it to Mozilla! Otherwise the site admins will just see another Chrome user and have little. Incentive to focus on FF.
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It should be bannable to recommend that trojan here
Ah yes, the browser that monetizers based on activity tracking. The one based on chromium, handing Google further control over web standards. The browser with a a mysterious nearly unlimited budget for advertising before they even had a handful of users. That browser.
I don’t like or use brave for multiple reasons but why is the fact that it’s built on chromium a problem?
Because every browser is becoming 3 chromes in a trench coat.
Long term this will be an issue.
LONG LIVE GECKO
They are doing what Apple has done to browsers on iPhones. It’s all safari all the way down… lol
Ironically, Apple forcing Safari on iPhones is the single greatest thing standing between Chromium and total market domination.
Not that it’s a good thing for Apple users, but it’s the one remaining reason not to slap a “Not on Chromium? Don’t bother visiting” sign on every website. Us Firefox users don’t matter, statistically speaking
Fuck. I hadn’t even thought of that perspective. You are totally right.
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Tell us more of the Floorp. (as long as its not based on chrome)
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Any issues with not being set up in Japanese?
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Vivaldi does have it’s own built in adblocker. You can add sources. It’s not as robust at uBO, but than nothing
Floorp is an excellent browser. I mainly use it for the first class vertical tab support, but it’s ability to pin websites to open in a sidebar is great. I use it for stuff like Proton mail and drive.
I will say in case anyone here saw it in the past, it had a bit of drama around the author making part of it closed source, but that was fortunately resolved before it was ever released with any proprietary code.
Link is borked, add another ) at the end
Works fine for me and has the ), what are you using to look at it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browsers_based_on_Chromium
This link works for me but the previous has the same broken link. I’m using the Sync android client. ¯\(°_o)/¯
The 1st opens a link to the wiki page: Chromium (web browser
Missing the ending ) for me
Odd so it does not like the link getting renamed then.
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i use brave on my phone since its harder to adblock on phones for me
Firefox mobile has ublock origin
ooh ty i’ll try it :)
I switched my phone browser the Firefox Mobile and have installed ublock and I am quite satisfied so far.
What the uBlock dev actually said:
Manifest v2 uBO will not be automatically replaced by Manifest v3 uBOL[ight]. uBOL is too different from uBO for it to silently replace uBO – you will have to explicitly make a choice as to which extension should replace uBO according to your own prerogatives.
Ultimately whether uBOL is an acceptable alternative to uBO is up to you, it’s not a choice that will be made for you.
Will development of uBO continue? Yes, there are other browsers which are not deprecating Manifest v2, e.g. Firefox.
I only use chrome when checking my Gmail account. Brave is my go-to.
Guess you get to find out if this will be effecting all of chromium or just chrome…
Brave has added a feature to explicitly enable MV2 apps and install uBo directly from Brave settings. You can also install uMatrix and Adguard MV2 versions also.
Or you could just Avoid chromium browsers and help the browser landscape from becoming a sea of chrome.
And jump to the clone? Mozilla isn’t better (consider their recent Ad Privacy clone), they just have less market share.
That said, I use Firefox and Brave. Whatever I feel like at the time.
There are plenty of browsers built on Gecko that aren’t fire fox. So if you don’t trust Mozilla to build your browser, and don’t want your ad blocker bricked by Google, you have options.
The clone? Are you implying that mozilla (founded 1998) is a clone of chrome (first launched 2008)?
Just use anything but chome or chromium if you can. Just don’t feed the beast now known as alphabet.
Brave is forked from Chromium so hypothetically they could maintain V2 but they’d need their own store as they currently rely on Googles
Guess we will see if Brave is all talk or not in the coming years.
Well I don’t use Chrome, so…
Did I miss a piece? I don’t see anywhere in the original statement where firefox is actively recommended, just mentioned as an example.
UBlock for Chrome is going away, no matter what Google says about Manifest.
memories of Internet Explorer doing the same thing intensifies
They did? Never used that garbage. Switched from Netscape Navigator to Opera to Firefox.
I used chrome on mobile since in the old days, Firefox mobile was unusable, but that’s been years ago.
Now for the 3 websites that stubbornly refuse to open in FF I use Edge on desktop, and kiwi on mobile.
