To those who argue that chrome is faster and therefore you prefer using it. You should ask yourself, what is more important to you, to see a website a few ms faster or preventing Google to to dictate how the Internet of the future works (apart from the fact that in my experience browser's are so close in performance, that I don't think anyone can consistently pick which browser their on).
But people recommended Firefox anyway for most browsing since it was a better experience on the open web. Eventually it up ended the dominance by giving a better browsing experience except when forced to use IE through bad code, which eventually forced more developers to improve the experience outside of IE.
I personally never stopped using Firefox for Chrome, since there was always some extension that just didn't work quite as well on Firefox for the longest time. I've always found it worked it well.
A popular opinion of a vocal contingent of users on this site always say that Chrome is so fast, without any benchmarks other than their personal feelings for the most part. If Google is going to be openly hostile to extensions like UBlock working as intended I really wonder if they would feel Chrome is much faster if the developers of such extensions stopped looking for work arounds in an actively hostile environment and simply let them experience the garbage that is the current state of the web. They've already shown their hand as being a terrible steward of the web by blocking extensions like AdNauseum that try to destroy all the tracking and privacy violations they've created.
I personally believe all the people who don't have their jobs tied to creating ad garbage would do another exodus. Although I'm sure a vocal minority would create noise on sites like this since their jobs are tied to making the world a worse place.
Only to people like us. The amount of tech-savvy people I see not using an ad blocker is surprising. As a user of an ad blocker, I definitely feel like I’m in a small minority in the real world.
> Without us chrome would likely not be in the position it is today and google could not dictate the terms like they do.
I kind of disagree with this. Google Chrome's current popularity stands on two things:
1. It is a great browser and it does its job very well.
2. Google in the first years was very active with its distribution. And this is not only about the link on their homepage. I remember how 10 years ago every piece of software you were trying to install was bringing Chrome alongside.
Engineers recommending Chrome to their friends and relatives shouldn't be discounted, but I tend to think that it's less important that the two other points above.
Good ad blocking is an essential part of a browser. Even Google who is actively slow boiling the frog knows they can't just hard cut it off because the users will jump ship immediately.
Why should we let Google get away with this? I feel the right move is to proactively take steps that make Chrome very obviously noncompetitive. By not providing ad blocking at all or at least making it a much inferior experience. It needs to be obvious to the users, not just to tech folks.
Consider checking for the Chrome user agent on your personal website. When you detect it, either:
1. Display a screen that encourages to use a browser that respects their privacy, such as Firefox.
2. Show a popup explaining that "for an ad-free experience, try Firefox + uBlock" and add a bunch of fake (or real) ads to a special Chrome-exclusive piece of the site.
If enough of us do this with personal websites, more and more people will stop using Chrome and start using Firefox. You don't even have to cut Chrome users off from the content -- just annoy them a little, and suggest Firefox.
After all, if Google refuses to fix bugs introduced by Google developers who don't test software in browsers other than Chrome (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1069227), the least that the rest of us can do is fight back in some small way.
It's a nice idea, but your personal website doesn't matter. Most people go to a Google website at least a few times a day, and they already tell you to switch to Chrome for the best experience. And almost all of the top non-Google websites also have a vested interest in less adblockers, so none are going to riot over this.
Devs of adblockers should all, suddenly, stop supporting Chrome. Make it a specific date (Jan. 1st 2023?) and make it known.
The web is unusable without strong, efficient adblocking. All power users would stop using Chrome in an instant. Even if they are a minority, the move would become visible on usage charts.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter what percentage of all users, just what percentage of techie word-of-mouth types use ad blockers. And that is a very significant percentage.
Maybe your mom can't change it herself but come Thanksgiving she's going to complain about it to you and you are going to fix it so she has an ad free experience again.
(posted from Firefox on Android)
MV3 will slowly make adblocking more and more useless, like boiling the frog
at which point most people who formerly used adblockers will become accustomed to the ad-infested web again
so.... Utopic best case scenario, 30% of the users? and that's if 100% of People using AdBlocking across the entire Planet were to make a move. and those are the users that don't provide any Revenue back to the Owner, anyways. the average user is using official Chrome, with very few Plugins, maybe like Reddit Enhancement, extra Twitch Emotes, Et Cetera.
I switched back to Firefox a few years ago. Firefox has improved a lot and the overall experience is just far better.
One of the nicest small things is that I've got the full URL back in the URL bar, including http/https!
If Google says, that they value speed of their browser as the main attribute, that mindset if adopted by the fanboys. If Google says you don't need more powerful ad blocking, then that idea is adopted by the fanboys. Google says it, so it cannot be wrong. Anyone saying something different is just being jealous, that they are not as good a developer to work at Google. Google! Oh please! Tell us what to think!
This kind of thinking also proliferates into non-developer communities and people, who look at it from the financial success side of things. Google, one of the biggest tech companies evaaar! Surely they must be doing something right! This developer friend, what do they know, compared to the knowledge of Google employees?! Better listen to Google.
Google has managed to twist the minds of many, who are too open for authority arguments and developers are no exception to that.
As long as we still in some way think, that Google has our wellbeing at heart, I think things will not change. However, I support not supporting Chormium-based browsers any longer. People only learn the hard way, which is, when they have to fight through jungle of ads to use even the simplest websites. Some learn not even then.
Those comparisons never take into account the runtime costs of ads. Yay, code runs 10% faster. It runs 3x as much code and has to wait on a dozen ad servers, but yay!
I just switched to Firefox. I'm typing this on Firefox.
I used to use Ungoogled Chromium.
No doubt it would. Google essentially advertised Chrome at the very top of the search results page. No amount of personal boycotting is ever going to win against that.
Just one example of how it is not safer, that I thought I should mention, on the background of such a blanket statement as "Chrome is safer" : )
Fixed that for you.
A lot of people even conflate Google Chrome, Google Search and other Google services (understandable, as Chrome's home page is a big Google logo with a search box), so they think that they cannot use Google anymore if they install Firefox.
The stats [1] speak for themselves: only 3.3% of users use Firefox. Even Edge has more users.
I don't know how to solve that problem, since those two outcomes are at odds with one another, but wanted to raise awareness
I can't understand why we have not seen strong regulatory/antitrust action on this front considering the precedent with MS.
The real danger to having a single codebase for the whole web is spec validation. Most web standards rely on two independent implementations. For newer technologies we could technically count WebKit and Blink as separate, but Gecko was providing an entirely separate codebase that isn't a fork of anything.
Remember how WebSQL was basically put out to pasture because it was just SQLite, warts and all, shoved inside the web sandbox? That's the sort of problem we'd rather avoid. Single-implementation standards tend to pick up bugs and misbehaviors from their implementation, since everyone winds up depending on implementation bugs rather than getting them fixed to match spec.
Yes. But adding back in Manifest v2 isn't. Even MSFT claims that it's too much work for them.
https://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&b...
[1]: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/main/_minutes/2022... (CTRL-F for "mv4")
[2]: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/main/_minutes/2022... (CTRL-F for "mv4")
I haven't heard of this plan. Do you have more information?
The only piece of reliable information is this: I once asked Google engineer whether they plan to support declarative cosmetic rules (that's what we do ourselves in MV3 and that's why the extension still requires wide permissions) and the answer was that they definitely do plan to do that in the future.
And then people use and rely on information like this to further ignite their cognitive biases. Seems more like promoting misinformation than anything.
The difference between that and the traffic modification API is the threat model. The third party were to compromise uBlock Origin's servers, they would have a frightening amount of power over millions of machines because uBlock Origin essentially self-modifies; it downloads new rules for what should be blocked. So that breaks the security guarantees Chrome wants to provide; they can't say that the lock icon on a website means anything if a Chrome extension is allowed to arbitrarily modify traffic back and forth as a man in the middle on the last mile and Chrome web store maintainers haven't looked at the source code it's running.
I don't think there's a similar security threat for cosmetic changes.
We'll now need to rely on Chrome team for implementing what we need. But they do it painfully slow or not do at all.
Also, where will we get the new ideas if every browser follows that path? Take Safari for example, every little improvement that we requested [1] was inspired by what we already did in other browsers long ago.
Anyways, a working content blocker on MV3 is possible. I even think a casual user won't feel much difference. But there is a big difference under the hood and to feel the consequences we have to wait a few years.
[1]: https://bugs.webkit.org/ (search for those reported by @adguard.com). Just a very small part of what we requested was implemented, content blocking is not a priority I guess, and it won't be a priority for Chrome.