Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox::Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs.
Why settle for less anyway, Firefox all the way
Last I checked, Firefox had also been switching to Manifest v3 because they’re also combating the tide of add-ons that pretend to do something useful, but actually steal your information. They asked uBlock at least a few times how they could build Manifest v3 in a way that’d be compatible. Instead of the browser asking about each URL, thereby giving the add-on access to personal information, uBlock could tell the browser what to block. uBlock’s answer was always, “No. That’s not good enough. Give the add-on access to URLs.” It seemed to me like every time uBlock was approached, they turned to news sites to complain and IIR, the feature that would have given uBlock some functionality was removed from v3 because if nobody’s going to use it, why build it?
I wonder, now that uBlock has conflated the discussion of, “How much should extensions be able to see and modify URLs you’re visiting?”, with, “v3 is a war on ad blockers!”, how quickly Firefox will move forward with v3, if at all.
I think a lot of people don’t realize what a gaping security hole extensions can be. Back in the 2000s, I’d install almost anything that seemed useful without realizing the amount of data that goes through them.
It blows my mind how many people do you not understand how essentially useless Chrome is now and how much it has changed.
In my book, nothing changed because I refuse to run anything closed source on MY computer.
Very Stallman of you, unfortunately for many people’s use cases they will want at least proprietary video codecs or drivers. You could even argue using most websites with minified JS is closed source.
Whatever you’re willing to be exterminated for.
Edit: All you fucking morons come here and downvote me but fact of the matter is you will all die and there will be zero reproduction of humanity in far less than a decade from now.
Only Free and Open Source AI Software will save you. Only. But go on, like your vote makes any fucking difference.
Why’re you so angry over this?
You read emotions in words written down. You a fishing. You are ignorant.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. I’m genuinely curious as to why you’re getting so angry over this, that’s all.
There’s no angry. You’re reading shit. Not observing a person.
What I don’t get is that my browser experience is legitimately better overall, I don’t know what was keeping me from switching all these years. Familiarity perhaps.
There’s so many post about Firefox. Mozilla should throw some money at Lemmy devs for free marketing.
Is it surprising that a userbase for an open-source online forum with no ads are advocates for an open-source browser that can remove ads?
Why Firefox? there are so many other options
Name another usable browser which is not based on FF or Chromium
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Safari 💀
True but it is available on a limited number of plattforms
If you are concerned about things like PWAs like I was, try it out anyway. PWAs require a bit more setup, but are a lot more flexible in Firefox. For example, PWAs with http connections have a huge banner in Chrome, and just an icon in Firefox. Everything I’ve noticed is that firefox is just as snappy as Chrome
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I mainly use them when I want something windowed but without tabs taking up space. Like monitoring my solar panels
I thought PWA’s didn’t work on Firefox. That’s good to know, because I’ve been using chromium specifically for PWA’s.
Same here, I tried the PWAsForFirefox extension a few years back and found the setup to be too much of a pain in the ass compared to the Chromium forks. I tried again around 9-12 months ago when Manifest V3 drama was making the rounds and found the extension had been overhauled and that’s no longer a problem. As a bonus each PWA is a self-contained browser instance, so performance is improved when only the PWA is open, and extensions are per-PWA. So I can run only Purple Adblock on my Twitch PWA, or only uBlock for Youtube, etc.
I’m using them heavily as well. Mostly good. Painful though when moving between computers as you have to set them up on each one. If they can get it to sync eventually that’d be handy.
What PWA do you use? I think they’re a neat idea but I haven’t come up with an actual use case yet.
Any idea how to get links clicked in a PWA like Google Messages to open in a normal browser tab? I’ve tried nothing.
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That’s such bullshit. People keep saying SO MANY SITES DONT WORK ON FOREFUX
with zero examples.
I see no examples. You’re making a ridiculous claim with no proof and I’m astounded at how many people believe you here.
I tried to bring this up as an issue back on Reddit, and I got downvoted into oblivion.
I think sometimes switching your use agent to Chrome can bypass some issues.
There is an addon that does this automatically.
Some pages load weird like a pop-up on mobile that should take over your view window is a side bar instead. Still fully functional but slightly harder to read.
But you know what makes it way harder to read? Ads
I’ve visited pages in Chrome without an ad blocker… Almost unusable, my eyes couldn’t even focus on what I actually needed to do.
I’m not sure if it’s better, or worse, than the cancer that was the dot come era. Pop-ups everywhere. Random fucking toolbars. So many toolbars. A clippy version of a titty dancer if you’re unlucky.
So many tech minded people, but at same time, so many of us fail to consider others POV and priorities.
JUST DON’T VISIT THAT WEBSITE! - sure bro, that means i won’t be able to pay the bills this month because the only traditional way of doing this is visiting a physical kiosk at working hour. Did i mention that i gotta work?
Similar with messaging apps.
YOU NEED BETTER FRIENDS LOL - trust me I’ve tried. i also need to send my resume using this app to whoever interviewing me. no, no email. yes, i tried teling that. no, i won’t be that guy preaching about software freedom when all i want is a fucking job.
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Make sure to only do that temporarily and only if it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise just avoid using said website and look for alternatives.
Reminder for others that they can report to Web Compat
This is an especially common problem on Android. I have found many sites whose mobile version simply does not work in Firefox. It’s very frustrating.
Have you got an example I can test? I switched to Firefox mobile over a year ago and I can’t think of any time I’ve come across a site that didn’t work.
The most recent issue I had was Birds and Beans “manage subscription” page so I don’t think you can test that without a coffee subscription. But here is a screenshot:
I’m not sure why it says “nightly” as I’m on the stable version.
This isn’t Firefoxs fault though, is it? Just a bad Website putting arbitrary restrictions in place
Not Firefox’s fault at all. Just a website not following web standards.
I also feel their number grew in the last year. I’ve recently tried using Mull again (mobile firefox privacy-focused fork) after using Bromite for a year, and it was so unbearable I had to switch back. I’d say I had less websites that worked than ones that did not
Unfortunately tracker blocking can lead to even more issues as many sites have started relying on it for basic functionality.
We should add another E… Embrace, extend, extinguish and enshittify.
Mr. Lahey?
“Eye am the liquor, Bobandy.”
That was Internet Explorer 20 years ago and look where we are now.
I personally can’t remember the last time I had issues with a site on Firefox in the last few years since I switched.
Chrome turning into Internet Explorer was something that I didn’t foresee some years ago.
Heck they have literally done that with Edge lol.
Discord and spotify web versions don’t work on Firefox for me. On discord in can’t connect to a call and Spotify doesn’t play songs or it takes a long time after pressing play for the song to start playing.
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The teams web app was borked for me on Firefox at one point. Idk if it’s still like that. Also Google Chat or whatever tf it’s called now disables a bunch of features on Firefox.
Still worth it to switch. 99% of websites work just fine. They basically have to intentionally design sites to not work with FF.
Ah yes wtf is Teams doing!? Some arbitrary features are blocked on Firefox, like you can’t direct call someone but you can be part of a group call 🤪
But I don’t think Microsoft’s online suite is a reference, most of it feels buggy or bloated at best.
Those are literally restrictions placed by the site in question, not a limitation of Firefox. Get a user agent changer, and set the user agent to the “required” browser, and magically it will work!
When I was using Firefox I felt like spoofing user agent was essential to make websites work the way they were supposed to. I could loose some rounded corners here and there but it was still better that some features completely missing
I keep seeing this sentiment on these posts, often with a suspicious number of up votes that don’t seem to correlate how many up votes everything else in the topic get.
Literally the only place I have EVER seen this issue was a state toll road website, which was using a timezones that didn’t actually exist but chrome added (and documented on the Internet to trick people into using it). A simple email to the website with an explanation and the correct timezones name and the problem was fixed.
Pretty sure a lot of this sentiment is either astroturfing, or people passing on astroturfing trying to be helpful.
Yeah, I’ve been exclusively using Firefox dev edition for the last 2-3 ys. I can’t remember one site not functioning properly apart from the odd visual bug from time to time.
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I’ve started making the switch. The only thing that’s holding me back fully is the google search function. I just don’t get as accurate results on Firefox as I do on Chrome
While I largely agree with the options that Tuta provides, I think the article could’ve been more succinct and to the point if they condensed all the Firefox forks like PaleMoon and WaterFox under one category. Also, I’m not sure if Brave should be on this list, not just because of their Chromium foundation but also because of their use of cryptocurrency, something I consider very suspicious and unsustainable. Finally, I question whether DuckDuckGo should be on the list. True, they are more private when compared to Google and all, but aren’t they limited to what they can block through their contract with Microsoft? I remember hearing/reading something about that.
I use Firefox but there are web apps that just plain do not test on it. Office 365 is one of those and Word is basically non functional…more than normal.
I can’t even log in to Lemmy properly on FireFox for mobile. And many drop down type selection boxes across tons of websites also do not work on either mobile or desktop versions of FireFox; this one irritates me most, because this was an issue years ago when I first was using it before Chrome existed and one of the reasons I originally switched to Chrome over FF at that time. It’s been over 10 years and still hasn’t been fixed.
why the Freenet logo and not I2P? Freenet is not designed with privacy in mind, unlike I2P which literally stands for the Invisible Internet Project.
As a user of Seamonkey - which you’d know as Mozilla, the app that Mozilla the company ditched for being ‘too hard’ - I have to say no. While I trust they’re not as evil as Google, I don’t trust them to do the hard part of actual software maintenance.
It’s a shame that Firefox is still heavily reliant on Google. It’s not chrome but we really do need some competition in this space that doesn’t feed the monster and is also not safari lol.
In my former job, I had no choice but use Chrome due to work rules. If I couldn’t have installed uBlock at the time, it would have killed me. So I hope for people like me, there’s at least an adblocker that has a small chance of working in Chrome.
Vivaldi has an adblocker built-in but has no cosmetic filtering unfortunately. I did ask and they said it’s been prioritised given the MV3 problems.
If they were in my situation, installing another browser was not an option, but installing Chrome extensions was still possible.
In that case, it’s best to hope the workplace enables the enterprise policy.
Well that sucks.
I’m curious if “must use browser X” is a deal breaker for many people.
Would you quit a job for forcing a specific browser?
For me it was the OS. We agreed, when I started my job, that I would use Windows but that I would eventually switch to Linux, which I did a few months in. If they wouldn’t allow it, although agreed upon, I would have left - which I did anyways, but for totally different reasons
Without this fiasco, i would’ve still use chrome. Yeah, now i use firefox.