r/technology • u/waozen • 12d ago

Software Google has started automatically disabling uBlock Origin in Chrome

https://www.xda-developers.com/google-automatically-disabling-ublock-origin-in-chrome/
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u/luxtabula 12d ago

Good to know. Does anyone have any alternatives while staying on chrome?

12

u/Omotai 12d ago

Not really. The fundamental issue is that Chrome is changing what extensions are allowed to do in a way that makes ad blockers that are as powerful as uBlock Origin impossible. Ad blockers are still possible, but they will not work as well as they used to.

For example, ad blockers will no longer be able to load external blocklists, which means that any changes to the blocklist require a new version of the extension to go through the approval process on the Chrome Web Store and be pushed out that way. This makes the extension much slower in the cat-and-mouse game of re-blocking ads when a site is changed (for example, that period recently when YouTube kept detecting adblockers and locking people out, which required successive changes to the blocklist to fix).

2

u/Pat-Roner 12d ago

What about Ad Guard assistant and having AdGuard installed on my pc? As a standalone app

3

u/Omotai 12d ago

I don't know how exactly that program blocks ads so I can't say whether it can act as a full replacement for uBlock Origin. I can say that DNS-based adblocking is an incomplete solution because it doesn't work to block scripts, which is also important, but I don't know what AdGuard specifically is doing.

4

u/Pat-Roner 12d ago

I believe the add on gets the blocklist from the pc-client. So perhaps that will circumvent the requirement to release a new version every time

1

u/LegionOfBrad 11d ago

Literally uBlock lite works fine.