Doesn't Safari have the same restriction, also ostensibly for "security/privacy" reasons? The only difference is that Apple doesn't have a web advertising presence, so you can't make the accusation that they're "abuse its market position to their own benefit".
Imagine what it would cost Google's bottom line if Apple was truly user-focused and enabled ad-blocking on desktop, mobile and embedded safari views by default. Someone do the napkin math please!
Apple and google did everything for you to not know about it. It’s not the first thread where people either don’t know about it or will read but won’t try.
Works fine on my machine. You might need to update your filter lists or try another content blocker app.
>Content blockers often block cookie banners too which can often result in broken functionality - a nightmare when you’re trying to buy tickets to something and have to “reload without blockers” for the website to work.
So don't enable the filter lists that try to block cookie banners?
There's also a new extension that was posted on hn a few weeks that's free and claims to have scriptlets to block youtube ads as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43204406#43208085
You can perform video search through DuckDuckGo, Invidious, or Piped.
The latter two are often blocked themselves, copy the video URL and feed to mpv to play through your preferred video player on the command-line:
Recent mpv / ytdl can almost always gain access. If you are blocked, check for updates to ytdl (which mpv typically uses for video/media downloading).
In my experience only the big ad networks let you post anything. Small specialized ad platforms usually have actual moderation.
Edit:// by the way it wasn't that hard to get ads trough ublocks filters by self hosting them either. But that's rarely really evil and I never saw that abused.
You're telling me you block ads, but have to unblock ads to view your ad sales?
Is this in the DSM-V?
If the page is too ad-ridden to tolerate, I may consider to just close that page, and go search for other options.
I use Firefox + uBlock Origin, because going to the wide commercial internet without some form of ad blocking is like going out without an umbrella when it's raining heavily.
Ad blockers usually block such stuff, for a good reason. But I don't mind it on a checkout page specifically though, because on a checkout page I wilfully disclose a ton of my private details, such as name, address, etc.
Good checkout pages work well with an ad blocker on.
The big deal was allegedly these small shops exposed you to viruses, but Walmart, Kroger, and Lowes did not.
Make it make sense.
Wasn’t Mozilla accused of selling data they collected from Firefox users?
Correct me if I’m wrong.
It's just the paradox of when you present yourself as "the good guys" - people will hold you extra accountable for things that others easily get away with as nobody expects them to do better.
Unfortunately, Mozilla tends to shoot themselves in their foot this way somewhat often.
I almost exclusively use Safari and I havent seen a single ad in almost a decade
Ps changed the term to avoid confusion, thanks!
The webRequestBlocking api, which allows the extension to inspect all request/responses in real time and act on them. With manifest v3 the extension can only supply a list of expressions to block, and the expressions that can be used is very limited.
The main difference between this and current element blockers is that Web Defuser allows you to block annoying behaviors (by modifying requests/responses in flight) in addition to elements.
At the moment it's a bit lacking in the UI department, I'd appreciate early adopter feedback (you can contact me at gmail with my username).
I understand that nerfing adblocking is definitely a big draw for Google, but Apple went the ManifestV3 route many years before, specifically to increase extension performance and privacy.
Back then there was a big uproar too, but mostly because Safari extension developers charged for a new version because they had to rewrite the entire thing.
This reasoning is so bogus that it’s hard to believe anybody could believe it in good faith. Ad blockers are essential for performance and user privacy and security.
If Apple truly bought into this reasoning then they’d integrate an ad blocker like Brave does. Follow the money.
And Apple does care because later on they started to allow blockers to spread blocking rules over multiple sub-extensions. Initially they were limited on... 15 000 rules? Can't quite remember.
But you're right. When I'm using Safari with 1Blocker, I don't even notice that I'm not using Chrome with uBlock Origin. And it accomplishes that with static rules instead of with an API that reads every request.
In other words, Google pays Apple ~$20B per year to be default search engine because they make ~$53B in revenue from those searches. This is profitable for both Apple and Google -- no "wildly illegal under-the-table measures" required.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/apple-gets-36percent-of-goog...
It's not that weird that people are a bit suspicious that it's really worth Google $20B/year.
I don't know if or how much that's changed.
I just gave Bing a quick try, and it seems to be a bit more useful (for Singapore) now than it used to be. I haven't tried all the other alternatives.
The power of the default is just that, they it is the default.
Also Apple themself has only one incentive which is to get the best deal for themselves. Is Microsoft willing to offer more money than Google? The evidence points to no.
even when an outsider tries to think of the nastiest scam, an insider shows up to explain the boring day to day is already worse.
Defaults is exactly how Microsoft has been getting away with everything they did for forever. Anti-trust investigations? Irrelevant if you can just make it configurable but the default is Microsoft.
Most people don't change default settings unless prompted and guided. And adding a setting shuts up most of "us" coz we'll just change it.
The only reason they're remove the ability to configure something would've been if too many of us change the settings for too many of our friends and relatives for it to register negatively on their end and they'd try to get away with not allowing it to be configured / hiding it as much as possible until they actually get anti-trust investigated // convicted (Re: requiring Windows to ask if you want to install other browsers than Internet Explorer).
At least it certainly leaves me (personally) having second thoughts, even though I'm no purist and use proprietary software (but try prefer free software if I can).
Very much a lesser of all evils situation.
Firefox is also the only open alternative to Chromium at the moment, so I prefer to endorse it instead.
But, I always recommend Brave for less-technical folks. It just works! My FF setup includes a number of extensions, some of which need a bit of tuning to be useful. Then you have to deal with issues in websites that just don't properly support FF, etc. My grandmother can install Brave and simply start browsing. Things just work without extra config or tinkering.
https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10
Why do you write "probably... based on... relationship ended"? Brave as a startup does not have time for feels not realz, pathos-over-logos nonsense. I recommend you avoid it in your work efforts too.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
This is a choice we made. As I wrote in my last reply, I think we would have died trying to get Gecko/Graphene with a Web front end up to competitive scratch vs. Chrome (nm Firefox).
A Firefox fork would have gone over badly with some potentially large number of Mozilla/Firefox fans, and we'd still lack key elements not part of the Mozilla open source (at the time, e.g., Adobe's CDM for HTML5 DRM). On the upside we'd have more UX customizability.
But our choice of Chromium/Blink (via Electron, so we had Web front end upside without Firefox extensions) was not a slam dunk choice. It involved trade-offs, as all engineering does. One downside is we have to audit and network-test for leaks and blunders, which often come from Chromium upstream:
There's no need to do it, their built-in adblocker supports the same rule lists.
There's also built in blocking under brave://settings/shields for Javascript and social features.
It doesn't have a specific feature to block fonts AFAIK but it does have fingerprint protection if that's your concern.
e.g. on DuckDuckGo.
(I work on Brave's adblocker, and FWIW the folks who work for Brave are very open about their affiliation when commenting about it online)
There is some bitching about the ads crypto token, but that is entirely optional, so complaints are mostly fear and dogma. And to be honest, is a fascinating new approach to ads that suvberts the current state of affairs in the advertising market.
Your response: "I want to keep my cake and eat it too."
I have a solution for you, stop using YouTube if you feel so strongly that a video platform should be free to use.
I'm paraphrasing in the quotes, they aren't real quotes...
In the last five years or so Firefox has increasingly introduced controversial changes that make it (IMHO) less good, primarily around interface design. And, from what I understand, Mozilla employs full-time UX designers who've been driving much of that. Of course, with Firefox it's still possible to modify, fix and restore all these recent interface "improvements" with user CSS but it's a constant annoyance to need to keep fixing it. Fortunately, there's an active community effort around restoring the Firefox interface and usability, exemplified by the brilliant Lepton project https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/releases.
My perception just watching the evolution of Firefox from the outside, is that it used to be a browser that celebrated the ethos of "Have it Your Way." However, Mozilla the company gets money to pay its executives and employees (millions in the case of more than one recent CEO) by actively driving users and eyeballs for Google, Pocket and other advertisers. So the company is highly incentivized to try myriad changes and redesigns to increase appeal to "the masses" of browser users. Thus, the UX keeps getting 'simplified' and 'de-cluttered' with advanced functionality 'de-prioritized' and add-on support demoted to second-class afterthought - instead of the shining key feature advanced users value most. Basically, in recent years the Firefox UX and end-user features have been pushed by the substantial payroll needs of the Mozilla company to become more like Chrome and Safari instead of embracing its unique position as a tool for power users who value advanced features, customization and extension. And it was all for naught because Firefox has continued to lose market share while ignoring (and even actively alienating) its niche community of fanatically devoted power users.
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-...
Now, why do I have this feeling that it will be bought by some entity very close to the current US administration?
No, content blockers are specific to Safari. Third party apps can show ads just fine.
Do they also get outraged when Costco “abuses its monopoly” as soon as they stop providing free samples or cheap hotdogs?
I hate these arguments where people point to some other shitty thing a company is doing as some sort of gotcha.
Windows is split off from Lenovo/Dell. How's that working out for the Windows OS, or the Edge browser?
Edge is a perfectly good browser now? Probably should be its own company too if we are splitting Chrome off from Google.
I will tell you that we should split these companies into 100 parts if thats what you are asking.
Imagine if Apple licensed its chips out in competition with Qualcomm...
They've gone well beyond what Microsoft did in the 2000s.
Google owns so many panes of glass and funnels them all through its search and advertising funnel. They've distorted how the web (and mobile) work to accomplish this massive market distortion.
Search, Ads, and Android should be broken up into separate units. Chrome shouldn't be placed with any of those units.
While we're cutting, YouTube should be its own entity and stand on its own legs too.
Apple, Amazon, and Meta need the same scrutiny. Grocery stores and primary care doctors should not be movie studios and core internet infrastructure. Especially when those units are wholly subsidized by other unrelated business units, and their under pricing the market is used to strangle out the incumbents and buy them up on the cheap.
New management is aligned with breaking up big tech.
Founders Fund (Thiel), A16Z (Andressen [0], Horowitz), and YC (Gary Tan) have all been lobbying for some form of big tech breakup because it sucks up capital+oxygen needed for startups they funded to exit at respectable valuations.
Also, Andressen's Netscape was screwed over by Microsoft, so he has a grudge against large players.
[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/andreessen-more-tech-compani...
Startups would be able to grow larger. There would be less threat from big tech coming in to eat your market, and M&A wouldn't be the preferred exit strategy.
Tech talent would be able to get paid more without big tech setting wages and orchestrating coordinated layoffs. More successful startups = more money for venture and labor capital. Right now that money just goes to institutional shareholders which are not the innovation drivers of the economy.
Startups will actually get to compete for markets rather than having them won and subsidized by unrelated business units at the big tech titans. The solutions delivered will fit the market needs much better.
Even big tech itself might fetch a higher valuation and be greater than the sum of its parts. So much of big tech is inefficient, untethered from market realities (eg. Alexa), and a waste of talent and human capital on dead end projects. Having Jeff Bezos "pay whatever it takes" to acquire the rights to "007" is a sign of how bloated these market distorting companies have become.
This needs to happen and is long overdue.
That one is already being pursued.
Sure, it doesn't rule out google was secretly intending on doing it, only internal memos or whatever can prove that definitively. But at the same time, to immediately conclude that google was "abusing its market position", you would have to be maximally uncharitable to google. That's a sad way to see the world. Take for instance, the flak that google got for banning third party cookies. If this is done by anyone else (eg. Firefox), this would be seen as a good thing. However, cynics have opposed this on the basis that such change would disadvantage third party ad networks more than google, thus google was "abusing its market position to their own benefit" and therefore the change was bad.
The reasoning is obvious, and "plausible deniability" is not enough to give Google charity. The more difficult you make it to block ads, the more impressions, and the more money made. Yet you believe people should be "charitable" to the same company that can't hire the manpower to defend their own users against bad faith DCMA takedown notices. Because they ran the analysis, and it wasn't worth the cost.
Best case scenario, Chromium loses market share, implements the parts removed from V2, Google likely kicks the can down the road to Manifest V4.
There's no reason to believe companies deserve charitability. Companies are systems designed to extract maximum value, and when the world around that system changes, the system adjusts itself. It's not the systems fault for trying to get more value, it's our fault for letting them.
Eventually, there will be an overstep that make enough capable people mad, and those people will get together and make/mod something better.
Google is an ad company restriction use of the primary ad-blocker on its browser, it's blatant.
Have you missed the part of my comment of my comment where I specifically mentioned "web advertising presence"? That's relevant, because ublock would only work on web ads. It can't block ads in the app store, or any other app (eg. spotify).
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AuBlockOrigin%2FuAssets+ap...
Thus they also clearly have an incentive to sabotage uBO. It may be a much smaller piece of their revenue than at Google, but it is a huge proportion of their revenue growth. Don't believe Apple's marketing about their caring for privacy, belied by their actions.
Can you link to a specific rule that shows Apple has web ads? The search results you linked either removeparam filters (which I guess is "tracking", but probably the most benign kind), malware sites that contain "apple.com", or analytics domains that seemingly belong to apple. Moreover there's no evidence that Safari's content blocker restrictions make a difference here. The domains are trivially blocked so it's unclear how apple is materially gaining from their nerfed adblock.
I currently use Adguard as a content blocker for Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Does this mean that Safari will also start restricting access to these ad blockers?
| month | Chrome | Firefox | Safari |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| Jan '25 | -1.29 | +0.07 | +0.84 |
| Feb '25 | -0.75 | +0.08 | +0.03 |
I know these numbers seem tiny, but if these trends were to continue, Chrome could be under 50% marketshare by June 2026 and overtaken by the end of 2027
Disco Stu has something to say about that
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-...
The modern web, as we all know, is all kinds of shit. Anybody here compile Firefox recently?
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-...
Yes, Tik Tok still needs to divest ownership or be banned in the US
For one, they simply have had a better product, at least in the past. Part of their large monopoly is due to just being better outright for a large portion of users (presumably). Are we to punish making overly-good products?
For another, sell to whom? And why would they be a good steward?
And yet another, there's literally Chromium, which other browsers (built by other corps) use, e.g. Edge, Brave, etc.
Did Google have to open Chromium? No.
Disclaimer: I hold these opinions weakly and would love to learn more about why they might be ill-premised.
Google did not make Chromium from scratch, and so were obligated to use a license compatible with the previous source they used. That source can be traced back to KDE's Konqueror browser and its KHTML engine.
However they chose to do it in the open, side benefit they also got to use a ton of preexisting code.
The reason why Chrome waited for so long to add extensions was the danger they posed to users. I was at Google when Sergey often worried about what extensions would do to non technical and older users who get tricked into installing them, then I saw first hand that danger with my own grandparents. They had extensions intercepting every network request, redirecting certain sites to fake sites, and injecting code into pages. It was horrifying, and they were lucky that they didn't have significant money or identity theft.
And it's not "altruistic" - it's because eval() and webRequestBlocking are bad for security and performance, so they're bad for a lot of users. Users who will switch to Safari or another browser without that extension API, because the browser is faster or didn't exfiltrate their banking credentials.
Offering something then taking it away is materially different from never having offered it at all.
Abuse of extensions was certainly a problem with IE. But, Google was also happy to use IE controls for Google Toolbar and other functionality. It irks me when a company/tool makes use of another's more permissive policies/APIs in order to gain a foothold and then restricts others from doing the same with its products. It feels like pulling the ladder up behind you.
Everyone will call them on it. Why not be straight with their intentions?
An advertising company optimizing their technology to better support their business while improving security.
What are you using instead?
Brave is decent too if you want something Chromium-based but more privacy-focused (comes with minor controversies).
Safari works well if you're in the Apple ecosystem.
I actually run a dual-browser setup these days - Firefox for most browsing, and only fire up Brave for those annoying sites that Google has mysteriously "optimized" to run poorly elsewhere. Not ideal but gets the job done!
I kinda appreciate that you still apply some benefit of the doubt.
Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it. People can use a different browser if they wish (I do).
This whole “better for users” bullshit is why I don’t respect Google as a company. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.
Google has a long history of "accidentally" breaking gmail on firefox and funneling users to Chrome back in the day. It's beyond stupid to argue they should be able to do whatever they want with their vertically integrated monopoly.
Like, if you want to dig holes in your own driveway sure whatever, but if you own all the roads in Detroit and you want to dig holes in them, then make a killing selling new tires and suspension repair a fair society wouldn't move out of Detroit, they'd fucking run you out of town.
The more things Google does to make gmail less useful, the better.
It’s no secret that Google is an ad company. Anyone still using gmail deserves what they get.
Would Google be making the world shit if all its cloud services had only a few dozen thousand users?
What's forcing you to interact with Google isn't Google, but Google users.
Let’s not pretend this was done unto them. Anyone can stop using gmail at any time.
It's a collective action problem: you'll have to persuade millions and millions of "normies", who have no idea what's going on, or what internet privacy is, or what's broken about the system, and who don't care to learn, and won't listen to us - or you'll have to impose regulation. Those are the choices. The second seems more possible than the first. Us nerds saying "walk away" is idealistic; we will, and always will, get squished, because the corps have the power and most folks won't (ever) care.
Who's your host, just in case that's the difference?
If you're dealing with spam originating from Gmail, without any helpful action from Google, that's not really your choice.
If you're dealing with difficulties sending mail to Gmail users, without help from Google, that's also not really your choice.
If vast numbers of other people stopped using Gmail, those problems would mostly go away.
Just going to copy/paste this part of the comment you replied to, because it seems like you may have missed it?
>My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.
I would recommend Google Workspace to any company because it gives them a ton of business productivity tools.
I would probably not recommend gmail as a users default personal email because frankly it's not that good.
The reality is most users have a Google account ans just use their Gmail account which is bundled.
Most of my circle which cares effectively use their Gmail account for sites that insist on it and never open that e-mail if they can get away with it.
True, and applies to many other things as well. Anyone claiming otherwise is shirking responsibility for their own actions. Every single sibling comment here suffers from this.
Arguments in the form of "other people do it, so I must also" are unpersuasive and pathetic.
Your post: > Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to.
No, it's clear that not everyone dealing with Gmail is doing so because they chose to. Repeating your incorrect statement does not make it correct.
Further, everyone has to deal with its impacts on the email ecosystem as it's practically impossible for somebody who works a 9-5 to run their own mail server that Gmail will deign to not only accept mail from but also successfully deliver it to its intended recipient.
So even if I never use Gmail I still have to deal with replies going to / coming from it.
Not my wife - her school board mandates it.
Organizations I don't like = Monopoly!
Organizations I like = ...
Gmail is not a government service. Google is free to make that work with only one browser, if they want.
You can't assert that Google must make Gmail work with any browser whatsoever, because that means supporting someone using Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 5.5.
Of course lying about why makes it worse, but I don't think it would've been that much more okay if Google was honest and said "users' ability to install highly effective ad blockers hurts our bottom line so we're removing them".
I LOL every time I see it. Imagine the lengths they have to go to, to try to make people trust a product they have.
My mom, who has Ublock Origin installed on her Chrome by me, will never know these details.
When I maintained a hook-based plugin system, I learned that many programmers do not know data structures or algorithms and would slow down the whole software by writing plugins that looked up rules using extremely slow ways extremely often. And if users wanted to complain about the software being slow, they would always blame me first.
But when I replaced it with rule lists, now I was in control and could implement fast data structures.
You're just pissed because I've chosen to block your code in software you created. Next, you'll tell me I have to watch your programming on a TV I bought with your code on it.
The idea that we have to do anything that evilCorp wants us to do is just insane that people have come to the point of accepting that.
I don't understand why they ads are not spliced into the stream. It would be undetectable by extensions at all.
Maybe you're willing to pay the price, but that doesn't mean it was what's best for the ecosystem.
If manifest V3 ad blockers were nonfunctional to the point of being broken, I’d be more concerned, but in my experience they’re perfectly OK.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
That said, I know a number of xooglers (myself included) who don't believe for a moment that this would have gotten off the ground if someone important hadn't opined on the usefulness WRT ad-serving.
Of course not all of them do, Google is a big company.
They shouldn't be free to use all the money in the world to corner a market, rope in the conpetition and then abuse that position.
It only works because nobody can touch them, it's otherwise straight illegal in most markets.
Have we seen this movie before?
That way if I click on some random GCP link in Slack it opens the link in Chrome, but everything else stays in Firefox. I don't need ad blocking for GCP so that works fine.
Sucks, but better than using Chrome full time.
For various functionality, there's also NeoLinker, UntrackMe, Intent Intercept, unalix, LinkSheet, and Open Link With. I believe Lynket browser, which uses the custom tab protocol, also has some basic rules-based choosing but it only works with two browsers and the rules are based on the app making the request.
It looks like LinkSheet added many of the settings I'm looking for at some point, so I'll be trying that out.
That would at least save you from stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942252.
Using Firefox and whatever for the Google cloud is kinda like running Windos applications in Wine or ReactOS.
Sometimes works better than on the original Windows? I assume that's not what you meant though :-)
But you know better than anyone's else what you meant :-)
I killed the tab and tried it in Chromium where the UI was... not snappy, but in range for my expectations of a heavyweight frontend.
Same thing will happen in the billing portal or really any experience but I notice it the most in BQ.
Great. Very few companies do. What difference does it make?
We don't give bankrobbers credit for all the days they could've robbed a bank but didn't.
It seems to completely lose track of the face value significance of any individual instance of abuse because it gets lost in the comparative equation to hypothetical worst harms.
It also confusingly treats restraint as though X amount of restraint can then be cashed in for a certain amount of harm, rather than something that's supposed to happen by default under good stewardship.
And it shifts the whole question to whether or not that position is being abused when I think the criticisms are more fundamental about the fact that they shouldn't be in the position to have or not have that leverage in the first place.
So that, long and short, would be my detox from the assumptions at play here.
>Lawyer: Okay, let's say my client killed his wife. What about the people he didn't kill?! That's six billion people! Don't they matter? Don't they matter?!
>Caption: In an alternate universe, Jeffrey Dahmer has a thank you parade every year.
The most recent case before this was nearly 40 years ago under Reagan, and he certainly wasn't the first president guilty of it.
The "Main Stream Media" rhetoric really started with the teaparty stuff, powered by the internet, and championed both the right (tea party in america, faragists in the UK) and left (corbynistas in the uk, AOC types I assume in the states)
I never said it was?
But who told you that there is a Fourth Estate? Was it the very “Fourth Estate”?
Except removing support for webRequestBlocking in manifest v3 doesn't really improve security. Nearly every extension require the "access your data for all sites" permission. The infamous Honey extension works just fine with manifest v3, for instance.
There are plenty of other reasons to hate Google. This isn't one of them. Sacrificing the "power" desired by couple thousand HN users in return for the safety of couple millions of normal users is the right thing to do. Of course HN users will disagree; let's just see how badly this post will be downvoted. Downvotes won't change my opinion.
That's some fatalistic wording. How about:
Company that publishes a free product and business model relies on ads, stops distributing app that piggybacks on their free product while circumventing ads.
But chrome is free to choose not to distribute that plugin. If you want you can download it elsewhere.
And it shouldn't take waiting until specific examples happen to understand the incentives and the possibilities that could ripen at some future date.
And just to throw in my little side hobby horse on this conversation, it's what I find personally frustrating about conversations with people who think that Brave counts as an alternative.
Being attached at the hip to the Chromium project is a ground level commitment to a long-term vulnerability, and it means that similar circumstances could "ripen" at some future date as the family of Chromium browsers become dependent on an increasingly vast foundation of code and web standards. To me, the combination of that capability and the incentive should be enough to be treated as a complete argument which disqualifies Chromium derived browsers from counting as alternatives.
That people claim it's impossible for a browser to survive without Google's funding demonstrates how broken the market is by ad money: of course people would pay for something like a web browser if it were illegal to make money by selling your users. The web is obviously valuable to people.
Call your senator and propose a bill, otherwise we'll keep doing what's legal.
And regardless, using their ownership of the browser to shut down competitors is the very definition of "anti-competitive" "monopolistic" behavior.
No point using 99% of the web due to the hostile, fraudolent, abusive approaches on top of the hollow (yeh, very very gentle world for the thing what it is) content. No point searching for advice, products, job, as crap is poured at you while your actions are registered, your profile is sold, just to pour dedicated crap on you by the highest bidder.
I have mail and 5 (7 with weather) pages I check regularly, and that's it. That's my online life. More like a hermit goes into town for tools and cans kind of digital solitary. Clicking on links only after reconsidering five times, if I am really interested in the possible content. Mostly here. So, so far away from the extremely curious me 20 or so years ago spending hours to the limit of my thirst and bladder, navigating all that is out there.
It is very sad what humanity made out of the Internet. It does not even hurt anymore. It is numb blob where the feeling about the rich common knowledge source this was and could have been should be.
https://programmerhumor.io/programming-memes/browsing-withou...
I feel really bad for less tech-savvy users who'll be stuck with this nightmare version of the internet.
I have the same experience as you, every time I set up a new machine or watch friends/relatives browse the web, it just blows my mind how bad the unfiltered internet is.
You realize these people pay check depend on that, right?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/google-fires-employees-p...
June 2025: Chrome MV2 deprecation enterprise rollout
# defaults write com.google.Chrome.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2
Now, because uBO is now disabled in the Chrome Web Store, you also need to install it as a "forced extension" (the way extensions are deployed in enterprise environments). Install the extension according to the section "Use a preferences file" in [2]:
- Create a file named cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm.json
- Place it in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/External Extensions/
- With content:
{ "external_update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx" }
The ExtensionManifestV2Availability definitely still works for now, but it's been a about a month since I used the preferences file way of installing the extension on a new device. YMMV.
[1] https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#ExtensionManifestV... [2] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/how-to/distribu...
I'm switching browsers, I hate ads more than I like Chrome.
Sounds like June 2025 is the real date when it'll no longer be possible to use manifest v2 extensions per https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begi...
Chrome still has many ad blockers. While I use chrome/chromium fairly little, ublock origin lite has worked well for me when I do. I'm aware older manifest V2 extensions are theoretically superior at blocking a wide variety of undesired content but if your main concern is not seeing ads, that is absolutely doable.
Once they are the only option in Chrome, it's just a matter of time until Chrome becomes largely useless at blocking ads.
Well the crappy copy does come with some extra text. (No judgement from me on whether the extra text improves the comic here; just that someone might think it does, and there's no arguing about taste.)
It's also interesting to see that XKCD itself explicitly supports eg hotlinking, and the license makes putting it into your own crappy creations rather easy. (Though I think the example linked to fails the 'attribution' requirement.)
Precisely why it should be broken up.
What makes me sad is that if we go back a handful of years here in HN comments, there were tons of posts assuredly stating google would never do anything like this.
Even though it should have been obvious that a company who lives and dies by ad revenue will of course do everything to protect ad revenue and block users freedom.
Thanks, now I have coffee on my keyboard.
I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy, a joke coming from Google. Then the excuse was "well it improves performance", which they could easily do by marking extensions as low performance.
If Google wanted to improve this they have an entire search engine where they could re-rank sites based on privacy and performance.
It was never about improving peoples web experience.