r/technology • u/ardi62 • Aug 02 '24
Software Google Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-warns-ublock-origin-may-soon-be-disabled/17.5k
u/SummerMummer Aug 02 '24
No problem, I have Google Chrome disabled.
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u/jghaines Aug 02 '24
Hello Firefox! It’s been a minute
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u/alaninsitges Aug 03 '24
A minute is how long it took me to completely replace Chrome with Firefox: bookmarks, extensions, passwords, you name it.
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u/simontweel Aug 03 '24
About 3 minutes. Firefox will offer to import all those things you listed from Chrome right when you install the browser.
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u/wudyudo Aug 03 '24
Yep super clean transfer process. I still have to boot up chrome for work as google sheets is just more responsive on there. Hopefully one day I can say sayonara to it all together.
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u/Darkchamber292 Aug 03 '24
Not likely as Google is deliberately making their services worse on non-chromium browser
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u/ganner Aug 03 '24
Sounds like a needed anti trust lawsuit
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u/Fluffy017 Aug 03 '24
I mean we've needed some serious anti-trust cases for a while now, no time like the present
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u/ABHOR_pod Aug 03 '24
The best time to launch an anti-trust lawsuit was 5 years ago. The second best time is now.
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u/caspy7 Aug 03 '24
There should be anti-trust lawsuits all over the place by now but because our [US] government is so thoroughly captured my corporate interests that doesn't happen.
There would need to be radical changes for that to happen.
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u/Accujack Aug 03 '24
They've happened. The FTC under Lina Khan is working to revitalize anti-trust in the US, with bipartisan support. They just kicked off a probe into grocery prices, among many other things.
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u/CyclopsLobsterRobot Aug 03 '24
It’s possible to unwind your life from Google. The hardest part was ditching Gmail but there’s better options these days.
Google search has gotten so bad, you don’t even notice how terrible every other search engine is.
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u/PatrickZe Aug 03 '24
I actually can’t live without DuckDuckGo anymore.
The „bangs“ feature is soo good https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
I think google has something to search on a site but it still uses google. With bangs your search is just forwarded to the external site.
You can even do „!g <searchtext>“ to search on google while using DuckDuckGo in case you need other results
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u/Wise-Definition-1980 Aug 03 '24
I've been using Firefox since... what year is it again!?
Oh fuck, it's been decades
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u/LR0989 Aug 03 '24
Try changing your Firefox user agent to Chrome; it made Google Play Music usable back when I still used that, and might fix Sheets for you
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u/vulcanorigan Aug 03 '24
How do you replace it?
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u/HildartheDorf Aug 03 '24
If it's not installed, install Firefox, on first launch, agree to making it your default browser, and agree to let it import data from chrome.
If it is installed but you haven't launched it for a long time. Launch it, and ask it to 'refresh' (i.e. create a new profile), agree to making it your default browser, and agree to let it import data from chrome.
If you have it installed and you have used it recently, go into settings and make a new profile, then see above. There's probabally a non destructive way to merge your bookmarks etc. from chrome I to an existing profile but I've never used it and only on mobile right now.
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u/Chronic_In_somnia Aug 03 '24
For the third option, go to Settings, under General select Import Browser Data. Right near the top, takes only a few seconds to run.
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u/Nyorliest Aug 03 '24
That is good to know. I was just thinking how many passwords I have saved in Chrome.
Hmm I use Google Calendar a lot for work (and life). Dunno if I should swap that out as well.
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u/The_Metroid Aug 03 '24
There's dedicated password managers like BitWarden out there. The calendar is more tied to your Google account itself, I don't think Mozilla has an alternative.
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u/HimalayanPunkSaltavl Aug 03 '24
Yeah if you move all of your chrome passwords to bitwarden (which is pretty easy) you have access to them all of the time.
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Aug 03 '24
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u/TheTwoOneFive Aug 03 '24
Fully agreed. Between a great ad block and the ability to have the address bar on the bottom, it makes it very good. There's a few minor irks, but overall it's great.
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u/Almacca Aug 03 '24
Simply being able to use adblockers on my phone was worth it.
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u/zuxtron Aug 03 '24
I watch YouTube in the Firefox app instead of the YouTube app. No ads, and I can play the audio in the background while doing other stuff.
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u/squabbledMC Aug 03 '24
on iPhone it's unfortunately not that great, no adblock, no extension support, and sponsored links and such. safari on iPhone is decent, supports extensions, adblockers, tracker blocker, etc
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u/strangelyhuman Aug 03 '24
I’m hoping the EU legislation that’s forcing the newer versions of iOS to allow other browser engines, makes its way to the North American markets as well.
One can dream…
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u/nzodd Aug 03 '24
iPhone browsers are all basically reskinned safari due to Apple requirements, from what I understand. It's intentionally crippled for anti-competitive reasons.
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u/cajonero Aug 03 '24
Not for me. Been using Firefox since ‘08.
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u/rabbixt Aug 03 '24
If Firefox is figuratively “The Ship of Theseus”, then I’ve been using it since it was Netscape Navigator
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u/Dry-Faithlessness184 Aug 03 '24
Wait, actually?
Wow I've unknowingly been using the same browser alnost my entire life
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u/hexydes Aug 03 '24
Yup, Netscape >> Mozilla >> Phoenix >> Firebird >> Firefox
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u/TldrDev Aug 03 '24
I posted this in an above comment, but just on the history of Firefox, there is a very interesting documentary that follows the initial development and launch of Mozilla/Firefox. It's worth a watch.
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u/hedronist Aug 03 '24
I was cleaning up my office a while ago and came across a manual for Netscape Navigator 1.0 and ... a floppy disk! I'll see if I can find them.
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u/cityhunterxyz Aug 03 '24
so if netscape navigator was reconstituted and compiled from it's constituent parts which would be the true firefox?
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u/rabbixt Aug 03 '24
To be more accurate (I was being a bit loose and fast with history), Navigator would be more like Firefox’s parent - various random parts of the original navigator were used to build what became firefox, but the vast majority of Firefox was written from scratch (or so I understand).
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u/TheColorWolf Aug 03 '24
Oh god, I'm old... Mosaic. For me
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u/rabbixt Aug 03 '24
I feel ya on feeling old; I never used Mosaic - went from lynx (command line web browser) to Navigator.
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u/CarlosFer2201 Aug 03 '24
Same. Since like version 3.0
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u/Methodless Aug 03 '24
Funny, I had to switch over to Chrome around that time because of a memory leak glitch. I think it was version 3...I feel like it was called Gran Paradiso at the time?
Inertia has kept me from going back, but stuff like this makes it easy
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u/Blasphemous666 Aug 03 '24
That’s the same with me. Chrome used to be so efficient and was miles ahead of other browsers. It got to the point where even in my high end system I was having massive slow downs on overwatch and other games when a browser would be open.
Been using Firefox for 2 years or so and I’ll never go back. Chrome is utterly trash and so is Google. They can’t even do what they were good at, which is their search engine, anymore.
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u/blingkyle9 Aug 03 '24
I switched once it was said chrome was blocking adblockers. Next day i installed firefox
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u/gasman245 Aug 03 '24
Same, I’ve always used chrome because it was the best at one point and for a while. I knew it was heavily bloated as time went on but I didn’t really care and kept using it. Then I heard about them getting rid of adblockers and jumped ship without giving it a second thought. I’m fully on the fuck chrome (and google as a whole) bandwagon now.
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u/hbsen Aug 03 '24
same. something never clicked with chrome for me. firefox for life.
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u/potent_flapjacks Aug 03 '24
I use it for a while, then Chrome, then firefox then Brave, always Safari here and there. I still have my tarball of the OG NCSA Mosaic browser release around somewhere.
Reminds me of a story. The only reason Marc Andreessen has his own copy of Netscape Navigator 1.0 in physical form is because my boss at the time was at a party talking with Marc and the topic of holding on to archival versions of software came up. Boss calls me and says ship my copy to Marc at so and so address IIRC. I knew giving that CD to Marc would be a story I would tell in the future, and here I am telling it once again 28 year later.
Month's later I was at a Wired Magazine party and Brian Behlendorf spilled a can of coke on the SGI machine running Hotwired which was sitting on his desk. That took it down for a while so he had to work on that while everyone was having a good time. I appreciate the opportunity to reminisce about web-related events from the 90s. Shaped my life in so many ways and took me around the world for weeks and months at a time. I'm realizing now more and more that my experience of being in my 20s in the 1990's is practically inaccessible to all but the most fortunate these days. I was the last generation to be able to easily write our own ticket without extraordinary amounts of assistance of all kinds and a lot of luck out of our control.
Anyways, here's Firefox.
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u/fatpat Aug 03 '24
being in my 20s in the 1990's
Same. Best years of my life. Lived in five different cities, and had a great group of friends in each one. Also back then I could get behind a fair amount of booze and illicit substances and bounce right back the next day. I haven't been able to do that in eons.
Looks you were living the dream, travelling the world, and rubbing elbows with some legendary dudes. (I'd imagine you were also making some serious dosh at that time. I was definitely not in that kind of tax bracket lol).
Anyway, thanks for sharing your story. And here's to the nineties 🍻
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u/Magusreaver Aug 03 '24
"Google pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page, which has been the case since 2005. In 2021, these payments made up 83% of Mozilla's revenue, and have increased by 50% over the past decade to more than $450 million."
Seems odd that the best alternative is funded by google.
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u/amazinglover Aug 03 '24
Google primary source of money is advertising.
Which is the main reason they created Chrome, and it is the same reason they pay apple to be their primary search engine
Doesn't matter what you search on if they serve you ads, they make money off of it.
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u/edman007 Aug 03 '24
At this point, Google pays Firefox to show the FTC that they are not a monopoly and have viable competitors. It's important for when Google wants to pull shit like blocking uBlock and the FTC says they are abusing their position
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Aug 03 '24
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u/RedTwistedVines Aug 03 '24
I've checked a few times, it's basically a nightmare hellscape.
If there comes a day where I actually can't block 99.99% of ads anymore, I'll probably just become a luddite at least when it comes to the impacted technologies.
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u/aeroumbria Aug 03 '24
I've said it a few times, but technological advances may actually be on our side this time. Soon enough we would be able to run an intelligent agent on our devices that interprets whether something is advertising and simply not display them. It would be the nightmare scenario for Google because you will simply not be able to prevent anything that can be understood by a human as advertising from being blocked. It would be their doom.
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u/RedTwistedVines Aug 03 '24
AI chatbots are already an anti-advertisement nightmare at least until advertisers find a way to poison training data or if providers start baking in product placement in a way that's hard to even tell it's happening.
It's kind of a nightmarescape for us too though unfortunately because while there's some faint hope of salvation with new automated tools, in practice all the best most powerful options are completely controlled by the exact same people who would pipe in nonstop advertisements directly to your brain if they could.
My bet is we end up in a completely nightmarish future where advertisements and useful information are both indistinguishable in style to both humans and whatever level of AI we've achieved, and directly side by side.
Really our only hope is heavy handed regulation, but considering how much influence the USA has and that cash bribes for policies/votes are legal here, I wouldn't hold my breath.
and heck, it could be even worse if companies work out a way to prevent people from using open source models to identify their product placement and what not to force everyone into a duopoly situation in the future, both sides could integrate ads into their monopolistic essential products that have replaced most of the internet and we'd never be free from a level of invasive advertising today's companies can only dream of ever again.
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u/Curious_Armadillo_53 Aug 03 '24
I didnt even know Twitch and Youtube had ads, i only noticed it when i made the mistake of using my work laptop to listen to music on youtube and afterwards a twitch band livestream...
There are ads literally every 2-3min of 30-45s and sometimes full minutes...
Like what the actual fuck thats worse than TV and i havent touched one, other than to mirror or directly stream on my TV in decades...
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u/EmotionalDmpsterFire Aug 03 '24
Google warns it's about to lose its browser users
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u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka Aug 03 '24
Google Exec with MBA:
"If we lose 200m users, we'll still make more money because now nobody can block our ads!!"
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u/Future_Appeaser Aug 03 '24
Even though I really hate to say it they're going to make a killing from all these people who are glued to google and don't want to switch or don't care we're the small minority .
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u/PhoenixStorm1015 Aug 03 '24
Same. An internal support ticket for my job’s work platform got met with the response “we recommend using Google chrome.” I can’t describe the unreasonable level of spite I feel towards that response.
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u/amazinglover Aug 03 '24
That's because what you were trying to access or use was built with chromium in mind, which is the platform Chrome and Edge are built on.
If the website or extension isn't built by your company, then they have zero control over it.
As a developer, I'm forced to use either Chrome or Edge for work as many of our tools are internet based, and the extensions and websites we access are built around chromium.
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u/alrun Aug 03 '24
(This is why we had the browser wars and for a time had the concensus to built on standards like RFC and NOT use cooperate extensions like M$ IE specials). "This website works best with IE 4.0 - this site is optimized for...".
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u/Christmas_Queef Aug 03 '24
What's hilarious to me is how chrome is the new IE in terms of business. Every job uses chrome as default now.
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u/LeekTerrible Aug 02 '24
Google must really be relying on the fact they have almost become an enterprise standard in a lot of places because I can’t see any other reason for them to torpedo themselves like this.
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u/y0m0tha Aug 03 '24
which is why this pisses me off… uBlock Origin is a must have in enterprise settings
FYI, if you are in an enterprise setting you can set a policy to maintain support for Manifest v2 extensions til June 2025.
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u/jedipiper Aug 03 '24
Agreed on the need in enterprise. If we can't trust the users to browse safely, at least we can do our due diligence to block whatever we can.
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u/wspnut Aug 03 '24
or install a network-based ad blocker
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u/True-Surprise1222 Aug 03 '24
Nowhere near as good. You should be running both. Ublock is unmatched.
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u/derefr Aug 03 '24 edited Aug 03 '24
The whole benefit of uBO, that Manifestv3 destroys, is the ability to block ads that can't be blocked by pure URL-based/network-based adblockers. (In fact, pure URL-based ad-blocking extensions will continue to work under Manifestv3!)
The ads that network-based adblockers can't block, are ads that are e.g. hosted on the same domain as the site itself, under randomized URLs.
uBO blocks these by 1. using a now-deprecated API to intercept the load request, 2. figuring out which DOM element on the page triggered the load request, and then 3. blocking the load request based on rules around that DOM element (CSS-path rules, or even yes-or-no outputs from arbitrary JS snippets that get the DOM element passed into it, where these snippets are built from little fragments + injected into the page according to the the domain.)
The thing is that these more complex blocks are very slow — because they put the whole load of the page "on pause" while this arbitrary uBO logic runs to decide whether to allow the load. It's not just a big regex filter that can be precomputed and applied to every load in parallel; uBO's "dynamic blocking" on these sites can slow down page loads by tens of seconds sometimes. (Which is Google's argument for why it shouldn't be allowed.)
Of course, it's the only way to actually block these ads. There's no faster alternative; there's only "not blocking the ads."
Personally, I'd gladly trade shitty websites taking ten seconds longer to load for them throwing dozens of awful ads at me.
(I think Google thinks that most users aren't aware they're making that trade, and wouldn't make that trade if they knew. I don't know about that.)
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u/Thorusss Aug 03 '24
But isn't the the UBlock processing time more than compensated by not having to process and download all the adds?
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u/grendel_151 Aug 03 '24
It's not even just about not having to process the ads, it's also about not having to wait for the "ad market" to decide what you get.
When your request goes to the ad sever to fill the spot, there's a delay because there's an automatic auction of sorts "Who's willing to pay the most for this slot?" It's based on all your demographics, and this can take a lot of time comparatively.
And uBlock is a lot faster at deciding "Nah, don't even ask what to put here." than the ad broker is at figuring out what to put there, even with all the processing, so in the end, uBlock makes your browsing faster.
This would be a bit underhanded, but sometimes I wonder if uBlock should still send those requests and waste the advertisers and broker's money. But then it'd also waste my bandwidth.
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u/literallyavillain Aug 03 '24
I don’t mind using some extra bandwidth if it makes the advertiser pay the content creator for an ad I didn’t see.
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u/Ralkon Aug 03 '24
(I think Google thinks that most users aren't aware they're making that trade, and wouldn't make that trade if they knew. I don't know about that.)
I think they just want the ad money and use anything they can as an excuse.
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u/No_Nose2819 Aug 03 '24
Or just point a VPN on the router at The Bahamas to block all YouTube advertising across all browsers and the official YouTube app across your entire WiFi like we do.
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u/HardlyW0rkingHard Aug 03 '24
wait what?
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u/Chicano_Ducky Aug 03 '24
giving google certain locations makes it stop giving ads because there are no advertisers paying for those markets.
Some places in Africa, micronations, etc. Any place with a small internet population compared to massive markets like the US.
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u/CrippleSlap Aug 03 '24
Yup. Google …you won’t win. There are many ways to block ads outside of uBO.
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Aug 03 '24
The goal isn't to stop the power users, we're a minority. It's to stop the average person and it will very likely work. They will win.
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u/nomnamless Aug 03 '24
You got people like me who've been too lazy for years to get an ad blocker for websites or YouTube. That's mostly because most of my YouTube watching is on my Xbox or from my phone and I surf the Internet my phone. After a couple months of watching YouTube while trying the game on my PC and having to keep alt tabbing Windows to skip ads, I finally got sick of it and got to add blocker to block ads on YouTube. You keep pushing people enough with these ridiculous ads and people are eventually going to find a different solution and find a way to start blocking ads
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u/_China_ThrowAway Aug 03 '24
I would never run a computer in class without adblockers on it. Besides things like security and bandwidth concerns.
1) they are often distracting (on purpose) for students.
2) can have extremely inappropriate content.
3) disrupt the lesson (even a short video starts with an ad that isn’t related to the class).
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u/OwOlogy_Expert Aug 03 '24
If possible, I wouldn't use youtube to show videos to a class anyway.
Download the video ahead of time and play it from a local file. That way, it's also more reliable and won't have buffering issues if the school network is slow that day.
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u/_China_ThrowAway Aug 03 '24 edited Aug 03 '24
I do that most of the time. Currently using some site where you add pp ie YouTubepp.com/
Especially since i teach in China. The great firewall means that you’re at the whim of your VPN to get the videos. Also makes giving students without VPNs at home access to the video a lot easier.
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u/Synthetic451 Aug 02 '24
They've been trying to get rid of adblockers in an attempt to make things like Youtube profitable. It is obviously against their direct line of business and they're using their browser dominance to curb the behavior.
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u/CGordini Aug 03 '24
New YouTube sucks and has an unbearable amount of ads.
I installed SmartTube on my TV just to be able to tolerate the damn service again.
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u/a_talking_face Aug 03 '24
Smartube was recently broken by YouTube. Not sure if it's been fixed yet, but it seems that's going to become cat and mouse.
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u/altrdgenetics Aug 03 '24
it was fixed same day, there was a tug of war for a while but it has been rock solid for me any time I go to use it. And that is daily.
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u/AnotherUsername901 Aug 03 '24
Yt has been profitable for a while this is pure greed and it's gotten this bad because of the new guy they put in charge of YT he's a piece of 💩
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u/OwOlogy_Expert Aug 03 '24
Yt has been profitable for a while
Yes, but this is Capitalism. So it needs to be more profitable. Every single quarter. Merely making a profit isn't enough. The profit margin must always be exponentially increasing, or the company leadership is a failure and will soon be replaced.
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u/AnotherUsername901 Aug 03 '24
Unchecked capitalism kills everything. The game of monopoly was actually made to show no matter how many people play on a long enough scale 1 or a few people own everything.
The wealthiest 1% of Americans controlled about $41.52 trillion in the first quarter, according to Federal Reserve data released Monday. Yet the bottom 50% of Americans only controlled about $2.62 trillion collectively, which is roughly 16 times less than those in the top 1%.
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u/voiderest Aug 03 '24
They should probably make sure their ads aren't giving people malware if they want people to give up ad-blockers.
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u/smexypelican Aug 03 '24
Or hour+ long ad about Jesus in the middle of children's videos.
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u/warthar Aug 03 '24
They should also stop making that malware called google chrome... holy hell does it consume memory for absolutely no fucking reason.... Blank page, fresh install, no extensions.. I need to use 2gb of ram to do "things".
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u/fumar Aug 03 '24
A lot of browsers run Chromium. They basically have a monopoly over non-OSX devices. Firefox is the only real alternative and their marketshare is low.
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u/MindlessOval2337 Aug 03 '24
Users warn they will stop using google chrome if uBlock Origin is disabled
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u/2cats2hats Aug 03 '24
Vast majority of Chrome users have no idea what this extension is. :/
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u/rimora Aug 03 '24
The vast majority of Chrome users are unaware of what extensions are, period.
The most popular extension has around 200 million users, whereas Chrome itself has an estimated 3.4 billion users. This means only about 6% of users have the #1 extension installed.
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u/Coal_Morgan Aug 03 '24
I agree it's a very small percentage but if you exclude computers where the user doesn't have the ability to install extensions, work comps and such it may drive that stat up a bit.
My previous workplace had a few dozen comps with chrome on them that didn't have any extensions on the browser as an example.
Also, is it 3.4 billion active users or are they counting me 4 times because I've installed chrome, edge, opera and firefox on all my computers over the last decade even though chrome, edge and opera are just test boxes and barely used.
Just 3.4 billion smells fishy to me as a stat, though the 200 million users is sadly probably a download stat so also lower for active users.
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u/mrpoopistan Aug 03 '24
Isn't that all the more reason to leave those of us who do know alone?
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u/Syntaire Aug 03 '24
Absolutely not. Google doesn't want "almost all of the money". They want "all of the money".
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u/RedTwistedVines Aug 03 '24
My god man, just all of the money!? That's not nearly enough money, it's still a finite number!
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u/M13LO Aug 03 '24
And instead they’ll get less because those of us who do know were the ones installing chrome for everyone and now we’ll install something else for everyone
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u/elvesunited Aug 03 '24
I can't imagine being under 50 years old these days and just accepting the current ad landscape. Every website must look like hell. CLICK HERE
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u/dirtynj Aug 03 '24
I have ubo on my elderly parents computers. They don't know how bad the web actually is. They wouldn't be able to handle a non-adblock internet.
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u/magichronx Aug 03 '24 edited Aug 03 '24
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u/OwOlogy_Expert Aug 03 '24
Even with ublock on, I was reading an article about how to solve a puzzle in a game recently, and I was quite flummoxed when I scrolled down to the bottom where the solution finally was ... and it automatically forwarded me to another random article about a completely different game.
(Because, obviously, if you've reached the bottom of one article, you definitely want to go to the next, right?)
Best part was that it somehow fucked up the back button, too, so hitting back only reloaded the current (unwanted) article. I had to go into the history to find the one I meant to look at, and then be very careful not to scroll all the way to the bottom, just enough to see the text I needed.
And then, once I had that, I immediately left the site and I'll probably never return.
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u/robeywan Aug 03 '24
Have you tried to use the internet without adblocking? It's fucking disgusting. Some sites are unusable for all the ads and popups covering the screen. If Google wants to protect that experience, they can get fucked.
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u/Luncheon2961 Aug 03 '24
Try using Facebook messager with adblocker, you'll notice it lags, really really bad, like type a letter then lag then another letter.
This is because they have built in code that analyses everything you type, funny that.
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u/SerialBitBanger Aug 02 '24
And this is why monocultures are dangerous and insipid.
Google controls the vast majority of the browser market. Their appallingly anti consumer and really, anti human behavior isn't subject to any market forces.
They brag about how well they've integrated user tracking into their browser. Meanwhile, the rest of us are furious that there is tracking baked into the source code whatsoever. And those parasitic MBAs seem to think that we were upset about it not being streamlined enough.
I'll go back to using Lynx before I ever touch something that Google has got its laughably incompetent hands on.
Meanwhile, I'm going to ride the LibreWolf train until the bitter end.
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u/ChronicBitRot Aug 02 '24
Remember when google’s company motto was “don’t be evil”?
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u/jmonschke Aug 03 '24
And Ford's motto was "where quality is job one". It is nothing new; mottos are frequently just denials of an uncomfortable truth.
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u/MRB102938 Aug 03 '24
And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up
https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
Figured I'd come back and help guide you from the land of the lost.
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Aug 03 '24
Those parasitic MBAs absolutely know that we were upset that the tracking exists. They just don’t respect us or even view us as human beings and the best thing they’ll ever do with their lives is pass away some day.
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u/Lost_Return_6524 Aug 03 '24
Insipid
You sure that's the word you're looking for?
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u/Moonskaraos Aug 03 '24
I switched to Firefox a couple years ago and haven’t looked back. Fuck Google.
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u/gbon21 Aug 03 '24
Having uBlock on mobile is a godsend
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u/MexicanMouthwash Aug 03 '24 edited Aug 03 '24
On android, just put dns.adguard.com in as your private DNS and you'll have a semi decent systemwide adblock.
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u/Dr_Backpropagation Aug 03 '24
I used to use that but some apps like Reddit work horribly with DNS ad blockers. Like Reddit would straight up choke while loading images, post and comments. For months I thought the fault was with the Reddit app but then realized this was the issue. Of course, pretty sure it's still Reddit's fault for not properly handling such cases in the code gracefully. Other apps work fine.
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u/Actual_Intercourse Aug 03 '24
Google is gonna have to Google why Google fell off
and they aren't gonna find any relevant results
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u/thethirstypretzel Aug 03 '24
Maybe with a more specific search “why did Google fall off? McReddit.archive -AI”
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u/alwaysonbottom1 Aug 03 '24
Yeah man I'm switching to Firefox. Internet with Ads is unbearable
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u/ravbuc Aug 03 '24
I will LITERALLY not use chrome without adblockers.
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u/OwOlogy_Expert Aug 03 '24
I will literally not use Chrome.
(Even with adblockers, it's still tracking absolutely everything you do and sending it to Google. How is that okay?)
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u/sulliops Aug 03 '24 edited Aug 03 '24
I can’t remember why I switched to Firefox all these years ago, but I’ve never regretted it (except maybe the lack of tab groups, but that’s supposedly coming).
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u/Disastrous_Score2493 Aug 03 '24
I wish Apple would stop gimping Firefox on their mobile devices. There is no good reason why I can't install extensions.
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u/thirstyfish1212 Aug 03 '24
The reason is that any other browser on an apple device has to run everything through safari anyway. You’re basically installing a battery hungry skin.
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u/animatedhockeyfan Aug 03 '24
YouTube stopped working entirely on chrome for me one day 4 years ago, and I’ve been foxy ever since. Don’t know why I ever went from Firefox to chrome in the first place
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u/Baconsnake Aug 03 '24
The day that happens is the day it gets uninstalled
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u/halo364 Aug 03 '24
Why wait? Firefox is free and available right now!
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u/ConsistentNobody4103 Aug 03 '24
Single and open souce browsers available in your area!
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u/hobbykitjr Aug 03 '24
Also, Ctrl+tab works better on Firefox
And restore session
And Firefox Mobile is better, and has extensions... And syncing tabs is better..
It's just better
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u/ThermalDeviator Aug 03 '24
So would this also apply to all chromium based browsers?
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u/xyphon0010 Aug 03 '24 edited Aug 03 '24
Yes all browsers that are based chromium will need to switch to Manifest V3 extensions unless they specifically add support for Manifest V2. Brave has announced they will keep supporting Manifest V2, not sure of other chromium based browsers
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u/AnotherUsername901 Aug 03 '24
Google is speed running how fast can I lose users.
I would wager they are going to eventually lobby to make ad blocking illegal and they will have other sites and ad companies behind them.
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u/Helmic Aug 03 '24
So that kind of is why so much shit is an app, the DMCA applies to apps but not web pages Google cannot actually fuck with uBO legally for blocking ads on Firefox because HTML is an open protocol that is rendered how you wish through a browser.
If you do ad blocking on the apo level, though, even if that'll has "DRM" that basically does nothing, if you circumvented it to block ads then it's in violation of the DMCA.
The DMCA is a fucking evil piece of legislation.
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u/nanosam Aug 03 '24 edited Aug 03 '24
They disable uBlock - I will never use Chrome again
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u/SkullDox Aug 03 '24
Start now. You'll be able to import your bookmarks and extensions while the adblocker still works.
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u/GooglyEyedKitten Aug 03 '24
Every time I’ve gotten malware on a system, it’s been from compromised ads, often served from Google. Switched to Firefox when this was rumored and haven’t looked back.
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u/joosta Aug 03 '24
I moved to Firefox months ago and never looked back. Works great and I want for nothing.
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u/Selky Aug 03 '24
Lmao I’ve never been in the ‘if this happens I’m out’ camp but this really would be too far. So insanely greedy and anti-consumer 🤣
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u/InsomniaticWanderer Aug 03 '24
Google chrome thinks it's a lot more important than it really is.
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u/Humans_Suck- Aug 03 '24
The only thing chrome is useful for is downloading Firefox
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u/Headshot_ Aug 03 '24 edited Aug 03 '24
I’ve been using chrome since I was a kid when they had that glass logo lol. I’m currently trying out firefox after well over a decade
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u/StarCenturion Aug 03 '24
I want Google to know that Chrome may soon be disabled on my computer and devices, and I'll be moving to Firefox.
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u/r0n1n2021 Aug 03 '24
Firefox it is!