> instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application

I am confused.

- The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article.

- The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps instead of learning web standards; but react apps work equally well (or poorly) in all major browsers.

- Finally, how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.

Consumers never really pick products for ideological reasons, no matter how galling that is to ideologues

Chrome was made to fracture, and everything started with the aptly named “Atom” editor (they “invented” Electron).

Everybody choose convenience over efficiency and standards, because apparently nobody understood what “being lazy” actually is.

IE was far less user-hostile than Chrome.

Excuse me. If it's on MDN, I'm going to use it if it's useful for my app. Not my fault if not all browsers can keep up! Half JK. If I get user complaints I'll patch them for other browsers but I'm only one person so it's hard and I rely on user feedback. (Submit bug reports y'all)

Not everyone. Some of us used Firefox all along and didn't just go with the "default" invasive thing.

That's fundamentally a mischaracterization.

Everyone focused on short term gains. Optimizing for browser with 30% market share, backed by Google makes more sense than a browser with 20%. Repeat with 40% and 20% respectively. And so on, and so on.

There isn't a lesson to learn. It's just short term thinking.

Now Google has enough power and lacks scruples that would prevent it from exploiting.

The main wrong lesson learned was to promote Chrome instead of Firefox (also in what many HN readers have been guilty of).

The answer is antitrust.

The FTC / DOJ should strip Google of Chrome.

Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:

- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"

- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)

- Google search is the default search

- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search

- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser

- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services

- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising

- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android

- Made Google accounts the default

- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer

- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google

- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)

- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues

- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results

- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise

- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android

... and that's just scratching the surface.

Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.

Webmasters who make their money on ads seem like the group least likely to do this.

We also need Google to stop showing annoying pop-ups every time someone goes to their homepage, Gmail, or any other site they own. They also need to stop promoting users on mobile to open links in Chrome, when the user doesn’t even have Chrome installed, and has chosen the “default browser” option 100 times already.

I’m so fed up with these nudges.

Better yet, include some piece of code in your webpage that is dynamically loaded from e.g. EFF.org or mozilla.org.

That way, you give these organizations the power to nuke Chrome, one day.

This can also be seen as a kind of mutually assured destruction approach, to keep Google in check.

Because the author reported it. Personally I would have told the ublock origin developers instead of google.

Wow, that brings me back. I used to use Proxomitron before plugin ad blockers were a thing.

A gift to reduce global CO2 search emissions...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron

https://www.proxomitron.info/

Interesting, I also just installed Firefox because of OPs comment, and I'm amazed at how much faster it is then Chrome.

Why? I fail to see how using chromium as basis for other apps has impact on who has the power to innovate in the browser space?

Treat it as isolating banking from the rest of your browsing, there are enough CVEs coming out for Chromium in spite of (or maybe because of) Google pouring billions into it.

Really? I've been FF only for years and everything works reliably, including banking sites (Australia & New Zealand).

Why not switch banks or move to a credit union?

Really? Which ones are broken? Every banking website I use works in Firefox.

I can’t imagine voluntarily using a browser without working ad blocking.

> Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome.

What countries banks?

I am in New Zealand and have not had that problem in years.

15 years ago I had to edit my user agent string to look like IE (IIRC) for the University of Otago's website (PricewaterhouseCoopers getting lots of money for doing a really bad job)

Makes me wonder have you tried that trick? Less tiresome than switching browsers....

There's essentially 2 browsers in that long list: Firefox and Chromium.

Everyone using Chromium as base committed to MV2 support, but that's while Chromium itself still supports MV2. What will happen when Google changes things enough that the small browsers can't merge updates in a day or two while maintaining MV2 support? I doubt Vivaldi and Brave have the resources to actually fork Chromium... not even going to mention small projects like Thorium or Ungoogle Chromium.

And the Firefox-based browsers are in a similar position. The 2 or 3 students working on Floorp can't do much if Mozilla decides to drop support and then introduces changes that breaks compatibility with old code.

Of course those browsers can decide to stop merging upstream code, but then you get a Pale Moon... even if we ignore security flaws (which are a problem for you and your machine), a visit to their forum tells me that it struggles with a few websites.

I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier. It's only been a couple of months, but I can't imagine going back to a browser without multi-account containers.

I don't know, I switched to Safari and it was painful for like two hours and then I stopped thinking about it. The only thing I somewhat miss is the built-in page translate, but I don't need it often enough to be bothered much.

It definitely is, buy I think the silent majority just don't care all that much. Is that what you're referring to?

It happened before, multiple times.

like most solutions to complex societal/economic issues:

it’s almost certainly going to take both of your ideas, more diversity in the browser space and political actions. and then other actions as well.

the collective We have fallen into a trap where we consistently talk down other important ideas because we think ours is important too (and it is.) i definitely catch myself doing this far too often.

i just hope We can get back to a place where We recognize that different ideas from our own are also important and will need to be used in our effort to solve some of our issues. because so many of these cracks we’re facing will require many many many levers being pushed and pulled, not one magic silver bullet.

In a democracy it’s actually the other way around, over time at least. Politicians follow votes.

Firefox only shares anonymized data with partners. Is there evidence OHTTP can be deanonymized?

> Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome

I find this notion completely baffling. I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari more or less daily cause I test in all 3, and other than Safari feeling clunkier and in general less power-user friendly, I can barely tell the difference between the 3, especially between chrome and FF (well, other than uBlock working better in FF anyways).

I once made a comment along these lines (de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough, as it supports the browser monoculture and inevitably makes Chrome as a browser better) and got a reply from from Brendan Eichner himself.

His point was that there isn't enough time to again develop Firefox (or ladybird) as a competitive browser capable of breaking the Chrome "monopoly". I don't know if I really agree.

Evidently, Google feels like the time is right to make these kinds of aggressive moves, limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers.

The internet without ad blockers is a hot steaming mess. Limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers makes people associate your browser (Chrome in this case) with this hot steaming mess. It is difficult to dissociate the Chrome software from the websites rendered in Chrome by a technical lay person. So Chrome will be viewed as a hot steaming mess.

I guess we will soon see if people will stay on Chrome or accept the small initial pain and take the leap to a different browser with proper support for ad blockers. In any case the time is now for a aggressive marketing campaign on the side of mozilla etc.

I am in no way affiliated with Google. So if you still think this is a PsyOp, please consider Hanlon's Razor:

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Although, please also consider that Hanlon's Razor itself was coined by a Robert J. Hanlon, who suspiciously shares a name with a CIA operative also from Pennsylvania. It is not unimaginable that Hanlon's Razor it in itself a PsyOp. ;)

Isn't that the exact argument behind the Serenity project? I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers. Control over virtually all media consumption mustn't be in the hands of a corporation.

Has any chromium based browser committed to continue supporting MV2 or building an alternative API for ad-blockers to intercept web requests in MV3 even after the code for MV2 is removed from upstream chromium?

If not, then no, switching to another chromium based browser is not enough.

And fwiw my experience trying Brave was that the user experience was actually more different from chrome than Firefox.

> Google still controls Chromium so it's not good enough" is exactly the kind of FUD

Ok, so which of the forks plan to support MV2?

[dead]

Keep chrome installed and fall back iff forced to. That way the majority of usage statistics show up as other browsers so when developers are making guesses at which browser to support, those statistics will push them away from chrome.

Additionally: you would be surprised how infrequently you have to switch to chrome

Find who is responsible for such sites and send them strongly-worded emails. If it's a commerce site, tell them they just lost a potential customer. In my experience it's usually the trendchasing web developers who have drunk the Goog-Aid and are trying to convince the others in the organisation to use "modern" (read: controlled by Google) features and waste time implementing these changes --- instead of the "deprecated" feature that's been there for decades and will work in just about any browser, and the management is usually more driven by $$$ so anything that affects the bottom line is going to get their attention. I've even offered to "fix" their site for free to make it more accessible.

By that logic attempting to change anything at all is not viable; e pur si muove.

For me “switching” is to start using something else rather than Firefox, so switching from Chrome is viable.

Most sites let you ignore that, but just keep like Ungoogled Chromium around as a backup

"This site requires Internet Explorer 6 to work"

>like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently

But that was the whole point. They were marketing to children. They still haven't recovered from that backlash. Anheuser-Busch took a pretty damning financial hit and it sent a message to all the other companies not to pull this kind of stunt because it's bad for business. Changing their behavior was the entire point.

> History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another

The South African apartheid regime was brought down by boycotts.

The Israeli genocide regime will suffer the same fate if there is any justice left in the world.

Boycotts are very powerful. Users boycotting ads is dismantling the surveillance web.

My wife was pissed when I installed an adblocker for her - turns out she likes the ads.

YouTube recently started showing ads through uBO in Firefox.

Could this be a subjective experience? Is it reproducible on multiple machines? And have you tried it with a new profile?

Google doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not written in the stars that Google must succeed. If Google's business model doesn't meet web users expectations then it's perfectly alright for Google to fail as a business. Businesses fail all the time.

Google is not special or different. Google can adapt or die.

Remember also that as Google has grown and captured more of the available attention and advertising dollars, other businesses that rely on attention and advertising such as free-to-air TV or print media have contracted and even failed. Google has shed no tears for them and, correspondingly, there's no need to shed tears for Google.

> Sounds great for you but how would that work if everyone would do the same?

I guess we would be free from companies such as Meta and Google? Where do I sign up?

You also seem to think that advertisement has no impact on alternative distribution methods. The fact that other viable options are scarce currently only shows that ad companies have a stranglehold on creative industries through their monopoly.

Almost all content I consume is not funded by adverts, it’s funded by passion or subscription or donation.

Adverts have no positive effects for anyone other than the advertising firm. They cost the viewer more than the provide the advertiser

I wouldn't mind if Google et al. went bankrupt. Only Youtube would be somewhat of a loss.

This is a comical view. If protection of downloadable material that someone wants you to pay for, is removed by an ad blocker, then that is broken by design. Make a website that is suitable to sell things, is the solution.

I sincerely hope that having produced a comment like that, you are not using ad blockers of any kind in any browser, including the reduced functionality Chrome uBlock Origin on manifest V3.

For me, ads broke the informal social contract between provider and end user years ago. Small, unobtrusive advertisements might've been okay, but ads eating an inordinate amount of my time and bandwidth, which exfiltrate my personal information, and which are served to me via SEO tricks and dark patterns are not okay. If sites want to ban me for not viewing their ads, fine. In the meantime, I won't lose any sleep over using my adblocker.

For you, if you are lecturing us on the moral imperative of viewing ads, then you better be viewing those ads yourself rather than only espousing cheap rhetoric.

Running ad blockers for me is a matter of principle. The amount of tracking and telemetry that exists on the Internet is 1. massively invasive from a privacy perspective and 2. massively wasteful from an energy, bandwidth and time perspective.

If you have something worth selling, then sell it.

I principally agree with you. But in reality, the ad-funded model has failed. It failed a long time ago.

There were never any restrictions placed on it, so it became a self-sustaining downward spiral to the current state of things. When I see the internet without an ad-blocker it is completely unusable. Quite frankly, I would most likely stop using most of the internet altogether if I couldn't block ads.

So what is the alternative? Same as always: paid services. A service / platform can either work out a pricing model that works for people, or it shouldn't / can't exist in that form.

Some people will argue that they'd rather have ads and also content for free and that's fine. Maybe some people can tolerate them. I cannot. I find them to be as close to experiencing physical pain as possible. It's like pure mind-poison and I will bend over backwards to avoid ads.

I am waiting for the age of smart-glasses to begin so that I can filter out ads in real-life as well. I simply never, ever, under any circumstances want to see any advertising ever.

If I want a product or service, I'll go search for it. I don't need anything to be suggested to me. And this is just my battle-hardened mind. I daren't think of what ads do to un-developed, children's minds.

It should be the government's responsibility to severely restrict advertising until it nearly doesn't exist. But that's not the world we live in, so I have taken matters into my own hands.

No, MV3 really isn’t more secure. MV3 still allows extensions to inspect your requests — it just doesn’t allow extensions to block them.

It’s almost comical how weak the security/privacy argument for MV3 is. Chrome could have developed a sandboxed web request inspection framework to prevent data exfiltration, but they didn’t even try. Instead they nerfed ad blockers without adding any security.

What I don't understand is why Google doesn't offer users the ability to add some extension ids into some whitelist to allow them using very sensitive permissions.

Force those extensions to have an prominent icon on the UI with a clear tooltip asking "did you install this yourself [No]" for easy removal, in case someone else did install it without you knowing.

There are so many ways to make this work, but they have zero interest in it.

I wish I could browse the web kinda like this but minus the human:

Make Signal video call to someone in front of a laptop, provide verbal instructions on what to click on, read to my liking, and hang up to be connected with someone else next time.

(EFF’s Cover Your Tracks seems to suggest fresh private tabs w/iCloud Private Relay & AdGuard is ineffective. VMs/Cloud Desktops exist but there are apparently telltale signs when those are used, though not sure how easily linkable back to acting user. Human-in-the-loop proxy via encrypted video calls seems to solve _most_ things, except it’s stupid and would be really annoying even with an enthusiastic pool of volunteers. VM + TOR/I2P should be fine for almost anybody though I guess, just frustrated the simple commercial stuff is ostensibly partially privacy theater.)

One of the main goals of MV3 seems to be nullifying protection against tracking URLs. Most of the discussion about adblocking technically "still working" under MV3 misses this point. It doesn't matter if you're actually served ads or not, when when your underlying habits can still easily be collected from the combination of fingerprints and tracking URLs.

https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/302

I've started assuming bad intent after WEI, even though it was dropped.

I believe them. The restrictions are reasonable and appropriate for nearly everyone. Extensions are untrusted code that should have as little access as possible. If restrictions can be bypassed, that's a security bug that should be fixed because it directly affects users.

I also think uBlock Origin is so important and trusted it should not only be an exception to the whole thing but should also be given even more access in order to let it block things more effectively. It shouldn't even be a mere extension to begin with, it should be literally built into the browser as a core feature. The massive conflicts of interest are the only thing that prevent that. Can't trust ad companies to mantain ad blockers.

The statement was: "Adblockers basically need webRequestBlocking to function properly. "

This is demonstrably false, ublock lite proves that adblockers can work without it.

Whether or not ublock lite is missing functionalities because of MV3 is irrelevant to the original statement that adblockers need webRequestBlocking.

> It is true though. Like, literally.

Doesn't seem true to me. If it's true, then why is uBlock Origin Lite functioning properly as an adblocker for me?

> Why do you think it is called Lite?

Because it's simpler and uses less resources. And they had to call it something different to distinguish it from uBlock Origin.

No, that's not true either. Updating rules is allowed. The restriction is about updating code.

If you think Braves just 'reskinned chrome' you've clearly not used it.

The 'crypto grifting' is something you can turn off completely, it's there as a way to make the browser sustainable without accepting payments from Google to make it the default search engine.

I'd argue its far more trustworthy than modern day Firefox/Mozilla, they're not exactly the second coming these days.

What makes Firefox more trustworthy?

Your favourite corporations commit all sorts of crimes (ethical and actual). But let’s remember that questionable thing Brave did for eternity.

They do it for free

Indeed.

Perhaps a hobbyist would code “MV2-capable” MV3 adblocker for the fun of it, forking UBO or something, as a proof-of-concept. How much time would anyone spend on its development and who would install it when the max runway’s a few days, weeks, or months?

Google isn't any less responsible just because somebody else also did something bad. Blame is not a zero-sum game

If we think your line of argument to the logical extreme, then being upset at at somebody who ratted out a Jewish hideout to Nazis would shift blame away from Hitler. That's obviously absurd. Both are bad people, and one being bad doesn't make the other less bad. And if one enables the other being more bad then that makes both of them worse, it doesn't magically shift blame from one to the other

> Maybe they'd even remove extensions that have (ab)used it from Chrome Web Store.

So now it's abuse to make the user's browser do what the user wants, for the user's benefit, to protect the user from, you know, actual abuse.

Sometimes you get $0, sometimes you get more. I would like to mention this stuff on my college applications, and even if I tried to gatekeep it, it'd eventually be patched. Not sure what your argument is here.

The author claims to be 8 years old in 2015. So that makes them still a teenager. It is pretty cool IMO.

Are you guys honestly arguing like the zero day industry would, for a vector that couldn’t be used by any ad blocking extension since Google has them under an electron microscope 24/7? To pick on a very young, enthusiastic programmer? What the hell??

Google would have found this bug if any extensions tried to rely on it and patched it instantly anyway.

"Because that's what it means to be a hacker."

Sure. But to me "hacking" this cat and mouse game is not very compelling. I feel like I've seen a thousand articles exactly like this over the years. This won't work in 4 months.

"It was patched in Chrome 118 by ..."

Or already?

>But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023. It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions using opt_webViewInstanceId actually had WebView permissions. For the report, I netted a massive reward of $0. They decided it wasn't a security issue, and honestly, I agree, because it didn't give extensions access to data they didn't already have.

The effort to overcome the community's chance at discovering the workaround?

> except that for a majority of users, windows is where their applications are at - such as gaming, word processing, or some other thing.

Until you switch to linux you won't understand how inferior your windows setup always was.

It's hard for us to tell you what you are missing out on, you simply need to experience it.

I mostly game in a Windows 10 VM running on my Linux desktop computer. Single keypress to switch to Linux workspace.

This is not because Linux gaming is horrible broken, but rather it gives me a fully separate leisure desktop, and my main Linux desktop is work only.

It also gives me 100% compatibility, unlike wine.

> People who say "just switch" to linux hasn't done it for their family/friends.

When we say so here, we are telling you to switch.

Nobody should be forcing anything on friends/family.

I always suggest MacOS for friends/family for ease of support. I would never recommend Windows to anyone.

You can always tell how much someone has tried Linux based on how they talk about it.

That's so much less true nowadays,

Web has become the default platform, where most people run most of their app/spend most of their time. Even Microsoft has had no choice but to embrace it, and Outlook (as in, the one from Microsoft office) is now a web first app (normal outlook is rebranded "classic" and we all know where this is heading, for better or worse). In a way, that makes switching OS much easier.

If you add to that that Windows itself is getting major visual overhauls from version to version (sometimes even within) it's not like sticking with it protects you from having to learn different UX paradigms and habits.

And regarding gaming, well, linux with Proton runs games faster than Windows nowadays, that's how little Microsoft cares about gamers/how good Valve is (depending on how you look at it), but the fact of the matter remains.

> (steamOS), which isn't available to a general PC

Most of its secret sauce is either in Proton or upstreamed into Wine, DXVK, SDL, etc. All available to a general PC.

Unless your focus is competitive online games, which often come with Windows-only anti-cheats, you've got a huge catalogue of great games playable on Linux distros. I did the switch about four months ago and I'm not missing Windows, the only pain point has been Nvidia drivers and I'll be solving that by switching vendors.

Proton is available for desktop Steam as well, just pick your distro and go.

I disagree that that's the majority of users.

The majority of users either use only web applications, or web applications and Microsoft Office.

The true majority of users are on mobile.

Windows is only unreplaceable for gamers. Which is fine, because Windows is a toy anyway.

The day Linux will be used more than Windows, it will be in more trouble than Windows will.

Threat actors are attracted by the most used system.

Fedora Bazzite it's Steam OS. And with Flatpak and Lutris you can have that setup everywhere, but some distros optimize the setings and compilations for the desktop better than Others:

- Solus OS

- Fedora Bazzite

- Catchy OS

Fallout 4 is running better on Linux than on Windows these days.

I wasn't writing about consumers though. I was writing about "hackers" who might read this article and try this hack.

It's a oui-sequitur for sure.

I don’t know. Eventually you read enough of this stuff and you would rather the next breath be, take leadership on a real solution. To me it’s a “sequitur” to say, the biggest fuck you is to convince people to stop using Chrome, not to fix bugs for their extremely highly paid engineers for free.

Right back at you. If you think my comment is a non-sequitur, maybe you didn't read the article?

>In your Windows vs. Linux example, Linux just doesn't do a lot of things very well on the UI/UX side of things (e.g., window management, driver support, an out of the box experience).

That judgement confuses me a lot. Window management, drivers and out of the box experience has been much better in Linux for the last 10 years in my experience. Sure, there are some companies that don't ship drivers for Linux or the configuration software is not fully fledged. Window management has almost always been better in Linux, but of course depends on the WM. Windows innovated one nice feature in Vista (aero snap) which most desktop environments has implemented since.

If you install Fedora, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, what are you lacking from that out of the box experience? Generally no driver installation needed, and no cleaning up of bloatware.

It supports keeping long term history so you can find a page you visited years ago from the history search in the address bar. Chrome/Google likes when you have to search for it and Brave has inherited that.

Firefox is not a Chromium fork

For me, I like being able to set a default font/size/colour for all websites as an override. Chromium browsers don't do that out of the box.

I like that it quarantines most of Facebook's shenanigans with cookies and the like.

I can't compare Brave's adblock to uBlock Origin, but it's probably good enough.

It doesn't do crypto bullshit, for example.

Is this on Linux? Do you have an example of a website where Yubikey does not work? I'm curious, because I use Firefox on Linux for years, also for work, and never hit a site where my Yubikeys would not work. (I'm also using Google Meet regularly for work from Firefox without problems)

about:config

Search for accel, look up the 'layout...' key, set it to true.

Also, set the webgl force enabled... key to true too.

+1 to this. This is probably the only thing that keeps me from ditching Chrome/Brave and going back to Firefox.

> except firefox is pretty bad nowadays.

Pretty bad as in that isn't true?

Firefox is the option that doesn't intentionally leave users vulnerable to hostile adtech. Firefox is the option with containers. Past that it is performant and reliable under a wide variety of user loads and platforms.

or Pretty bad as in Firefox+forks are better than the alternatives?

It is true that some unfortunate default options were recently added to Firefox configs.

Those options are unfortunate because they are variants of anti-user options baked into Chromium - options created to keep Chromium users susceptible to big-tech's worst intentions.

How? Seriously, I keep seeing this argument against using Firefox, but as a long time user I fail to see any glaring issues with it.

The only websites that break for me are those I broke on purpose by using ad-block.

I browse the web daily, and the number of website that ever gave me trouble on Firefox can be counted on a single hand. The website compatibility issue is vastly overblown.

I've switched to Firefox 3 years ago now after using Chrome for a decade. The list of things I missed from chrome:

- Tab grouping, now added in Firefox as of a few months ago

- built-in translation services. Firefox is slowly introducing this, but its missing many languages. In the meantime, a translation extension works fine.

- Google products operating better... but the issue here is obvious and outside of Firefox's control.

- various micro quirks from random sites I might find during research. Nothing functionality breaking, just clear examples where there was likely hard coded chrome user agent business.

- the occasional extension on Chrome that didn't have a Firefox port. This happened maybe 4 times total.

so, 2 things that are fixed (or close to), one anti-competitive measure, and the 2 smallest nitpicks I could imagine. I don't know what the fuss is that justifies Firefox being considered vastly inferior to Chrome these days. Even thsoe small issues are far offset by the ability to have proper adblock. Using Adblock on Chrome for my work computer is miserable.

Firefox has been my main browser for almost 10 years and I haven't encountered any challenges other than availability of plugins, but even that has been a very rare issue.

FF is my daily driver and I don’t see any issues. Do you have examples?

No, firefox is great nowadays.

The point is you don't need to worry about manifest v3 interfering with ad blockers, because Brave has an ad blocker built into the browser. Also makes it a good Chromium-based option for mobile, since you can't install extensions on Chrome mobile at all.

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

I do turn off the wallet, VPN, AI and other bloat, but it's a minor inconvenience for a better browser.

Heh, funny, Twitch was the primary reason I installed Brave because it was being glitchy on Firefox (at the time years ago - no longer the case). I've never had trouble with Twitch on Brave.

From my experience (as a Brave user), using a User-Agent switching extension and setting it to Firefox for twitch.tv gets around that :)

You're personally unable to look at twitch on it?

Shields can be turned off right from the url bar as needed.

>Brendan Eich's hateful hands

LOL California Proposition 8 was pretty mainstream opinion back then. Maybe stop with the ex post facto persecution?

Really? I turned off the crypto buttons once several years ago and it’s been just fine since.

The crypto part is an optional thing, which takes a split second to turn off - thats it. Once its off you are basically running chrome without the google call home, and with a built in adblocker unaffected by manifest v3.

It's also opensource so it's not like theres anything being hidden here.

It's the top of the list because it works so well. I forget it's a different browser most of the time. I was able to turn off everything extraneous that I was concerned about. Brave is also Open Sourced.

I really don't care about crypto stuff. If you do, I can understand why that's a dealbreaker for you. But for me, it doesn't matter at all. I just turn the crypto features off and continue on my way.

Might as well edit and add some suggestions

Probably wants to share state though (cookie jar, history, password manager, etc)

The bottom line is that Google invests more in Chrome than Mozilla can afford to invest in Ff, so the latter will likely never catch up in features or performance.

> * infinite loop of Cloudflare verification * inferior performance compared to Chrome (page loading, large page scrolling) * subtle bugs (e.g. audio handling)

The first two are likely due to extensions rather than the core Firefox. I find at least as many cases where it’s faster, and it usually uses less memory. The third one has high variability - I’ve reported enough bugs against all of the major browsers not to trust any of them but these days there are a lot of web developers who only test on Chrome and half of the time I find what appears to be a bug in Safari or Firefox it’s really an unnecessary reliance on something Chrome specific.

I don't run into CAPTCHA loops with Firefox. Have you tried changing your user agent to pretend to be Firefox on Windows or Mac? I've heard Linux users are more likely to be interpreted as bots.

Your comment is pretty meaningless without more specifics.

I switched to Firefox again back in 2017, I have 0 issues with it. If anything it's faster and less resources hungry than chrome in my usage. The extension ecosystem is now arguably better with MV3 being rolled out to chrome.

Probably the only annoying thing was learning where the buttons are in the devtools. They're all still there, just laid out differently. It took about a week to get to grips with that.

What exactly makes you say it's an awful browser?

I use Zen everyday and a love it! I am glad they chose Firefox as a base, otherwise I would have skipped it. Firefox is stable, I open it when I boot my PC which runs for weeks and never think anything about it. On topic of ad blocking, I think that there are more ways to anoy users using ad blockers today despite of which browser someone uses, with ad block detection and blocking access. If your browser is build by a ad company, expect these changes. For this reason I won't use these browsers

Weird, Firefox blows Chrome out of the water. What do you smoke?

I would interpret that "TBD" to mean the moment Microsoft pulls in Chromium 139 changes. Anything else would be to costly for a small amount of goodwill from a niche community.

Switched to Firefox yesterday, I suggest you do the same.

Google using YouTube to block non-MV3 browsers, would be Google picking a fight with Firefox - who they use in court documents to say that they're not a monopoly. Their legal team will have a few words to say about it.

Ultimately the issue is allowing Google to skirt around anti-monopoly rules by throwing money at Mozilla. Can't really blame the latter for cashing in when the rules fail at enforcing a competitive environment.

Hate the game, not the player, basically.

That's why you should keep stuff like this quiet.

I see from the other comments here that you're still young, so I'll give you a word of advice: Google and the other megacorps are NOT your friends. Don't think that helping them and acting against users' interests will result in anything positive for you in the long term.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

You’re right, and good on you for paying attention to the human/business context behind the code.

Initially the increase in frequency of the advertising on Android youtube app. Followed by uBlock being broken in Chrome. Followed by uBlock being tarpitted in Firefox. Followed by FreeTube client getting 403 IP forbidden requests and DRM content shovelled down which could not be rendered.

They just did everything to make sure I watched the ads and burn all my bandwidth, which can be somewhat limited and expensive as I travel a lot.

Google is here

Indeed. I love the FF vertical tabs too, I should say.

Too bad the work one is still locked to 128 ESR :(

I fully agree. The original comment and the other replies to it are bewildering. There was nothing to gain here, yet people are throwing ad hominem attacks left and right.

Would be quite different if they patched it and broke important extensions, possibly facing serieous outcry and bad publicity.

Not really, this sort of fame farming is what makes candidates stand out in infosec interviews. A bug in Google systems is good for his future career.

Dude, what.

I don't think ads are immoral but I think the way FAANG does ads and tracking is immoral. Google does not do enough to vet ads for malicious activity such as scams and viruses. The FBI in recent years has started recommending an adblocker for that reason.

Lol. Treating cancer is immoral. Miss me with this shit!

Exactly... brave is the de facto choice for cryptobros. The copying of UBOs work is a nice addition too.

expose DOM and JSON to external .DLL then

browsers should have open Web standards as well as open local runtime.

"'webview' is only allowed for packaged apps, but this is a extension."

:( but maybe Vivaldi and Brave could remove this check just for fun.

I hate to use this word but this is a huge amount of projection in response to the comment you replied to, which did not seem to make any of the points you ascribed to it.

If you use a free operating system https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html then you have less chance of being spied on. At least you can check

I paid premium a few months, then they added shorts and there was no way to block them, so I installed a blocker and stopped paying for it.

Yes me too, and they fucked me.

Youtube premium is still an ad driven business model. They are the ones making the problem worse so they can sell you the solution. The more you pay for Youtube Premium the more incentive they have to make ads worse.

It has never been ad-free, sponsored segments have always existed

Netflix and other streaming sites have ads on some paid subscriptions. First they start with ad free subs, then introduce ads and introduce a higher priced tier to get rid of ads

Or rather, don't use YouTube without paying.

Youtube isn't free, and unlike a simple blog, requires tons of infrastructure and content creation. None of that is free, and people wanting that to be free is why we're in adscape hell.

Edit: I'd love for a competitor to youtube, but there isn't. Rumble isn't a real competitor, and none of my favorite channels place their content there either.

I wish there was a youtube alternative that was more of a federation, but every attempt I've seen of federations have been mess.

Ads are social cancer that's spreading without any attention nor control from the authorities. Just like cigarettes 30 years ago.

That’s quite a stretch. I loathe ads as much as anyone else here, but I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind (is my mind even sacrosanct, such that it could be violated?) it’s just something I don’t like.

And yes, attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things. Like any other voluntary transaction, no one is entitled to my attention unless we both voluntarily agree to it.

Can you elaborate a bit? Why would that make my attention more valuable than other's?

The point is most people will never pay. That makes the Adblock/anti-adblock war inevitable for them. If you can afford it, you sidestep it. If you can’t or won’t, you don’t. Pretending there is some point where those folks would pay is a little delusional in my view.

That's good to know. I was hoping for a reply like yours. I will subscribe. YouTube is an amazing resource for human kind and I agree those of us who can afford it should pay to support it.

Totally, there's not a lot of places to vote with your dollars to get rid of interruptions like Ads, and also get back a lot of time of your life.

I think people just decided it doesn't count as ads when it's the creator doing it. And it feels more tolerable since the money is going to the creator that they probably like instead of megacorp Google.

I'm honestly baffled why anyone who objects to ads would still want to use any of the official YouTube clients. Whether or not they show ads to you on YouTube, they still track your every move and use it to improve their profile of you so that they can show you ads on any of their other platforms, sell your data, or whatever other shady business they do behind the scenes to extract value from it.

Adtech cannot be trusted. I refuse to support their empire whether that's financially or with my data and attention.

And that's not to mention pretty much every single creator stuffing sponsored sections into their videos now.

Fortunately I mainly watch the videos which are not made by "creators" looking for $$$ but just people sharing something interesting and useful; the ones which have no annoying intros or outros, "like share and subscribe" drivel, and are often not much more than raw unedited content. They still exist on YouTube.

Nah, Firefox with ublock origin is better than giving money to google.

I get an ad-free YouTube experience for $0 with software. Why do you pay for it?

That's what sponsorblock is for

Same experience.

The family plan is nice to share with family to reduce how much everyone's exposed to ads.

In-Video sponsorships are a pain, sometimes they are chaptered out enough and can be skipped.

If I could pay for an ad-free google search I probably would. Off the shelf, not doing API calls.