Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. Then I'll get called over when the computer starts acting screwy. If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation. They didn't do that and probably never will.
If my parents get a new machine, the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.. On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. I just try to make sure they use a browser that isn't horribly unsafe.
We should all do this for people we care about. Don't ask them what browser they prefer. Odds are they don't know or care. Don't try to convince them to install Firefox themselves. They won't. Just do it for them. Think of it like picking up a rusty nail that's on their lawn. Sooner or later they're going to step on that thing if you don't.
My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks on her toolbar in Safari had gone missing (presumably she accidentally deleted it). After I added it back and she clicked it to see that it opened properly, she was satisfied that I had fixed the internet. To her, when she opened Safari, it was all just "the internet"; she didn't differentiate between the local browser UI and the web, let alone different elements on a single webpage being from different sources.
It was even worse in the 90s/00s - on Windows, the IE browser icon was literally labeled “The Internet”
iirc there was a story in The Onion about someone who “accidentally deleted The Internet” on their Windows system and the whole Internet stopped working. They were so sorry, maybe it was in the Recycle Bin, there was still hope for the world, lol
There’s this: [All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash | The Onion](https://youtu.be/lvpuT3aoypE?si=UI8wTzkNXdEKMO4x) which is pretty funny but doesn’t contain the idea of moving the internet into the trash bin… I feel like I remember that from somewhere too though
This isn't about users not being tech savvy enough. Ad Blocking has always been a safety issue. Many of the ransomware infections in enterprises were actually drive by ad driven exploit networks.
Sandboxes get better, yeah, but this is akin to leaving your door open in a neighborhood with violent crime and then saying I built this awesome laser guided Kevlar chamber that scans introducers upon entry instead.
Low resolution conflation of things is a very understandable outcome. It’s a lot of vocabulary to absorb to speak precisely about UI in general. I’m glad your grandmother has someone like you in her life.
The better thing would be to hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network. If they cannot do that, they should not be in business selling ads then.
Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.
This. There should be no intermediary liability protections for any paid or monetised content: as soon as a platform is either charging for placement or paying the creator, they should be treated as a publisher and held responsible.
Not just the networks (although preferably also the networks) but also the publishers.
If a newspaper took money to advertise blatant, obvious scams, I assume a judge would consider them at least partially responsible for restitution, if not an accessory to the crime. Looking away really hard (and delegating the task of looking away really hard) shouldn't get you out of this.
Hold the publisher responsible, they can then hold the platform responsible, thus creating a market for platforms that actually fight scams. Right now, there is limited incentive to fight scams, as the scams still drive revenue. If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
Given the colour of the text, I just wanted to say that I agree 100% with this:
> If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
If they don't want to take responsibility then they should guarantee that the responsible party have provided valid credentials that can result in their being held responsible.
That would clear up the quagmire that is internet advertising pretty darn quick.
I am working on a hobby project to help me manage my Toastmasters clubs and Id love to get it into more hands because its genuinely helpful but more hands means more maintenance and opération costs. I asked Claude if I could charge for it and it basically said that as long as its a hobby project Im safe but once I start charging, then the Toastmasters organization could sue me or issue a cease and desist for using their IP to make money without permission, which makes sense. It did advise me to talk to a lawyer which I haven't done, but assuming it's right, then financial incentives causing other parties "harm" (for some definition of the word) are illegal.
In other words, I think the law wants what you and OP said to be true, but seems like it doesn't apply once you get big enough. Anecdotally, Amazon and Walmart and other big retailers seem to not be held responsible when they sell goods that dont work as advertised or even actively harm people.
This kind of thing has come up before with "murder for hire" advertisements [1]. The publishers were only found liable when the advertisement was very explicit. Seems like the bar is quite high and courts are currently unwilling to impose "undue burden" on publishers.
You start with the obvious cases of sending you to a domain that serves malware, sure there will be instance of fraud that will slip trough, but lets not let best be the enemy of good
This is bad enough for Americans, but things are a bit worse for those who aren't.
If my government tries to regulate, tax, or otherwise annoy one of these corporations, their billionaire owner will deposit a few million into the right campaign fund and the Big Cheeto will tariff us, threaten to invade us, swear at us, send us ambassadors who swear at us, or start trying to rename bodies of water. (He'll probably do that anyways.) In general, it's bad enough for our business that we usually just let these companies do what they want and hope that, someday, the U.S. will regulate them properly. That's unlikely to happen anytime soon. (Note: Even Democrats get nasty when their campaign funding is threatened.)
In the meantime, look out for the people you care about and support anything that pries your data out of American fingers.
But they don’t. Google and others do vet ads, but when they don’t host them, the ads can change based on who is looking (clean ads for Google! Not for you!).
Google didn’t have this issue until they bought DoubleClick (text ads and they hosted). And they had pretty good privacy as they didn’t want to share shit.
> But they don’t. Google and others do vet ads, but when they don’t host them, the ads can change based on who is looking (clean ads for Google! Not for you!).
That sounds like a problem that Google should have already solved. Maybe that's why "Don't Be Evil" got the boot.
Define "validate". App Review is really only good at catching things that make Apple uncomfortable for financial reasons, or make their attorneys worried (trademarks, copyright, etc.) The sandboxing is what makes the App Store pretty unsuitable for distributing actual malware (the kind that can do stuff to your device without you knowing).
Well if they cannot technically differentiate malicious, then they should drop that business niche. They receive money for that, similar as selling stolen goods.
Newspapers and magazines didn't sell ad space to obvious crooks back in the day. Scammers didn't have tv ads. Obviously there was somebody watching them. The trashy scams were reserved for the real scummy publishers: comic books.
How would one hold Google accountable? By fining them $1bn? $10bn? $100bn? To them it is just the cost of doing business.
We're beyond holding huge companies accountable. The only way they could be held accountable is if there was personal risk involved for the CEOs. There isn't.
At this point, breaking them up into smaller companies. Then start fining the individual companies so the balance sheets feel the fine more. Increase the fines exponentially for each violation.
If a scam ad is found, at the very least, require them to disclose business records to show how much money the scam ad made (revenue, not profit), and make them repay it. Leave it up to the platform whether to recoup the paid-out share from the publisher or not.
If they are caught doing it repeatedly without taking adequate measures to stop it, treat them as an accessory to the crime.
If I am the evil corporations owning the state I would love to make all citizens pathetic cynics who think they have no capability for change and therefore bears no responsibility.
In Japan, the identity verification is quite strict to subscribe to a voice/text capable phone line. Still yet to get robocalls or spam texts. I'm sure they exist, but despite handing out my phone number to city hall and countless private businesses, I have yet to receive one.
On the other hand, enabling my Verizon eSIM is a surefire way to receive hourly "Potential Spam" calls, despite giving nobody outside of direct family my US phone number. Thankfully, I've convinced enough of my family to use Signal and we call/text through there instead.
Nowadays, I only turn on the Verizon line if I have to receive an SMS one-time code or call my broker.
Don't think the U.S. will ever solve this problem; people will just say something about privacy, the country's "too big" to combat spam at scale, etc. It's also too easy to get a phone number anonymously. A frequent phenomenon I've witnessed is that when someone blocks a phone number, the same caller contacts them again from a different number with the same area code.
Sadly does not apply to political organizations, which is probably the largest source of spam “mail” (to mention nothing of text/sms spam). The amount of crap stuffed into my mailbox every election season is insane.
You wouldn't hold a landlord accountable if it was a surprise that a crime took place, but if they were aware that some of their tenants were committing crimes and just "choosing not to ask about it," they could reasonably be called "accountable."
Telcos are regularly asked to give up information regarding crimes committed by their customers, see the Patriot Act for details - in some sense, we as a country have decided to hold them accountable for this (though, not spam).
Meta have been involved in a whole list of litigation that is at minimum adjacent to stalking/harassment, if not directly involving those things. I would need to look up to be more specific, though.
I know what you're trying to say, but you're saying it terribly.
If Ad Platforms don't want to be held responsible for the fraud that their platform literally delivered to the victim, then they should have KYC for all of their Customers that pay them money to deliver advertising to their victims. That way, shock fucking horror, someone or something might actually be able to be held responsible.
And if the argument is that there are many ways that scapegoats can be used and shell companies setup to avoid actual responsibility, then we'll know more about the next layer of regulation that's required.
Or we just give up and say that fraud is OK (which, I believe, is the current thinking in the US).
A problem is that the platform owners argue that this kind of stuff is why they need to put up a security gate that prevents you from installing whatever you want on your own device while also allowing you to install the malware from the ads (... maybe because they want to control what you can install more than they care about the malware?)
> On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use.
I did the same with my mom, but then her broker and doctor's websites started complaining that they will only run on a supported browser, i.e., Chrome.
I've gotten her to still use Firefox for most other things, but it's not easy.
It's off by default and has to be turned on per site, but will automatically stay on for subsequent visits. Test the site with it to be sure it works for your mom. Most sites that insist on enforcing Chrome-only user-agents run just fine on Firefox. I've encountered a few that run even better on Firefox than they do on Chrome.
You can try Brave, it's Chromium under the hood so it's usually accepted and has built in ad blocking, and a one click way to turn it off for a specific site if you have an issue.
> If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services
This is the crux of it.
If they can't block scammers from their own platform then they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place. The profit they make should easily cover it - unless they like profiting from promoting scams, in which case they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place.
It's not just elderly parents. I've sat in on many an incident where skilled people in accounts or HR similarly saw and ad and thought "I have to do this thing", leading to compromise.
Evidently whenever money and safety are opposed, money wins every time.
Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.
Your bank, school, doctor, and government would all still have websites. Companies would still sell things online. Video calls and chat systems would be there. All the websites run by donation or self-funding would be unchanged. Without ads, the worst parts of the internet might stop existing though.
> It's not just Google, the Internet stops existing.
Uh? No?
The internet existed before being overrun by corporate presence. It still does.
Advertising pays a lot, but take the ad money away and let it scale accordingly.
I love Brave's seemingly easy and automatic ad blocking, but turning off shields for important things like banking and government sites is a chore. I struggled with domain whitelisting (if I'm honest I gave up on it some time ago as the recipes I found online didn't work). So I can't recommend it for less technical people. It's a step away from being the easiest way to control all that annoying content that comes at you when you're trying to do something else.
Tangentially related, but has anyone else noticed a big increase in fraud attempts over the last year or two? I hardly remember any a while back, but I've gotten probably a dozen calls this year that go "hey this is AmEx please confirm your credit card number" or some such.
It's partially a product of the widespread availability of LLMs. Criminal organizations that would previously have been limited by the language fluency, scale, or technical competence of the labor available to them can now use LLMs to supplement their operations. It's also helping them target new populations that you're more likely to be in alongside traditional victims like the elderly, the desperate, previous victims, etc. They're pretty slow to adopt new technologies, so scam usage is still ramping up.
Phone call scams seem to ebb and flow depending on which 'sucker lists' you're on. Online scams appear to be persistently on the rise, both against consumers and organizations (businesses, non-profits, and governments). I suspect that LLM-AI will be a boon for scammers of all sorts, but particularly for phone and video-call scammers.
Every now and then I hear advice to the effect that saying even a single word to a robocaller will get your number flagged for more, so you should just answer silently and hang-up. Whenever I follow that advice, I get more and more calls. Then I start engaging with callers to waste their time and resources. I press numbers, try to get to speak to a human, and then generally mess with them if I do get a human. That usually takes care of the calls for a while.
The problem is, Microsoft and Google themselves are doing shady things. A full screen advertising for using OneDrive on Windows and a full screen random request to use Google App when doing a Google search on Safari comes to mind. Apple is no different, when I press my Bluetooth button, it opens Music on macOS.
I’m sure we can find rather strange things going on Ubuntu too and bending the definitions a bit, there are several pleads for donation like on Gnome, Vim and Wikipedia that are a bit questionable.
They send out someone in an unmarked van who doesn't have a locksmith license (at least in CA these are a legal requirement and they are required to show it to you). When you ask to see it they tell you they keep it at the office for "safety". That was the extent of my personal experience.
I've read that if you let them work on your property, they will claim your bog-standard lock is unpickable, and charge you an exorbitant amount to drill it (destroying the lock) and replace it.
Almost everyone who calls a locksmith is in a hurry, dealing with something unfamiliar, so people are susceptible to this.
Instead of getting a local locksmith, it's a "lead gen" service which charges the locksmith $100 or something to get your info. They're placed on the map, but aren't actually there.
The only thing that should come up is actual local locksmiths.
To give my example, if you search for locksmiths or plumbers or any sorts of trades you'll land on a page for "small family locksmith in your small suburb name". Except the site has thousands of urls with the same exact content and pictures, one for every suburb in Australia. Gary the small business owner does not live in my street.
As far as I can tell its a national company with an overseas call center, the scam is that it looks like a local company - at least they can sell a lead gen to someone that can open my lock.
I've had this happen to me personally on vacation - we were locked out of our rental car, asked a person at the nearby place to call a locksmith to get me back in, and they didn't quote price over the phone. When they got there, they popped the lock and then wanted $200, cash only so you couldn't chargeback, which I learned after the fact is completely outrageous for that service. They had a lot of fake Google reviews that were glowing, overshadowed by the real ones calling out the scam.
I've heard worse happening in other cases where they drill locks and then quote much higher than $200 after they do it, it's sadly common.
That's exactly what I would think if I were in trouble and hadn't done any research, but in fact it is not. When I needed a locksmith a few years ago, at night, it cost $70.
Specifically? Because it’s something people search for. Because it’s something people pay for. If the scammer can get you to pay for “a visit“ upfront, and never show up, they’ve made money.
>Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.
I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.
Nonsense. Before the advent of those first “you’re the 1000th visitor” banners or relatively harmless “worms” spready by literal .exe files sent by email in the early 2000s… most of the internet could be trusted by default.
And at that point the blast radius was so hilariously small, some rando compromising your computer was a nuisance versus a threat to your financial wellbeing.
Viruses were common on FTP sites and BBSs. They weren't all benign. DOS in particular had zero protections against damaging code. Bot armies hadn't been developed yet so malicious destruction was just as likely an outcome.
Yes, and what did the damaging code and viruses actually do in that era?
Software, OSs, and the internet at large were comically unsafe from a safety perspective. There was also a very high barrier of entry in terms of the skills required to take advantage of that, and very little incentive to do so compared to today or even 20 years ago.
> the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.
Does this run the risk of reverting with OS updates? History is full of OS vendors resetting defaults, whether that was maliciously intentional or inadvertently doesn't matter. If you set up Firefox as default browser yet the OS resets to using Edge, would your parents even notice?
Raspberry pi + adguard + tailscale could be a good solution for you. Browser agnostic, you get an admin dashboard to manage the white/blacklists, see logs of the attempts and other goodies. Bonus, this combination works on mobile too. The only nit I have is that after restarting the phone, tailscale may not auto-start.
A few days ago, my mother asked me to fix her YouTube because she kept getting something telling her to update. I looked at YouTube on her iPhone and saw an autoplaying video ad that displayed an animated fake system style pop-up button, designed to look like an important iPhone OS security update. The ad even showed an animation of the button appearing on the screen, making it look even more like a real system notification.
The kinds of banner ads that exist now are atrocious, as bad as they have ever been. Anything that masquerades as a legitimate internet or site service should be banned, I really detest the ones that are simply some sort of fake captcha, sign in, etc.
They must pay the best because so many old forums that are/were near and dear to my heart use them to pay for servers, hopefully because they only saw the profit number and didn't consider the consequences, but you never know.
> If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.
This has been solved on iOS. It’s not an ads problem.
It feels weird that everyone is talking like Google has banned adblocking in Chrome, when there's dozens of adblockers still in the extension store, including an updated version of uBO that works 90% the same.
Ad-blocking is a safety issue, but luckily you can still block them just fine.[1]
The only thing this heavily neuters is tracking blocking, but no one admits that because they know, deep down, that ~0% of the non-tech crowd cares, so it's not as good at stirring up outrage as being dishonest is.
[1] If anything gorhill is to blame for the safety issue, since he refused to update his extension in-place, so any distant relatives will have the adblockers you installed for them removed, instead of updating to the fully functional Mv3 version.
Or maybe there are more things using the same tactics / scammer's reach keeps increasing.
My parents "fell" for fundamentalism early (as kids - raised in it), for televangelists in their 40s, and Fox News in their 70s/80s. Fox News so recently only because they didn't get it very often until about 10 years ago when they moved into a retirement home (didn't have cable before that).
There’s a long way between perfectly functioning and dementia. I want to say that I hope you never find out, but the twilight of life is tough either way.
Normal cognitive decline comes gradually with age to most people. Dementia is more severe, often more sudden, and can be caused by a host of things, from Alzheimer's to brain injury. Regardless, you're not going to take away somebody's computer because their brain isn't quite as sharp as it once was.
I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
We had a glimpse of that antitrust future on the horizon with the previous admin. This spooked all the big tech weirdos so much that they put their weight behind the other guy and, well, they won. Antitrust is dead for another generation. Yay.
I couldn't agree more with your point. But also, precisely because I agree with you, I'm flashing back to Proton CEO Andy Yen claiming that Trump would be great on tech anti trust and an improvement on what came before, which was ridiculous from the moment he said it but symptomatic of a certain kind of tech bro mindset.
If only the DNC was interested in promoting candidates that work for the people and aren't just interested in lip service while mostly maintaining the status quo. Things could have been different. Imagine what 8 years of Bernie and a functioning Congress might have accomplished.
I didn't make that claim, you misread what I said. I explicitly mentioned a functioning Congress because that's a necessity, a functioning executive branch is not enough. We are in agreement.
We're in agreement, so what did I misread? :D The point is, there's not some realistic, single-point "if only" scenario where "things could have been different", because the problem is largely Congress.
Agreed. But on the topic of antitrust specifically, Lina Khan was absolutely doing the work, and Biden 100% deserves credit for appointing her. He could've chosen some do-nothing loser like everyone before him did, but he chose Khan.
However, it's generally hard for me to give Biden much credit for anything, however, given his own and his party's general complicity with decades of genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Same for Harris.
That and oversight of many more atrocities also carried forth by his predecessors really puts a damper on any good deed and make it hard to buy into any narrative of authenticity when it comes to politics that benefit human beings.
I also generally think Bernie would have played hardball on antitrust and given what we got with Biden, I'd prefer to have seen what Bernie could have done with the time.
Terrible narrative. Lina Khan under Biden was more than willing to go after big companies. She was forced out because the American people voted Trump into office.
Eight years of Sanders would have left us with a far more gridlocked country. The man has virtually no political talent.
I love Lina Khan as much as the next guy. But as you've already pointed out, it's kind of pointless if the fundamental problem is a malfunctioning executive branch (and a federal government with far too much power). But I'm going to need receipts on your claims about eight years of Sanders.
More unique individual people donated to his primary efforts than any other candidate in history. Wouldn't this be indicative of some large amount of political talent?
I think people grossly underestimate "money is speech" that is spent by corporate interests. PACs and SuperPACs are something I've just never understood how their donations are not just bribes
Well, the current cronies that run the USA may seem to have won for the time being, but sooner or later the population in the USA will realise how much fudged up the orange clown is. Only about 30% approval rating - that will continue to dwindle.
There’s a partisan floor¹ that’s in the neighborhood of 25–30% where people will vote for their party no matter what. The 2004 Illinois Senate election was a good test case where when the Republican nominee went down in self-inflicted flames and was hurriedly replaced with Alan Keyes, who had no in-state constituency and, being Black (which, no doubt was the cynical reason for his recruitment), eliminated the racist choice. He gained a mere 27% of the vote which is likely the floor for a major party candidate in a contested broad-population election (smaller-level partisan elections, whether for single congressional seats or in small states, generally have demographically skewed populations which can result in wider margins).
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1. Although as I think about it, this may only be valid on the right side of the spectrum given the data points.
The Democrats already tried out the idea that Trumpism would blow over and everything would go back to "normal" with Biden's 2020 campaign, but it didn't really turn out that way. Right-wing reactionary politics has been overrepresented in the US since its founding due to state based representation, and I expect that this will continue to be the case for as long as the US exists in its current form.
They'll immediately fall for the next such guy. Republican voters aren't actually reconsidering their views. Corporations and oligarchs have known no major blowbacks in decades and keep winning on every front, further eroding the Republic and its institutions little by little. And they won't stop until all that's left of America is an empty shell, a dead state like Russia, a sandbox for the Epstein class.
Humans have figured out an easy medicine to reduce weight, which is the number 1 causal factor in morbidity/mortality.
There are also novel cancer immunotherapy medicines that are drastically increasing quality and quantity of life for cancer patients, like keytruda and blinatumomab.
I think there's a remarkably clear precedent at least for browsers, which is having Android users pick from a list of browsers instead of having Chrome as the pre installed default. That's already been done previously with Microsoft and I believe with search on Apple, andI think it would reverse the Mozilla market share trend overnight.
I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.
I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).
And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.
This type of populist message seems like such an easy path to popularity for an aspiring politician. You don't have to be a leftist like Bernie Sanders to be a trust buster. Just acknowledge that almost every large corporation has seemingly made it their mission to make life worse for the citizenry in the name of profit and vow to fight it.
Anyone running with that type of message will be squashed by said "every large corporation". They will finance their opponent(s). They will run deep fakes against them. Until "every large corporation" is prevented from spending unlimited money, things will not change.
What would limiting corporations from contributing more than the total of max donation per employee? I've never seen numbers from that, but I've heard people discuss it.
That's so long ago I honestly can't see that being true. It used to be a funny home video hosting platform in those days. The quality of content you can get on youtube these days is incredible.
Okay, Google bought YouTube earlier than I remembered (2006). For some reason, I remembered the purchase being somewhere around 2009-2012.
So, if I may change my opinion, early YouTube was better, despite being owned by Google. I feel like the platform has been atrocious in the last decade or more. Constant clickbait, a new NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends ad every 15 minutes, politics being injected into every other video, creators trying to game the algorithm to escape the rat race, the obnoxious algorithm itself, and now I am getting an absurd amount of LLM generated videos.
I would not dare claim there is not great content though. I am listening to a YouTube video as I type this. Though, I have been listening this particular creator since 2006, if that tells you anything.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel YouTube is just getting the slow squeeze of death -- like everything Google wraps its tentacles around.
The LLM scripts has been a plague but I don't think that's Google pushing it, it's youtubers optimizing to create the most minutes of video as quickly as possible.
Paying for views is both why we have high quality content, and why the site is so gamed.
Really? I don't remember it from back then, but right now must be better in terms of the content available, the player (not the shorts one; that's awful), automatically generated subtitles with transcripts that can be searched, automated translation, dubbing, etc.
I would enjoy automatically generated subtitles more if they weren't wrong about 10% of the time.
I constantly get something like "Today, we are going to discuss which model is better at programming. Is it an tropic's latest model, Cloud Fable? Or is it, Open AI's Chat G pity?"
It's as though Google hired my dyslexic ass to write the subtitles. It trips me up even more because I can't tell if I misread something or the chat messed up sometimes.
I cannot comment on translation or dubbing. English is the only language I can somewhat understand.
Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business? I’m for less consolidation in the tech industry, but I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
Bonus: they might not be able to fund the anti-user behavior like sunsetting MV2, all of the "anonymous audience tracking" that prevents any other advertiser from identifying you (but Google's scale still can), aggressively pushing 'sign in with Google', retracting their stance on blocking third party cookies, continually removing settings that drive user control, and more.
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Short answer? Yes.
Long answer? Definitely.
> I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
I see you have an unconventional definition of the word "great". I'll take that to mean you're an outside-the-box thinker, so you're in a good position to understand that a break up of Google would radically change all the markets they're dominant in.
If Android 'dies' post-breakup, that would leave a gaping hole in the economy. iOS might fill it, but regulators would need to break them up too. Say iOS 'dies' too, would we all collectively just stop using smartphones? Obviously not. Entrepreneurs who can see opportunity will raise money and hire the right people to build a new OS, foundations will apply for grants to maintain Android or iOS forks, industry standards will form to improve interop and reduce development costs, etc. The sky's the limit!
Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? It never had a business model besides "support Google's monopolies", so it shouldn't survive (IMO). Lots of browser vendors already use Chrome's open source codebase, so those orgs can fork it, or they can collectively come together to fund development, or apply for government grants or something.
I think that Chrome development team members will have plenty of new job and business opportunities available to them if this ever happens. New markets will open up for browser tech that didn't exist before, and I think everyone will come out winning in the end, even users who would never even consider paying money for a web browser.
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? It never had a business model besides "support Google's monopolies", so it shouldn't survive (IMO)
You just explicitly claimed that Chrome has definitively a viable business model as a stand-alone company ("Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely."). Now you claim the opposite...
Is the argument also as strong for the other cases?
Sorry, I forgot this was HN and wasn't obnoxious enough in my reply.
The original question was:
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Please take note of the absence of the word "standalone" in that quote.
My response to the response to my response (henceforth responses['bogwog'][1]) was thus:
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? ...
Please note the truthiness of `'standlone' in responses['bogwog'][1]`
From this evidence we can surmise that my point was 'Chrome' the non-business can't survive as an independent business, because Chrome is not a business. Likewise, the 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' you get on an airplane can't survive as an independent business were we to break up the airline, as 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' isn't a business.
But can Chrome the project survive without Google? I say yes, just like Cheez-Its can survive without being complimentary additions to overpriced flights. For why I think that, please refer to my other comment in this thread.
No one is paying for browsers. Maybe there is a market for enterprise support contracts for it, but this is not going to replace the money spigot of Google Ads. If I were to guess, Chrome "as its own business" would go bust very fast, with the staff being picked up by Microsoft (to support Edge, which basically is a Chrome fork) and Apple (to make Safari decent).
Android I'd say could survive, at least as long as it is bundled in the same entity that handles Play Store, that thing is a money printer. Without it... I'd say Samsung won't care, they already have their own marketplace and mess around in AOSP to an unholy degree, and everyone else will either attempt to fork Android like some Chinese brands did, go for Graphene or go bust like HTC.
Youtube... they probably got enough Premium subscribers now to keep the lights on, the problems are going to start when they have to separate their infrastructure. Bandwidth is still insanely expensive and at the moment they benefit a lot from Google being the top dog, able to tell even the largest ISPs "peer with us for free, or else". Without that leverage, with their own infra, bandwidth costs are going to eat them alive.
We've done this in the past. AT&T was broken up into the regional baby bells. Eventually, the baby bells started to get absorbed back into the monolith AT&T again. Nobody stopped it. I assume that the fact that few people use landlines and there are more than one provider of communication services where the AT&T voltron is no longer a monopoly.
The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though
Trustbusting is like weeding your garden. It's just a chore that must be done periodically to counteract the natural tendency of markets to degenerate into monopolies. It's not something you do once and then never again, it's something that you have to do regularly, forever, if you want a functioning market.
Your "do regularly" got me thinking. There's only been 2 companies in the US to have been busted up, Standard Oil (1911) and ATT (1984). Microsoft (2000) got close but cut a deal. So yeah, we haven't been tending garden very well
This won't ever happen, the US and the US government can't afford to weaken its corporations and risk impact their data collection, social control, influence and profitability world-wide.
Sadly you are right, but the people can still learn. There is a reason more and more folks move towards De-Googling. This is also a world-wide movement - it is not just the US government. Tons of lobbyists in other countries support mega-corporations dictating terms to us. Just look at EU legislation recently in the news again - constant betrayal of EU citizens here. All paid for EU taxpayers. The EU commission works for these mega-corporations.
The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.
In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.
I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
Why are these two points, countering China and keeping Europe safe, the framing for this? Who is needed to counter the US and keep foreign countries, like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and so on, safe from the US? And who needs to be strong to counter the US's state-sponsored terrorism via Israel?
One could argue that it’s all the centralization and monopolistic behavior which hinders tech development in the usa. So a breakup might have short term stutters but long term gains.
Why would you be "torn" on this? Competition breeds innovation, and monopolies are literally the opposite of competition. A break up of big tech doesn't destroy anything or reduce economic activity, it can only accelerate it.
America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.
> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.
Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.
What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.
> know (academic) international relations Realism.
or you not knowing less about economics then you think
> to counter China and keep Europe safe.
eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).
The US just added a colony in Venezuela in cooperation with their local Reichskommissar and is looking to secure its oil. American perception of their country is quite something.
The realpolitik is not lost on American HN readers. It's like you say - there's a balance between maintaining a competitive economy and a fair one.
In this instance, should we let AdSense persist as a platform? It does turn out lots of revenue, but it does so by creating a closed ad space economy that Alphabet manages. This not only gives Google and YouTube unfair advantages on their own ad service, but it also creates a blind auction for businesses that don't know what their advertisements are worth. The entire system is deliberately and artificially segregated from competitors to AdSense.
We see this throughout America's economy, with Apple and Microsoft too. It undoubtedly incurs fiscal damage to legitimate competitors that should be given fair ground to offer a better service. But since the US federal government encourages consolidation, all of America's services get described as "enshittified" by their customers while China innovates.
Hahaha, today I learned that we need to keep Google's advertising income intact (~75% of their revenue) so that the US economy doesn't fall apart. We can't stop projecting these ads onto people's eyeballs, or literally the entire world goes to shit! AHAHAHAHA
> I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
Market share appears to be hovering around 4%, which sounds small but that is still a massive amount of people, over 200 million users. It is even more impressive considering it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users, people overwhelmingly just use what is already installed. That's a huge number of users earned rather than inherited.
I use firefox and sometimes safari. I had to install chrome recently, and I don’t understand how people stand it. It’s a half-assed attempt to reimplement windows 95 era preload spam. (Or non-decrapified win11).
I don’t understand how it has any market share. It’s like finding out that 80% of people voluntarily install browser toolbars that force penis pill ads down your throat, and then there are a bunch of HN fanboys saying that all other alternatives are worse.
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
> They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari)
They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".
> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome
Very few people go to that page anyway.
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
> They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
QFT. The biggest impediment to Firefox's success is the Mozilla Org, which sees it as a cash cow to fund a zillion projects no one wants (sacrificing the future of the browser everyone wants).
Silly take. Chrome does extremely well on Windows because every Google site, from search to Youtube to Gmail to Docs nudges people to install it. Without that 99% of people would just stay on Edge.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
This is a consequence of browser monopolies, established by Microsoft in the 90s: everyone should have to pay for a browser and make a deliberate choice in vendor. The fact that they're free and subsidized by large businesses in other markets, rather than being a product you choose to buy, is a concrete example of monopolistic market distortion.
Doesn't Mozilla foundation have millions of dollars, including paid for by Google? "Linux" is better capitalized, "Wikipedia" is sort of open source, what else ranks above Mozilla?
Firefox works everywhere I point it to, for now. "Let the user modify their own software" does not cost extra.
Being beholden to Google who might decide that the risk of antitrust is lower than the price they are paying for that search box is a pretty precarious place to be in.
The series of own goals is a bigger problem. They should spend their $ on FF and allow direct donations that only go to FF and not to their hobby projects.
I've been using Firefox as my main browser since I switched from Windows to Linux.
No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.
I've been using Firefox since the beginning and will continue using it. I only use Chrome for occasional testing, but close to 100% of the time, everything works in Firefox unless an overzealous add-on breaks a page and then I simply disable it to get going again.
I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.
To a degree, sure, but is it really 'MITM' if the site you are trying to visit has chosen to add cloudflare into the middle?
You may as well say all load-balancers are MITM because you might connect to a different host on each attempt and there's a man in the middle influencing your connection.
What makes it any different if the website executed the same logic cloudflare is on their own box?
The CLI tools for automation are still a pain to use and missing functionality, which also means LLMs use it less; Claude gives up when it sees Chrome isn’t installed unless I specifically tell it to try and use Firefox.
I created an automation tool recently for taking screenshots (for SOC2 reporting, hopefully tptacek is proud), and getting it working with FF on the CLI was very painful (but necessary since I needed my cookies!)
I switched to Firefox like 6 months ago. I’m happy with it even though Chromium is a better engine imo. What Google is doing with Chrome is unacceptable.
Such a wonderful take on Firefox. The only thing it is really missing to make it perfect for everyone is proper sync not just on one computer but across systems.
Without wanting to sound rude: you're talking about browsers – serious business. Most hackers – I feel – need a bit more than 'I strongly suggest it' to even consider switching to a nascent browser :D
The main issue is security. The browser is the most sensitive piece of of software you can run on a machine. It’s susceptible to both supply chain and JS attacks and a huge target for both of them.
it’s a firefox fork. ‘most hackers’ would research it no matter what was typed on a msg board prior to installing. the first step is knowingg about it. personally, im a big fan and daily drive it on my personal systems. but I do find their tab groups implementations to be a bit subpar.
Yeah, consider the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if an existing browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
I feel the opposite, the more chrome abuse their dominance the closer they move to a tipping point where enough people become browser interested to return to browser wars. It's likely one of those things where it has to go to far, then change will happen fairly quickly.
By the time FF isn't a thing we'll have AI distilling site content for us and removing all the bullshit and there won't be anything site operators can do about it. And it'll use sandboxed browser instances that are immediately deleted
I know it's more infrastructure, but just use pi-hole and then it doesn't really matter what browser you use, if we're just talking about pop ups and malicious ads.
I use firefox on all devices, but there are two notches against it in my book:
Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.
Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:
>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.
I've had the issue on multiple phones. Firefox nightly seemed to fix it for a while but it suffers from it too after a while. I need to test if it's UBO or the sister comment that says closing tabs and restarting helps. It's only on certain sites I really notice it, maybe JS or video heavy sites. NYTimes in particular.
Vanadium is a good browser but I wish it had Firefox's Private Mode toggle, for permanent private mode *
It's fiddly to even manually wipe history in Vanadium as it defaults to the '15 mins' option, and then it tries to suggest a subset of sites it thinks you want to retain data for **
* (Yes I know about the suboptimal workaround of the intent shortcut)
I stopped using Firefox when it had massive performance issues (CPU and memory) to the point it was unusable. Chrome in comparison was lightning fast and since then I somehow cannot get myself to use Firefox though I know they likely have fixed those issues long time ago. I have Firefox installed but never open it.
There was a period in time, few years ago, when I was going back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, driven by alternate paranoia about privacy vs performance. These days I don't really have to. Firefox on Android, at least for the phones I regularly used, like several OnePlus from 7T up and now razr ultra, has been very stable. Only blip was the one month I was on Pixel 10- turns out they have special hardware optimization for Chrome that cripples Firefox on Pixel 10 otherwise. All the more reason to (return the phone and) stick to Firefox.
Same. I found Firefox was fast on Windows at the time, but on Mac it was so slow (compared to Chrome), and had weird non-native scrolling for the longest time. As a Mac user it felt like they developed for Windows, and occasionally do some work on the Mac app too.
I also was a Firefox user, but Mozilla killed Firefox many years ago. I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio in order to watch videos (well, hear audio) on youtube. Chrome worked fine. At that moment in time I knew mozilla no longer cared about the users. (I use thorium though, so actually I can still use ublock origin fine. But I am sad that I ended up with the evil Google empire. There is no real competition against it anymore, sadly enough.)
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.
> I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio
I am 99% sure Firefox will run just fine without systemd, or OpenRC half of Gentoo would be with pitchforks and torches.
It isn't correct, either, that it requires PulseAudio; I'm running FF with PipeWire, for example. But perhaps let's steelman that to "does not work with ALSA". I'm not sure what the objection to PA would be. It appears you can run FF under an adapter that will backport FF's PA output to ALSA — so it is possible to do —, I'm just not fathoming what the objection to Pulse is. (Or for that matter, its successor, PipeWire.)
Um.... If I learned anything from Apple, the best and brightest don't matter. Capitalism forces the best and brightest to make apps for the walled prison because the masses saw someone dancing with colorful backgrounds.
I do know a few perpetually single people working in academia using some obscure Linux distro(btw my company is 90%+ Fedora).
I am completely over thinking HN nerds can cause an uprising. Somehow the aristocrats have almost no power in democracy and capitalism. Power is held in 0.1%ers and the masses.
Firefox is a terrible browser. The engine is alright, and good just because it's not the monoculture. The browser is terrible. When you open it up in a fresh profile, it starts asking you to sign up for things and spend money.
I feel like with the advent of vibe coding, the bar to making your own browser is gradually lowering. People are already making all sorts of useful "houseplant programming" to serve their own pain points. Sooner or later, agentic coding will actually become really good and people will be able to just vibe code a whole browser in Rust or something that addresses the exact pain points that power users have.
The core will have to still be a solid battle tested thing. Imagine having to worry about if your vibed browser is quietly dropping some elements. Firefox and Chromium browsers are valuable because they are the targets, if a site doesn't render properly in them, it can be said that the site is wrong.
If everyone runs a vibe coded browser engine that evaporates and you might as well just have sites serve a bunch of markdown for LLMs to render in whatever inconsistent way they choose.
Vibe coding is obviously not quite there yet right now. But in the future it will be. The output of agents will be just as correct and rock solid as the software from the most experienced software developers. We'll also have the additional advantage of there being existing browsers to use as an oracle to test against to ensure that nothing regresses.
I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it.
Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.
No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.
Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users.
This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
No need to be revisionist. Chrome brought amazing work to the table. The multiprocess, sandboxed system was incredible - it's not to say that Chrome was the first (IE did it earlier) but it was certainly way ahead of Firefox for a long time. Chrome is the reason we have Seccomp V2 on Linux. Chrome made "software is always up to date" the standard. Before Chrome, Blackhole and PoisonIvy absolutely ruined people's computers - click to play Java, click to play and sandboxed Flash, etc, were massive improvements to every day user security, probably some of the biggest security improvements to computers in my lifetime.
Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
I remember for a while that Firefox had a single process architecture for all tabs. This often frustrated me as one bad tab could just crash the whole browser while Chrome used separate processes for each tab, prompting me to switch to Chrome for a bit. Firefox caught up ages after chrome, and now I went back to them over the manifest v2 stuff.
Indeed. Around that era I had a fun little "crashmybrowser.com" toy site that had a few different JS tricks you could click that would absolutely wedge your browser (any browser, at the time). This had come after years of my being vocally annoyed that there weren't better guardrails around Javascript. Each of the functions was based on a real-world failure case.
Chrome was the first browser to be immune to all of those functions.
Mozilla really screwed the pooch not long after. Their biggest single misstep was forcing automatic updates in corporate networks. At the time, they still had pretty good adoption in the kinds of environments that had a couple of people somewhere deciding what everyone was allowed to run on the company computers. Chrome had already moved to forced updates, so these environments went to Firefox. When Firefox decided to follow Chrome, they no longer had that differentiation, and corporate IT had to choose between two browsers that both had automatic updates, but one of them had frequent memory and performance problems.
I've happily returned to Firefox a few years ago and don't have Chrome installed on any device I control.
Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead.
Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had better privacy controls.
I doubt there are many things in this universe that are unambiguously good, but Chrome's sandboxing is certainly as close as anything.
You can make your arguments about noscript if you'd like (I have a great respect for the project) but I think it was essentially irrelevant to user security at the time, real users were really harmed by malware that exploited Firefox, Java, and Flash, and Chrome killed every one of those attack paths in virtually no time at all.
Computers were far more dangerous before Chrome. You watch old TV shows and it's a joke that people would visit a site and get hacked - that's unrecognizable today, it simply doesn't happen. It used to, Chrome changed that.
I agree that on a large scale, Chrome made browsing safer for the general public at the time. But for me it made things slower, use more RAM, waste more bandwidth on ads, didn't provide meaningful security improvements, and was a big downgrade in privacy. The only time I've been successfully attacked through a browser was when a Chrome extension sold out and became adware. And Google is now deciding for a frighteningly large part of the public exactly how much security and privacy they should get.
> Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead.
This is true, but this is why we create faster and faster PCs, so our software can do more. The cost was because you were getting new safety features. Want the app to be fast, able to show you lots of tabs with no delay? That takes RAM and CPU. The CPU and RAM are there to be used for features the user wants. It's actually 100% ok if a computer has to work really hard to run an app as long as that app is designed well, it means the user is making it do lots of useful work. That's what the computer is there for.
The "Just buy a new computer" excuse doesn't actually make the tradeoff no longer a tradeoff. The cost is still real, you're just putting a price tag on it (then ignoring the price, along with any alternative tradeoffs).
It is especially true for projects like Firefox which have access to massive funding since these attract the sort of people who consider those funds 'wasted' because they can be used to do so much for 'the common good'. Mitchell Baker - the utterly incompetent CEO - considered Firefox an afterthought because what the world needed was more NGO activism and what she needed was 400% more money for herself [1].
Wikipedia/Wikimedia is another example of a project with massive funding with similar problems even though the latter has a (not so) BDFL.
Wikimedia might be not perfect, but Wikipedia is still one of the most visited websites in the world and source of a lot of humanity knowledge in general.
Firefox on other hand is just something only nerds like us care about and only alive because Alphabet / Google is scared of antitrust legal action possibility.
And wikipedia runs off a tiny tiny fraction of what they raise. Almost all of the good on wikipedia comes in-spite of the organisation that owns it. Without the community pouring hundreds of thousands of hours into the project (unpaid) a year, wikipedia would be dead immediately. And if there was ever a time in its life that the project needed good leadership and innovative thinking, it would be now when AI is seriously threatening its survival. If people stop going to the site and instead go to the chat bots that scrape the site, there will be less and less incentive for the power users to continue maintaining wikipedia.
It was just less of everything than Chrome. First install experience for an average user was much better in terms of speed and snappiness. That was one of the keys to its success.
3. For a significant period of time (that continues to this day) websites were made using only Chrome as the target platform, turning Firefox into an eternal second fiddle that would occasionally break important/work websites.
Were you a Mac/Windows or Linux user? Personally I was an early adopter of Firefox and it worked great on Windows, but on Mac for a long stretch of time it was significantly slower than other Mac first browsers.
Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling for the longest time, and the UI was dated.
Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".
In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!
It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.
Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.
When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.
If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...
It's only strange because you interpreted "Chrome made the web so much better for everyone" as "Chrome had a webRequest API", which is probably not what the original poster meant.
The article we're discussing is about how extensions that didn't upgrade to Manifest v3, including uBlock Origin, are now being removed from the Chrome web store.
uBlock Origin didn't migrate to v3 because they use the webRequest API and didn't want to switch to the less-powerful replacement, declarativeNetRequest (uBlock Origin Lite uses the new API and is available in the store).
Based on this context, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the reasons the person I replied to believes Chrome isn't making the web better any more is due to the removal of uBlock Origin. And this is due to the removal of the webRequest API.
Few years ago when google announced their MV2 plan I moved to Firefox. I don't think in all this time I ever missed Chrome for anything in particular outside of maybe 1 or 2 websites that didn't have proper support.
Firefox is genuinely quite a good option. There are some Google-driven web proposals that they've refused to implement[0] (I'm sure I disagreed with some of them, though I forget which), but overall I've found that I've never really had to think about the browser: it's just a medium for the web.
They do offer some integrated services (which some would denote as bloat), though unlike Chrome, they do let you actually turn things off, which I'm very appreciative of -- they don't seem to be nearly as forceful as Google, who recently added a 4GB download to every Chrome install[0].
As I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more appreciative of platforms which don't try to redefine the problem scope, and instead just provide a platform for other things. GrapheneOS does this perfectly too.
I would question if those sites only worked with Chrome or just had some user agent filtering in place. There are Chrome only websites, but thankfully most things I encounter are just requiring a blessed id, which can be easily faked.
For Work they actively deactivate Linux users for "security reasons", or Microsoft makes their web apps intentionally hostile like disabling copy/paste or disabling photo/picture or file uploads for Linux users when you're allowed in the policies.
Turns out, it's bypassable.
They just check the User Agent and Sec-CH headers, so I built a small browser extension for Chrome that allows to modify those headers.
On top of that I built chromium-profiles [1], my tool for managing those isolated sandboxes so that I can tweak/change them based on the stupid policies per O365 tenant I have to work with.
So I use 3 different profiles for 3 different customers with 3 different security policies set for their organization... For being allowed to use a freaking web app.
That, for me, is the only reason I still have to have chromium installed. Microsoft stupidity.
I wish Firefox would focus on this sort of use case, like the "--pwa" and "--user-data" CLI flags and preinstallable extensions for those profiles. But it can't be done due to how they manage extensions with their own signing cert, how dev mode extensions are always cleared etc. Well, apart from Microsoft intentionally making webapps unusable in Firefox.
DNS blocking just isn't as good as a browser extension, because it can only block based on domain names. Pihole helps block ads on non-browser apps, but a real ad blocker extension in a browser is much better. I run pihole on my network, but I still run uBlock Origin on Firefox.
I'm fairly happy with uBlock Origin Lite. Sure the original was better but this one does the job as well. uBlock Origin Lite is a MV3 extension, by the same author.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... has a few of the more practical concrete examples. Namely content can load without the blocker being ready to filter, CNAME cloaking can't be handled properly (in Chrom* at least), and the filter rules aren't as flexible.
Interestingly, the rule count limits themselves do not (currently) seem to be much an issue despite it being one of the more common concerns on the original MV3 announcement.
> content can load without the blocker being ready to filter
This isn't an MV3 issue, it's a Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization. It was also true with MV2. In fact, MV3 has improved the situation because DNR rules are enforced immediately.
You could certainly argue that Chrome should allow extensions to block browser initialization, or that it should be user configurable - but it seems like an entirely defensible Chrome decision. Regardless, it's nothing to do with MV3.
> the filter rules aren't as flexible.
That's true, but they are still very flexible, and DNR makes some very nice features possible in uBO lite that were not possible in uBO.
For example, did you know that you can change your User-Agent with uBO lite? Go to the Custom DNR rules tab, and enter something like this to pretend to be Lynx on whatever.com:
Any MV3 issue could probably be summed up as "MV3 isn't so bad, just the implementation in Chrome" where Chrome defines MV3 (as it's not a W3C standard) and ships it as such.
That said,
> Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization
It's not "browser initialization" that was blocked, it was blocking network requests for pages until they were processed by all components in the chain. Notably, this could never apply applied to the browser or its internal pages itself.
Firefox is a great example about all of the above points: MV3 still supports blockingWebRequest there, so it gets the best of both worlds.
> did you know that you can change your User-Agent with uBO lite?
With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders. I'm not sure uBO ever bothered with this before uBO Lite, but it's a bit of a double standard to say "MV2 didn't offer blocking requests, that was a different API which happ
> and then the request had to wait until it was given to and processed by the blocker.
Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately.
> With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders
Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
> Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately.
There were several workarounds like suspendTabsUntilReady which helped greatly in this half of the problem. Then it would solidly stay permanently registered too. I'm pretty sure none of these work in Chrome anymore though, it was obvious they never intended these sorts of things to work that way.
Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just guarantee full filtering on startup as seen in this change https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1447551
> Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
What you said is so, it just might highlight more than what you'd like it to at the same time. That it was missing before had nothing to do with the difficulty or need for MV3. uMatrix had it for a while and Gorhill regretted it because it didn't change things like the user agent JS would report and such, hence he wouldn't port it over. The above filter has the same problems. Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher, that it's normal quality is why it was never in the old extension though.
> Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just support full filtering on startup
Sure, but as I said, it's a design decision, and nothing to do with MV3. I'm not trying to litigate it one way or the other.
I do think DNR is a good solution, and that request callbacks were a bad idea. That's my opinion - and the counterargument is obvious -- you can't do literally everything you could do in a callback declaratively. That doesn't sway me, I still think it's better!
> Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher
It was just a trivial example of using a powerful new feature that uBO doesn't have, not a full featured extension! The fact that it's possible at all is the point, it's cool.
You can definitely do anything that DNR can do with webRequest, nobody can dispute that. The point is that there are things you can do with uBO lite that you can't do with uBO (and vice versa!). It's not a straight downgrade, there are powerful new features.
The companies that don't want you using the lite version are waiting for full version to completely go away before blocking the lite one. No sense driving you to that. So, check back in a couple months and see if it's all still good.
I've seen some ads slip through the cracks nowadays, like I think Wikia ads for some TV shows I go to now have ads on them. They gave up on blocking Meta.
I believe the main things are that block lists have to be updated through the Chrome Web Store and there is an upper limit for things that can be blocked.
The main reason uBlock on Firefox works better is because of CNAME de-cloaking. All the tracking shit that appears to load as first-party, but isn't, can be correctly detected and blocked on Firefox. On Chrome it cannot, and with Google, Facebook, et al. encouraging site owners to move to these fake first-party conversion tracking solutions, your exposure to profiling has increased dramatically. You may see fewer ads but it does not do the same job.
Isn’t the idea that over time chrome will limit what ubo lite blocks? It will phase out all of its own ad networks so they’re not blocked first, but it’s possible they also start allowing third party ads through for a price.
Blame the brain damaged judge that literally told Google
"The Apple app store is not a monopoly because Apple has no competitors on their platform."
Google is just doing what they need to do to stop being a monopoly....by becoming a monopoly, because of a ruling that the internet actually celebrated. Which we can trace back to Epic not being happy that sideloading on Android wasn't perfectly frictionless.
(Note: Epic also sued Apple, but lost, because the Apple app store is not a monopoly.)
The Android/iPhone duopoly is nearly impossible to break because very few people want to carry two personal phones, and it takes only one app that they can't do without being only available on Android/iPhone to make it impossible to choose anything else. The app providers likewise have no incentive to support anything else because everyone has one of these two.
Bank apps are the prime example here that's unlikely to start supporting other systems. Public transit (and in some places parking) is another potential problem where even the unhinged "well just change banks to the one that does support your favorite phone" argument fails. ID apps (either governmental or de facto standards like the Swedish BankID) are coming too.
I’m irrationally angry with Mozilla for the way they’ve handled Firefox over the past few years. Clearly we need an independent, safe browser and there are no major alternatives for the common folk. Just let me pay a monthly fee to keep Firefox lean and fast instead of jamming AI tools and 3rd party integrations.
There's never been a better time to switch to Firefox. Hopefully soon we'll have another player in this space with Ladybird but for now, Firefox is almost necessary to use the internet unimpeded.
There are also some good Firefox forks out there, and I have been daily driving Zen for nearly a year. However, Librewolf and Floorp are both good options if you don't like Firefox's defaults or their push for more AI features (which you can turn off, to be fair).
Nah. One step at a time. That's the end goal, but by throwing everything all at once it's too easy to tell yourself it can't be done; so start with the worst offenders.
Reintroducing pen and paper to your note-taking repertoire might not be such a bad idea, anyway -- it's a much more creative medium than most digital, textual forms.
I suppose it's harder to cross-reference and find things, though I suspect you could utilize some sort of organizational system to mostly overcome that.
I really do think pen and paper will slowly regain prominence; I personally find that it can be much more liberating than digital media.
It's great to be able to use the page as a canvas, writing wherever you want, without having to meet the constraints of a text editor or the likes. Doodles help to visualize and understand problems, too.
Tangent for macOS is my current go-to for note-taking, and it works quite well: it's mostly just a Markdown editor, a tree structure of folders (which is really just a normal folder), and the ability to cross-reference and embed images.
I suppose the primary problem of note-taking apps is that they sort of have to be opinionated in some way to be useful (that's been my experience, anyway.) Markdown files are also guilty of this: they constrain you to a certain layout, which can either be a negative or a positive. Anything too complicated can be off-putting, whilst anything too simplistic can also be limiting.
It's a surprisingly complex field, and it could explain why there's so many different apps for it.
A similar life hack is the next time you have to give a presentation, you know, what is normally a brain numbing powerpoint slide deck sort of thing, rehearse and do the slides live on a chalkboard. The novelty of the spectacle means people will actually pay attention. Whiteboards are ok but really lack that visceral staccato punctuation that a chalkboard brings to the table.
Never, because you have to pay for pen an paper, and the most reliable way to determine what the internet will favor is simply "Does it cost money or show me ads". That is literally as deep as the internets interest goes.
That is up to you but I don't see why. Just ignore whatever these entities do, run you free OS with your free software when and how you want it and 'your kit' is yours without interference by hostile entities. You won't be able to access much of what those entities put out there but that doesn't matter once you realise their offerings aren't worth their cost.
The 'net is a big place with a lot of things going on. Drop the hostile actors and it is still a big place with a lot of things going on. The only problem you might encounter is once created by authorities which insist on you interacting with them through those hostile entities. I have thus far managed to use their applications - Swedish BankID and Dutch DigiD being the main ones - without needing to resort to any hostile entities - no Google accounts or Google services on my devices yet everything still works once I get rid of the nag screens telling me things won't work without the aforementioned.
In short, drop hostile entities and keep 'your kit'.
I’ve had quite a few issues with Firefox crashing or otherwise behaving poorly in recent years.
Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.
There is a very easy solution to this problem, it's called FireFox. Now if only Mozilla would stop messing with it and instead would turn it into a class example of speed and memory efficiency I'd be even happier. But it's pretty good and I'm running it routinely with way too many tabs open (in the 100's, on a 32G laptop). I do have to be careful about unloading stuff. So, kick the Chrome habit.
Ironically, this is a fantastic time to use Firefox with UBO. I made the switch back when Chrome first threatened to block UBO and it was clear they were just kicking the can. What I've come to find is most of the things with ads won't take the time to 'block' UBO on Firefox. Perhaps it is not a big enough segment to justify anti adblocking coding. Youtube seems to have given up trying to fight it. Most things just work. It has been a long time since I've needed to fire up Chrome for anything.
The reality is that Chrome users still have sufficient ad blocking so as to not be impacted by this. What will be interesting is if it stops being sufficient, at which point I think people will migrate. But until then, why would they? Most people don't really care if their extension is MV2 or MV3, they just want their youtube video to play faster.
I'm pretty sure it is just a matter of time before the first (open source?) extensions marketplace for Chromium fork extensions will hit the net.
A party like Helium or Brave might even already be working on it. Because while Google might not like it at all, a huge chunk of people love extensions like uBO and ease of use a little bit too much.
Funny how many people shit on Firefox in this thread. To some of us it was ALWAYS OBVIOUS this was going to happen.
Google is an advertisement company, after all. “Chrome is better still except for the shit we’re getting rammed down our throats”
Same here, not using firefox because of worse compatibility (maybe not their fault, many devs only test in chrome) and weaker security (maybe not their fault, they don't have as much money). I appreciate the people who do and help diversify the ecosystem though.
15 years ago: "why is google putting so much effort into building a web browser? it must be because they want to see the web grow and by extension more people will use their services"
I think the new features in MV3 are great, and UBO lite is great. The initial versions of UBOl worked, but definitely lost some power user features. Those are basically all back, it now has full scriptlet support, custom dynamic filters work, element zapper is back and you can now have custom dnr rules. That's a very powerful feature that doesn't exist in UBO.
The big loss for me with the mv2 deprecation was uMatrix, so I made my own replacement. It's a prototype, but you can try it if you like: https://github.com/taviso/matrix3
I think the real question is how have Edge and Mozilla shipped WebExtension support on Android, but Google hasn't. If other competent vendors can ship it then there can't be a technical reason, it must be a policy decision. I'm more open to hearing conspiracy theories about that than MV3 :)
Been using FF since they announced this. The only disadvantage I've found is that I think it consumes more memory compared against chromium based browsers.
Hoping my browser gets some love in the near future
I can imagine business reviews within Google that are seeing precipitous drops in Ad revenue given the uptake of AI Mode, which needs to be balanced out. And this becomes an easy tap that they can open, in the pretext of 'security', so Ad Words campaigns weren't getting rendered previously start showing up. If they'd only look at cracking down on malicious Ads rendered through their systems, it would be applause worthy, but I guess we're asking too much.
Thank you google for hosting the downloader that exists for making it easy to use for automated testing('cause all the other people still use it). Its the only use case that exists for me(actually my ai) to use it.
Weirdly enough, you can install the full version of uBO on Edge, and I think it's a great option for less tech savvy family and friends. It's basically chrome but without the 'make this your default browser' shenanigans.
The media just have to report the removal of ad blocking as a security/safety issue.
If users are made aware that what Chromium is doing, they can make a better decision, but it has to be called out in every post about Chromium (preferably mentioning a few safer choices), otherwise it will disappear in the noise.
I made a conscious attempt to try to switch to Zen (built on Gecko/Firefox), but ended up switching back to Chromium-based browsers because pages just feel like they load faster with Chromium. :(
I recently switched to Zen with Ublock Origin and it does seem like some sites are slower than before. It's got me suspicious that site owners are increasingly throttling users with adblockers. YouTube absolutely does.
Zen is my favorite browser experience by far, and I've been using the web since Netscape in 1994. But the slowdowns do put a damper on things. Also some of the streaming platforms don't seem to play nice with it.
This caused me to go back and try Firefox again, I struggled with performance years ago on Mac when I did this. This time it’s been great, I switched from Arc to Zen and don’t see any reason to go back.
Zen is genuinely so nice. I have been a Safari die hard because for so long it’s been remarkable at resource efficiency. After switching my macOS window management to aerospace, Zen finally got me to switch away. And it’s great that it loads all the Firefox extensions.
I like Brave, and I know and respect many of the technical team there. I looked into the various stories about the browser that led to it being unpopular in some key communities, and I really couldn't find anything some misunderstandings, common business practices (which you can legitimately disapprove of), and a wish to register opposition to their connection to cryptocurrency/web3.
I think many people would choose not to use Brave because of its association with Brendan Eich (details at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... ), which stands as separate from the browser itself, or the actions of the company.
It's been working great for me as the primary browser for a couple of years now.
Prior to that I was on Firefox (for the sake of browser engine diversity) but left as soon as they announced they were turning into an AI powered advertising company, and would use your data for training. However, I keep it around for cross-browser testing.
Avoid Brave. It is basically Chromium, with commercial shitware slapped on, and an ad-blocker which performs worse than UBlock Origin on Firefox. Brave Inc. (a for-profit company) is openly hostile to forks and independent builds, and expects you to run and trust their binaries. It also wants to charge you a one-time fee for a build free of crapware, i.e. something you can get for free from Chromium.
Brave does what it says on the tin: It's another Blink based browser that is now rather mature and trouble free. It's supported by very responsive developers that provide a fully integrated ad blocking engine that is superior to every browser add-on/extension solution ever created.
That's it in a nut shell. Take a few minutes and go solve all your browser problems.
I've been using Brave for years and its great. Having JS off by default (i.e. shields) is excellent for security. They provide MV2 versions of AdGuard and uBlock Origin that you can enable directly from the browser settings. Those are also both excellent for security since the main threat is malicious scripts served up by ad networks.
I used to be interested in it but ever since they launched Brave Orion it has become clear they intend to actively monetize the free public versions they have been releasing, and the path they're taking with crypto and add-on bloat just feels ickier than most of its competition including Chrome.
What Google means to say is that MV3 will allow them to more closely control what you’re able to do with your time, since this was done primarily to target ad blocking software.
Not that this matters much anymore as Google is now more an AI than it is a search engine, and an unreliable one at that.
When you make your money selling ads, you're not going to want your users to block ads. It's as simple as that. Google should not be allowed to both sell web ads and control a browser platform.
If I remember correctly, ~10 years ago one of Waterfox's main points was 64-bit + Intel compiler with aggressive optimization flags. At that time Firefox was 32-bit only on Windows, at least the stable version. From my experience, it didn't feel faster. Actually, it felt slightly more sluggish, I guess pointers and some data structures become larger, so the browser used more memory and put more pressure on CPU caches. It's probably no longer relevant as all major browsers are 64-bit by default.
Switched the family to Firefox. I use Libre but I understand it’s a hard sell. FF is much easier and the regular user can’t tell the difference anyway since they don’t spelunk into the details.
Pick my mother-in-law phone, is full of apps that pushes mensages every second, ad block is a way to prevent web to become IE with that toolbars, remember?
I know people don't like apple and safari here, but I like safari. It works good enough for me. And when an experience is off, it helps me develop my web developer hat by better understanding webkit and why safari has a different experience or frontend like behavior.
I'm with you. I've been riding with Safari for almost 20 years now. It's been nothing but great for me. I cannot think of a time I have used a website that did not function properly in Safari.
Prior to the reintroduction of UBO (lite), I feel like Safari helped me reduce my trash content consumption. Page with tons of ads? Not worth visiting. Youtube keeps playing ads? My frustration is a sign I need to get off YouTube and do something else. I do not need nor want to mange tens of plugins. I like to keep things simple and slim. So, perhaps that is one dealbreaker for some?
Even if I believe Apple hung the Moon, I still seriously recommend Safari to anyone using Apple devices.
People fall for "think of the children!" so let's also try "think of the elderly!". We're a society that ruthlessly opposes individual responsibility and individual outcomes.
For most people, mv3 is "good enough". But that's mostly just random chance. If sites really start taking advantage of the deficiencies in mv3 to push ads, I think Chrome will lose a lot of users. And I think at that point Google will be forced to backtrack and bring back mv2. (Quite contrary to people who think this is just the start of the slippery slope, boiling the frog move to manifest vEvil which will disable adblocking entirely).
Contrary to some confusion about whether firefox will keep mv2:
Yes they will. Also I predict that MV2 is going to be a major boon for firefox.
It has taken a long time to prove the value of firefox to the masses and I believe mv2 extensions in particular ublock origin will be what keeps people coming back to it
I've not touched chrome in decades. Firefox stands strong. I would donate but in EU that comes with tax issues.
However, this paper[1] suggests that uBO Lite (MV3) which is still supported in the latest Chrome/chromium browsers, works at least as well for almost all users as the original (MV2) uBO, and, in some cases even better than before... so it's really no cause for alarm IMO.
This (whether MV3 blocking is sufficient) is the right question to ask, but also a premature answer.
Because here's the future: Google is already promoting that sites have their tag management (including ad network JS) resolve at the CDN level, with randomized custom-built URLs baked into your page source as served.
In this context, the only thing that can sufficiently block ads as this is more broadly adopted, is dynamic code whose definitions and behaviors can be updated regularly. Because ad networks, including Google, will become increasingly creative (especially with the ability to use AI) in having a near-infinite set of embedding techniques.
And Google sits as both the beneficiary of unblockable ads, and (with MV3) the gatekeeper of timing for executable code updates for ad blocking extensions. Core to the MV3 model is that any use of dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension (and subject to a mandatory review period for every update) is forbidden.
Google doesn't need to do something as drastic as disallow uBO and other extensions; they simply need to "boil the frog" over the course of years as more and more of their clients move to Tag Gateway and similar approaches, and give their ad implementation an increasing "head start" by delaying approval of uBO code updates that are trying to keep pace.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of permanent absence.
> dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension
How could that be enforced on open source browsers like chromium which can always sideload extensions and/or be modified/forked to not have such limitations?
I am a webdev and sometimes I have issues with ungoogled-chromium so I switched to firefox. One time I had to debug a push notification issue and realized ungoogled-chromium simply doesn't support it (but never displayed information about that when registering the service worker). That was years ago, situation might be different now.
They moved over to a new extension platform for legitimate development reasons. I agree there was pain but it wasn't a self interested flexing of power to remove ad blocking extensions.
The "excuse" is a distinction between different types of motivating factors and consequences which has everything to do with the relative merits of those two examples.
Hopefully more and more people wake up as to what this adMonster has become.
If we want a real open world wide in the future, we need to do something about Google. UBO is not the only one killed by Google here. They will continue on their wicked path. (And, while it may be great that Ladybird exists, I have some doubts that this will really be a contender. We should not become lazy and think that Google will just comply with the demands of The People here - its business is based on controlling influx of adMoney via its Evil Empire, and it secures this by de-facto controlling the browser stack. Just look how many people in % use the chrome-codebase now. That IS effectively a monopoly powered by greed.)
Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?
Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.
I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.
You mean OS as in "operating system", not "open source", which made me question how you'd suggest Safari and Edge before I realized what was going on.
I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.
Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?
I recently switched from Safari to Zen and the Firefox extension for Apple passwords works well. You have to enter a pushed 6 digit code when you first start the browser, but it’s relatively painless.
The UBO on Safari has the same issue as chrome except that it has been that way for several years longer. They brought back the lite form of UBO only recently as, presumably, the developer saw the writing on the wall and mv3 and Safari carry the same limitations.
I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.
As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.
Firefox's extension support is far superior to Safari's, cross-platform support, and I really don't want to use Edge for the same reasons I don't want to use Chrome.
If you use more than one operating system, you can't use the operating system browser if you want sync or the same experience. For example, I use a Windows desktop and a MacBook.
Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.
Second,
God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.
Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help
No this one specifically for me, but same idea. I want to use safari, especially for battery life, but there are too many behaviors about Safari that I can't change.
yes, for example they have Ecosia but not Qwant (they are said to share their index but for my searches, I often flip over to Qwant when Ecosia results for the same query are not adequate.) I understand why Safari went with a search engine whitelist but I wish there was a way to make exceptions.
I use Safari for nearly everything and it's my favorite browser. It has some oddities, but I find just as many Chrome and Firefox bugs as I do Safari bugs. I use Firefox on everything else though.
The inspector is a nightmare if you're doing web dev (imo; it always felt clunky). If they replaced that with a Chromium-style inspector, I'd probably jump over.
I use Safari, but don’t really like it. I don’t want to use Chrome or Chromium derivatives and Firefox doesn’t support AppleScript (that’s essential for me), so all that’s left is Safari. Or Orion, I guess, but it’s not good enough to offset Safari’s iCloud Private Relay.
Things I dislike about Safari include not being able to setup alternative search bar engines other than the awful default choice; not being able to disable JavaScript by default and enable it selectively; not being able to have it auto-delete site data on close except for defined domains; iCloud tab sync is finicky and doesn’t always work.
Some of those can be solved with extensions, but then the system to allow or deny extensions is atrocious: You can’t easily say “allow extensions everywhere except these domains”. You have to open each domain in tabs, then deny each domain individually in each extension. It’s also not kept in sync with iOS, where it’s even worse because you have to accept an extension on a domain before you get the option to deny it.
I'm a dev and use windows (sadly have to), android and linux, and would never use edge, because why? when it randomly opens because of a wrong file association or whatnot, I only see a bucket of ms nags and dark patterns. It's disgusting.
Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.
One data point: I’ve been building Web GIS applications for the past 15ish years and Firefox has one and off been a real pain in the neck, suffering from canvas API quirks and performance issues. I think the current state at work is that Firefox is palpably slower than Chrome and I need to find time to go figure out why.
Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.
Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. Then I'll get called over when the computer starts acting screwy. If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation. They didn't do that and probably never will.
If my parents get a new machine, the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.. On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. I just try to make sure they use a browser that isn't horribly unsafe.
We should all do this for people we care about. Don't ask them what browser they prefer. Odds are they don't know or care. Don't try to convince them to install Firefox themselves. They won't. Just do it for them. Think of it like picking up a rusty nail that's on their lawn. Sooner or later they're going to step on that thing if you don't.
My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks on her toolbar in Safari had gone missing (presumably she accidentally deleted it). After I added it back and she clicked it to see that it opened properly, she was satisfied that I had fixed the internet. To her, when she opened Safari, it was all just "the internet"; she didn't differentiate between the local browser UI and the web, let alone different elements on a single webpage being from different sources.
It was even worse in the 90s/00s - on Windows, the IE browser icon was literally labeled “The Internet”
iirc there was a story in The Onion about someone who “accidentally deleted The Internet” on their Windows system and the whole Internet stopped working. They were so sorry, maybe it was in the Recycle Bin, there was still hope for the world, lol
This, Jen...is The Internet.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
There’s this: [All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash | The Onion](https://youtu.be/lvpuT3aoypE?si=UI8wTzkNXdEKMO4x) which is pretty funny but doesn’t contain the idea of moving the internet into the trash bin… I feel like I remember that from somewhere too though
This isn't about users not being tech savvy enough. Ad Blocking has always been a safety issue. Many of the ransomware infections in enterprises were actually drive by ad driven exploit networks.
Sandboxes get better, yeah, but this is akin to leaving your door open in a neighborhood with violent crime and then saying I built this awesome laser guided Kevlar chamber that scans introducers upon entry instead.
Low resolution conflation of things is a very understandable outcome. It’s a lot of vocabulary to absorb to speak precisely about UI in general. I’m glad your grandmother has someone like you in her life.
I once was asked why the internet went away when he closed Internet Explorer. I really didn't know what to say.
My girlfriend worked in IT and people would frequently complain that Microsoft was down whenever something went wrong.
The better thing would be to hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network. If they cannot do that, they should not be in business selling ads then.
Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.
This. There should be no intermediary liability protections for any paid or monetised content: as soon as a platform is either charging for placement or paying the creator, they should be treated as a publisher and held responsible.
Agreed
It's not just malicious software ads, they also sell ads to entities mitming every government service.
Not just the networks (although preferably also the networks) but also the publishers.
If a newspaper took money to advertise blatant, obvious scams, I assume a judge would consider them at least partially responsible for restitution, if not an accessory to the crime. Looking away really hard (and delegating the task of looking away really hard) shouldn't get you out of this.
Hold the publisher responsible, they can then hold the platform responsible, thus creating a market for platforms that actually fight scams. Right now, there is limited incentive to fight scams, as the scams still drive revenue. If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
Given the colour of the text, I just wanted to say that I agree 100% with this:
> If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
If they don't want to take responsibility then they should guarantee that the responsible party have provided valid credentials that can result in their being held responsible.
That would clear up the quagmire that is internet advertising pretty darn quick.
I am working on a hobby project to help me manage my Toastmasters clubs and Id love to get it into more hands because its genuinely helpful but more hands means more maintenance and opération costs. I asked Claude if I could charge for it and it basically said that as long as its a hobby project Im safe but once I start charging, then the Toastmasters organization could sue me or issue a cease and desist for using their IP to make money without permission, which makes sense. It did advise me to talk to a lawyer which I haven't done, but assuming it's right, then financial incentives causing other parties "harm" (for some definition of the word) are illegal.
In other words, I think the law wants what you and OP said to be true, but seems like it doesn't apply once you get big enough. Anecdotally, Amazon and Walmart and other big retailers seem to not be held responsible when they sell goods that dont work as advertised or even actively harm people.
This kind of thing has come up before with "murder for hire" advertisements [1]. The publishers were only found liable when the advertisement was very explicit. Seems like the bar is quite high and courts are currently unwilling to impose "undue burden" on publishers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_Fortune_(magazine)#...
How do you figure out what is a malicious ad? That seems really difficult at scale.
If you're asking socially, you don't, that's the benefit of writing laws instead of programs.
If you're asking technically, well, google made over 400 billion dollars last year, they can spend some of that to figure it out.
Or stop serving ads. Just because it's difficult to do safely doesn't mean you get to just do it anyways because there's profit involved.
You start with the obvious cases of sending you to a domain that serves malware, sure there will be instance of fraud that will slip trough, but lets not let best be the enemy of good
"At scale" sounds like an assumption that costs must decrease as income increases.
That's not required. Google could employ proportionality as many people reviewing what they advertise as, say, National Geographic Magazine.
This is bad enough for Americans, but things are a bit worse for those who aren't.
If my government tries to regulate, tax, or otherwise annoy one of these corporations, their billionaire owner will deposit a few million into the right campaign fund and the Big Cheeto will tariff us, threaten to invade us, swear at us, send us ambassadors who swear at us, or start trying to rename bodies of water. (He'll probably do that anyways.) In general, it's bad enough for our business that we usually just let these companies do what they want and hope that, someday, the U.S. will regulate them properly. That's unlikely to happen anytime soon. (Note: Even Democrats get nasty when their campaign funding is threatened.)
In the meantime, look out for the people you care about and support anything that pries your data out of American fingers.
Idk if apple can validate each and every apps before publishing to appstore, why can't google and facebook validate each and every ads?
But they don’t. Google and others do vet ads, but when they don’t host them, the ads can change based on who is looking (clean ads for Google! Not for you!).
Google didn’t have this issue until they bought DoubleClick (text ads and they hosted). And they had pretty good privacy as they didn’t want to share shit.
After DC it all went to hell.
> But they don’t. Google and others do vet ads, but when they don’t host them, the ads can change based on who is looking (clean ads for Google! Not for you!).
That sounds like a problem that Google should have already solved. Maybe that's why "Don't Be Evil" got the boot.
> the ads can change based on who is looking (clean ads for Google! Not for you!).
How is that even allowed?
Define "validate". App Review is really only good at catching things that make Apple uncomfortable for financial reasons, or make their attorneys worried (trademarks, copyright, etc.) The sandboxing is what makes the App Store pretty unsuitable for distributing actual malware (the kind that can do stuff to your device without you knowing).
Well if they cannot technically differentiate malicious, then they should drop that business niche. They receive money for that, similar as selling stolen goods.
Cause that would cut into their profit margins, and section 230 absolves them of liability
Newspapers and magazines didn't sell ad space to obvious crooks back in the day. Scammers didn't have tv ads. Obviously there was somebody watching them. The trashy scams were reserved for the real scummy publishers: comic books.
X-Ray specs that didn't even work.
Scammers had entire TV networks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Broadcasting_Network
How would one hold Google accountable? By fining them $1bn? $10bn? $100bn? To them it is just the cost of doing business.
We're beyond holding huge companies accountable. The only way they could be held accountable is if there was personal risk involved for the CEOs. There isn't.
At this point, breaking them up into smaller companies. Then start fining the individual companies so the balance sheets feel the fine more. Increase the fines exponentially for each violation.
The other option is jailing those who direct companies to break laws. It works for criminal organizations, why doesn't it work for companies?
If a scam ad is found, at the very least, require them to disclose business records to show how much money the scam ad made (revenue, not profit), and make them repay it. Leave it up to the platform whether to recoup the paid-out share from the publisher or not.
If they are caught doing it repeatedly without taking adequate measures to stop it, treat them as an accessory to the crime.
> There isn't.
Not with this attitude.
I hate these comments. What meaningful thing is this person supposed to do?
In the US, the government is _owned_ by corporations. To pretend otherwise is naive.
If I am the evil corporations owning the state I would love to make all citizens pathetic cynics who think they have no capability for change and therefore bears no responsibility.
Well I guess you are the smart one who will win! Put us all to shame, please.
Put execs in jail for enabling fraud
> How would one hold Google accountable? By fining them $1bn? $10bn? $100bn? To them it is just the cost of doing business.
Percentage of global gross revenue like the EU's GDPR does seems to work effectively enough for a scare tactic.
all of this seems a little like second-level nonsense.
it's like ... "when my vacuum cleaner takes pictures of my wife naked, it should use HTTPS when uploading the pictures to the cloud"
But … it really should
I mean, maybe we can try going after the scammers.. but we can’t even stop scam callers and junk mail
In Japan, the identity verification is quite strict to subscribe to a voice/text capable phone line. Still yet to get robocalls or spam texts. I'm sure they exist, but despite handing out my phone number to city hall and countless private businesses, I have yet to receive one.
On the other hand, enabling my Verizon eSIM is a surefire way to receive hourly "Potential Spam" calls, despite giving nobody outside of direct family my US phone number. Thankfully, I've convinced enough of my family to use Signal and we call/text through there instead.
Nowadays, I only turn on the Verizon line if I have to receive an SMS one-time code or call my broker.
Don't think the U.S. will ever solve this problem; people will just say something about privacy, the country's "too big" to combat spam at scale, etc. It's also too easy to get a phone number anonymously. A frequent phenomenon I've witnessed is that when someone blocks a phone number, the same caller contacts them again from a different number with the same area code.
You can stop junk mail for $8: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619939
Sorry, no solution for spam calls/texts.
Sadly does not apply to political organizations, which is probably the largest source of spam “mail” (to mention nothing of text/sms spam). The amount of crap stuffed into my mailbox every election season is insane.
Generalize this.
Every landlord should be directly accountable for all crimes committed by their tenants.
Every telco should be directly accountable for all crimes committed by their customers.
Meta should pay damages when their users stalk and harass people.
There are levels to this though.
You wouldn't hold a landlord accountable if it was a surprise that a crime took place, but if they were aware that some of their tenants were committing crimes and just "choosing not to ask about it," they could reasonably be called "accountable."
Telcos are regularly asked to give up information regarding crimes committed by their customers, see the Patriot Act for details - in some sense, we as a country have decided to hold them accountable for this (though, not spam).
Meta have been involved in a whole list of litigation that is at minimum adjacent to stalking/harassment, if not directly involving those things. I would need to look up to be more specific, though.
I know what you're trying to say, but you're saying it terribly.
If Ad Platforms don't want to be held responsible for the fraud that their platform literally delivered to the victim, then they should have KYC for all of their Customers that pay them money to deliver advertising to their victims. That way, shock fucking horror, someone or something might actually be able to be held responsible.
And if the argument is that there are many ways that scapegoats can be used and shell companies setup to avoid actual responsibility, then we'll know more about the next layer of regulation that's required.
Or we just give up and say that fraud is OK (which, I believe, is the current thinking in the US).
Try generalizing the argument without changing it substantially, then we'll talk.
A problem is that the platform owners argue that this kind of stuff is why they need to put up a security gate that prevents you from installing whatever you want on your own device while also allowing you to install the malware from the ads (... maybe because they want to control what you can install more than they care about the malware?)
> On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use.
I did the same with my mom, but then her broker and doctor's websites started complaining that they will only run on a supported browser, i.e., Chrome.
I've gotten her to still use Firefox for most other things, but it's not easy.
A user-agent spoofer like Chrome Mask is helpful here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/
It's off by default and has to be turned on per site, but will automatically stay on for subsequent visits. Test the site with it to be sure it works for your mom. Most sites that insist on enforcing Chrome-only user-agents run just fine on Firefox. I've encountered a few that run even better on Firefox than they do on Chrome.
You can try Brave, it's Chromium under the hood so it's usually accepted and has built in ad blocking, and a one click way to turn it off for a specific site if you have an issue.
Did you try spoofing the User-Agent?
> If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services
This is the crux of it.
If they can't block scammers from their own platform then they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place. The profit they make should easily cover it - unless they like profiting from promoting scams, in which case they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place.
It's not just elderly parents. I've sat in on many an incident where skilled people in accounts or HR similarly saw and ad and thought "I have to do this thing", leading to compromise.
Evidently whenever money and safety are opposed, money wins every time.
Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.
I'm looking forward to an AI product that filters all consumed Internet content to remove ads.
Now _that_ would be a killer feature.
It's not just Google, the Internet stops existing.
I know people have rosy eyes for a BBS/IRC comeback, but that will never happen.
By and large, people don't care about having to look at tide and Toyota ads to watch YouTube.
No it wouldn't.
Your bank, school, doctor, and government would all still have websites. Companies would still sell things online. Video calls and chat systems would be there. All the websites run by donation or self-funding would be unchanged. Without ads, the worst parts of the internet might stop existing though.
> It's not just Google, the Internet stops existing.
Uh? No?
The internet existed before being overrun by corporate presence. It still does. Advertising pays a lot, but take the ad money away and let it scale accordingly.
The worst thing about the modern internet is people's innate expectation that others will work/pay to entertain or inform them for free.
What existed in 1993 was a cultural blip, it's never coming back, so let it go.
> What existed in 1993 was a cultural blip, it's never coming back, so let it go.
Ha! I am under no illusion it is coming back. But even though it flows like the unstoppable tides, ad money is not a requirement.
I love Brave's seemingly easy and automatic ad blocking, but turning off shields for important things like banking and government sites is a chore. I struggled with domain whitelisting (if I'm honest I gave up on it some time ago as the recipes I found online didn't work). So I can't recommend it for less technical people. It's a step away from being the easiest way to control all that annoying content that comes at you when you're trying to do something else.
Tangentially related, but has anyone else noticed a big increase in fraud attempts over the last year or two? I hardly remember any a while back, but I've gotten probably a dozen calls this year that go "hey this is AmEx please confirm your credit card number" or some such.
It's partially a product of the widespread availability of LLMs. Criminal organizations that would previously have been limited by the language fluency, scale, or technical competence of the labor available to them can now use LLMs to supplement their operations. It's also helping them target new populations that you're more likely to be in alongside traditional victims like the elderly, the desperate, previous victims, etc. They're pretty slow to adopt new technologies, so scam usage is still ramping up.
Phone call scams seem to ebb and flow depending on which 'sucker lists' you're on. Online scams appear to be persistently on the rise, both against consumers and organizations (businesses, non-profits, and governments). I suspect that LLM-AI will be a boon for scammers of all sorts, but particularly for phone and video-call scammers.
Every now and then I hear advice to the effect that saying even a single word to a robocaller will get your number flagged for more, so you should just answer silently and hang-up. Whenever I follow that advice, I get more and more calls. Then I start engaging with callers to waste their time and resources. I press numbers, try to get to speak to a human, and then generally mess with them if I do get a human. That usually takes care of the calls for a while.
My credit card number is 1234 5678 abcd efgh.
What do you mean it has to be numbers? I can read it right here, it says abcd efgh.
Mine is actually all letters, it's G U L L I B L E. If you're having trouble remembering, I heard it's written on your ceiling right above you.
The problem is, Microsoft and Google themselves are doing shady things. A full screen advertising for using OneDrive on Windows and a full screen random request to use Google App when doing a Google search on Safari comes to mind. Apple is no different, when I press my Bluetooth button, it opens Music on macOS.
I’m sure we can find rather strange things going on Ubuntu too and bending the definitions a bit, there are several pleads for donation like on Gnome, Vim and Wikipedia that are a bit questionable.
They've all spent too long getting high on their own supply.
The longer a company is able to profits from something, the less they'll be able to see that it may even possibly be a net negative for society.
Google doesn't care about this. Try searching for a locksmith in your area on Google and the top results are all scans.
How would this scam work? Why would someone pose as a locksmith specifically?
They send out someone in an unmarked van who doesn't have a locksmith license (at least in CA these are a legal requirement and they are required to show it to you). When you ask to see it they tell you they keep it at the office for "safety". That was the extent of my personal experience.
I've read that if you let them work on your property, they will claim your bog-standard lock is unpickable, and charge you an exorbitant amount to drill it (destroying the lock) and replace it.
Almost everyone who calls a locksmith is in a hurry, dealing with something unfamiliar, so people are susceptible to this.
Instead of getting a local locksmith, it's a "lead gen" service which charges the locksmith $100 or something to get your info. They're placed on the map, but aren't actually there.
The only thing that should come up is actual local locksmiths.
To give my example, if you search for locksmiths or plumbers or any sorts of trades you'll land on a page for "small family locksmith in your small suburb name". Except the site has thousands of urls with the same exact content and pictures, one for every suburb in Australia. Gary the small business owner does not live in my street.
As far as I can tell its a national company with an overseas call center, the scam is that it looks like a local company - at least they can sell a lead gen to someone that can open my lock.
I've had this happen to me personally on vacation - we were locked out of our rental car, asked a person at the nearby place to call a locksmith to get me back in, and they didn't quote price over the phone. When they got there, they popped the lock and then wanted $200, cash only so you couldn't chargeback, which I learned after the fact is completely outrageous for that service. They had a lot of fake Google reviews that were glowing, overshadowed by the real ones calling out the scam.
I've heard worse happening in other cases where they drill locks and then quote much higher than $200 after they do it, it's sadly common.
$200 for an emergency specialty service is shockingly...fair?
That's exactly what I would think if I were in trouble and hadn't done any research, but in fact it is not. When I needed a locksmith a few years ago, at night, it cost $70.
The person charging you more than you think is reasonable in hindsight doesn’t make it a scam? It also doesn’t mean you can do a chargeback?
Specifically? Because it’s something people search for. Because it’s something people pay for. If the scammer can get you to pay for “a visit“ upfront, and never show up, they’ve made money.
>Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.
I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.
Bitcoin changed everything. It used to be if you hacked somebody's PC you got.... a hacked PC. Big whoop.
Bitcoin provided both a financial use for stolen compute and a bankless online international payment system for ransoms.
That's what turned the script kiddies into professionals. Malice and lulz were replaced with dollars and cents.
Nonsense. Before the advent of those first “you’re the 1000th visitor” banners or relatively harmless “worms” spready by literal .exe files sent by email in the early 2000s… most of the internet could be trusted by default.
And at that point the blast radius was so hilariously small, some rando compromising your computer was a nuisance versus a threat to your financial wellbeing.
Viruses were common on FTP sites and BBSs. They weren't all benign. DOS in particular had zero protections against damaging code. Bot armies hadn't been developed yet so malicious destruction was just as likely an outcome.
Yes, and what did the damaging code and viruses actually do in that era?
Software, OSs, and the internet at large were comically unsafe from a safety perspective. There was also a very high barrier of entry in terms of the skills required to take advantage of that, and very little incentive to do so compared to today or even 20 years ago.
If you got lucky, they just self-replicated onto floppies. Not so lucky, they would corrupt your hard drive.
Ad blocking has always been a safety issue.
> filter malicious ads out of their own ad services
It's worse than that. Google turned their exploit delivery platform into Google Tag Manager so they can be employed on more than just ads.
> the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.
Does this run the risk of reverting with OS updates? History is full of OS vendors resetting defaults, whether that was maliciously intentional or inadvertently doesn't matter. If you set up Firefox as default browser yet the OS resets to using Edge, would your parents even notice?
Money from confused seniors getting scammed is a critical revenue stream. Without scams, ads are far less viable.
Raspberry pi + adguard + tailscale could be a good solution for you. Browser agnostic, you get an admin dashboard to manage the white/blacklists, see logs of the attempts and other goodies. Bonus, this combination works on mobile too. The only nit I have is that after restarting the phone, tailscale may not auto-start.
You could also set it up to be administered remotely so that you don't have to make that in person visit.
> They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it.
You could even extend that to OS as well.
A few days ago, my mother asked me to fix her YouTube because she kept getting something telling her to update. I looked at YouTube on her iPhone and saw an autoplaying video ad that displayed an animated fake system style pop-up button, designed to look like an important iPhone OS security update. The ad even showed an animation of the button appearing on the screen, making it look even more like a real system notification.
This needs to stop.
Get Chromebook for them, I know it is backwards, but at least they won't install viruses.
The kinds of banner ads that exist now are atrocious, as bad as they have ever been. Anything that masquerades as a legitimate internet or site service should be banned, I really detest the ones that are simply some sort of fake captcha, sign in, etc.
They must pay the best because so many old forums that are/were near and dear to my heart use them to pay for servers, hopefully because they only saw the profit number and didn't consider the consequences, but you never know.
uBlock Origin lite is an mv3 extension and blocks ads.
> If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.
This has been solved on iOS. It’s not an ads problem.
How? Can't apps link you to the app store where you have to make an in app purchase?
It feels weird that everyone is talking like Google has banned adblocking in Chrome, when there's dozens of adblockers still in the extension store, including an updated version of uBO that works 90% the same.
Ad-blocking is a safety issue, but luckily you can still block them just fine.[1]
The only thing this heavily neuters is tracking blocking, but no one admits that because they know, deep down, that ~0% of the non-tech crowd cares, so it's not as good at stirring up outrage as being dishonest is.
[1] If anything gorhill is to blame for the safety issue, since he refused to update his extension in-place, so any distant relatives will have the adblockers you installed for them removed, instead of updating to the fully functional Mv3 version.
> My parents are at an age where they fall for things.
If they're falling for things that they didn't used to fall for, that's sounds more like dementia than age.
Or maybe there are more things using the same tactics / scammer's reach keeps increasing.
My parents "fell" for fundamentalism early (as kids - raised in it), for televangelists in their 40s, and Fox News in their 70s/80s. Fox News so recently only because they didn't get it very often until about 10 years ago when they moved into a retirement home (didn't have cable before that).
Right that's why I qualified that with "things they didn't used to fall for".
There’s a long way between perfectly functioning and dementia. I want to say that I hope you never find out, but the twilight of life is tough either way.
"Being at an age" can include having age-related illnesses.
Right but an age-related illness that affects cognition is generally just called dementia.
Normal cognitive decline comes gradually with age to most people. Dementia is more severe, often more sudden, and can be caused by a host of things, from Alzheimer's to brain injury. Regardless, you're not going to take away somebody's computer because their brain isn't quite as sharp as it once was.
I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android, Youtube need to be separate companies. It's not the only company that needs this treatment.
We had a glimpse of that antitrust future on the horizon with the previous admin. This spooked all the big tech weirdos so much that they put their weight behind the other guy and, well, they won. Antitrust is dead for another generation. Yay.
Lina Khan is lying in wait.
Doing great work in New York actually.
She'd have some teeth with President AOC.
I actually laughed. Thank you.
I couldn't agree more with your point. But also, precisely because I agree with you, I'm flashing back to Proton CEO Andy Yen claiming that Trump would be great on tech anti trust and an improvement on what came before, which was ridiculous from the moment he said it but symptomatic of a certain kind of tech bro mindset.
If only the DNC was interested in promoting candidates that work for the people and aren't just interested in lip service while mostly maintaining the status quo. Things could have been different. Imagine what 8 years of Bernie and a functioning Congress might have accomplished.
That "functioning Congress" requirement is doing a lot of the work in that claim, and no single election result would make that happen.
I didn't make that claim, you misread what I said. I explicitly mentioned a functioning Congress because that's a necessity, a functioning executive branch is not enough. We are in agreement.
We're in agreement, so what did I misread? :D The point is, there's not some realistic, single-point "if only" scenario where "things could have been different", because the problem is largely Congress.
You had me until Bernie
Which candidate would you have preferred?
Agreed. But on the topic of antitrust specifically, Lina Khan was absolutely doing the work, and Biden 100% deserves credit for appointing her. He could've chosen some do-nothing loser like everyone before him did, but he chose Khan.
I agree, it was a great move.
However, it's generally hard for me to give Biden much credit for anything, however, given his own and his party's general complicity with decades of genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Same for Harris.
That and oversight of many more atrocities also carried forth by his predecessors really puts a damper on any good deed and make it hard to buy into any narrative of authenticity when it comes to politics that benefit human beings.
I also generally think Bernie would have played hardball on antitrust and given what we got with Biden, I'd prefer to have seen what Bernie could have done with the time.
Terrible narrative. Lina Khan under Biden was more than willing to go after big companies. She was forced out because the American people voted Trump into office.
Eight years of Sanders would have left us with a far more gridlocked country. The man has virtually no political talent.
Some argue gridlock is a feature, not a bug. I'm of two minds about it, but I understand the appeal.
I love Lina Khan as much as the next guy. But as you've already pointed out, it's kind of pointless if the fundamental problem is a malfunctioning executive branch (and a federal government with far too much power). But I'm going to need receipts on your claims about eight years of Sanders.
>The man has virtually no political talent.
More unique individual people donated to his primary efforts than any other candidate in history. Wouldn't this be indicative of some large amount of political talent?
I think people grossly underestimate "money is speech" that is spent by corporate interests. PACs and SuperPACs are something I've just never understood how their donations are not just bribes
Well, the current cronies that run the USA may seem to have won for the time being, but sooner or later the population in the USA will realise how much fudged up the orange clown is. Only about 30% approval rating - that will continue to dwindle.
There’s a partisan floor¹ that’s in the neighborhood of 25–30% where people will vote for their party no matter what. The 2004 Illinois Senate election was a good test case where when the Republican nominee went down in self-inflicted flames and was hurriedly replaced with Alan Keyes, who had no in-state constituency and, being Black (which, no doubt was the cynical reason for his recruitment), eliminated the racist choice. He gained a mere 27% of the vote which is likely the floor for a major party candidate in a contested broad-population election (smaller-level partisan elections, whether for single congressional seats or in small states, generally have demographically skewed populations which can result in wider margins).
⸻
1. Although as I think about it, this may only be valid on the right side of the spectrum given the data points.
The Democrats already tried out the idea that Trumpism would blow over and everything would go back to "normal" with Biden's 2020 campaign, but it didn't really turn out that way. Right-wing reactionary politics has been overrepresented in the US since its founding due to state based representation, and I expect that this will continue to be the case for as long as the US exists in its current form.
They'll immediately fall for the next such guy. Republican voters aren't actually reconsidering their views. Corporations and oligarchs have known no major blowbacks in decades and keep winning on every front, further eroding the Republic and its institutions little by little. And they won't stop until all that's left of America is an empty shell, a dead state like Russia, a sandbox for the Epstein class.
I hope we get to the Idiocracy timeline before the one you describe
I still say the [Waldo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment) timeline fits closer. Just a bunch of empty signifiers stuffed into a costume.
We are there now.
Nobody is working on solving death/aging.
You have to pay rent, go to work, companies have average Joe’s shilling for them.
The entire society is death marching toward - well - death! And nobody notices or cares in the slightest.
The vast majority of people think they will live for all of eternity “in heaven” and many others just don’t even think about it.
The shortness and pointlessness of their lives doesn’t even cross their minds - worse - they think the point is feelings!
And so it’s a war of who can have the best feelings for ~80 years and that’s it.
Doesn’t get any more idiotic than present day wealth inequality and total lack and void of real intellectual pursuits
What does solving death/aging mean?
Humans have figured out an easy medicine to reduce weight, which is the number 1 causal factor in morbidity/mortality.
There are also novel cancer immunotherapy medicines that are drastically increasing quality and quantity of life for cancer patients, like keytruda and blinatumomab.
You are painting with extremely broad strokes here.
Painters with broad strokes have done extremely well the past few decades.
We wouldn't be in this mess is Obama wasn't sleep at the wheel. When it's been 20 years with a 10 to 10 split its not a democrat vs republican issue.
I think there's a remarkably clear precedent at least for browsers, which is having Android users pick from a list of browsers instead of having Chrome as the pre installed default. That's already been done previously with Microsoft and I believe with search on Apple, andI think it would reverse the Mozilla market share trend overnight.
I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.
I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).
And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.
I look forward to a new era of trust busting.
It's an old American Tradition in need of revival
This type of populist message seems like such an easy path to popularity for an aspiring politician. You don't have to be a leftist like Bernie Sanders to be a trust buster. Just acknowledge that almost every large corporation has seemingly made it their mission to make life worse for the citizenry in the name of profit and vow to fight it.
Anyone running with that type of message will be squashed by said "every large corporation". They will finance their opponent(s). They will run deep fakes against them. Until "every large corporation" is prevented from spending unlimited money, things will not change.
What would limiting corporations from contributing more than the total of max donation per employee? I've never seen numbers from that, but I've heard people discuss it.
Was saying this about Chrome and Android a decade ago.
> Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android need to be separate companies.
As well as youtube, and the combination of google drive/docs.
YouTube really could hold up as its own company these days.
It was a better platform when it was its own company back in the day.
That's so long ago I honestly can't see that being true. It used to be a funny home video hosting platform in those days. The quality of content you can get on youtube these days is incredible.
Okay, Google bought YouTube earlier than I remembered (2006). For some reason, I remembered the purchase being somewhere around 2009-2012.
So, if I may change my opinion, early YouTube was better, despite being owned by Google. I feel like the platform has been atrocious in the last decade or more. Constant clickbait, a new NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends ad every 15 minutes, politics being injected into every other video, creators trying to game the algorithm to escape the rat race, the obnoxious algorithm itself, and now I am getting an absurd amount of LLM generated videos.
I would not dare claim there is not great content though. I am listening to a YouTube video as I type this. Though, I have been listening this particular creator since 2006, if that tells you anything.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel YouTube is just getting the slow squeeze of death -- like everything Google wraps its tentacles around.
The LLM scripts has been a plague but I don't think that's Google pushing it, it's youtubers optimizing to create the most minutes of video as quickly as possible.
Paying for views is both why we have high quality content, and why the site is so gamed.
Really? I don't remember it from back then, but right now must be better in terms of the content available, the player (not the shorts one; that's awful), automatically generated subtitles with transcripts that can be searched, automated translation, dubbing, etc.
I would enjoy automatically generated subtitles more if they weren't wrong about 10% of the time.
I constantly get something like "Today, we are going to discuss which model is better at programming. Is it an tropic's latest model, Cloud Fable? Or is it, Open AI's Chat G pity?"
It's as though Google hired my dyslexic ass to write the subtitles. It trips me up even more because I can't tell if I misread something or the chat messed up sometimes.
I cannot comment on translation or dubbing. English is the only language I can somewhat understand.
I'd like to nominate, Amazon marketplace, Amazon Ads and AWS to be separate as well please. ;)
I really wish we had an admin that would be willing to do this.
Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business? I’m for less consolidation in the tech industry, but I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
The latter two potentially yes, as they can sell a product. Chrome - not so much: sell the browser, embed ads… nothing palatable.
A $1 a year payment (like in WhatsUp) from all the current Chrome users can easily cover all the reasonable browser development.
Bonus: they might not be able to fund the anti-user behavior like sunsetting MV2, all of the "anonymous audience tracking" that prevents any other advertiser from identifying you (but Google's scale still can), aggressively pushing 'sign in with Google', retracting their stance on blocking third party cookies, continually removing settings that drive user control, and more.
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely.
> I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
I see you have an unconventional definition of the word "great". I'll take that to mean you're an outside-the-box thinker, so you're in a good position to understand that a break up of Google would radically change all the markets they're dominant in.
If Android 'dies' post-breakup, that would leave a gaping hole in the economy. iOS might fill it, but regulators would need to break them up too. Say iOS 'dies' too, would we all collectively just stop using smartphones? Obviously not. Entrepreneurs who can see opportunity will raise money and hire the right people to build a new OS, foundations will apply for grants to maintain Android or iOS forks, industry standards will form to improve interop and reduce development costs, etc. The sky's the limit!
I'm all for breaking up Google, but how do you see Chrome making money without ads?
If they charged users directly, everyone would just switch back to Firefox.
Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? It never had a business model besides "support Google's monopolies", so it shouldn't survive (IMO). Lots of browser vendors already use Chrome's open source codebase, so those orgs can fork it, or they can collectively come together to fund development, or apply for government grants or something.
I think that Chrome development team members will have plenty of new job and business opportunities available to them if this ever happens. New markets will open up for browser tech that didn't exist before, and I think everyone will come out winning in the end, even users who would never even consider paying money for a web browser.
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? It never had a business model besides "support Google's monopolies", so it shouldn't survive (IMO)
You just explicitly claimed that Chrome has definitively a viable business model as a stand-alone company ("Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely."). Now you claim the opposite...
Is the argument also as strong for the other cases?
Sorry, I forgot this was HN and wasn't obnoxious enough in my reply.
The original question was:
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Please take note of the absence of the word "standalone" in that quote.
My response to the response to my response (henceforth responses['bogwog'][1]) was thus:
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? ...
Please note the truthiness of `'standlone' in responses['bogwog'][1]`
From this evidence we can surmise that my point was 'Chrome' the non-business can't survive as an independent business, because Chrome is not a business. Likewise, the 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' you get on an airplane can't survive as an independent business were we to break up the airline, as 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' isn't a business.
But can Chrome the project survive without Google? I say yes, just like Cheez-Its can survive without being complimentary additions to overpriced flights. For why I think that, please refer to my other comment in this thread.
Thank you.
Search licensing would be one of the big ones
> Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely.
No one is paying for browsers. Maybe there is a market for enterprise support contracts for it, but this is not going to replace the money spigot of Google Ads. If I were to guess, Chrome "as its own business" would go bust very fast, with the staff being picked up by Microsoft (to support Edge, which basically is a Chrome fork) and Apple (to make Safari decent).
Android I'd say could survive, at least as long as it is bundled in the same entity that handles Play Store, that thing is a money printer. Without it... I'd say Samsung won't care, they already have their own marketplace and mess around in AOSP to an unholy degree, and everyone else will either attempt to fork Android like some Chinese brands did, go for Graphene or go bust like HTC.
Youtube... they probably got enough Premium subscribers now to keep the lights on, the problems are going to start when they have to separate their infrastructure. Bandwidth is still insanely expensive and at the moment they benefit a lot from Google being the top dog, able to tell even the largest ISPs "peer with us for free, or else". Without that leverage, with their own infra, bandwidth costs are going to eat them alive.
We've done this in the past. AT&T was broken up into the regional baby bells. Eventually, the baby bells started to get absorbed back into the monolith AT&T again. Nobody stopped it. I assume that the fact that few people use landlines and there are more than one provider of communication services where the AT&T voltron is no longer a monopoly.
The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though
Trustbusting is like weeding your garden. It's just a chore that must be done periodically to counteract the natural tendency of markets to degenerate into monopolies. It's not something you do once and then never again, it's something that you have to do regularly, forever, if you want a functioning market.
Your "do regularly" got me thinking. There's only been 2 companies in the US to have been busted up, Standard Oil (1911) and ATT (1984). Microsoft (2000) got close but cut a deal. So yeah, we haven't been tending garden very well
This won't ever happen, the US and the US government can't afford to weaken its corporations and risk impact their data collection, social control, influence and profitability world-wide.
Sadly you are right, but the people can still learn. There is a reason more and more folks move towards De-Googling. This is also a world-wide movement - it is not just the US government. Tons of lobbyists in other countries support mega-corporations dictating terms to us. Just look at EU legislation recently in the news again - constant betrayal of EU citizens here. All paid for EU taxpayers. The EU commission works for these mega-corporations.
I'm quite torn on this.
The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.
In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.
I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
Why are these two points, countering China and keeping Europe safe, the framing for this? Who is needed to counter the US and keep foreign countries, like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and so on, safe from the US? And who needs to be strong to counter the US's state-sponsored terrorism via Israel?
One could argue that it’s all the centralization and monopolistic behavior which hinders tech development in the usa. So a breakup might have short term stutters but long term gains.
Tech development is hindered in the USA?
By monopolies, yes. Know what an acquihire is? Heard of a buyout leading to a shut down?
That hinders development.
Why would you be "torn" on this? Competition breeds innovation, and monopolies are literally the opposite of competition. A break up of big tech doesn't destroy anything or reduce economic activity, it can only accelerate it.
America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.
> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.
Companies flooding the space with ads making the internet unusable != strong economy to counter china?
China has just been plain better then the USA at capitalism for a while now.
anti monopoly actions != weak economy
Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.
What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.
> know (academic) international relations Realism.
or you not knowing less about economics then you think
> to counter China and keep Europe safe.
eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).
The US just added a colony in Venezuela in cooperation with their local Reichskommissar and is looking to secure its oil. American perception of their country is quite something.
Drumming up incoherent fears about China is the new favorite oligarch talking point, yes.
The realpolitik is not lost on American HN readers. It's like you say - there's a balance between maintaining a competitive economy and a fair one.
In this instance, should we let AdSense persist as a platform? It does turn out lots of revenue, but it does so by creating a closed ad space economy that Alphabet manages. This not only gives Google and YouTube unfair advantages on their own ad service, but it also creates a blind auction for businesses that don't know what their advertisements are worth. The entire system is deliberately and artificially segregated from competitors to AdSense.
We see this throughout America's economy, with Apple and Microsoft too. It undoubtedly incurs fiscal damage to legitimate competitors that should be given fair ground to offer a better service. But since the US federal government encourages consolidation, all of America's services get described as "enshittified" by their customers while China innovates.
Hahaha, today I learned that we need to keep Google's advertising income intact (~75% of their revenue) so that the US economy doesn't fall apart. We can't stop projecting these ads onto people's eyeballs, or literally the entire world goes to shit! AHAHAHAHA
> I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
Market share appears to be hovering around 4%, which sounds small but that is still a massive amount of people, over 200 million users. It is even more impressive considering it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users, people overwhelmingly just use what is already installed. That's a huge number of users earned rather than inherited.
> it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users
Remember when Microsoft was sued for having installed one browser in their OS and making it default?
Now suddenly we're okay with another company installing another browser in their OS
I use firefox and sometimes safari. I had to install chrome recently, and I don’t understand how people stand it. It’s a half-assed attempt to reimplement windows 95 era preload spam. (Or non-decrapified win11).
I don’t understand how it has any market share. It’s like finding out that 80% of people voluntarily install browser toolbars that force penis pill ads down your throat, and then there are a bunch of HN fanboys saying that all other alternatives are worse.
My hope is the chrome fanboys get forced to experience the full visceral web and revolt.
Will Google employees who used UBO now vomit over their own corp decisions and reverse?
They are in a tough place.
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
> They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari)
They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".
> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome
Very few people go to that page anyway.
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
> They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
QFT. The biggest impediment to Firefox's success is the Mozilla Org, which sees it as a cash cow to fund a zillion projects no one wants (sacrificing the future of the browser everyone wants).
Quantum field theory? Quiet Firefox tremors? What is this QFT you speak of?
Quoted for the truth.
Quarterly Financial Targets? Questionable Functionality and Technology?
Quoted for truth
Windows is not really a growing user base in a lot of places it is in decline.
Most "internet users" are mobile. The ones using windows are doing it from work laptops that are locked down and use edge (chrome).
If windows was a growing market MS would not be so far down the extraction path they have gone with the OS.
Edge still doesn't have a market share as big as Chrome, even among desktop browsers. Chrome is still a behemoth at 70% of all desktop browser usage.
Silly take. Chrome does extremely well on Windows because every Google site, from search to Youtube to Gmail to Docs nudges people to install it. Without that 99% of people would just stay on Edge.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
Firefox has 1.4 billion in reserves and no debt.
If they stop paying tens of millions to their management, they could easily afford paying devs in perpetuity just from investing that money.
I don't think you get the compensation for devs capable of working on this stuff.
1.4b; assume 5% returns. That’s $70M per year for devs.
At $1M per year (equivalent to a good startup exit, but zero risk), that’s 70 engineers; probably senior to principal phd’s with 10 yr+ experience.
If that’s not enough to maintain a web browser, then pay them to simplify the damn thing.
Only people who live in SF are capable of programming a browser?
There's something in the water that makes you just better.
> how to pay for that
I would not mind to pay for the browser, but they will not let me.
This is a consequence of browser monopolies, established by Microsoft in the 90s: everyone should have to pay for a browser and make a deliberate choice in vendor. The fact that they're free and subsidized by large businesses in other markets, rather than being a product you choose to buy, is a concrete example of monopolistic market distortion.
You say that, but out of the remaining users of FF, I severely doubt even 1% would pay. Any attempt to paywall would kill whatever they have left.
I've donated to thunderbird since they made a promise that won't go into other weird/stupid mozilla ventures.
I'd gladly do the same for firefox, but they have not given the opportunity.
If I had the cash back then I'd do the same for B2G/firefoxOS.
Doesn't Mozilla foundation have millions of dollars, including paid for by Google? "Linux" is better capitalized, "Wikipedia" is sort of open source, what else ranks above Mozilla?
Firefox works everywhere I point it to, for now. "Let the user modify their own software" does not cost extra.
Being beholden to Google who might decide that the risk of antitrust is lower than the price they are paying for that search box is a pretty precarious place to be in.
The series of own goals is a bigger problem. They should spend their $ on FF and allow direct donations that only go to FF and not to their hobby projects.
I've been using Firefox as my main browser since I switched from Windows to Linux.
No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.
I've been using Firefox since the beginning and will continue using it. I only use Chrome for occasional testing, but close to 100% of the time, everything works in Firefox unless an overzealous add-on breaks a page and then I simply disable it to get going again.
I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.
It's still 200 million monthly active users according to https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Cloudflare with their "checking if the site connection is secure" (while being MITM) is another example.
To a degree, sure, but is it really 'MITM' if the site you are trying to visit has chosen to add cloudflare into the middle?
You may as well say all load-balancers are MITM because you might connect to a different host on each attempt and there's a man in the middle influencing your connection.
What makes it any different if the website executed the same logic cloudflare is on their own box?
"What makes it any different if the website executed the same logic cloudflare is on their own box?"
Without Cloudflare it's highly unlikely that 20% of websites _would_ implement the same logic.
The second I see that awful Cloudflare countdown I blacklist the site and never return.
I am convinced all their metrics saying they reduce bot traffic are mistaken for the fact that they reduce all traffic by annoying users away.
Gatekeeping internet and reading every byte unencrypted. Nice business monopoly.
Firefox is still popular in Germany, at around 10%
I remember when it was the last bastion of Firefox users with a majority marketshare there when everyone else already switched to Chrome...
I really wish Firefox will catch up on the debug/devtools front. Nonetheless, I use FF as much as I can on both my mobile and desktop devices.
I do prefer Firefox devtools to Chrome, that's one of the reasons I use it at work.
I think both are kind of equivalent nowadays but I find that the Firefox one has a better design and looks more polished
> I really wish Firefox will catch up on the debug/devtools front.
Genuine curiosity: what's it lacking?
The CLI tools for automation are still a pain to use and missing functionality, which also means LLMs use it less; Claude gives up when it sees Chrome isn’t installed unless I specifically tell it to try and use Firefox.
I created an automation tool recently for taking screenshots (for SOC2 reporting, hopefully tptacek is proud), and getting it working with FF on the CLI was very painful (but necessary since I needed my cookies!)
Yeah I'm not sure what they are talking about...
Joke: it doesn't have 80% market share.
But also with AI, the most I'm doing is hitting inspect and sending problem elements. Maybe screen resizing for mobile.
I switched to Firefox like 6 months ago. I’m happy with it even though Chromium is a better engine imo. What Google is doing with Chrome is unacceptable.
Try using ladybird as a fit alternative. It will be complete within your lifetime, and maybe even in firefox’s lifetime.
I’ve stopped supporting it once Kling decided to stop accepting community contributions.
The entire point was that it was a browser built by a warm and friendly community, and not corporate interests.
I have no hope that they will keep their other values if they’ve already been so quick to let this one go.
I'm more of an optimist!
We've been here before with Windows and IE dominance!
IE peaked at ~95% market share, and windows peaked at ~97%.
Broadly it seems to me that Google is behaving much like MS did.
But who knows, everything is the same and different this time around.
Typing this from Zen browser as we speak, can't suggest it enough.
Such a wonderful take on Firefox. The only thing it is really missing to make it perfect for everyone is proper sync not just on one computer but across systems.
Without wanting to sound rude: you're talking about browsers – serious business. Most hackers – I feel – need a bit more than 'I strongly suggest it' to even consider switching to a nascent browser :D
The main issue is security. The browser is the most sensitive piece of of software you can run on a machine. It’s susceptible to both supply chain and JS attacks and a huge target for both of them.
it’s a firefox fork. ‘most hackers’ would research it no matter what was typed on a msg board prior to installing. the first step is knowingg about it. personally, im a big fan and daily drive it on my personal systems. but I do find their tab groups implementations to be a bit subpar.
> I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
I've met so many people in the tech industry who use Zen Browser. Not even because of some ideological point, but just because it is cooler.
So no, I don't believe it'll be gone. I believe firefox and ff-based browsers will actually make a comeback.
Yeah, consider the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if an existing browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
I feel the opposite, the more chrome abuse their dominance the closer they move to a tipping point where enough people become browser interested to return to browser wars. It's likely one of those things where it has to go to far, then change will happen fairly quickly.
By the time FF isn't a thing we'll have AI distilling site content for us and removing all the bullshit and there won't be anything site operators can do about it. And it'll use sandboxed browser instances that are immediately deleted
I know it's more infrastructure, but just use pi-hole and then it doesn't really matter what browser you use, if we're just talking about pop ups and malicious ads.
I use it exclusively on Android for the ad block on naughty hot girl sites wink wink.
I use chrome and those sites are miserable.
I think a lot of us would pay them at this point, if they kept seriously working on the browser.
I use firefox on all devices, but there are two notches against it in my book:
Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.
Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:
>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.
I have never had any scrolling lag issues on Firefox (in the form of Fennec from F-Droid) on GrapheneOS.
Native Firefox on native Android (or at least the Samsung variant) here and I haven't had issues either.
I've had the issue on multiple phones. Firefox nightly seemed to fix it for a while but it suffers from it too after a while. I need to test if it's UBO or the sister comment that says closing tabs and restarting helps. It's only on certain sites I really notice it, maybe JS or video heavy sites. NYTimes in particular.
> Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome.
It starts to lag after a while on some sites but force-stopping occasionally fixes it for me.
Vanadium is a good browser but I wish it had Firefox's Private Mode toggle, for permanent private mode *
It's fiddly to even manually wipe history in Vanadium as it defaults to the '15 mins' option, and then it tries to suggest a subset of sites it thinks you want to retain data for **
* (Yes I know about the suboptimal workaround of the intent shortcut)
** (Yes I know this is upstream behaviour.)
firefox has a setting on ios version that blocks ads so maybe they will get more market share that way?
This move will help Firefox a lot. This is why they've been my browser on mobile for years, now there's a big incentive to switch on desktop
I stopped using Firefox when it had massive performance issues (CPU and memory) to the point it was unusable. Chrome in comparison was lightning fast and since then I somehow cannot get myself to use Firefox though I know they likely have fixed those issues long time ago. I have Firefox installed but never open it.
There was a period in time, few years ago, when I was going back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, driven by alternate paranoia about privacy vs performance. These days I don't really have to. Firefox on Android, at least for the phones I regularly used, like several OnePlus from 7T up and now razr ultra, has been very stable. Only blip was the one month I was on Pixel 10- turns out they have special hardware optimization for Chrome that cripples Firefox on Pixel 10 otherwise. All the more reason to (return the phone and) stick to Firefox.
Same. I found Firefox was fast on Windows at the time, but on Mac it was so slow (compared to Chrome), and had weird non-native scrolling for the longest time. As a Mac user it felt like they developed for Windows, and occasionally do some work on the Mac app too.
Well, open it…
I can definitely say the performance is good now, though
On Mac it is very obviously quite a bit worse than both Chrome and Safari.
I also was a Firefox user, but Mozilla killed Firefox many years ago. I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio in order to watch videos (well, hear audio) on youtube. Chrome worked fine. At that moment in time I knew mozilla no longer cared about the users. (I use thorium though, so actually I can still use ublock origin fine. But I am sad that I ended up with the evil Google empire. There is no real competition against it anymore, sadly enough.)
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.
> I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio
I am 99% sure Firefox will run just fine without systemd, or OpenRC half of Gentoo would be with pitchforks and torches.
It isn't correct, either, that it requires PulseAudio; I'm running FF with PipeWire, for example. But perhaps let's steelman that to "does not work with ALSA". I'm not sure what the objection to PA would be. It appears you can run FF under an adapter that will backport FF's PA output to ALSA — so it is possible to do —, I'm just not fathoming what the objection to Pulse is. (Or for that matter, its successor, PipeWire.)
Um.... If I learned anything from Apple, the best and brightest don't matter. Capitalism forces the best and brightest to make apps for the walled prison because the masses saw someone dancing with colorful backgrounds.
I do know a few perpetually single people working in academia using some obscure Linux distro(btw my company is 90%+ Fedora).
I am completely over thinking HN nerds can cause an uprising. Somehow the aristocrats have almost no power in democracy and capitalism. Power is held in 0.1%ers and the masses.
Firefox is a terrible browser. The engine is alright, and good just because it's not the monoculture. The browser is terrible. When you open it up in a fresh profile, it starts asking you to sign up for things and spend money.
I feel like with the advent of vibe coding, the bar to making your own browser is gradually lowering. People are already making all sorts of useful "houseplant programming" to serve their own pain points. Sooner or later, agentic coding will actually become really good and people will be able to just vibe code a whole browser in Rust or something that addresses the exact pain points that power users have.
The core will have to still be a solid battle tested thing. Imagine having to worry about if your vibed browser is quietly dropping some elements. Firefox and Chromium browsers are valuable because they are the targets, if a site doesn't render properly in them, it can be said that the site is wrong.
If everyone runs a vibe coded browser engine that evaporates and you might as well just have sites serve a bunch of markdown for LLMs to render in whatever inconsistent way they choose.
Vibe coding is obviously not quite there yet right now. But in the future it will be. The output of agents will be just as correct and rock solid as the software from the most experienced software developers. We'll also have the additional advantage of there being existing browsers to use as an oracle to test against to ensure that nothing regresses.
It isn't even a matter of having rock solid AI. I wonder how massive of a test suite would be needed to catch regressions...
I used to use firefox a long time ago but got tired of all the memory leaks and lag before I switched to chrome.
Now that mv2 is going away, I switch back to firefox, and it still has memory leak issues after all these years, it is really disappointing.
I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it.
Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.
Firefox was amazing even when Chrome was released
No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.
Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users.
This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
TBF KaiOS had a measure of success but it is now on life support.
The fact is Android could be scaled down way better than KaiOS could be scaled up.
(and you could just wait for the perf/$ to continue to decrease).
No need to be revisionist. Chrome brought amazing work to the table. The multiprocess, sandboxed system was incredible - it's not to say that Chrome was the first (IE did it earlier) but it was certainly way ahead of Firefox for a long time. Chrome is the reason we have Seccomp V2 on Linux. Chrome made "software is always up to date" the standard. Before Chrome, Blackhole and PoisonIvy absolutely ruined people's computers - click to play Java, click to play and sandboxed Flash, etc, were massive improvements to every day user security, probably some of the biggest security improvements to computers in my lifetime.
Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
I remember for a while that Firefox had a single process architecture for all tabs. This often frustrated me as one bad tab could just crash the whole browser while Chrome used separate processes for each tab, prompting me to switch to Chrome for a bit. Firefox caught up ages after chrome, and now I went back to them over the manifest v2 stuff.
Indeed. Around that era I had a fun little "crashmybrowser.com" toy site that had a few different JS tricks you could click that would absolutely wedge your browser (any browser, at the time). This had come after years of my being vocally annoyed that there weren't better guardrails around Javascript. Each of the functions was based on a real-world failure case.
Chrome was the first browser to be immune to all of those functions.
Mozilla really screwed the pooch not long after. Their biggest single misstep was forcing automatic updates in corporate networks. At the time, they still had pretty good adoption in the kinds of environments that had a couple of people somewhere deciding what everyone was allowed to run on the company computers. Chrome had already moved to forced updates, so these environments went to Firefox. When Firefox decided to follow Chrome, they no longer had that differentiation, and corporate IT had to choose between two browsers that both had automatic updates, but one of them had frequent memory and performance problems.
I've happily returned to Firefox a few years ago and don't have Chrome installed on any device I control.
Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead.
Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had better privacy controls.
I doubt there are many things in this universe that are unambiguously good, but Chrome's sandboxing is certainly as close as anything.
You can make your arguments about noscript if you'd like (I have a great respect for the project) but I think it was essentially irrelevant to user security at the time, real users were really harmed by malware that exploited Firefox, Java, and Flash, and Chrome killed every one of those attack paths in virtually no time at all.
Computers were far more dangerous before Chrome. You watch old TV shows and it's a joke that people would visit a site and get hacked - that's unrecognizable today, it simply doesn't happen. It used to, Chrome changed that.
I agree that on a large scale, Chrome made browsing safer for the general public at the time. But for me it made things slower, use more RAM, waste more bandwidth on ads, didn't provide meaningful security improvements, and was a big downgrade in privacy. The only time I've been successfully attacked through a browser was when a Chrome extension sold out and became adware. And Google is now deciding for a frighteningly large part of the public exactly how much security and privacy they should get.
> Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead.
This is true, but this is why we create faster and faster PCs, so our software can do more. The cost was because you were getting new safety features. Want the app to be fast, able to show you lots of tabs with no delay? That takes RAM and CPU. The CPU and RAM are there to be used for features the user wants. It's actually 100% ok if a computer has to work really hard to run an app as long as that app is designed well, it means the user is making it do lots of useful work. That's what the computer is there for.
The "Just buy a new computer" excuse doesn't actually make the tradeoff no longer a tradeoff. The cost is still real, you're just putting a price tag on it (then ignoring the price, along with any alternative tradeoffs).
NoScript and uMatrix were a great help - for very advanced users. But the typical user was left behind.
> Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
This is basically whole history of Mozilla and to be honest most of open source projects that dont have BDFL type of leadership.
It is especially true for projects like Firefox which have access to massive funding since these attract the sort of people who consider those funds 'wasted' because they can be used to do so much for 'the common good'. Mitchell Baker - the utterly incompetent CEO - considered Firefox an afterthought because what the world needed was more NGO activism and what she needed was 400% more money for herself [1].
Wikipedia/Wikimedia is another example of a project with massive funding with similar problems even though the latter has a (not so) BDFL.
[1] https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
Wikimedia might be not perfect, but Wikipedia is still one of the most visited websites in the world and source of a lot of humanity knowledge in general.
Firefox on other hand is just something only nerds like us care about and only alive because Alphabet / Google is scared of antitrust legal action possibility.
And wikipedia runs off a tiny tiny fraction of what they raise. Almost all of the good on wikipedia comes in-spite of the organisation that owns it. Without the community pouring hundreds of thousands of hours into the project (unpaid) a year, wikipedia would be dead immediately. And if there was ever a time in its life that the project needed good leadership and innovative thinking, it would be now when AI is seriously threatening its survival. If people stop going to the site and instead go to the chat bots that scrape the site, there will be less and less incentive for the power users to continue maintaining wikipedia.
It was good, but slow by comparison at the time.
It was certainly better than IE but Chrome definitely surpassed Firefox and is still better except for blocking addons
It was just less of everything than Chrome. First install experience for an average user was much better in terms of speed and snappiness. That was one of the keys to its success.
> It was just less of everything than Chrome.
This is insane. As a power FF user, I don't think Chrome ever "got ahead". There were 2 reasons for its success (in order):
1. Made by a respected company that was killing everything in those days.
2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable.
Feature-wise - it was always worse.
3. For a significant period of time (that continues to this day) websites were made using only Chrome as the target platform, turning Firefox into an eternal second fiddle that would occasionally break important/work websites.
> 2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable.
That is ahead for the majority of people.
Yep, Chrome was great but the past few years they're obviously moving the wrong way. I'm completely off of Chrome, back to Firefox and Brave.
No it didn’t? People(web devs) jumped to Chrome because Google advertised it heavily.
I never did because I remember internet explorer and lack of transparent PNG support.
Funny enough I never left Firefox. It’s always been great.
Were you a Mac/Windows or Linux user? Personally I was an early adopter of Firefox and it worked great on Windows, but on Mac for a long stretch of time it was significantly slower than other Mac first browsers. Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling for the longest time, and the UI was dated.
Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
>Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling
Hasn't been the case since at least 2017.
Ditto.
Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".
Was that before Google removed "don't be evil" ? Good thing they weren't doing anything sketchy before that ;)
I remember those days. I still used FF even back then. Stability was an occasional issue with FF, but feature-wise Chrome was always better.
I remember when my friends were singing the praises of Chrome and Gmail and I was telling them it's a trap.
Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.
I will keep the same
It was astonishing how you fell for it back then.
In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!
It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837
Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.
When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.
If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...
A - Billions
B - not Billions
The webRequest extension API -- the one that uBlock Origin uses and was removed in Manifest v3 -- was not added until 2012.
All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there.
It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.
> All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there
Something that was great in 2010 may not look great in 2026.
It's been 16 years. The Internet has moved on. Blocking ads is the norm now, and they are removing that functionality.
It's only strange because you interpreted "Chrome made the web so much better for everyone" as "Chrome had a webRequest API", which is probably not what the original poster meant.
The article we're discussing is about how extensions that didn't upgrade to Manifest v3, including uBlock Origin, are now being removed from the Chrome web store.
uBlock Origin didn't migrate to v3 because they use the webRequest API and didn't want to switch to the less-powerful replacement, declarativeNetRequest (uBlock Origin Lite uses the new API and is available in the store).
Based on this context, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the reasons the person I replied to believes Chrome isn't making the web better any more is due to the removal of uBlock Origin. And this is due to the removal of the webRequest API.
Few years ago when google announced their MV2 plan I moved to Firefox. I don't think in all this time I ever missed Chrome for anything in particular outside of maybe 1 or 2 websites that didn't have proper support.
Switch to Firefox if you haven't already really.
Firefox is genuinely quite a good option. There are some Google-driven web proposals that they've refused to implement[0] (I'm sure I disagreed with some of them, though I forget which), but overall I've found that I've never really had to think about the browser: it's just a medium for the web.
They do offer some integrated services (which some would denote as bloat), though unlike Chrome, they do let you actually turn things off, which I'm very appreciative of -- they don't seem to be nearly as forceful as Google, who recently added a 4GB download to every Chrome install[0].
As I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more appreciative of platforms which don't try to redefine the problem scope, and instead just provide a platform for other things. GrapheneOS does this perfectly too.
[0]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ [1]: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/05/google-chrome...
And some of these proposals are available as polyfill browser extensions for Firefox
I would question if those sites only worked with Chrome or just had some user agent filtering in place. There are Chrome only websites, but thankfully most things I encounter are just requiring a blessed id, which can be easily faked.
For Work they actively deactivate Linux users for "security reasons", or Microsoft makes their web apps intentionally hostile like disabling copy/paste or disabling photo/picture or file uploads for Linux users when you're allowed in the policies.
Turns out, it's bypassable. They just check the User Agent and Sec-CH headers, so I built a small browser extension for Chrome that allows to modify those headers.
On top of that I built chromium-profiles [1], my tool for managing those isolated sandboxes so that I can tweak/change them based on the stupid policies per O365 tenant I have to work with.
So I use 3 different profiles for 3 different customers with 3 different security policies set for their organization... For being allowed to use a freaking web app.
That, for me, is the only reason I still have to have chromium installed. Microsoft stupidity.
I wish Firefox would focus on this sort of use case, like the "--pwa" and "--user-data" CLI flags and preinstallable extensions for those profiles. But it can't be done due to how they manage extensions with their own signing cert, how dev mode extensions are always cleared etc. Well, apart from Microsoft intentionally making webapps unusable in Firefox.
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/chromium-profiles
Most office IT actively blocks it.
The solution is to use Firefox. uBlock Origin always worked best in Firefox anyway:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Or just run pihole or any other dns blocking service
DNS blocking just isn't as good as a browser extension, because it can only block based on domain names. Pihole helps block ads on non-browser apps, but a real ad blocker extension in a browser is much better. I run pihole on my network, but I still run uBlock Origin on Firefox.
AFAIK firefox also will remove MV2
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signi...
> Towards the end of 2023 [...] we’ll decide on an appropriate timeframe to deprecate MV2.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manif...
> Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future.
Seems they changed their mind in 2024.
Firefox declared that they intend to keep MV2 support[1].
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-manifest-v3-adbl...
No, they do not: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manif...
Based on what?
I'm fairly happy with uBlock Origin Lite. Sure the original was better but this one does the job as well. uBlock Origin Lite is a MV3 extension, by the same author.
Yeah I don’t seem to feel any performance or functionality degradation myself. What <X> ad blocking related feature has been made impossible with MV3?
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... has a few of the more practical concrete examples. Namely content can load without the blocker being ready to filter, CNAME cloaking can't be handled properly (in Chrom* at least), and the filter rules aren't as flexible.
Interestingly, the rule count limits themselves do not (currently) seem to be much an issue despite it being one of the more common concerns on the original MV3 announcement.
> content can load without the blocker being ready to filter
This isn't an MV3 issue, it's a Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization. It was also true with MV2. In fact, MV3 has improved the situation because DNR rules are enforced immediately.
You could certainly argue that Chrome should allow extensions to block browser initialization, or that it should be user configurable - but it seems like an entirely defensible Chrome decision. Regardless, it's nothing to do with MV3.
> the filter rules aren't as flexible.
That's true, but they are still very flexible, and DNR makes some very nice features possible in uBO lite that were not possible in uBO.
For example, did you know that you can change your User-Agent with uBO lite? Go to the Custom DNR rules tab, and enter something like this to pretend to be Lynx on whatever.com:
I don't think that's possible in uBO, so clearly there are some benefits to switching. I have a ton of custom dnr rules, and love this feature.Any MV3 issue could probably be summed up as "MV3 isn't so bad, just the implementation in Chrome" where Chrome defines MV3 (as it's not a W3C standard) and ships it as such.
That said,
> Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization
It's not "browser initialization" that was blocked, it was blocking network requests for pages until they were processed by all components in the chain. Notably, this could never apply applied to the browser or its internal pages itself.
> It was also true with MV2.
With MV2 you used the blocking version of https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w... which no longer works with MV3 extensions in Chrome and then the request had to wait until it was given to and processed by the blocker.
Firefox is a great example about all of the above points: MV3 still supports blockingWebRequest there, so it gets the best of both worlds.
> did you know that you can change your User-Agent with uBO lite?
With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders. I'm not sure uBO ever bothered with this before uBO Lite, but it's a bit of a double standard to say "MV2 didn't offer blocking requests, that was a different API which happ
> and then the request had to wait until it was given to and processed by the blocker.
Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately.
> With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders
Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
> Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately.
There were several workarounds like suspendTabsUntilReady which helped greatly in this half of the problem. Then it would solidly stay permanently registered too. I'm pretty sure none of these work in Chrome anymore though, it was obvious they never intended these sorts of things to work that way.
Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just guarantee full filtering on startup as seen in this change https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1447551
> Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
What you said is so, it just might highlight more than what you'd like it to at the same time. That it was missing before had nothing to do with the difficulty or need for MV3. uMatrix had it for a while and Gorhill regretted it because it didn't change things like the user agent JS would report and such, hence he wouldn't port it over. The above filter has the same problems. Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher, that it's normal quality is why it was never in the old extension though.
> Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just support full filtering on startup
Sure, but as I said, it's a design decision, and nothing to do with MV3. I'm not trying to litigate it one way or the other.
I do think DNR is a good solution, and that request callbacks were a bad idea. That's my opinion - and the counterargument is obvious -- you can't do literally everything you could do in a callback declaratively. That doesn't sway me, I still think it's better!
> Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher
It was just a trivial example of using a powerful new feature that uBO doesn't have, not a full featured extension! The fact that it's possible at all is the point, it's cool.
You can definitely do anything that DNR can do with webRequest, nobody can dispute that. The point is that there are things you can do with uBO lite that you can't do with uBO (and vice versa!). It's not a straight downgrade, there are powerful new features.
Maybe or maybe not. But Youtube ads are now freely flowing through with MV3. That was the entire ruse.
I have used uBlock Origin Lite or a couple years. Youtube is supposed to have ads?
The companies that don't want you using the lite version are waiting for full version to completely go away before blocking the lite one. No sense driving you to that. So, check back in a couple months and see if it's all still good.
I've seen some ads slip through the cracks nowadays, like I think Wikia ads for some TV shows I go to now have ads on them. They gave up on blocking Meta.
I believe the main things are that block lists have to be updated through the Chrome Web Store and there is an upper limit for things that can be blocked.
Severe limits on additional filters, which is bad for people who want it to add more annoyances than it does by default.
The main reason uBlock on Firefox works better is because of CNAME de-cloaking. All the tracking shit that appears to load as first-party, but isn't, can be correctly detected and blocked on Firefox. On Chrome it cannot, and with Google, Facebook, et al. encouraging site owners to move to these fake first-party conversion tracking solutions, your exposure to profiling has increased dramatically. You may see fewer ads but it does not do the same job.
Isn’t the idea that over time chrome will limit what ubo lite blocks? It will phase out all of its own ad networks so they’re not blocked first, but it’s possible they also start allowing third party ads through for a price.
One Google doom over, another to go: https://keepandroidopen.org/
Blame the brain damaged judge that literally told Google
"The Apple app store is not a monopoly because Apple has no competitors on their platform."
Google is just doing what they need to do to stop being a monopoly....by becoming a monopoly, because of a ruling that the internet actually celebrated. Which we can trace back to Epic not being happy that sideloading on Android wasn't perfectly frictionless.
(Note: Epic also sued Apple, but lost, because the Apple app store is not a monopoly.)
Can't wait until we are forced to actually make Linux Phone systems actually good, but no one will invest until Android is closed
No one will invest even after Android is closed.
The Android/iPhone duopoly is nearly impossible to break because very few people want to carry two personal phones, and it takes only one app that they can't do without being only available on Android/iPhone to make it impossible to choose anything else. The app providers likewise have no incentive to support anything else because everyone has one of these two.
Bank apps are the prime example here that's unlikely to start supporting other systems. Public transit (and in some places parking) is another potential problem where even the unhinged "well just change banks to the one that does support your favorite phone" argument fails. ID apps (either governmental or de facto standards like the Swedish BankID) are coming too.
I’m irrationally angry with Mozilla for the way they’ve handled Firefox over the past few years. Clearly we need an independent, safe browser and there are no major alternatives for the common folk. Just let me pay a monthly fee to keep Firefox lean and fast instead of jamming AI tools and 3rd party integrations.
There's never been a better time to switch to Firefox. Hopefully soon we'll have another player in this space with Ladybird but for now, Firefox is almost necessary to use the internet unimpeded.
There are also some good Firefox forks out there, and I have been daily driving Zen for nearly a year. However, Librewolf and Floorp are both good options if you don't like Firefox's defaults or their push for more AI features (which you can turn off, to be fair).
Switch to firefox
AND try to not use Google, Facebook, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Oracle and other similar products made by asshole companies.
Nah. One step at a time. That's the end goal, but by throwing everything all at once it's too easy to tell yourself it can't be done; so start with the worst offenders.
Those ARE the worst offenders. And you can easily avoid 80% off that list.
Did you forget the biggest asshole, Mr Apple?
In what universe? Apple is by far the most consumer friendly big tech company.
Here's your boycott list:
* Android * All websites hosted on Google Cloud, Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure * All websites using React * Github
Life is tough. Good luck.
I don't know why you didn't include Apple on the list and why you use Meta's old company name.
Yes, these criminals have achieved quite a lot and it's hard to avoid them. I agree.
Apple is not that evil in my opinion compared to the rest. If I don't use Apple then they don't bother me.
I don't care about Facebook's rebranding. I'm allowed to call them what they are.
Honestly, at what point do we just throw our kit in the trash and go back to pen & paper?
Reintroducing pen and paper to your note-taking repertoire might not be such a bad idea, anyway -- it's a much more creative medium than most digital, textual forms.
It's extremely complicated to organize it, though
I suppose it's harder to cross-reference and find things, though I suspect you could utilize some sort of organizational system to mostly overcome that.
I really do think pen and paper will slowly regain prominence; I personally find that it can be much more liberating than digital media.
It's great to be able to use the page as a canvas, writing wherever you want, without having to meet the constraints of a text editor or the likes. Doodles help to visualize and understand problems, too.
Tangent for macOS is my current go-to for note-taking, and it works quite well: it's mostly just a Markdown editor, a tree structure of folders (which is really just a normal folder), and the ability to cross-reference and embed images.
I suppose the primary problem of note-taking apps is that they sort of have to be opinionated in some way to be useful (that's been my experience, anyway.) Markdown files are also guilty of this: they constrain you to a certain layout, which can either be a negative or a positive. Anything too complicated can be off-putting, whilst anything too simplistic can also be limiting.
It's a surprisingly complex field, and it could explain why there's so many different apps for it.
What is complicated about organizing written notes?
No search, no making space in an existing page, no moving text around, cumbersome to take it with you everywhere, unlike a phone.
You don't really need most of this, or it can be solved simply by thinking and remembering.
By that logic you don't really need paper notes either.
Not complicated, but many people have never learned how to do it or developed a system.
A similar life hack is the next time you have to give a presentation, you know, what is normally a brain numbing powerpoint slide deck sort of thing, rehearse and do the slides live on a chalkboard. The novelty of the spectacle means people will actually pay attention. Whiteboards are ok but really lack that visceral staccato punctuation that a chalkboard brings to the table.
Never, because you have to pay for pen an paper, and the most reliable way to determine what the internet will favor is simply "Does it cost money or show me ads". That is literally as deep as the internets interest goes.
Yesterday. Do we actually need any of this stuff? Probably not. But it's damn hard to stop enjoying it.
The moment you are reading this is not only peak digital trash, but also peak digital treasure!
That is up to you but I don't see why. Just ignore whatever these entities do, run you free OS with your free software when and how you want it and 'your kit' is yours without interference by hostile entities. You won't be able to access much of what those entities put out there but that doesn't matter once you realise their offerings aren't worth their cost.
The 'net is a big place with a lot of things going on. Drop the hostile actors and it is still a big place with a lot of things going on. The only problem you might encounter is once created by authorities which insist on you interacting with them through those hostile entities. I have thus far managed to use their applications - Swedish BankID and Dutch DigiD being the main ones - without needing to resort to any hostile entities - no Google accounts or Google services on my devices yet everything still works once I get rid of the nag screens telling me things won't work without the aforementioned.
In short, drop hostile entities and keep 'your kit'.
I’ve had quite a few issues with Firefox crashing or otherwise behaving poorly in recent years.
Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.
There is a very easy solution to this problem, it's called FireFox. Now if only Mozilla would stop messing with it and instead would turn it into a class example of speed and memory efficiency I'd be even happier. But it's pretty good and I'm running it routinely with way too many tabs open (in the 100's, on a 32G laptop). I do have to be careful about unloading stuff. So, kick the Chrome habit.
Ironically, this is a fantastic time to use Firefox with UBO. I made the switch back when Chrome first threatened to block UBO and it was clear they were just kicking the can. What I've come to find is most of the things with ads won't take the time to 'block' UBO on Firefox. Perhaps it is not a big enough segment to justify anti adblocking coding. Youtube seems to have given up trying to fight it. Most things just work. It has been a long time since I've needed to fire up Chrome for anything.
Google for me died when they banned my many years old gmail account out of blue. Because i used vpn to access it.
It was such a big hit to my online life to lose my email like that.
Their appeal system is fully automated, impossible to get a human to look at your case.
This is warning to any reader of this comment, do not depend on your google account to be forever.
This exact issue is why I have been paying for my e-mails for the last 5 years.
It's nice to be the customer, instead of the product.
I'm hoping that Mozilla Firefox can adopt a similar foundation/donation strategy as Signal has proven to work quite well.
We really need independence from Google in the browser landscape if we want the open web to survive.
The real issue is one fine day all web devs will gangup and say
- This site works only with Chrome or Edge.
I sincerely hope worldwide software devs grow up some ethics and resist doing such things.
The reality is that Chrome users still have sufficient ad blocking so as to not be impacted by this. What will be interesting is if it stops being sufficient, at which point I think people will migrate. But until then, why would they? Most people don't really care if their extension is MV2 or MV3, they just want their youtube video to play faster.
And in the case of Brave the ad blocker is built into the browser itself.
I'm pretty sure it is just a matter of time before the first (open source?) extensions marketplace for Chromium fork extensions will hit the net.
A party like Helium or Brave might even already be working on it. Because while Google might not like it at all, a huge chunk of people love extensions like uBO and ease of use a little bit too much.
Brave Browser offers "Brave-hosted" versions of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.
Funny how many people shit on Firefox in this thread. To some of us it was ALWAYS OBVIOUS this was going to happen. Google is an advertisement company, after all. “Chrome is better still except for the shit we’re getting rammed down our throats”
Firefox <3 open web <3 corporate demons </3
I've been using the Brave browser for years. I just turned off all the crypto stuff. How does Firefox today compare with Brave today?
You don't have to turn off any crypto stuff.
Instead, you just get inundated with ads and pop culture garbage whenever you open a new tab.
Same here, not using firefox because of worse compatibility (maybe not their fault, many devs only test in chrome) and weaker security (maybe not their fault, they don't have as much money). I appreciate the people who do and help diversify the ecosystem though.
15 years ago: "why is google putting so much effort into building a web browser? it must be because they want to see the web grow and by extension more people will use their services"
Haven't used chrome in years, Firefox has served me well
I think the new features in MV3 are great, and UBO lite is great. The initial versions of UBOl worked, but definitely lost some power user features. Those are basically all back, it now has full scriptlet support, custom dynamic filters work, element zapper is back and you can now have custom dnr rules. That's a very powerful feature that doesn't exist in UBO.
The big loss for me with the mv2 deprecation was uMatrix, so I made my own replacement. It's a prototype, but you can try it if you like: https://github.com/taviso/matrix3
I think the real question is how have Edge and Mozilla shipped WebExtension support on Android, but Google hasn't. If other competent vendors can ship it then there can't be a technical reason, it must be a policy decision. I'm more open to hearing conspiracy theories about that than MV3 :)
All that hassle to sell youtube premium
Allowing Google to capture both phones (android) and browsers (chrome) was a mistake. Needs to be broken up...
Been using FF since they announced this. The only disadvantage I've found is that I think it consumes more memory compared against chromium based browsers.
Hoping my browser gets some love in the near future
I can imagine business reviews within Google that are seeing precipitous drops in Ad revenue given the uptake of AI Mode, which needs to be balanced out. And this becomes an easy tap that they can open, in the pretext of 'security', so Ad Words campaigns weren't getting rendered previously start showing up. If they'd only look at cracking down on malicious Ads rendered through their systems, it would be applause worthy, but I guess we're asking too much.
Thank you google for hosting the downloader that exists for making it easy to use for automated testing('cause all the other people still use it). Its the only use case that exists for me(actually my ai) to use it.
Weirdly enough, you can install the full version of uBO on Edge, and I think it's a great option for less tech savvy family and friends. It's basically chrome but without the 'make this your default browser' shenanigans.
The media just have to report the removal of ad blocking as a security/safety issue.
If users are made aware that what Chromium is doing, they can make a better decision, but it has to be called out in every post about Chromium (preferably mentioning a few safer choices), otherwise it will disappear in the noise.
I made a conscious attempt to try to switch to Zen (built on Gecko/Firefox), but ended up switching back to Chromium-based browsers because pages just feel like they load faster with Chromium. :(
Doesnt matter which browser you use, if you don't have proper adblock in it, the pages will load waaaay slower than any other engine.
I recently switched to Zen with Ublock Origin and it does seem like some sites are slower than before. It's got me suspicious that site owners are increasingly throttling users with adblockers. YouTube absolutely does.
Zen is my favorite browser experience by far, and I've been using the web since Netscape in 1994. But the slowdowns do put a damper on things. Also some of the streaming platforms don't seem to play nice with it.
This caused me to go back and try Firefox again, I struggled with performance years ago on Mac when I did this. This time it’s been great, I switched from Arc to Zen and don’t see any reason to go back.
Zen is genuinely so nice. I have been a Safari die hard because for so long it’s been remarkable at resource efficiency. After switching my macOS window management to aerospace, Zen finally got me to switch away. And it’s great that it loads all the Firefox extensions.
I stopped using chromium browsers years ago. After this move, not sure why anyone would.
If I can’t install an ad/malware blocker, I’m not using your browser.
How about Brave? Any thoughts?
I like Brave, and I know and respect many of the technical team there. I looked into the various stories about the browser that led to it being unpopular in some key communities, and I really couldn't find anything some misunderstandings, common business practices (which you can legitimately disapprove of), and a wish to register opposition to their connection to cryptocurrency/web3.
I think many people would choose not to use Brave because of its association with Brendan Eich (details at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... ), which stands as separate from the browser itself, or the actions of the company.
I agree that inventing JavaScript is unforgivable, but surely we can't cancel people permanently.
It's been working great for me as the primary browser for a couple of years now.
Prior to that I was on Firefox (for the sake of browser engine diversity) but left as soon as they announced they were turning into an AI powered advertising company, and would use your data for training. However, I keep it around for cross-browser testing.
Avoid Brave. It is basically Chromium, with commercial shitware slapped on, and an ad-blocker which performs worse than UBlock Origin on Firefox. Brave Inc. (a for-profit company) is openly hostile to forks and independent builds, and expects you to run and trust their binaries. It also wants to charge you a one-time fee for a build free of crapware, i.e. something you can get for free from Chromium.
Brave does what it says on the tin: It's another Blink based browser that is now rather mature and trouble free. It's supported by very responsive developers that provide a fully integrated ad blocking engine that is superior to every browser add-on/extension solution ever created.
That's it in a nut shell. Take a few minutes and go solve all your browser problems.
I've been using Brave for years and its great. Having JS off by default (i.e. shields) is excellent for security. They provide MV2 versions of AdGuard and uBlock Origin that you can enable directly from the browser settings. Those are also both excellent for security since the main threat is malicious scripts served up by ad networks.
I love it as a browser. The startup screen shocks me every now and then, pimping some crypto shit or another, but other than that, it's good.
The intended usage is to disable the startup screen immediately after installing.
Also all the crap in the toolbar.
Also on the sides now...
I used to be interested in it but ever since they launched Brave Orion it has become clear they intend to actively monetize the free public versions they have been releasing, and the path they're taking with crypto and add-on bloat just feels ickier than most of its competition including Chrome.
> they launched Brave Orion
I think you mean Brave Origin. It's the minimal version without the extra services. Free on Linux and purchaseable on other platforms.
I think that's a fair compromise, since the company needs to somehow make money.
What Google means to say is that MV3 will allow them to more closely control what you’re able to do with your time, since this was done primarily to target ad blocking software.
Not that this matters much anymore as Google is now more an AI than it is a search engine, and an unreliable one at that.
When you make your money selling ads, you're not going to want your users to block ads. It's as simple as that. Google should not be allowed to both sell web ads and control a browser platform.
Waterfox is the best browser I have ever used. Native tree style tabs, minimalist UI, built in ad blocking, Firefox extensions.
If I remember correctly, ~10 years ago one of Waterfox's main points was 64-bit + Intel compiler with aggressive optimization flags. At that time Firefox was 32-bit only on Windows, at least the stable version. From my experience, it didn't feel faster. Actually, it felt slightly more sluggish, I guess pointers and some data structures become larger, so the browser used more memory and put more pressure on CPU caches. It's probably no longer relevant as all major browsers are 64-bit by default.
Yeah, kind of the same. Out of the other "firefox" clones, Waterfox is my goto.
Switched the family to Firefox. I use Libre but I understand it’s a hard sell. FF is much easier and the regular user can’t tell the difference anyway since they don’t spelunk into the details.
Pick my mother-in-law phone, is full of apps that pushes mensages every second, ad block is a way to prevent web to become IE with that toolbars, remember?
Apparently uBO can't be ported to MV3, as dynamic request interception is no longer allowed, only fixed block lists.
"For security and privacy"
The same day I finally migrated from Arc to Zen. What a coincidence ^^
I know people don't like apple and safari here, but I like safari. It works good enough for me. And when an experience is off, it helps me develop my web developer hat by better understanding webkit and why safari has a different experience or frontend like behavior.
I'm with you. I've been riding with Safari for almost 20 years now. It's been nothing but great for me. I cannot think of a time I have used a website that did not function properly in Safari.
Prior to the reintroduction of UBO (lite), I feel like Safari helped me reduce my trash content consumption. Page with tons of ads? Not worth visiting. Youtube keeps playing ads? My frustration is a sign I need to get off YouTube and do something else. I do not need nor want to mange tens of plugins. I like to keep things simple and slim. So, perhaps that is one dealbreaker for some?
Even if I believe Apple hung the Moon, I still seriously recommend Safari to anyone using Apple devices.
This entire thread is so ridiculous. UBlock Origin Lite still blocks all the ads.
Why do you think it's called 'Lite'? Are you going to argue that Google did us a favor by benevolently removing functionality?
For now
I suspect it's to force even more people to use they AI
People fall for "think of the children!" so let's also try "think of the elderly!". We're a society that ruthlessly opposes individual responsibility and individual outcomes.
Google has been boiling the frog for a long time with this one. I for one will keep using Firefox.
Last year, I moved back to Firefox after a decade or so exclusively on Chrome, which is something I'd been procrastinating about doing for some time.
It was mostly painless. Bookmarks were automatic. I had some extensions to reconfigure and some passwords to migrate to a different password manager.
I wished I'd gotten it over with sooner.
Firefox is still great!
As a longtime Firefox user: shrug
For most people, mv3 is "good enough". But that's mostly just random chance. If sites really start taking advantage of the deficiencies in mv3 to push ads, I think Chrome will lose a lot of users. And I think at that point Google will be forced to backtrack and bring back mv2. (Quite contrary to people who think this is just the start of the slippery slope, boiling the frog move to manifest vEvil which will disable adblocking entirely).
Contrary to some confusion about whether firefox will keep mv2:
Yes they will. Also I predict that MV2 is going to be a major boon for firefox.
It has taken a long time to prove the value of firefox to the masses and I believe mv2 extensions in particular ublock origin will be what keeps people coming back to it
I've not touched chrome in decades. Firefox stands strong. I would donate but in EU that comes with tax issues.
I don't get it why don't they include it in a separate fork in Chromium..... problem solved.
ungoogled-chromium (https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-por...) still supports MV3/uBO and is de-Googled.
However, this paper[1] suggests that uBO Lite (MV3) which is still supported in the latest Chrome/chromium browsers, works at least as well for almost all users as the original (MV2) uBO, and, in some cases even better than before... so it's really no cause for alarm IMO.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01000
This (whether MV3 blocking is sufficient) is the right question to ask, but also a premature answer.
Because here's the future: Google is already promoting that sites have their tag management (including ad network JS) resolve at the CDN level, with randomized custom-built URLs baked into your page source as served.
https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/gatew...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/google-tag-gateway-for-advertise...
In this context, the only thing that can sufficiently block ads as this is more broadly adopted, is dynamic code whose definitions and behaviors can be updated regularly. Because ad networks, including Google, will become increasingly creative (especially with the ability to use AI) in having a near-infinite set of embedding techniques.
And Google sits as both the beneficiary of unblockable ads, and (with MV3) the gatekeeper of timing for executable code updates for ad blocking extensions. Core to the MV3 model is that any use of dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension (and subject to a mandatory review period for every update) is forbidden.
Google doesn't need to do something as drastic as disallow uBO and other extensions; they simply need to "boil the frog" over the course of years as more and more of their clients move to Tag Gateway and similar approaches, and give their ad implementation an increasing "head start" by delaying approval of uBO code updates that are trying to keep pace.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of permanent absence.
> dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension
How could that be enforced on open source browsers like chromium which can always sideload extensions and/or be modified/forked to not have such limitations?
I am a webdev and sometimes I have issues with ungoogled-chromium so I switched to firefox. One time I had to debug a push notification issue and realized ungoogled-chromium simply doesn't support it (but never displayed information about that when registering the service worker). That was years ago, situation might be different now.
uBlock Origin Lite
It is nerfed.
What is a concrete example of an ad you are seeing that it can't remove?
"No way to prevent this" say users of only browser where this regularly happens.
Mozilla has had their share of mass extension deprecation and breakage.
They moved over to a new extension platform for legitimate development reasons. I agree there was pain but it wasn't a self interested flexing of power to remove ad blocking extensions.
Having what you consider to be a good excuse doesn't mean it didn't happen. Multiple times.
The "excuse" is a distinction between different types of motivating factors and consequences which has everything to do with the relative merits of those two examples.
Seems to be an unpopular opinion, but uBlock Origin Lite has been fine so far.
Next front in the ad-blocking war will be AI-based instead of simple heuristics anyway.
Google's Evil knows no more boundaries.
Hopefully more and more people wake up as to what this adMonster has become.
If we want a real open world wide in the future, we need to do something about Google. UBO is not the only one killed by Google here. They will continue on their wicked path. (And, while it may be great that Ladybird exists, I have some doubts that this will really be a contender. We should not become lazy and think that Google will just comply with the demands of The People here - its business is based on controlling influx of adMoney via its Evil Empire, and it secures this by de-facto controlling the browser stack. Just look how many people in % use the chrome-codebase now. That IS effectively a monopoly powered by greed.)
dd
Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?
Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.
I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.
You mean OS as in "operating system", not "open source", which made me question how you'd suggest Safari and Edge before I realized what was going on.
I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.
Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?
That's usually said as Open Source Software (OSS) or longer acronyms that sound like dental care.
FLOSS, FOSS, OSS, OS, dear child has many names :)
> or longer acronyms that sound like dental care.
What acronym are you thinking of?
They're referencing "FLOSS": Free/Libre and Open Source Software [0]
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html
> I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better?
Are being ignorant on purpose now?
Apple's Safari has integration with Apple's Password app which firefox does not. Edge automatically connects with your Microsoft account.
Both browsers sync tabs, bookmarks and so on across your Microsoft/Apple account connected devices.
For a lot of 'average' users this is already extremely convenient.
On top of that, Safari is still the most 'energy efficient' browser you could use on macOS.
I recently switched from Safari to Zen and the Firefox extension for Apple passwords works well. You have to enter a pushed 6 digit code when you first start the browser, but it’s relatively painless.
The UBO on Safari has the same issue as chrome except that it has been that way for several years longer. They brought back the lite form of UBO only recently as, presumably, the developer saw the writing on the wall and mv3 and Safari carry the same limitations.
I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.
As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.
Firefox's extension support is far superior to Safari's, cross-platform support, and I really don't want to use Edge for the same reasons I don't want to use Chrome.
Is the limiting factor for extensions APIs or just porting it to WebKit?
Firefox sucks on memory though on MacOS.
I use Firefox when I want disposable tabs / containers.
then majority of stuff - Safari. private window work stuff set to chrome - since I can resume the session unlike safari.
If you use more than one operating system, you can't use the operating system browser if you want sync or the same experience. For example, I use a Windows desktop and a MacBook.
Safari is fantastic for me. Passwords app integration alone is a killer feature.
Okay, so first.
Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.
Second,
God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.
Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help
My number one reason. Safari won’t let me customize the search engine. If I had that I would use safari all day long.
No this one specifically for me, but same idea. I want to use safari, especially for battery life, but there are too many behaviors about Safari that I can't change.
It's such a silly limitation. There are extensions, but they're all imperfect hacks.
They are annoying hacks too because the common one the search still goes to the chosen default and then the extension hijacks and redirects.
I see 5 choices for search engine in Settings? Are you saying you want one not listed?
yes, for example they have Ecosia but not Qwant (they are said to share their index but for my searches, I often flip over to Qwant when Ecosia results for the same query are not adequate.) I understand why Safari went with a search engine whitelist but I wish there was a way to make exceptions.
Yes. The obvious choice for HN is not listed in it. It’s a silly limitation anyway.
Because for enterprise with Google login you literally can't login with anything else except official Chrome.
This might be IT department enforced, we're a FedRAMP High shop with Google IdP and roll Safari
I've worked at some places where they restrict to Chrome because they have a corporate extension
Yes
Just change the user agent.
I've used Linux exclusively for over 20 years. What is its "OS browser"?
Epiphany on Gnome - https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/
In all other cases Firefox, I'd assume.
Lynx?
eww?
:r !curl?
Probably FF lol
I use Safari for nearly everything and it's my favorite browser. It has some oddities, but I find just as many Chrome and Firefox bugs as I do Safari bugs. I use Firefox on everything else though.
The inspector is a nightmare if you're doing web dev (imo; it always felt clunky). If they replaced that with a Chromium-style inspector, I'd probably jump over.
Is edge Different here? It's also dropping ubo anyway.
I prefer Firefox on mobile for supporting ublock personally and I don't see why I would use a different browser on my desktop.
I'm still using Arc, I wonder when I'll lose UBO support. That'll be the day I switch back to Firefox.
Arc turned off MV3/UBO a few weeks ago for me, similar time to when all the other Chromium based browsers did.
I'm thinking of switching to Zen which is a Firefox based clone of Arc
It is not without its fair share of faults, but I stay on Firefox because of multi account containers
> Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?
Because Edge sucks, and FF is better than Safari.
I use multiple OSes. I do not want a different list of extensions and preferences on each machine I am on. Firefox makes it simple and uniform.
"Safari" and "beautiful" in the same sentence?
It's not. It's barely functional, slower than Chrome, and always trails it in feature compatibility.
Safari was always the Internet Explorer 6 of the Internet. Archaic, quirky, way behind on useful new APIs. Perhaps things have changed recently.
> Why not just use Safari?
I use Safari, but don’t really like it. I don’t want to use Chrome or Chromium derivatives and Firefox doesn’t support AppleScript (that’s essential for me), so all that’s left is Safari. Or Orion, I guess, but it’s not good enough to offset Safari’s iCloud Private Relay.
Things I dislike about Safari include not being able to setup alternative search bar engines other than the awful default choice; not being able to disable JavaScript by default and enable it selectively; not being able to have it auto-delete site data on close except for defined domains; iCloud tab sync is finicky and doesn’t always work.
Some of those can be solved with extensions, but then the system to allow or deny extensions is atrocious: You can’t easily say “allow extensions everywhere except these domains”. You have to open each domain in tabs, then deny each domain individually in each extension. It’s also not kept in sync with iOS, where it’s even worse because you have to accept an extension on a domain before you get the option to deny it.
I'm a dev and use windows (sadly have to), android and linux, and would never use edge, because why? when it randomly opens because of a wrong file association or whatnot, I only see a bucket of ms nags and dark patterns. It's disgusting.
Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.
One data point: I’ve been building Web GIS applications for the past 15ish years and Firefox has one and off been a real pain in the neck, suffering from canvas API quirks and performance issues. I think the current state at work is that Firefox is palpably slower than Chrome and I need to find time to go figure out why.
Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.