Most studies[1] done in the last 2 years report between 20-40%, depending on the population and device type (laptop, desktop, phone, tablet) studied.
While I can't say what % you or GP would estimate or whether you'd be surprised that it's 20-40%, I think 20-40% is a lot.
[1]: Choose any study or summary of one: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percentage+of+internet+...
I doubt uBlock Origin being removed from Chrome will change the status quo. Maybe in a few years when enough powerusers convince enough casual users. If you just look at software out in the world, it's clear that powerusers have next to zero influence. It's why desktop Linux use, for example, is still just a blip after all of these years.
the moment they can't find ad blocker that actually works they will stop switching ad blockers and switch browsers.
What's holding back linux isn't the lack of influence power users have, it's that it's still lacking in gaming, hardware compatibility, and ease of use (although those are improving all the time)
At least that is my theory on it.
Content blockers in Safari are limited to 50k filters. uBlock Origin's default filters have more than that. Therefore, the choice is between a new, but much less useful extension, or no extension at all. uBlock Origin decided on the latter.
https://backstage.1blocker.com/say-hello-to-1blocker-x-8b55e...
Who do you think the moms and friends all listen to? Their technical friends. This of course won't hit 90% of users but it's enough to have a large influence well beyond just power users.
Few companies survive pissing off the nerds when there is legitimate competition available in consumer products.
I wish this sage advice was part of every business executive's education. :-)
You're probably not wrong that there will not be a rapid initial migration. Maybe more over a longer time period. Maybe not.
And for small browser like safari it will be fast death
And for chrome
On mobile chrome is already (for me) dead coz it not allow extensions
The manifest v3 proposal takes chrome down to roughly the same level as Safari for ad blocking plugins. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
So, that day isn't far off. It was supposed to be in canary last month, I haven't checked.
The big difference is that the functionality problems 20 years ago were easier to explain, and therefore easier to get people upset about. It's a lot easier to weave a compelling political story about straight-up incompatibility than it is to weave one about degraded performance due to differing just-in-time compiler optimization behavior.
Also, we seem to be stuck in a situation where people are still so fixated on a monarch that hasn't been in power for over a decade that they maybe haven't been so concerned that the old monarch's overthrower has consolidated power to become a new monarch.
(Scare quotes around "standards" because calling Chrome-only things standard nowadays seems a bit like calling AcitveX a standard 20 years ago.)
But I have seen sites that don't work in Safari.
Twitter doesn't work very well on Firefox for Android.
That's the only one I remember encountering.
[0]https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/
[1]https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-edged...
[0]https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/04/microsoft-edge-may-come-...
Like I said: ux-wise, I'm not impacted negatively by using chrome, at all. If my laptops resources were more limited or my local workload was bigger, I'd probably check out Firefox, but since I'm not bottlenecked, why bother?
>This is because since their core functionality is so similar, small advantages will tip the scales.
It is a a bold assertion, which is not backed up by the data. Despite Mozilla repositioning Firefox recently and reclaiming some lost ground, it is to a larger extent, still only maintaining a steady set of core users. To make an assumption that small advantages will tip the scales in favour of FF is wishful thinking, as demonstrated by some of the conversations. Furthermore, it is inherently not in the best interests of Google to actively promote ad-blocking policy unless it serves it's own purpose, coupled with the acute awareness of why power users and developers pick Chrome ─ they are well positioned to throttle any competition.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
I think most people who wanted adblocking on Android switched to Brave instead, which is essentially a Chrome fork without the Google stuff and with better tracking protection.
What makes you say that? Firefox has been my primary mobile browser for over 5 years, am I missing something?
1. You are on this web page in Fennec[1], and you want to do a web search. Click the address bar, type in your query, hit go. Sometimes, Fennec will start the progress bar and act like it is searching, but will draw another tab in the main viewport before resetting the progress bar and changing the url to the SERP you want. If you don't know its going to do that, it looks like Fennec completely ignored your search and loaded another tab.
2. Fennec will sometimes lose its cool and stop rendering pages. The UI layers will respond, you can open hamburger menus, tab listings and thumbnails, but no matter what tab you select, it no longer renders anything but a blank canvas in the viewport. You have to force close Fennec to restore normal behaviors.
3. Fennec will after a long time of being active lose its extensions like noscript et al, you have to force close and re-open to get them to show up in the hamburger menu again.
Stated as a die-hard Firefox for Android fan.
[1] %s/Fennec/<whateverItActuallyIs/g
As in, the core browser is available and seems to work fine, but for many people there's not much point in switching until it supports extensions. It won't replace Fennec until it does.
See the difference here: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158#issuecommen...
I'd give Apple's claim here as much credence as I give Google's claim that webRequest caused performance problems when extensions used it.
I'd love an adblock system that allowed me to block trackers with a purely declarative API. I do not trust Apple (or Google) when they say that their API will be as effective as current extensions.
Ublock Origin and UMatrix are hands-down the gold standard for blocking right now. I'm very, very cautious about ignoring the advice of the person who made them, and that person is saying that declarative APIs don't offer enough flexibility for the blocking they want to do.
Of course extensions are a privacy risk. But I only need to vet two extensions, and without them I need to vet hundreds of websites. If the current extensions do a better job without a declarative API, then I'd rather risk installing them. You have to look at the risk of extensions in the context of the risks of the broader ad ecosystem on the web.
Yes, ad networks can track you across participating networks. But an ad network can only attack the sites that use it.
An extension can access everything.
And how do you "vet" an extension? By checking if the author looks like a trustable person on their Github photo?
If you're worried about malicious transfers of power, turn off auto-updating in Firefox. If you're worried about being able to audit the actual installed code, use Firefox Developer Edition and audit and compile your own version to run.
In practice, I trust UMatrix and Ublock Origin because I'm familiar with Gorhil's work and comment history around Github and HN. I also extend a similar amount of trust to Decentraleyes for similar reasons. Those are the only big 3 you need to get the biggest impact on your privacy. Arguably, you don't even need Decentraleyes if you only want to trust one person.
There's a tradeoff between default privacy settings and user simplicity. As a power user you're still free to run whatever complicated scheme/browser you want to.
Ideally, we would like sandboxing on the desktop to be at least as good as sandboxing on the web (preferably better). People don't run sandboxed desktop apps right now because the ecosystem currently makes it inconvenient. Wayland and Flatpack are both good steps in the right direction. Apple's making some progress as well there, but it's all pretty early-stage stuff.
Until the sandboxing gets better, you should be cautious about installing unvetted desktop and phone apps. You should also be cautious about installing unvetted browser extensions. But browser extensions are complicated because while keeping a minimal system isn't that hard, you're probably not going to stop visiting unvetted websites, even if you know it's dangerous. It's a much higher priority for experienced users to make the browser sandbox good than it is to make the extension sandbox good.
People take a long-term view on this, and while I agree with them in theory, I don't think it's always particularly helpful to think about what technology will look like. With browsers, it's not a question of whether or not theoretically it would be good in the future to make extensions entirely declarative. Of course it would be good. It's a question of, 'is it possible to do that right now?' At the moment, Safari's declarative API is significantly less powerful than the blocking API that Firefox has. In the future, that could definitely change, but people have to use computers today.
So for the moment, the browser advice I give to non-power users is to install UBlock Origin and Decentraleyes on Firefox and nothing else. I think that's a safer, more private environment than anything they'll be able to set up on Safari. I advise power users to add uMatrix to that list, and for people who are really paranoid, I advise them to run Firefox Developer edition, which will let them compile extensions from source.
If you're just handing someone a computer and you don't trust them not to go off and install random extensions, then sure, give them Safari. In that context, it's not confusing why Apple would do this -- they're optimizing for the largest number of users; people they can't trust not to install random extensions. It just means that more experienced/responsible users will be safer using Firefox.
For that matter, on macOS I don't have anything in Safari, and regularly go between Safari, Chrome and Firefox (the latter two with uBlock Origin). Somehow just the native anti-aggravation technology in Safari is more than sufficient to give me a great experience. If it has a list solution like the iOS Safari, then I'll partake of that.
Apple should enable classic-style blocking as an admin override kind of thing, but remarkably their list-based regex approach has been remarkable effective.
MitM like "antiviruses" do? Nice
Some security vulnerabilities are acceptable in some situations in exchange for user freedom and/or other benefits, such as blocking ads, which are essentially malware for your brain.
It's nice that random extensions can't peek at your browsing history, but on the other hand, you have to trust that Apple won't decide to ignore any block rules. What if one day they make a deal with Disney and now all Disney ads are on the permanent do-not-block list?
Quite the spin to make a negative a positive.
"Privacy" is the new buzzword.
Normal extensions can potentially monitor everything you do inside your browser, even in incognito mode. They could even impersonate you.
That's a huge gaping security hole, and I think Apple is doing the right thing by preventing that.
They've spent a lot of effort with sandboxing to limit the attack surface of native apps -- it's logical that they do the same inside the browser.
Now there is a security hole, yes, but closing it comes at a huge cost: the removal of useful ad blocking.
I suspect more and more uBO users will be forced to move to Firefox and/or install a pihole.
Many people don’t have time or inclination to check which extension is doing what. Proof is the fact that ublock and adblock are bad, but ublock origin is good.
Whose non-techy friends and family are going to spend time to figure that one out? In that case, the macOS and iOS content blocking system is better for those users.
Have you ever used a content blocker? For all their restrictions, they’re still quite effective.
I’m sorry, but does uBlock Origin detects & filter ads based on contents?
I thought they maintained a database of URLs that serve ads & page elements... and Safari content blockers also have the same capability to block content based on URLs (hence can block YouTube ads).
BTW, PiHole blocks ads based on hostname... and is more incapable than Safari content blockers.
And I'm aware PiHole is just DNS filtering, but an extra layer of blocking is useful.
Apple doesn't care individually what users use. However, Apple (and everyone else for that matter) does have reason to be concerned about Google's Chrome completely dominating the web in the way IE once did. iOS is certainly their biggest bulwark, but that doesn't mean they'd be delighted if Mac users felt required to use Chrome. Further, they also have made being able to avoid the anti-privacy ad-driven ecosystem to some extent an important differentiating factor. Even with Firefox existing, having a purely Mac focused and maximally optimized browser (FF is only barely catching up this/next version on basic power efficiency for example) that has strong privacy protections with no conflicts of interest is a sales point.
That doesn't mean it's a total core focus of course, but neither is there no pressure at all.
Just like most printer manufacturers don’t focus on AirPrint compatibility because of the Mac. That’s just a byproduct of iOS compatibility - which they do care about.
We don't want websites to be written for compatibility with a single browser engine. That means developers are writing to Chrome's quirks, not to actual web standards. Over the long term, that gives Google complete control over how the web is run.
There are currently between 3 and 2.5 browser engines that matter, depending on how you count webkit vs blink. I'd really rather that not fall down to only 2 on desktop.
Any web standard is useless without Apple being on board. Developers either won’t implement it or create an app for iOS to use a feature they need.
Of course we know that Google has to make money from Ads so its understandable but what about Apple ? They are putting heavy focus in privacy, would it be good if they open their browser to make sure their users will not move to Chrome/Firefox or other browser ?