Orion cannot support uBlock Origin completely either. I know that Orion allows the extension to be installed (I have done it too), but it only has partial support.

Quoting from a reply in a discussion on the Orion Feedback site from a few months ago (November 2024):

> " uBO is not supported on iOS due to Apple limitations."

[1]: https://orionfeedback.org/d/9145-ublock-origin-not-existent-...

I am using Orion on iOS with uBO for two years and UBO works well enough for me. There is the odd website that won’t load in Orion so I switch to Safari, which I never use, and the amount of ads that are presented in Safari reassures me that uBO in Orion is working.

I've just tested it and while the ubo extension can be installed, it does not work at all.

I use brave browser and nextdns to block ads on ios now.

The ubo extension does work in orion, but I remember having to go somewhere deep into settings to make it actually be enabled. I don't remember exactly how I did it but eventually after a few restarts of the browser I got it working.

I did compare against other adblock systems on ios and found it to be the best option, as other adblocks either gave broken webpages or just didn't work at all.

Are you sure you're not just using Orion's built-in content blocker? I realized I had the uBO extension installed on iOS but it wasn't doing anything because I also had Orion's ad blocking enabled.

I have tried UBO on Orion on iOS and it does not work. It is definitely installed. It definitely thinks that it's working. But the moment you switch the default Orion blocker off - the ads appear. And uBO just says "Blocked on this page 0", no matter the page. If you actually did manage to get it to work - that would be golden, would really appreciate it if you shared how you made it work.

To be quite frank - I haven't manage to get _any_ of the extensions (that I would like to have) to work in Orion. They all just silently fail in different ways.

> the amount of ads that are presented in Safari

First, consider NextDNS to DNS adblock all your apps.

For in the browser, for those who do use Safari, consider 1Blocker, otherwise consider AdGuard Pro.

Sounds like Orion will do the job on macOS though, so that's at least one platform with an alternative. :)

Is the partial support only on iOS? Because iOS is a rather special case. Personally I don't count iOS versions of browsers as even being the same software.

As far as I can tell, Ublock Origin in Orion on iOS is way better than any other Adblock extension for Safari

When the platform itself limits the browsers then it's more a platform discussion than about what each of the browsers do on the platform.

The problem with support on iOS is that each browser is forced to be a skin for Safari and Safari only supports Safari Web Extensions, which are MV3-like, hence the platform limitation. The EU law may allow a browser to release in that region but Apple placed such heavy requirements and restrictions to do so none have actually been approved. I haven't seen a clear answer if less limited extension access itself would result in not being approved by Apple.

Browser vendors are somewhat responsible for this confusion by pretending to have a version of their browser for iOS. If they were honest with their app names instead of lying for marketing points then the blame would go to Apple where it belongs.

If it's chromium based, they will need to remove manifest v2 at some point to stay close to the upstream version.

Possibly in Arc, although Brave also continues to support Manifest v2 so it’s possible it will continue to persist in some subset of Chromium-based browsers and as I said, it ships with the browser and is installed by default; but Orion is not Chromium-based.

Brave supports it right now, which is 2 months after it's been removed upstream.

I strongly suspect they're gonna drop support as soon as the first bigger merge issue happens along with a heartfelt blog that "they did they everything to support it, but it was just too much for the resources available to them"

I doubt it's gonna take more then 1-2 years (December 2027) for this to happen, but we will see.

Chrome officially supports Manifest V2 extensions until at least June 2025, hidden behind an enterprise flag: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...

I expect Brave to easily support it until then and then drop it very quickly as you described.

You know, Google's really playing with fire here. There are enough browser companies running Chrome underneath, to more than equal Google's commitment.

That is, if those companies choose.

If even 80% of them wanted to fork? Not a biggie. And they could still cherry pick commits from the alt fork.

How hard would it be to "wrap" the browser in a ublock like shell, so that all network requests are filtered through a firewall before they even reach the chrome application layer.

It might be easier to maintain than an actual extension interface with hooks thought the code.

I don't think you'd need manifest V2 for such a rudimenty logic.

The reason why ublock origin is so powerful is because it works with the DOM/not at the network level and can use heuristics to determine wherever something is a advertisement or not.

I imaged you would use both.

I think you might be underestimating the scope of work that happens on chromium a tad, from Github's "pulse" feature:

"Excluding merges, 684 authors have pushed 3,139 commits to main and 3,866 commits to all branches. On main, 14,924 files have changed and there have been 740,516 additions and 172,682 deletions."

That's stats from last week. Last year Google apparently was responsible for about 95% of contributions. Other than Microsoft (which has the same bad incentives as Google) none of the alt-chromium browser companies has like, 5% of the engineers to maintain a real alternative

Yes, but as I said they can merge in changes. Apparently more than I thought, but still, they can.

Opera has pinch-zoom text-reflow in a chromium backend, and that seems to be substantial, and yet it is (on purpose) kept out of mainline chrome. So they do loads of tracking/merging too.

The scope of work to do a few small features on top of chrome wouldn't be a biggie, compared to the entire project.

I don't understand or know alot about extensions, but what is so incredibly impossible about adding new capabilities to manifestv3? It's a manifest describing what the addon wants to do and some UX to allow it right?

It’s not really about the manifest. It’s about the APIs available to extension programmers. Chrome has made the "webRequestBlocking" API unavailable and that’s what’s affecting adblockers. Chrome will eventually remove the code supporting this API, and it is not feasible for downstream to make it available anyway.

Why can’t forks just maintain an independent implementation afterwards?

They could, theoretically. But just imagine what that actually means. Unless you cease merging upstream/the project you've forked, you'll have to resolve all conflicts caused by this divergence.

And that's a lot of work for a multi million LOC project, unless the architecture is specifically made to support such extensions... which isn't the case here.

And freezing your merges indefinitely isn't really viable either for a browser

A quick look at the code gives me the impression that webRequestBlocking is a fairly trivial modification to webRequest, and they seem to be keeping the latter. This leads me to two conclusions: it wouldn't be terribly hard for a fork maintainer to keep webRequestBlocking, and Google's technical excuses for removing it are disingenuous.

> ... and Google's technical excuses for removing it are disingenuous.

That's been the default assumption of pretty much everyone anyway.

That may be true now but will it still be true when Google next refactors their request code under the assumption that no requirements for a webRequestBlocking API exist.

So go make an LLM manage the fork or something. Everyone keeps telling me they are amazing at code these days. Surely it can do a task like that if that's all it's doing all day.

If not today maybe soon...

Because these aren't really independent browsers but reskins.

Being independent of google requires actually doing the work and not just copying google.

The codebase is huge, sure, but the particular feature is relatively small and (as I assume and as verified by another poster) quite easy to implement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43204603

This is arguably the most compelling reason for people to switch to Brave. If there are smart people over there, they'll make a concerted effort to keep Manifest v2 in their fork.

Brave supports uBO blocklists OOTB, no extension needed.

So even when they have to say farewell to Manifest v2 it really doesn't matter, at least in case of privacy (and for some medical) protection.

This is good info to keep in my back pocket. Thanks!

As does Vivaldi

In addition, since their adblocker isn't an extension and doesn't care about extension APIs, they can do things even Manifest v2 Chrome extensions can't. For example, full-fat uBO can't do CNAME uncloaking on Chromium due to API limitations, but can do it on Firefox which has the APIs. Brave is Chromium-based, but since Shields isn't an extension they've built CNAME uncloaking into it.

I think if a bunch of Chromium forks come together, they can maintain v2 support for quite a while. A fork maintained by a combination of Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and maybe some of those startup-based browsers can probably keep the most important APIs running for quite some time.

At some point the issues will become too difficult to fix, but none of these companies need to be doing it alone. Adding a separate upstream with some "fuck off Google" fixes for them to base their proprietary browser on seems like a smart thing to do.

Whose idea was it to take over the whole screen and play sound when you start Arc for the first time? It also showed a signup screen.

I removed it right away. I just want a browser, not whatever that was.

I was using Arc as my main browser until they added the mandatory account requirement. It came around the same time they moved iCloud syncing to their own backend.

Now I just use Safari because all I do really is read stuff.

"The Browser Company" does not want to be seen as a dumb pipe. You are not downloading a mere browser, but a "platform" for "experiencing the web as never before".

They have to make money somehow I guess.

Obviously Google has many income streams. Mozilla does not.

It always comes down to the question: do you want to pay money for a browser? And the answer for 99% of the users is "hell no".

...and US tech companies take that as a reason to fill the app with feature bloat and then charge a subscription for it. Arc as a product is dead because the founders are of course pivoting to an "AI browser".

"It's not shit, it's experience" kind of corporate bs repacked?

Arc is a very... Appley browser. Its marketing and communication pretends it's a world-changing product of massive importance, something everyone desires to own. In reality, it's a fork of someone else's browser with some UX tweaks.

I looked into it, but couldn't get over the pretentiousness. They seem to make plenty of money from either investors or customers because they're not bankrupt yet, so I guess there must be a demographic that likes being treated like that.

There's something funny about a browser pretending it's the best thing since sliced bread telling me to drag the downloaded application to the macOS dock after downloading the Windows setup file.

I use Arc for work. It has a few nice UX enhancements. None of those things that you mentioned affect me on a day to day basis. (Honestly, I don’t pay attention to marketing when making my decisions.)

Pretentious or not, Arc is pre-enshittification. Chrome, Edge and FF are not, which is what matters.

Huh? Chrome was shit since launch. Maybe it was rising, but it's still much deeper in shit than ff.

Chrome at launch was an extremely minimal web browser (hence the name, Chrome referred to the barest amount of window chrome around the web content) with decent system integration and essentially no Google service integration other than setting Google as the default search engine (maybe the only one, I don’t remember if there was even a setting to change it). There wasn’t a Mac version at first, but when that came, it has Keychain integration too rather than its own password manager.

It was fast. At some point it had its own install of Adobe Flash so you could get rid of your regular Flash install and run two browsers: one without Flash as your main, and use Chrome for those few websites that require Flash effectively isolating them from your regular web experience, until this eventually became moot, it was another WebKit browser, albeit with V8 instead of JavaScriptCore, and pioneered per tab process isolation so rather than your whole browser crashing, just that one tab would. Prior to Chrome, whole browser crashes were not uncommon, oftentimes because of Flash (giving another reason to want to isolate it, although plug-ins I think were also isolated).

What Chrome subsequently became is the very definition of enshittification, and you can pinpoint it to around the time Google started trying to force people to link their Chrome profiles to their Google Accounts.

Arc is in maintenance mode as The Browser Company focuses on building a new browser: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24279020/browser-company...

Lost all trust for a lot of users after they did this.

Zen browser would be an almost drop-in replacement for those that like Arc but it uses FF under the hood instead.

Yeah, I saw their YouTube video which was immensely annoying to watch. That’s why I was pretty pleased when I discovered Orion and I recently switched from Arc and MobileSafari to Orion as my defaults, but I’m using Arc as the Chromium browser I keep around for when that matters (which right now just means DRM streaming sites like Netflix and Crunchyroll), but Brave could fill this spot just as easily.

Especially since Firefox's new leadership has been encroaching on a lot of the value Firefox provides people (e.g removing the pledge to not sell data?!?).

Also Brave.. just not sure when or if someone will breaking fork chromium.

What about Brave? I eas avoiding it for a long time for no reason while chrome was getting continually worse.

Maybe it's time

It's time. People can complain that "oh it's based on Chromium" but I don't think that's the hill to die on right now.

What makes Brave a better choice than Firefox? While it claims to be privacy-focused, it's developed by a VC-funded company, not a non-profit foundation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

Mozilla now sells data, while Brave does not?

Does Mozilla sell your data, or did they remove language saying they won't?

Do you really think Brave won't, when it comes time to pay the piper?

Brave sells ads and discloses aggregate-level data to advertisers, and has a history of trust-undermining transgressions mentioned upthread:

>installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc

For the simple reason of not using Gecko

What's wrong with Gecko?

I would think the logic runs exactly the opposite way. Browser diversification would make not using chromium the good thing, rather than not using gecko.

Site isolation is one: Firefox doesn't sandbox websites from each other on non-Windows platforms, and even on Windows its sandboxing solution is just worse than Chromium's. They're doing work on implementing sandboxing more widely, mind, but still have a long road ahead of them to get to parity.

Firefox has had site isolation since 2021: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/05/18/introducing-sit...

Yes, on desktop. Mobile Firefox still has none, though that should change within this year or the next.

I think many people's issue with Brave is that it's a cryptocurrency grift, not that it's a Chromium reskin.

Don't most Brave users have all the crypto functionality turned off or opted out?

I would really like people to stop recommending Brave :(

It may be an okay-ish browser, but the company behind it _repeatedly_ does shady things (installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc), I am honestly not sure why people are OK with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

Brave is still the best browser on the market. Trying creative things for monetization (and failing loudly) is a million times better than anything else that any other browser is doing -- including Firefox.

If you don't want the Web3 crap you can turn it off -- as I have done for years now. But someone please help me understand how a browser that takes in half a billion dollars from Google annually to function as controlled opposition in case of an antitrust case is somehow OK to recommend, but a browser that is independent is somehow bad because of bad business decisions made years ago.

Brave is organizationally independent, sure. But it also relies on Chromium, and so isn't independent from the Chromium code base.

Firefox is at least any kind of opposition.

It’s so frustrating to me that the Brave boosters can’t seem to fathom that I don’t want a “better ad experience.” I want a /”no-ad experience.”/

It's equally frustrating to me that some people don't seem to realize that you can opt-out (once, at initial setup) and have a completely ad-free experience.

It's the same kind of iterative creep of compromises on privacy that initially raised alarms with Mozilla, which culminated in Mozilla's "don't be evil" moment (or, their, erm, not-"don't be evil" moment).

You can opt out now while they are trying to gain market share. Honestly everyone on here should know this game by now. There is no such thing as "free" product made by a for-profit corporation.

That's what a lot of us have. Brave's own ad systems are opt-in, and a majority of users don't opt-in. It's a minority that are interested in the crypto features. I just left the crypto stuff off, hid the icons and have a degoogled Chromium with strong adblock and some nice quality of life extras.

I would also add the dead simple point that Brave is yet another Chromium-derived browser. If someone likes Brave just because they like it then, sure, whatever.

But it doesn't belong in a conversation about browser diversification away from Chromium. I am so bewildered why it keeps getting referenced in "let's get away from Google Chrome" threads

> I am so bewildered why it keeps getting referenced in "let's get away from Google Chrome" threads

At the end of the day, it’s not Google Chrome. I’ve mentioned in other comments that Brave isn’t my top 1, 2 or 3 choice, so I won’t rehash that here, but I think it absolutely belongs in a conversation as an alternative for people that want to get away from Google Chrome. The basic skeleton that composes Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers mostly isn’t the issue, because Chrome is and always has been technically excellent. It’s all the other crap Google started grafting on top of it that is, on top of their stance (backed up by many many web developers here) that the standards and web technologies that Google supports should be the standards and web technologies that all browsers support and prioritize.

Brave is better than Chromium in the same way that a sore throat is better than strep throat, when what everyone really wants is a vaccine.

All the arguments in favor of Brave over Chrome are going to apply tenfold to browsers fully independent of Chromium, and it's a perilous place to be, a boat on the edge of the Chromium whirlpool forever rowing (Brave repeatedly branching and forking the parts of Chromium it doesn't want and reconciling them to new updates) to not get sucked in.

I wouldn’t put it in as strong a terms but directionally, I think we agree that Brave isn’t the strongest possible alternative to Google Chrome. I don’t think it is invalid to include it in a conversation about alternative browsers to Google Chrome that aren’t Firefox, nor is the use of Chromium sufficient criteria to disqualify alternatives.

That said, I do have a general preference for browsers that aren’t Chromium-based as well.

I stopped using Brave a couple of years ago when I switched to Arc and I have since switched from Arc to Orion. I didn’t have any issues with at the time even though it was not my default; it made a nice enough fallback Chromium-based browser for the very few times that mattered. I just turned off all the crypto-crap, and regular reviews of the settings didn’t reveal them to be turning on anything I already disabled.

If Brave works for you, go for it.

Please use Firefox instead of a Chromium derivative. We need variety in the browser space and Gecko is pretty much the only independent option remaining.

No.

Firefox is still my primary work browser because all the anti-tracking stuff Orion does actually breaks some sites I depend on (well, makes them harder to use anyway), but Orion has become my main and I have lost confidence in Mozilla.

If you want to continue using Firefox as a kind of service to the world or weird self-imposed civic duty, that’s on you. I can pay for Orion and know that there is a company with an actual business model behind it and also not worry about misaligned incentives, or fixing all the tracking and telemetry defaults (only to watch my hard work crumble like when a random Firefox update hosed my settings on my personal machine a couple years ago) because there is no telemetry.

Idk I switched about a year and a half ago from Chrome and aside from Firefox still being slower I haven’t had any issues. All the websites I visit and the features I use like Nvidia video upscaling work fine. Ublock Origin works fine which is really the most important thing. I’ll eat my hat if any Chromium derivative is still supporting MV2 in 2030.

I keep having to correct people up and down this thread.

Orion is not a Chromium derivative.

Further, nobody here said Firefox was incapable as a browser. Use it if you like it, but having used Firefox off and on since 2005, I’ve written it off on my personal machines.

It's a Safari derivative (WebKit). You're still giving market share for an engine owned by a large corporation.

Using WebKit doesn’t make something a Safari derivative. There are many WebKit browsers out there, Chrome used to be one them.

John Gruber had the Kagi CEO—Vlad Prelovac—on in December. I yoinked this from the auto-generated transcript in Apple’s Podcasts app:

> Orion is still in beta. We are nearing V1. There was so much to do.

> One thing that differentiates building on top of WebKit to Blink is that for Blink, there is Chromium, which is the web browser app framework. You get the entire browser out of the box. You can just change the name.

> And you have a browser for WebKit. There is no Chromium equivalent. You have to create every menu, every button, everything, which is why it took us six years to get where we are.

> It's basically written from scratch. And on top of that, we also decide to port web extensions, to port API to natively to WebKit. We're doing all these hard things that take a lot of time.

> And I know many people [aren’t] happy to see Orion is buggy. This extension doesn't work. Well, yes, it takes time to do this properly, but we are determined to do that properly.

> And of course, it also has the native ad blocker included and all these good things that a browser should have. But for various reasons, all the mainstream browsers cannot do. And yeah, that's the origin story for Orion.

Notably they have been porting in support for Web Extensions APIs that even Safari doesn’t support. You can see a full breakdown comparing Orion (Mac) and Orion (iOS) vs other popular browsers here: https://kagi.com/orion/WebExtensions-API-Support.html

Why? Variety for variety’s sake is just inefficiency. There are plenty of Chromium forks that work just fine.

FF’s legalese may have burned through their last bit of good will, and if that’s the last nail in their coffin let it be a lesson in terminal enshitification and not understanding or caring about your users.

>Why? Variety for variety’s sake is just inefficiency.

It's more than that. It prevents monopolization of the web by a single company. This isn't like picking a different version of Ms. Dash from the grocery store.

Maybe I’m a bit slow and I’m not following. Why does using chromium give Google a monopoly? One might argue the opposite: that having a lot of stakeholders prevents Google from unilaterally applying unpopular changes, because a large critical mass can simply fork it.

It gives Google unparalleled power to influence web standards, effectively giving other browsers no choice but to adopt their preferred implementations.

They can push technologies that benefit their ads business (e.g. manifest 3 breaking ublock origin). And the notion "embrace extend extinguish" was practically invented for circumstances like this, of engaging the development community in a particular field of software, dominating it, and achieving leverage to change the way the web works.

>that having a lot of stakeholders prevents Google from unilaterally applying unpopular changes

Google controls commits to Chromium, and it does that with an invite only developer pool almost entirely of people associated with Google. The stakeholders don't have a proportionate hand in the destiny of Chromium. I think you're right that it's maybe better, in the sense that we could imagine something even worse, but that's loo low a benchmark to offer comfort that Chromium is having a net-positive impact on balance of power in terms of who can help you access the web.

That ship has sailed. There are websites I depend on that can't use Firefox because it doesn't work with Firefox no, those websites are not going to update themselves for something that is used by 0.1% of the web.

And now Firefox has shad the bed so badly with their "we will actually sell your data now" that I don't even care. It can burn in hell.

In what way do you "depend" on those websites? I.e. what would be the "cost" to you of not being able to use them? More than a small inconvenience?

Arc and Orion are both closed source.

I wish they released an android version, much easily ported to debian &| windows.

Although, if kagi fails, it probably won't matter.

On an HN thread a couple weeks back, the Kagi team mentioned they just started working on a Linux version of Orion.

No idea what they plan to do about syncing though since right now they just use iCloud syncing, but it’s a start.

Arc is a Chromium browser that has been kneecapped to explicitly not work on Linux. No thanks!