Seems like Microsoft is just taking whatever Chromium releases and repackages it to show more ads and to make Bing the default search engine. In this case, it's just dropping support for Manifest V2 extensions, such as uBlock Origin, and moving to Manifest V3, which does not support extensions intercepting and blocking requests using blockingWebRequest.
Just three days ago, Mozilla reiterated [1] that Firefox would continue to support Manifest V2 alongside Manifest V3. So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it). While you're at it, note that "uBlock Origin works best on Firefox". [2]
Given most EULAs contain standard tech boilerplate that paraphrases to "We can change anything about this agreement at any time without warning or notice to you", I doubt it.
It's really hard to take someone seriously when they say things like this:
> For years I’ve been warning about this inevitable outcome, and for just as many years people told me I was overreacting, that it wouldn’t happen, that I was crazy.
The removal of that language is important but this person is trying to make it about themselves.
Arc is a Chromium web browser that also includes uBlock Origin in the default install.
Orion is a WebKit web browser from the folks at Kagi that supports both Firefox and Chromium extensions (including on iPhones and iPads) and has zero telemetry, and I have the Firefox version of uBlock Origin installed.
Firefox is not the only option for people that want alternatives to Chrome that support uBlock Origin.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
...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".
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?!?).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Full context, from the link you provided: ""Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love."
I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
I would expect that the default search engine deals that Firefox mostly relies on for financing could be interpreted as such.
Mozilla gets money, and as a result of the deal, the searches (data) of anyone who didn't change the default go to the company running the default search engine.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)."
How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.
> We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be.
Normally when you say "as close to X as legally possible", that means you want to do X fully, but you can't because the law forbids you to. X in this case is "not selling data". But "not selling data" is not illegal at all. What are they even trying to say here?
(Also I don't find that sentence on their FAQ page)
I think the key is the "about you" part, not the "selling data" part. Based on the rest of the statement, your personal information (name, age, location, personal files (uploads/downloads), that kind of data) isn't shared, which is what most people would think of when they hear "your data". It sounds like the information they do share may be associated with you, but isn't about you in the colloquial sense - even if it is about you in the legal sense.
> How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.
This situation isn't perfect, but I disagree that this is particularly weasely or disingenuous. It's not black & white and there are meaningful differences here.
I think the assumption of 'selling data' and primary concern from most users is the sale of their identifiable personal data - i.e. telling advertisers "this user is interested in X", using their privileged position as a browser to track and collect that information. This is absolutely what Facebook is doing when they sell your data, for example.
The description here is suggesting that Firefox are still committed to never doing that or anything similar. That is the main thing I'd want to know, so that's great.
However, it sounds like they may be selling generic anonymous data in some way - for example telling Pocket what percentage of people use the Pocket extension, or telling Google what percentage of people change their search engine away from Google. Both of those are cases where you can imagine they might receive significant extra income from partners given that data, and they feel this is reasonable but means they can technically no longer say the 'never sell your data'.
You could consider that level of data sharing problematic of course. That said, there is spectrum of problems here, and personally (and I think for most people) I am much more concerned about the tracking & distribution of actual personal identifiable data than I am about generic metrics like those, if that is what's happening (unfortunately, they haven't explained much further so this is still somewhat speculation - I fully agree more precise language would be very helpful).
The problem is that ‘anonymized data’ is quite a big spectrum, and may be able to be deanonymized quite easily.
See this submission from earlier this month: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads (26 days ago, 1957 points) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909921
> I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
It's actually super simple and needs no obfuscation or verbal esoterica. Don't engage in a contract where data Firefox has collected from users is transferred to a third party.
Done. Easy as.
The sister comment on search engine data transfer is FUD -- the browser can of course send queries to a default search engine without needing to pipe any information to Firefox. Firefox would need no usage monitoring whatsoever, just do a firm fixed price contract and the details are settled.
Turn off bat - no issues. I installed brave from a portable version and update the parts - found thru trial and error - as required, from the latest downloads
They falsely advertised that creators who didn't opt in (or even knew about this) could be supported by donating BAT, and then kept it once it remained unclaimed.
BAT is also different from adblocking, because it monetizes other people's content. It's about as close to stealing as you can get in the ad business, aside from the Honey affiliate highjacking.
> Users should never had the power to block what we did in the first place.
-- Some prominent ad company which happens to run a search engine as a side business and build a web browser to make ad-targeting better for their customers.
I think power users are the type of users who can be bothered to install a browser that supports the features that they want (and doesn't implement the misfeatures that they don't want) ;)
You may have heard G. Michael Hopf's famous quote: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
I think we may be advancing to another step in that cycle with software development. Strong, principled software companies created good times in the late 2000s and 2010s, now good times have created software company leaders who are less principled, and the hard times are beginning. And eventually, after the hard times have gone on for long enough, principled leaders will hopefully emerge and create good times again.
That being said:
- I really admire the thinking and moral aptitude that resulted in the Oxide Principles page[0]. Oxide and 37signals[1] are two examples of very principled companies that are keeping good times rolling in their respective fields, and both of them do a ton to support open source software.
- And, there is nothing like ad revenue to accelerate corruption of good principles in software companies that handle user data -- to the extent that I wonder if it's in the same moral category as government officials accepting bribes.
This requires a proper alternative to continue to exist. Firefox users already have to make a lot of concessions(i know, i'm one of them). With how Mozilla management is running, we're at risk of the only real alternative being mismanaged into oblivion.
Yes, but there seems to be a growing hiatus between the tools used by power users and normal ones. Fifteen years ago everyone had a PC with Firefox, now this browser has a marginal market share, and even personal computers are starting to be a second-class platform, the focus being phones. And products used by a minority tend to be less supported – as shown by the increasing number of sites that don't support Firefox.
It's already been trivial. There's a few sites showing you a special message or denying access if you block ads. uBlock doesn't really help here that much and if they tried, the issue is very asymmetric - it's much easier to update the site than to patch it again.
Most anti-adblock also fails on Brave. Those that don't can generally be sidestepped with literally two clicks to disable scripts. The remaining few require substantially more tweaking (generally disabling a specific script while allowing others to run) which is outside the domain of most people, but still viable.
What you said is true: I indeed cannot tell the difference between a v2 and v3 ad blocker. But that doesn't change OP's perspective that a v2 ad blocker is a symbol of the power user era. Power users often want customizability to an extreme level. Normal users who block ads simply install the extension and be done with it: they don't write custom rules or adjust the filters.
This isn't the end of uBlock Origin. Just the end of it on Chromium-based browsers.
If you are a power-user you may well benefit from using Firefox where uBlock Origin has always claimed to work best.
By switching you will also be removing power from an ad-funded near-monopoly that feels (correctly) that they can do whatever they want even if it is universally despised by users because the other choices are quickly going away. Every using using another browser weakens that grip, every user using a Chromium derivative allows them to keep trying to wedge new features that no other browser wants to implement for user privacy reasons and creates website incompatibility.
That's exactly what Edge is. It reminds me of the mobile operator branded versions of feature- and early smartphones: Same core functionality, more intrusive ads, delayed feature updates.
MV3 is non-negotiable. The second its dropped in Arc I am jumping ship... somewhere. Firefox isn't appealing, Zen isn't fleshed out, Orion is coming along nicely but isn't done yet. But above all else I need MV3. Very sad Vivaldi won't be supporting it, before I was an Arc user I used Vivaldi and I quite liked it
Indeed, Ive used firefox (since 2004) with uBlock (since 2015 or so) and have mac Mini(s) connected to TVs; use wireless mouse to enjoy the web from my couch or in my room. There are zero ads or popups seen.
On other TVs like my Roku i do pay for a few streaming services with ads and get bombarded with ads on that tv. But its a group tv that many use.
If Mozilla really is as shady about user data as some people think they've become, someone's about to be pretty confused about why they suddenly have hundreds of nearly-identical screenshots of this HN page on their servers
All the major browsers can do the screenshot thing, most just keep it hidden in the dev tools for some reason while MS realized “hey, people who have no idea what html is might like taking screenshots too”.
I used to use edge quite a bit when I did a contract stint at a Fortune 500. My favorite feature was the vertical tabs. Working there I often has 20-30 tabs open and having them in a vertical list was super nice.
Never used it since because of data privacy concerns. But in the context of working for that company where the assumption was that I would have zero privacy it was fine
That is sad. I need multiple profiles for my work and I cannot use Firefox because the profile support is awful. Creating and managing profiles as well as switching profiles is so intuitive in Chrome, it just works. In Firefox it's extremely user hostile. Hearing that Microsoft will also remove uBlock from Edge makes me angry, because that will make my work-life so much more annoying.
I like that Orion (safari based, Mac only) shows different icons in the dock. All chrome profiles show up as a single icon. I haven't checked Firefox, I've got away with just installing separate types (default, ESR, nightly).
Brave still works with ublock origin but every month or so they pull a windows and some new Brave feature I don’t want gets turned on or featured in some way.
I wonder how long they’ll maintain manifest v2 compatibility. Once they throw in the towel, Firefox will truly be the last stand.
They are going to keep it enabled until google removes the code from chromium in June. Then it sounds like they are going to try to use other means to offer "limited MV2 support" but there are some issues, including the fact that they don't have their own extension store (and presumably the chrome one won't allow mv2 extensions to be updated) so I'm not sure to what degree that will actually work.
I mean, I initially installed it on mobile to get rid of the ads, and then eventually deleted it, after it started showing me ads on the main page. I also think that their whole original "ad replacement" scheme (https://archive.is/W0k4j) is complete BS and pretty telling.
Then there was the "donations for content creators" debacle, where they started gathering donations for various YouTubers, without.. actually talking to those YouTubers. But using their names and faces to promote the whole thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c...
Apparently, the original idea was that you could "contribute to any website you visit. The idea was that once a site reached a threshold, the potential owner would be notified. They could then authenticate (prove ownership, etc) and claim the donations." (https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1e9i5ls/how_...), which is mind boggling to me that somebody actually thought it's a good idea.
Then there's Brave News, Brave Wallet, Brave Rewards, which is just completely unnecessary bloat IMO. You _can_ turn some of it off, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth though.
The massive amount of online features Brave has (just have a look at all the toggles in settings) makes me wonder whether this has been exploited in the wild at all.
Are you sure? I just installed it on Android and can't find anything about lists in the settings.
Tried searching and I can't find anything about subscribing to lists on desktop either, only a few discussions about the default set of lists they use.
Assuming it's the same as on desktop, go to settings->shields->content filters. They have a bunch of default filter lists you can subscribe to or you can add your own. You can also create your own custom filter rules. You can also do it semi-automatically by right clicking (no idea the equivalent on mobile) on an element in a page and there will be a "Block Elements" option that does a pretty decent job of wildcard blocking the element group you selected, and can be configured pretty easily with the popup.
I'm gonna be honest with you, the giant orange un-hideable brave logo might be the biggest reason I don't use Brave. It's like I can feel it burning into my phone's OLED.
I actually like kiwi browser quite a lot on mobile. Extensions, Devtools(!!!) make it especially great. Try that if you want (it's on top of chromium android).
I use brave most of the time though, because I use their sync service across all my devices.
Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?
As in, suppose your daily browsing generates about $3 of monthly ad revenue [0]. Instead, you have a (digital) wallet linked to your browser, which could be pre-loaded with credit each month. For each website you visit you may decide to opt-out of ads by paying a fraction of your credits.
You could even have a system where you could pay for a model with light-ads (i.e. at most 1 ad per page, 10 seconds of ads per 30min of video), or pay more for zero ads.
I understand it's a difficult system to organize and is dependent on a strong network. But I'd expect there to be a solid small market by now.
Lots of individual websites have this option (e.g. Netflix, newspapers, Spotify, Youtube Premium) but there's nothing overarching.
Why would I pay someone to stop sending me malware? I'm not going to pay random sites to not send crypto miners or not auto download and execute a virus. I expect my computer to protect me from those things.
For more general pay-to-browse, it needs to have the friction of the user deciding to pay, or you still incentivize spam (maybe even worse than with ads). As long as you keep that friction, you don't really change much because most sites on the Internet aren't worth anything, especially the commercially motivated ones. The ones that are worth something already charge money (and people pay because it's valuable) or they're not trying to monetize (academia, free culture groups, hobby discussion groups, etc).
"How do we get people to pay fractions of a cent" is the wrong problem to solve. The correct related problem is "how do we filter out all the cruft that isn't even worth 1 cent?" Blocking ads removes the financial incentive for spam, and is therefore a socially positive action in addition to being prudent security posture. Assuming ads have an effect on your psychology (and we ought to believe they do), it also helps you to remain a more moral person by preventing you from receiving and internalizing constant messages to consume frivolously. With climate change being one of the most important issues of our time, cutting out such consumption is imperative.
> Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?
Friction. The vast majority of people are not going to go through the effort of setting up a digital wallet to browse, when the existing system allows them to do it for free.
Some people would for sure, but then you also need websites and creators to agree to participate in the scheme (or don't, and just unethically redirect ad revenue to yourself, like Brave used to).
I don't think so. The fact you see any particular ad instead of another, is because someone put the highest bid for that slot to show you this ad, and nobody else was willing to pay more.
By very definition 99% of ads that could be in the slot are not there because someone is not willing to pay that much to show that ad, except for the single one that won the auction.
Ads have a maximum cost at which they don't become viable/profitable anymore.
The only difference is that now the user could bid on that ad slot himself, to keep it empty.
If you look at the average ad revenue, that wouldn't be all that much money. Certainly a fraction of what it costs to become a no-ad subscriber currently in various platforms.
Yeah. I think this is probably insurmountably hard.
ApplePay is about as frictionless as digital payments can possibly be, and I still occasionally abandon a purchase because of some annoying authentication issue.
I imagine it's because people are worth far more to advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to browse. That and once you've given something away for free, for so long, it's very hard to then charge for it.
People aren't rational when it comes to money. They will haggle and loose sleep over very small amounts, but have no problem overpaying thousands of dollars when it's a big purchase or throwing away their life savings.
If I had to guess, I think the big reason that never took off is that no one can agree on the standard and everyone wants money on the edges, and won't agree with each other.
So, instead, we get companies like the New York Times thinking they're worth, what, $20/mo, per person, all by themselves?
Only a small percentage of people are willing to pay for internet services. It is psychology and competition between the sites who offer services for free vs requiring payment. Paying for a service is a barrier to entry, while getting it for free and selling your data instead is not perceived as such. That is why all the big sites never would've taken off if they had paywalls.
That and regional differences. The amount that people in many regions would be able (not even willing) to pay would be tiny for the company running the site in many cases.
TBH, pay to browse will not work. Look at Netflix/Spotify. Yes, it's a good revenue stream for them, but the incentives are plain wrong:
1) Consume more content -> More revenue -> Means more bloated content, esp. with LLM
2) They will simply re-introduce ads even though you're paying
I really don't mind ads, and I don't really mind ad-targeting, except for 'sensitive' topics.
But I despise animated ads, big walls of ads, interstitial ads, popovers, etc, etc, etc. Just be like google in the early '00s: I want content, and I'd be very happy to have non obtrusive relevant-to-the-current-topic ads on the side.
Goodbye web-components. A W3C spec that mandates the use of JS to keep browser vendors happy. Once upon a time, there was HTML imports which didn't need this, but the ad-boys killed that spec.
And good riddance. I really don't get any personal value out of the vast majority of modern web apps. Much, but not all, of what we do on the web could be via a much more basic interface.
> Much, but not all, of what we do on the web could be via a much more basic interface.
... but it won't be.
Delivering information and digesting it from users is the purpose of the web as the user sees it. HN is a good example of a website meant to do this. No ads, minimal algorithms, no feature creep beyond a traditional news-and-comment feed.
Only one problem: that doesn't drive engagement. I come to HN because I'm genuinely interested in the content and discussion here. Being interested in content and discussion, though, is not nearly as profitable as being addicted. A lot of the UI elements and behaviors of websites today are meant to drive addiction, and thus, engagement.
Hell, HN itself might not even be profitable or even break-even. It's the side-project of YC; something that exists to further the profit-building exploits of that organization.
This is not practical for common folks. I wouldn't be able to get into ebanking, buy anything in eshops, probably most stuff I use daily would be at least half-broken. Imagine this for my elderly parents, just endless desperation and frustration, I am happy if they manage to use internet as it is and not fall for some scam or hack.
Heck, stuff sometimes breaks without me even trying to disable anything, like airbnb login via facebook popup stopped working suddenly few months ago (biggest internet mistake I ever done many years ago, as a host I am locked to specific well-rated account and airbnb support told me they can't migrate my account to another form of auth).
Edit: just saw its 'per site' - that would work for me, but not for my parents who live far. But damn I don't want to do this active fight of cat and mouse with whole internet. Firefox/ublock origin user here, on both desktop and phone for many years. Internet looks utterly horrible when I open it somewhere without those, hell youtube with all those ads is absolutely ridiculous shit service. Apple devices I've seen aren't that good either, shame that would be a great selling point for me.
Disable JS in 2025 does NOT work. Petty much every site only works properly with JS, with some exceptions.
JS is a core part of the modern web experience. 10 years go MAYBE Noscript would work, I never bothered, you end up having to whitelist a bunch of sites anyway even 10 years ago.
There are also "upstream" options, like PiHole or NextDNS which block requests to ad/tracking/malicious domains at the network (local machine, router, etc.) level.
My issue with upstream options is that it prevents ads from coming through but their "place" on the page is still preserved so you still need uBlock to remove the elements.
I can't say I understand why that would be the case -- probably naivete on my part. Are browser/JS apps loading ads via proxies or websockets or something? Is uBlock Origin somehow able to intercept those?
I've got used to the google lens thing. If you click the address bar then the lens icon and then highlight part of the page it visually analyses it, ocr's text, searches for the text, optionally translates it etc. I use it all the time because people will post text in image form.
Some sites have issues with Firefox, it is rare, but it happens. Some streaming services may not work at full resolution on Firefox because of DRM. You may also want sync with your Microsoft or Google account and not your Firefox account (if you even have one) for whatever reason.
Ads that use dns cnames to bypass block lists. Only Firefox has an API for this.
Ads that previously were blocked at the HTTP Response level. ManifestV3 removed this API.
A world where the number of ad rules exceeds the new limit. Which is 500 dynamic rules, 50 static rulesets, 30,000 rules. This may sound high but its not.
This is really really important now that server side tracking is rolled out at the major Ad providers. Keeping up a block list of the custom domains every site uses to mask their tracking will lead to an unsustainable cat and mouse game.
Can't say i have big problems using Edge in combination with a pihole, but i do agree that Firefox with the very nice plugins like uBlock origin does look so much better.
I mostly use Edge for accessing the big streaming websites and Firefox for everything else. Video runs somewhat better on Edge for me.
DNS-level blocking doesn't work very well. It only blocks requests to 3rd party domains; however, publishers can just turn to 1st party solutions, and many do just that.
E.g., DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links in Google's Search or the ads on YouTube. And while my NextDNS has blocked ads on my Samsung TV, it was unable to block ads on the new Max streaming service (former HBO).
I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking. If it's for privacy, I guess it's fine, but 1st party requests can and do share your data with first parties, with just one more level of indirection.
I, for one, block ads because ads can be dangerous for my family and even for myself. I don't want ads because I don't want behavior modification, or malware. I also don't want my son to watch ads for services that should be illegal, such as gambling services. And don't get me wrong, I'm one of those people that actually pays for subscriptions to avoid ads, I'm against freeloading as well.
So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those websites anyway.
Not sure what you're using but I found that Google streaming devices hard code their 8.8.8.8 and .4.4 DNS addresses into their products. Blocking those IP addresses at the router forces the device to default to your router's DNS.
"DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links in Google's Search". It's true i see the weblink in Google results, but you can't click them.
"or the ads on YouTube" i use other methods for that on Firefox.
"I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking." I do not need any reason to block or allow any form of communication on my own infrastructure. I get to decide what connects to it and what comes in and gets out of it. I am fully aware some info will always get passed because otherwise i cannot consume the things i want to consume.
"So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those websites anyway."
So far my list of 5 million blocked sites serves me quite well in pihole.
Well, with it, it is just barely bearable still, if you do not pull yourself back radically and are paranoidly picky. Crap with ad vs crap without ad is the typical choice nowadays. The web is murdered by those whose livelihood depend on it, like a virus. Leaving alone only tiny safe heavens like this.
On my work laptop (not an old one), Chrome easily consumes a huge amount of RAM when I go to a page with lots of ads (including this article). I don't have an ad blocker on it.
Essentially, if I open 2-3 pages with these types of ads, I run out of RAM (16 GB) and the whole laptop slows down. I simply can't browse the web while working (which may be a good thing!).
Of course, part of the problem is Outlook and Teams and some other apps using a lot of RAM, but Chrome is the real bottleneck.
So no, not "just bearable". I couldn't even read this article. It's the norm that I just close the tabs without reading because I don't want a laggy PC.
Use uBlock Origin Lite, it works fine and in some ways is more efficient than the regular extension. Most people won't notice much of a difference if anything.
Firefox is debatably less bearable than a Chromium based browser with uBlock Lite at least on Windows.
I'm slowly thinking that this might be the correct way forward. It's difficult, at least for me, because I am addicted to the internet, but recently I realized that I need to be more mindful about my internet time, simply because it became shit, and using it actually has hugely negative impact on my life. I'm not sure how to phrase it, but it's not "ah yeah I'll do that someday", but rather "ok, things are getting serious, I am making a decision and starting to follow though right now".
What about an "AI" browser? You put in a URL, it fetches the page, re-renders the page without ads, cleans up any mess as much as possible, and passes the result to your screen? Could that work?
Not exactly the simplest instructions, to your point, but you can still just do it once for them or get on a call and walk them through it. They might even notice that websites load faster when they don't make dozens of requests to advertisers and trackers.
AdGuard also has a browser extension for blocking inline ads. The combo of AdGuard extension + DNS blocking is good enough that I haven't missed uBlock Origin
Does that work with DoH (DNS over HTTP)? It's my understanding that using systems like AdGuard or NextDNS or even PiHole fail to handle DoH requests. In that case the only solution is something like uBlock Origin.
But that’s really only viable if you have a very small number of devices and those devices only have one user. Let’s say you have a family of 4, each with smart phones, two tablets, three computers, each with myltiple user accounts… setting DNS on each individually becomes extremely cumbersome. Not to mention all the other connected devices that want to throw ads at you these days, TVs gaming systems, etc. And god help you if you’ve invested in any kind of crazy connected thing like a fridge with a screen on it, setting device level DNS there might be so obfuscated t’s not possible.
Point is that using any kind of DNS based blocking is far better at the router level but the above poster is right in that a lot of ISPs these days make it impossible to adjust your router level DNS and even for someone tech minded setting up some kind of downstream secondary router can be become so convoluted that they just give up.
Why are you being fair to a company worth billions of dollars that are trying to control your computer and what you see? Do you regularly advocate for the devil as well? Who does that help?
If you're not trying to be fair with your arguments then what's the point of making an argument at all? If you're deliberately introducing a bias to your arguments then you completely invalidate them to anyone seeking to find a grounded understanding. This can cause people to completely discredit any criticisms of products by Big Tech as just whining by the open source community. I hate this kind of mentality and unfortunately you're not the only one.
Recently I've been asking myself, what do web browsers and the web look like in twenty years? I've been applying this to all "free" software (e.g., VSCode) released by the large tech companies who ultimately are incentivized by profit.
I really have no clue, but as far as I can see the answer is never better. More centralized, more bloated, more invasive, less choice, and less freedom.
I've always held AOL fondly. You paid per month, and get access to a giant ecosystem including forums, chat, email, news, zines, games, etc. Mostly ad free as I remember.
In fact, when NetZero became a thing, people mostly weren't interested. They were turned off by the stupid permanent ad bar, and the lack of community.
I wish something like AOL would come back around. Charge me $20 a month, give me a community, email, etc. Don't dare show me an ad.
We're just now getting back to pay for no ads, but its 5 dollars here or there for disparate services.
Man, AOL was ahead of its time. All it needs today that it didn't have was the 'wall', 'profile', whatever. And of course vid/pic sharing.
I remember when moving off AOL to broadband, my family hated it despite the speed. They thought it was clunky and stupid to have to download separate programs or visit different websites to do one thing at a time, in what was in AOL an integration.
FB is probably closest to that experience today, but of course is ad and data driven, and somehow still doesn't feel very community like.
I'd love to see a new, electron based AOL type service come about today. It'd cost a crapton to get the network and content up to attract any user base, else I'd try it myself.
As an avid AOL user, that is the worst version of the internet. I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet. Whatever some large corporation had paid AOL so they could build a shitty little Visual Basic type app that controlled everything you looked at. There were no ads because the entire experience besides the chat rooms and IM was an ad. It was a lot of people's first email accounts but spam blocking was so bad back then I count that as advertising.
I remember being blown away by discovering people would randomly make private chats and trying to guess at what the chat name would be for things I was interested in as a kid. Then I remember having my mind blown that AOL had a built in browser where someone had built a website, not a keyword, that actually had my niche interest that no one in real life did. Then I discovered you could download a much better version of that experience called a browser.
Your idea is just Facebook where you can't link out and is fully corporate controlled. Which I guess is actually Twitter.
I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
> I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet
Is it really that different from having the .com of a word today?
> I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
I struggle to see how you got to that conclusion, but it's an absolutely true statement nonetheless so I cannot complain.
I can say my family never once paid for AOL or cared about its basket of features. But we did pay for NetZero for a long time until broadband become more affordable in our area.
It reminds me of that meme, maybe called the midwit meme?
On the left you have the dumb guy, saying AOL does everything. On the right you have the hooded guy, saying AOL does everything.
In the middle you have the crying guy saying no you should use Netscape browser, and ICQ for messaging, and usenet for forums, and dogpile for search, etc.
Its not just the internet. Its almost everything in your life. Financialization of products and services seems to keep pushing products to get cheaper while providing additional supposed 'value'. In reality, you are usually paying more for less but are fooled into believing that you are getting more.
I was reminded of this recently by comparing an old 90s Toyota to the latest models. The 90s cars were over-engineered and 30 years later, had more breathing room to keep going. Meanwhile the latest stuff is all plastic pieces that have been engineered to perform many tasks using just one piece. The idea was that they could focus on making that one piece as robust as possible and still save money on reducing parts and making the operators life easier during assembly (no one cares about the plight of the repairman). All in the name of saving costs to keep the product competitive in the face of the declining value of fiat money.
Well even though its supposed to be better, the new stuff still sucks. People are holding onto their old cars, we lost so many wonderful 2000s cars due to cash for clunkers. The designs and colors are also more boring.
How do you fight this?
Well as software people we have an out: Homemade software and open source. Homemade software allows us to cut the cruft out of products that companies add. We pay for in our time but if it is important enough to us then it has to be done.
This applies to everything: You can make your own food instead of accepting the declining garbage from takeout/restaurants, you can buy raw materials and do your own woodwork/electronics/metalworking.
Even something like cars can be somewhat pushed back on. Communities form around popular cars to document and better understand the issues prevalent with certain models. Use this info to self select on a vehicle that has a large community and to help anticipate problems that can be coming down the pike with that particular model.
Again, no one has infinite time so you have to decide for yourself what things are important to you and take back control while trying your best to minimize nonsense in other areas.
VSCode is still a very competitive text editor even without its proprietary plugins.
Ootb VSCode is already a superior experience to Emacs, which I only begrudgingly move away from because of subpar TypeScript + JSX support like 6 years ago. However, after I started using VSCode for work there was just no going back. I use VSCode a lot for text manipulations. I find its regex search replace much easier than using sed in the terminal. Multiple cursors, Git integration, beautiful diffs, command palette is just like Emacs M-x.
Without its proprietary plugins it's still a great gift to the public and forks like Cursor is a good showcase of that. Thanks to monaco almost every web editor nowaways have great usability, syntax highlighting and the keybindings that I'm familiar with.
I think the bigger joke of the century are open source beneficiaries that only take and give nothing back, but still have the audacity to demand for things and hound open source developers to implement what they want. You can't have your cake and eat it too
Agreed. Open source is great, but the only way we build the software world we want to see is by supporting the software projects which align with your values. Using software is not supporting it; contributing to it is, but that simply isn't viable for many people; paying for it also is, and that's viable for most people, especially software engineers.
I've moved to using systemwide Adguard on my home PCs and Macs. It's not a solution for work devices (my employer doesn't have ads on internal websites so this is not much of an issue), but it frees me from worrying about browser APIs and having to copy my custom filters to every single browser I want to use.
It's a tradegy antitrust enforcement isn't forbidding advertising networks owning / having undue influence on browsers.
I think this is heading to a point where lot of power users are simply not updating their browsers any more.
Personally I'll take the miniscule chance of being infected with malware due to a security bug on an older version of Firefox over the inability to run uBlock Origin any day. I can recover from malware installation. I can not use the web without an ad blocker.
What I'll probably do is use an isolated sandbox environment for any web browsing I need absolute security (e.g. online banking/shopping).
Thorium (https://thorium.rocks/) is a fork of Chromium that maintains a patchset that reverses functional and UI regressions introduced by Google (such as the tabs and menu styling from the 2023 refresh). The author has committed to maintain manifest V2 support for as long as possible.
I switched to Edge on my Windows machine for a while, because that meant that I didn’t need the disk space for an additional browser (same as when just using Safari on Mac) and it was reasonably pleasant and worked well. Guess that’s ending, I liked the DevTools in Firefox a bit more anyways.
I find Firefox much more heavy on resources vs Edge. I’m always get disappointed when trying to make Firefox my main browser.
Chromium devtools has more features but more cluttered and more annoying to work with.For the common devtools tasks Firefox works better IMHO. But that can be my bias after using Firefox/Firebug devtools for over 15 years.
How many tabs do you have open? I am often surprised at such statements, because my browser have basically never been slow the last 20 years. Like, never. Sometimes they crash / hang. But then I view on screen sharing colleagues who have like 200+ tabs open, and then I'm like "ah, this must be it". Not discarding your case but maybe try to have better digital hygiene?
Yes, it is the 200+ tabs (probably closer to 500) over multiple windows.
My latest move was to merge every tab in all windows to one window only (with an extension) and start using vertical tabs (better scrolling and overview of tabs) Then sort tabs by title with another extension (Edge built in AI tab sort sucked on sorting so many tabs). With sorted tabs I could start create tab groups, Edge AI tab sort worked better when the tabs was already sorted alphabetically and managed to create most of the tab groups for me. With all this reorganization it was easier to manage all of them and to start closing tabs.
I’m not done yet but it is much better and number of opened tabs has been significantly reduced. Now I have one main window with all the tabs and some temporary windows that is only used for temporary stuff that get closed within a day.
What makes things a bit more complicated is that I also use two profiles, private and work. Firefox always sucked on multi-profile setup. Firefox’s new container stuff is somewhat improvement but not fully (at least when I tried last)
I usually have at most 10 or so tabs open. Anything more than that and that tab gets buried visually and cognitivly. I like to be able to read the first bit of the title page. Anything else I make folders of 'tosort' and bookmark them. Then every few months I do an 'open all' in that folder. Usually I find that only one are two were really worth keeping. The rest I was just hoarding and are just clutter.
Check out the Auto Tab Discard extension for Firefox. It removes the contents of tabs from memory after a period of time, but keeps the tab icon/title around. Next time you click the tab, it acts like a bookmark and reloads the page it was on. As a tab hoarder, I've found it very helpful to keep CPU/memory usage down.
It's not an exact drop-in replacement. There are many filtering capabilities that cannot be ported [1] to MV3, filtering lists can only be distributed through extension updates [2], and filtering is unreliable.
> Injecting content scripts in a non-declarative way is unreliable in MV3 due to fact that extensions are really service workers which can be suspended at any time.
I'm going to be honest, but this is a really weird way for Microsoft to announce Edge is EOL and they can't afford to even hire two or three more developers to perma-fork Chrome and bring the rest of the Chromium community under one roof, away from Google (who is an extremely bad steward of the project).
Shame that Microsoft just chose to no longer have a real browser. Oh well, long live MSIE I guess.
It is also a collossal missed opportunity. When Google eventually kills it on Chrome, everyone will switch to the next best thing. Microsoft could have put Edge ahead of Firefox in that game and collected all those users. Since Microsoft's business doesn't revolve around ad-revenue, they don't even have any skin in this game. It's pure lazyness that will only hurt them long-time.
> If you use the uBlock Origin extension in Google Chrome or Edge, you should probably start looking for alternative browsers or extensions—either way.
I've used Firefox on android for a while as android chrome hasn't had adblocking for a long time.
Am pretty anti-google these days but it'll take some time to untangle myself from the ecosystem.
Anyway, I've largely moved back to Firefox on the desktop too, swapped a few icons about so my muscle memory now opens Firefox instead of Chrome and it's been totally painless. An easy win.
Good call, I've been meaning to try it for a while.
It feels a bit like ~25 years ago when Yahoo was this bloated do everything company with a bad search engine and someone showed me this simple website with just a search bar that was super quick with clean results...
I think that we'll need to adopt network-level filtering if we want to outsmart the browsers. I haven't looked back since adopting NextDNS and configuring my router to filter all traffic through it. It does a great job of stripping ads out of all my devices connected to it, and that's something I don't mind paying a few bucks for a year (I think it's like $19/year).
Unfortunately, the browsers are one step ahead of you. They already have a way to ignore your DHCP-provided DNS and instead use DoH, which you can't inspect and filter easily, especially since it's over the HTTPS port. There is also a proposal for individual web properties to tell the browser what DNS (DoH) servers should be used for further requests to them, so even blocking a few well-known DoH resolvers could become impossible: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9462/
Microsoft don't really invest the right kind of resources into Edge to make that happen. There are sound technical reasons (aside from the obvious financial reason) why Google wants to make this change, I suspect this'll unblock the Chromium team making a very substantial refactor of the networking layer which Microsoft can't feasibly maintain a fork of.
I wish all Chromium forks would band together to maintain a base that supports Manifest V2, it shouldn't be that difficult to each chip in some funding.
Does anyone have (educated) qualms about ungoogled chromium? I started using it on a whim awhile ago, and it works great on MacOS and Linux for me with uBlock installed.
Honest question since I am not exactly of a skill level that really understands what goes on under the hood of popular browsers, but I am baffled as to why people are so resistant to just switching to Firefox.
Every time this conversation comes up here and elsewhere, you get a huge swath of comments decrying Mozilla or suggesting Brave instead, which is Chrome in a trenchcoat last I checked. I've used all sorts of browsers over the years, and I keep returning to Firefox, at this point being able to configure it for good level of privacy in less than a minute with each install on a new machine.
My experience is perhaps skewed, but I view Google and Microsoft as modern enemies of the Web I want to see happen, perhaps having started off the hero, but living long enough to see themselves become the villain. Their products seem actively and aggressively hostile to users and compliant with websites that demand we use them for "best experience" which, by now we should all know means harvesting our data.
Again, I have some ignorance here that needs to be rectified, but where are the true apples to apples comparisons of all browsers so that users can use to evaluate which is best? I don't mean just surface level features and marketing woo, but what's happening at the code level that allows the developer or websites we visit to treat us like data thralls. Where are the resources to learn about that in these discussions?
>but I am baffled as to why people are so resistant to just switching to Firefox.
Somehow Chrome has fried my brain and I can't stand the UX of other browsers. I understand you may be asking "how bad can it be? Its just a browser?" but when I use other things (even Safari) it just doesn't cut the mustard.
The Firefox feature set is limited compared to other browsers and Mozillas business model is literally hush money payments to keep google out of anti-trust litigation. While I hear you that they are a lesser evil, its part of a greater system that is working against consumers
I'm a fan of Brave and Arc. The LadyBird announcement is great.
I had issues with Firefox sometimes not showing Google Docs / Sheets (which I use extensively) in other words, would not show any text / values, whereas Edge worked fine. So I switched and didn't go back.
Why would Google bother to make their apps work with a competitor? I used have to install an extension in Firefox to not have Office365 applications throw a fit about the user agent.
Why, though? I suppose the point of my original comment was to ask that in broader strokes. I'm happy with Firefox and do not see a compelling reason to switch to Zen without an apples-to-apples comparison, which seems like a ridiculously taboo ask in this space.
I appreciate your recommendation, I'm just frustrated with the level of discourse I see in these discussions.
Because, as a society, we like to complain about things but not actually do the necessary effort to change things, even at small scale. It's part of our society-wide drive towards enshittification in every aspect of life. Our society and our experience in the world is made up of millions of small individual choices that happen every day, but we all see ourselves as lacking agency rather than doing something about it.
I have more issues with Mozilla management and more reasons to do so than almost anyone on HN, and yet I still use Firefox as my predominant browser, as I have done so since 2003. I worked at Mozilla and then quit over some of my concerns, yet at the same time it's blatantly obvious that Firefox very much empowers you as a user to configure anything you like in `about:config` regardless of what the default settings may be.
I predict this will only get worse as the iPad Kids in Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha come of age and accept the soulless shitheap that is modern corporate software without question. You're on the right path, all you can do is make your own individual choice and continue pointing out the sheer laziness and hypocrisy of those who complain but do nothing about it, including in their own lives.
FreeTube works very well for watching YT videos. They have adblock and sponsorblock. You can subscribe without logging in. You stay out of the ecosystem as it were.
This is a cat and mouse game. The overarching issue here is the web embraced the monoculture of Chromium as the basis for browsers. Can we really expect any less?
I've had good success with Violent Monkey and scripts from Greasy Fork on every browser I run, which is Edge (work becoz SSO), Chrome, and Firefox. They have never been detected.
The current boat I am on is relying on Firefox for most of my devices: Windows Laptops, Android Phones/Tablets with Ublock Origin and NextDNS set over DNS mode for all of the devices in my family.
For iDevices relying on Orion Browser paired with Ublock Origin and NextDNS set up. As good as Safari but without the annoyances of Plugins. Their compatablity mode seems to work on sites where Safari seems to have issues.
Ungoggled Chromium for sites that seem to break on both Firefox and Orion, unfortunately there are loads out there. It's a shame that Firefox isn't as effecient with Battery Consumption as Orion is.
Edge is much worse than chrome anyway. Chrome just screws the user behind their back, with hidden tracking.
Edge has all the user-hostile stuff much more in your face. Like the shopping bar that keeps popping up with coupons or tries to get you to buy at a shop that pays more for advertising. And it tries to trick the user into getting bogged down with loans by offering buy now pay later schemes.
All the sneaky tracking stuff from chrome also happens. So why would you bother?
The only reason it's still popular is that companies love it because they can lock it down in full BOFH mode. At my work I can't even choose to reopen the last tabs anymore on launch. That and pretty much every other setting is "managed by your organisation"
It's not allowed in our policy. However Firefox is still on my system from the time when it was officially supported. I've heard they want to schedule a removal though.
This is the same combination I'm using, and it works so well that I really have to wonder if all this handwringing over the move from Manifest V2 to V3 is really worth it. What is uBlock Origin supposed to be able to block that Wipr isn't already blocking?
> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn’t have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles content blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, content blockers have no knowledge of users’ history or the websites they visit.
This is the same change that ManifestV3 brings - ad blockers can no longer run code to determine if they get to block content or not, they have to supply lists that the browser applies.
If you're getting good results that just means you're using good lists.
As one of the few (only?) HN users who uses Edge, I'll wait until this actually reaches the mainline Edge build. If it even does. And then, I'll evaluate the Manifest V3 compatible ad blockers. And if those are inadequate, I'll switch to another browser. But I'm expecting that, as always, this is largely a nonexistent scenario.
>We are deprecating the blocking version of the webRequest API. This required extensions to proxy all network traffic to provide filtering capabilities, which came at a performance and privacy cost. The new declarativeNetRequest API provides a safer alternative for many use cases.
This is from manifest v3 google page. Is this declarativeNetRequest API not able to provide any filtration ? Proxying traffic does affect privacy, I agree, but that also means that Google is trusting all traffic by default which is another privacy concern. So the privacy concern seems to not make sense except that in one of the two, google loses money because of ads being blocked.
Serious question: Would it not be possible to build an adblocker that is not browser based but installable?
The browsers control what they allow to be loaded (extensions, add-ons). They are forever changing internally. If the blocking was outside the browser, they could do nothing about it. Yes, a type of proxy perhaps, whereby the stream was filtered. Could a type of uBO or similar be created that has lists to filter all traffic through the program?
I've ran a Pi-hole for years, but increasingly there is 1st-party content and Pi-hole cannot handle this. Likewise for YT videos. Pi-hole cannot handle this issue.
DNS ad blockers like Pi Hole and AdGuardHome have been around forever. However, in non-free browsers like Edge and Chrome, they can (and do) play all kinds of tricks such as hardcoding DNS servers, cert pinning, fixed DOH routes, etc. which means it's only a matter of time until those stop working as well.
For users who will miss custom filtering in uBlock Origin, AdGuard supports custom filtering and is compatible with Manifest V3. Custom filter lists from uBlock Origin can be imported into AdGuard. However, AdGuard lacks the element picker function.
Speaking of Edge, every so often it resets by default search engine to Bing (from Kagi), and it requires about 10 clicks in a well hidden away setting to restore it.
Anyone have suggestions for which other browser is best for power saving? I’ve been using Edge on my Surface as it seemed much better on the battery than Chrome.
Does anyone know if any of the Firefox forks avoid this problem? Librewolf, Waterfox, etc. I know this might not be a long-term solution if Firefox continues to degrade, but it does seem like a valid short term measure.
I just moved my main browser on Android to Edge using the uBlock Origin installation trick. It will not have a happy ending as I hoped. I will consider moving away from Edge on my PC now.
Sadly, I still cannot add custom filters to uBlock Lite.
Have you tried Kiwi browser on Android? It's supported installing extensions for many years but for some reason never gets much traction. I guess they don't have enough of a marketing budget.
I was long time Kiwi user, then changed to Cromite recently. But I missed uBlock Origin so I decided to give Edge a try. And fyi, Kiwi browser is discontinued. [1]
The internet is unusable without uBlock. At this point I don't have a browser preference, I only have a uBlock preference. I'll use whatever browser that has good uBlock support.
There is always a massive push when Mozilla does something dumb for large numbers of people to say that they are the devil incarnate and it's a waste of dev time to care about anything besides Chrome and we are all better off just letting Google control the browser. Just assume Mozilla has the worst possible intentions and Google, Microsoft, or a crypto browser are the same choice.
It's good to call Mozilla out for doing something shitty, but it always feels chicken little at best when people yell about switching to any Chromium varient. Usually it just feels kind of like Astro turfing,
The best version of ublock origin is the one that is banned by Google but allowed in Firefox, Ad Nauseum
"uBlock Origin was turned off. This extension is no longer supported. Edge recommends that you remove it."
I have a few decades of experience with the Internet, and even I understood the dialog box as saying that Ublock didn't work anymore. In reality, as the text says, it still works if you click "Manage Extension" and turn it back on.
For me it's Safari. In Firefox, everything works as I expect almost always. Chrome requires weird workarounds from time to time. And Safari is just all kinds of screwed up.
I really doubt Brave will be able to support manifest v2 for long after chromium deletes that part of the codebase. Brave does not have the resources to maintain a fork in perpetuity. They are really just a reskin with a marketing team (privacy conscious individuals being the mark).
This same conversation is being held about Vivaldi as well, as they are subject to the same thing. Unless and until people move en masse to Firefox or other, the monoculture invites abuse by those who control it. This is the new milieu of control.
It is their original play. However I think this is just “Chrome is going to do this anyway and we’re not about to write custom code to work around it.”
This. It's extremely expensive to keep core functionality like this in a fork. Every single surface that manifest v2 touches (js runtime, extension hosting, permissions, network, APIs, chrome even) that gets changed upstream has to be redone to account for v2. Every new system built into Chrome that only works with v3 has to be effectively back ported to v2.
The only other option is to keep v2 in chromium itself and have Chrome disable it... While still paying the cost of supporting it in all new feature dev.
There's no world where Microsoft spins up a new engineering team solely to deal with the extra cost of keeping v2 around.
That said this sucks. I got my first internship on the Internet Explorer team by talking about how hard it was to install an ad blocker in IE, compared to Chrome.
No one cares for specifically V2, it's just V3 is intentionally crippled. Just allow functionality required for more feature-rich extensions like uBO and everyone will forget V2 very fast. V3 does allow extensions to monitor and sell network data (no privacy improvements), but blocks modifications (no cutting out ads)
Seems like Microsoft is just taking whatever Chromium releases and repackages it to show more ads and to make Bing the default search engine. In this case, it's just dropping support for Manifest V2 extensions, such as uBlock Origin, and moving to Manifest V3, which does not support extensions intercepting and blocking requests using blockingWebRequest.
Just three days ago, Mozilla reiterated [1] that Firefox would continue to support Manifest V2 alongside Manifest V3. So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it). While you're at it, note that "uBlock Origin works best on Firefox". [2]
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-manifes...
[2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Can you explain in detail what feature of UBlock Origin I will lose because of V3 vs V2 extensions?
I see people complaining, I don't see concrete examples, only panic
Meanwhile FireFox just removed their commitment to not sell user data. Its their “Don’t be evil” moment
https://www.osnews.com/story/141825/mozilla-deletes-promise-...
Independent FOSS forks of firefox without Mozilla services / tracking exist
https://librewolf.net/
> Nope. Never have, never will.
Promissory estoppel maybe? Stronger case for it if you ever paid them for anything after this promise.
Given most EULAs contain standard tech boilerplate that paraphrases to "We can change anything about this agreement at any time without warning or notice to you", I doubt it.
It's really hard to take someone seriously when they say things like this:
> For years I’ve been warning about this inevitable outcome, and for just as many years people told me I was overreacting, that it wouldn’t happen, that I was crazy.
The removal of that language is important but this person is trying to make it about themselves.
I can understand them being frustrated
Arc is a Chromium web browser that also includes uBlock Origin in the default install.
Orion is a WebKit web browser from the folks at Kagi that supports both Firefox and Chromium extensions (including on iPhones and iPads) and has zero telemetry, and I have the Firefox version of uBlock Origin installed.
Firefox is not the only option for people that want alternatives to Chrome that support uBlock Origin.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. :)
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.
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.
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?
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?!?).
If it's chromium based, they will need to remove manifest v2 at some point to stay close to the upstream version.
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.
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.
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
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.
Because these aren't really independent browsers but reskins.
Being independent of google requires actually doing the work and not just copying google.
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.
Arc is a Chromium browser that has been kneecapped to explicitly not work on Linux. No thanks!
What about Brave? I eas avoiding it for a long time for no reason while chrome was getting continually worse.
Maybe it's time
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
For the simple reason of not using Gecko
What's wrong with Gecko?
I think many people's issue with Brave is that it's a cryptocurrency grift, not that it's a Chromium reskin.
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.
Also Brave.. just not sure when or if someone will breaking fork chromium.
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.
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.
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.
It's quite relevant to highlight that Mozilla is removing the promise that they won't sell your data: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Another browser option is Brave, but you have to disable the altcoins stuff :/
Full context, from the link you provided: ""Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love."
I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
What "sale of data" falls under a legal definition but would be understood by everyone to not be selling data? An example?
It sounds more like 'we sell your data, but we do it in a legally protracted way so we could claim up to now that we don't'.
Given this relates to Firefox's central selling proposition, they surely have an essay detailing exactly what data they're selling?
I would expect that the default search engine deals that Firefox mostly relies on for financing could be interpreted as such.
Mozilla gets money, and as a result of the deal, the searches (data) of anyone who didn't change the default go to the company running the default search engine.
By default Google gets not only search but everything entered into the address bar (for "suggestions").
It is always the same idea - if the data is even slightly touched and/or processed, it is suddenly not a personal data anymore and is "ok" to be sold.
Even fuller context:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)."
How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.
> We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be.
Normally when you say "as close to X as legally possible", that means you want to do X fully, but you can't because the law forbids you to. X in this case is "not selling data". But "not selling data" is not illegal at all. What are they even trying to say here?
(Also I don't find that sentence on their FAQ page)
I think the key is the "about you" part, not the "selling data" part. Based on the rest of the statement, your personal information (name, age, location, personal files (uploads/downloads), that kind of data) isn't shared, which is what most people would think of when they hear "your data". It sounds like the information they do share may be associated with you, but isn't about you in the colloquial sense - even if it is about you in the legal sense.
> How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.
This situation isn't perfect, but I disagree that this is particularly weasely or disingenuous. It's not black & white and there are meaningful differences here.
I think the assumption of 'selling data' and primary concern from most users is the sale of their identifiable personal data - i.e. telling advertisers "this user is interested in X", using their privileged position as a browser to track and collect that information. This is absolutely what Facebook is doing when they sell your data, for example.
The description here is suggesting that Firefox are still committed to never doing that or anything similar. That is the main thing I'd want to know, so that's great.
However, it sounds like they may be selling generic anonymous data in some way - for example telling Pocket what percentage of people use the Pocket extension, or telling Google what percentage of people change their search engine away from Google. Both of those are cases where you can imagine they might receive significant extra income from partners given that data, and they feel this is reasonable but means they can technically no longer say the 'never sell your data'.
You could consider that level of data sharing problematic of course. That said, there is spectrum of problems here, and personally (and I think for most people) I am much more concerned about the tracking & distribution of actual personal identifiable data than I am about generic metrics like those, if that is what's happening (unfortunately, they haven't explained much further so this is still somewhat speculation - I fully agree more precise language would be very helpful).
The problem is that ‘anonymized data’ is quite a big spectrum, and may be able to be deanonymized quite easily.
See this submission from earlier this month: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads (26 days ago, 1957 points) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909921
Mozilla owns Pocket.
> I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
It's actually super simple and needs no obfuscation or verbal esoterica. Don't engage in a contract where data Firefox has collected from users is transferred to a third party.
Done. Easy as.
The sister comment on search engine data transfer is FUD -- the browser can of course send queries to a default search engine without needing to pipe any information to Firefox. Firefox would need no usage monitoring whatsoever, just do a firm fixed price contract and the details are settled.
It may be armchair speculation, but it’s not FUD.
Perhaps no fear, but definitely uncertainty and doubt, thus in the ballpark.
Still makes it sound like they want to profit from user data.
I also thought Brave is the browser with the annoying token. But I still haven't seen anything about BAT but happily using brave for a while now.
There's also Zen, which is Firefox based.
No you don't, it's opt in.
By altcoins do you mean BAT? What’s the issue with it?
Turn off bat - no issues. I installed brave from a portable version and update the parts - found thru trial and error - as required, from the latest downloads
What’s the issue with BAT though?
They falsely advertised that creators who didn't opt in (or even knew about this) could be supported by donating BAT, and then kept it once it remained unclaimed.
BAT is also different from adblocking, because it monetizes other people's content. It's about as close to stealing as you can get in the ad business, aside from the Honey affiliate highjacking.
I don't think they kept any BAT in that situation.
mad-max-tom-hardy-nuh-uh-thats-bait.webm
The end of extensions like uBlock Origin will mark the end of power user era in web development history.
> Users should never had the power to block what we did in the first place.
-- Some prominent ad company which happens to run a search engine as a side business and build a web browser to make ad-targeting better for their customers.
Its like they want their own web crawlers to be slow as hell
They'll carve out exceptions for themselves don't worry. They tried with Web Environment Integrity, it'll be back with a different name.
I think power users are the type of users who can be bothered to install a browser that supports the features that they want (and doesn't implement the misfeatures that they don't want) ;)
You may have heard G. Michael Hopf's famous quote: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
I think we may be advancing to another step in that cycle with software development. Strong, principled software companies created good times in the late 2000s and 2010s, now good times have created software company leaders who are less principled, and the hard times are beginning. And eventually, after the hard times have gone on for long enough, principled leaders will hopefully emerge and create good times again.
That being said:
- I really admire the thinking and moral aptitude that resulted in the Oxide Principles page[0]. Oxide and 37signals[1] are two examples of very principled companies that are keeping good times rolling in their respective fields, and both of them do a ton to support open source software.
- And, there is nothing like ad revenue to accelerate corruption of good principles in software companies that handle user data -- to the extent that I wonder if it's in the same moral category as government officials accepting bribes.
[0] https://oxide.computer/principles
[1] https://37signals.com/
The trouble is, it's hard to say how long the "bad times" arc will last.
Exogenous factors! <https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/strong-3>
This requires a proper alternative to continue to exist. Firefox users already have to make a lot of concessions(i know, i'm one of them). With how Mozilla management is running, we're at risk of the only real alternative being mismanaged into oblivion.
I am cautiously optimistic for ladybird. But itll take quite a bit longer to become viable, sadly.
Yes, but there seems to be a growing hiatus between the tools used by power users and normal ones. Fifteen years ago everyone had a PC with Firefox, now this browser has a marginal market share, and even personal computers are starting to be a second-class platform, the focus being phones. And products used by a minority tend to be less supported – as shown by the increasing number of sites that don't support Firefox.
Until sites block them completely, which will be easier with attestation
It's already been trivial. There's a few sites showing you a special message or denying access if you block ads. uBlock doesn't really help here that much and if they tried, the issue is very asymmetric - it's much easier to update the site than to patch it again.
So far, most of these sites that try to exclude adblocker users don't detect uBO on Firefox.
Most anti-adblock also fails on Brave. Those that don't can generally be sidestepped with literally two clicks to disable scripts. The remaining few require substantially more tweaking (generally disabling a specific script while allowing others to run) which is outside the domain of most people, but still viable.
Marketshare. People don't care that much.
Many users don't notice any difference after switching to a Manifest v3 ad blocker. I'll reserve judgment until it actually happens.
What you said is true: I indeed cannot tell the difference between a v2 and v3 ad blocker. But that doesn't change OP's perspective that a v2 ad blocker is a symbol of the power user era. Power users often want customizability to an extreme level. Normal users who block ads simply install the extension and be done with it: they don't write custom rules or adjust the filters.
This isn't the end of uBlock Origin. Just the end of it on Chromium-based browsers.
If you are a power-user you may well benefit from using Firefox where uBlock Origin has always claimed to work best.
By switching you will also be removing power from an ad-funded near-monopoly that feels (correctly) that they can do whatever they want even if it is universally despised by users because the other choices are quickly going away. Every using using another browser weakens that grip, every user using a Chromium derivative allows them to keep trying to wedge new features that no other browser wants to implement for user privacy reasons and creates website incompatibility.
That's exactly what Edge is. It reminds me of the mobile operator branded versions of feature- and early smartphones: Same core functionality, more intrusive ads, delayed feature updates.
> So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it).
Stand up against the browser hegemony*, choose WebKit with support for UBlock Origin:
https://kagi.com/orion/
---
* Tongue in cheek, of course. Long live Firefox.
Vivaldi is a chromium browser with a built-in ad blocker that doesn’t require extensions at all.
MV3 is non-negotiable. The second its dropped in Arc I am jumping ship... somewhere. Firefox isn't appealing, Zen isn't fleshed out, Orion is coming along nicely but isn't done yet. But above all else I need MV3. Very sad Vivaldi won't be supporting it, before I was an Arc user I used Vivaldi and I quite liked it
I've been looking at Floorp and Zen, maybe add those to your list to check out
Microsoft loves ad revenue as much as anyone, why would they argue it? They can just blame google, having their cake and eating it too.
Indeed, Ive used firefox (since 2004) with uBlock (since 2015 or so) and have mac Mini(s) connected to TVs; use wireless mouse to enjoy the web from my couch or in my room. There are zero ads or popups seen.
On other TVs like my Roku i do pay for a few streaming services with ads and get bombarded with ads on that tv. But its a group tv that many use.
Edge has two features I actually like:
- integrated screen shot, which includes a “full webpage” option that handles scrolling for you
- Split View, which lets you open two webpages side by side within a single tab
I use both of these daily and get a decent productivity boost from them.
It's funny because Firefox and Chrome both support full webpage screenshots natively, but they just bury it in their dev tools.
The screenshot feature is easily accessible in Firefox using the right-click context menu on any webpage
If Mozilla really is as shady about user data as some people think they've become, someone's about to be pretty confused about why they suddenly have hundreds of nearly-identical screenshots of this HN page on their servers
If you customize your toolbar you can also add a button for it there
TIL! Thanks!
All the major browsers can do the screenshot thing, most just keep it hidden in the dev tools for some reason while MS realized “hey, people who have no idea what html is might like taking screenshots too”.
I used to use edge quite a bit when I did a contract stint at a Fortune 500. My favorite feature was the vertical tabs. Working there I often has 20-30 tabs open and having them in a vertical list was super nice.
Never used it since because of data privacy concerns. But in the context of working for that company where the assumption was that I would have zero privacy it was fine
Firefox has vertical tabs now, but they are still behind a feature flag I think. Using them for some time now and it's working great.
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That is sad. I need multiple profiles for my work and I cannot use Firefox because the profile support is awful. Creating and managing profiles as well as switching profiles is so intuitive in Chrome, it just works. In Firefox it's extremely user hostile. Hearing that Microsoft will also remove uBlock from Edge makes me angry, because that will make my work-life so much more annoying.
Better profile support is coming soon, already in Nightly.
Edit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-out-firefox-p...
I assume this means they've added AI to better tie together the profile you use for work and the one you use for sh*t posting.
Working title: Copilot for Tracking.
I created shortcuts in my taskbar for launching firefox with each of my profiles. It works pretty well.
Are containers not good enough to replace profiles for your use case? I've been juggling those like profiles and I'm very happy.
You should use "Multi account containers" instead of profiles in firefox. It's like profiles in chrome/edge but it works by tab instead.
It doesn't allow for different extensions though. I need to use a full profile in order to use separate bitwarden accounts, for example.
I like that Orion (safari based, Mac only) shows different icons in the dock. All chrome profiles show up as a single icon. I haven't checked Firefox, I've got away with just installing separate types (default, ESR, nightly).
Only thing I can suggest is filing feedback. They don't have market share so they still listen, for now
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Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable. The result is one of the following two: migrate to Firefox, or the biggest web detox ever
Brave still works with ublock origin but every month or so they pull a windows and some new Brave feature I don’t want gets turned on or featured in some way.
I wonder how long they’ll maintain manifest v2 compatibility. Once they throw in the towel, Firefox will truly be the last stand.
> I wonder how long they’ll maintain manifest v2 compatibility.
https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
They are going to keep it enabled until google removes the code from chromium in June. Then it sounds like they are going to try to use other means to offer "limited MV2 support" but there are some issues, including the fact that they don't have their own extension store (and presumably the chrome one won't allow mv2 extensions to be updated) so I'm not sure to what degree that will actually work.
I stopped trusting Brave after they launched a crypto token and started replacing affiliate codes in URLs.
that sounds as illegal as wiretapping
There seem to be a handful of anti-Bravers in this thread, and is it too much to hope they’d do 5 minutes of research? https://np.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/nw7et2/delete...
I mean, I initially installed it on mobile to get rid of the ads, and then eventually deleted it, after it started showing me ads on the main page. I also think that their whole original "ad replacement" scheme (https://archive.is/W0k4j) is complete BS and pretty telling.
But sure, let us do 5 minutes of research! So, this referral code injection was a mistake (that their CEO had to apologize for https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...)
Then there was the "donations for content creators" debacle, where they started gathering donations for various YouTubers, without.. actually talking to those YouTubers. But using their names and faces to promote the whole thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c...
Apparently, the original idea was that you could "contribute to any website you visit. The idea was that once a site reached a threshold, the potential owner would be notified. They could then authenticate (prove ownership, etc) and claim the donations." (https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1e9i5ls/how_...), which is mind boggling to me that somebody actually thought it's a good idea.
Anyway, they had to apologize for it, after hearing "important feedback": https://brave.com/blog/rewards-update/
They have also installed VPNs onto users machines without asking: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-se... I don't think they apologized for that one... But they did revert the decision.
Then there's Brave News, Brave Wallet, Brave Rewards, which is just completely unnecessary bloat IMO. You _can_ turn some of it off, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth though.
What new features? I've been using it for years and it's been very steady, I've switched off their wallet and that's it.
Automatically inserting affiliate links into URLs when users visit certain e-commerce websites.
Integration of Web3 features, including cryptocurrency wallets and NFT support.
Inclusion of Brave News and sponsored images on the new tab page.
Addition of a VPN service within the browser.
Feels very scammy and grifty for a project that's supposedly about user privacy.
#1 existed for literally 24 hours and was clearly a stupid idea.
#2 opt-in only.
#3 agreed. annoying. can opt out.
#4 opt-in only.
#5 disagreed.
Broken trust, even if only 24h.
Has Brave advertised those opt-in features on first launch forcing a choice? Cause that is scammy if they did.
opt-in but afaik they still show up in places unless you disable them
It was always just a crypto grift.
1. Sleazy
2. Weird but not evil
3. 100% acceptable
4. Good, maybe. What vpn?
4. No, it is not good. "Brave appears to install VPN Services without user consent" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932754
The massive amount of online features Brave has (just have a look at all the toggles in settings) makes me wonder whether this has been exploited in the wild at all.
I never see ads with default Brave. I was under the impression that uBlock was obviated by Brave.
Have been using it for a long time. I am very happy with it.
Brave does not need ublock origin, and brave adblock is independent of manifest v2/3.
They implement compatible features in the browser itself.
With Brave you can enable manifest v2 ublock origin if you prefer anyway.
Can you create your own filters, or subscribe to filter lists with Brave's ad blocker? If not then it's in no way a replacement for uBlock.
No fan of Brave here, but you can, yeah.
Are you sure? I just installed it on Android and can't find anything about lists in the settings.
Tried searching and I can't find anything about subscribing to lists on desktop either, only a few discussions about the default set of lists they use.
Assuming it's the same as on desktop, go to settings->shields->content filters. They have a bunch of default filter lists you can subscribe to or you can add your own. You can also create your own custom filter rules. You can also do it semi-automatically by right clicking (no idea the equivalent on mobile) on an element in a page and there will be a "Block Elements" option that does a pretty decent job of wildcard blocking the element group you selected, and can be configured pretty easily with the popup.
Settings -> Brave Shields and privacy -> Content Filtering.
I'm gonna be honest with you, the giant orange un-hideable brave logo might be the biggest reason I don't use Brave. It's like I can feel it burning into my phone's OLED.
Lol, understandable.
I actually like kiwi browser quite a lot on mobile. Extensions, Devtools(!!!) make it especially great. Try that if you want (it's on top of chromium android).
I use brave most of the time though, because I use their sync service across all my devices.
How long will Firefox take to fall? Until Google tells the lawyer who runs Mozilla that they'll stop sponsoring her if she doesn't fall in line?
Firefox has such a small slice of the browser market, that I doubt Google will bother.
Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?
As in, suppose your daily browsing generates about $3 of monthly ad revenue [0]. Instead, you have a (digital) wallet linked to your browser, which could be pre-loaded with credit each month. For each website you visit you may decide to opt-out of ads by paying a fraction of your credits.
You could even have a system where you could pay for a model with light-ads (i.e. at most 1 ad per page, 10 seconds of ads per 30min of video), or pay more for zero ads.
I understand it's a difficult system to organize and is dependent on a strong network. But I'd expect there to be a solid small market by now.
Lots of individual websites have this option (e.g. Netflix, newspapers, Spotify, Youtube Premium) but there's nothing overarching.
[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-go...
Why would I pay someone to stop sending me malware? I'm not going to pay random sites to not send crypto miners or not auto download and execute a virus. I expect my computer to protect me from those things.
For more general pay-to-browse, it needs to have the friction of the user deciding to pay, or you still incentivize spam (maybe even worse than with ads). As long as you keep that friction, you don't really change much because most sites on the Internet aren't worth anything, especially the commercially motivated ones. The ones that are worth something already charge money (and people pay because it's valuable) or they're not trying to monetize (academia, free culture groups, hobby discussion groups, etc).
"How do we get people to pay fractions of a cent" is the wrong problem to solve. The correct related problem is "how do we filter out all the cruft that isn't even worth 1 cent?" Blocking ads removes the financial incentive for spam, and is therefore a socially positive action in addition to being prudent security posture. Assuming ads have an effect on your psychology (and we ought to believe they do), it also helps you to remain a more moral person by preventing you from receiving and internalizing constant messages to consume frivolously. With climate change being one of the most important issues of our time, cutting out such consumption is imperative.
> Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?
Friction. The vast majority of people are not going to go through the effort of setting up a digital wallet to browse, when the existing system allows them to do it for free.
Some people would for sure, but then you also need websites and creators to agree to participate in the scheme (or don't, and just unethically redirect ad revenue to yourself, like Brave used to).
And whatever users are willing to pay for not seeing ads someone is willing to pay more for users to see ads.
Of course the best would be to let users pay for not seeing ads and then shove them in their face anyway for maximum profit.
I don't think so. The fact you see any particular ad instead of another, is because someone put the highest bid for that slot to show you this ad, and nobody else was willing to pay more.
By very definition 99% of ads that could be in the slot are not there because someone is not willing to pay that much to show that ad, except for the single one that won the auction.
Ads have a maximum cost at which they don't become viable/profitable anymore.
The only difference is that now the user could bid on that ad slot himself, to keep it empty.
If you look at the average ad revenue, that wouldn't be all that much money. Certainly a fraction of what it costs to become a no-ad subscriber currently in various platforms.
Yeah. I think this is probably insurmountably hard.
ApplePay is about as frictionless as digital payments can possibly be, and I still occasionally abandon a purchase because of some annoying authentication issue.
> Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?
1. Free competition and lots of it.
2. No widely adopted standard for micropayment
3. Transaction processing fees often left very little for the site.
I imagine it's because people are worth far more to advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to browse. That and once you've given something away for free, for so long, it's very hard to then charge for it.
> I imagine it's because people are worth far more to advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to browse.
People must be ultimately paying the money somehow. Otherwise advertisers wouldn't bother.
People aren't rational when it comes to money. They will haggle and loose sleep over very small amounts, but have no problem overpaying thousands of dollars when it's a big purchase or throwing away their life savings.
If I had to guess, I think the big reason that never took off is that no one can agree on the standard and everyone wants money on the edges, and won't agree with each other.
So, instead, we get companies like the New York Times thinking they're worth, what, $20/mo, per person, all by themselves?
Only a small percentage of people are willing to pay for internet services. It is psychology and competition between the sites who offer services for free vs requiring payment. Paying for a service is a barrier to entry, while getting it for free and selling your data instead is not perceived as such. That is why all the big sites never would've taken off if they had paywalls.
That and regional differences. The amount that people in many regions would be able (not even willing) to pay would be tiny for the company running the site in many cases.
TBH, pay to browse will not work. Look at Netflix/Spotify. Yes, it's a good revenue stream for them, but the incentives are plain wrong:
1) Consume more content -> More revenue -> Means more bloated content, esp. with LLM
2) They will simply re-introduce ads even though you're paying
I really don't mind ads, and I don't really mind ad-targeting, except for 'sensitive' topics.
But I despise animated ads, big walls of ads, interstitial ads, popovers, etc, etc, etc. Just be like google in the early '00s: I want content, and I'd be very happy to have non obtrusive relevant-to-the-current-topic ads on the side.
I know. Because for every paid service you have one that is "free".
Third option is disable JS.
Although I wish more browsers made it easier to selectively enable it per site, like Orion.
Goodbye web-components. A W3C spec that mandates the use of JS to keep browser vendors happy. Once upon a time, there was HTML imports which didn't need this, but the ad-boys killed that spec.
>Goodbye web-components. A W3C spec
And good riddance. I really don't get any personal value out of the vast majority of modern web apps. Much, but not all, of what we do on the web could be via a much more basic interface.
> Much, but not all, of what we do on the web could be via a much more basic interface.
... but it won't be.
Delivering information and digesting it from users is the purpose of the web as the user sees it. HN is a good example of a website meant to do this. No ads, minimal algorithms, no feature creep beyond a traditional news-and-comment feed.
Only one problem: that doesn't drive engagement. I come to HN because I'm genuinely interested in the content and discussion here. Being interested in content and discussion, though, is not nearly as profitable as being addicted. A lot of the UI elements and behaviors of websites today are meant to drive addiction, and thus, engagement.
Hell, HN itself might not even be profitable or even break-even. It's the side-project of YC; something that exists to further the profit-building exploits of that organization.
> Third option is disable JS.
You mean you’d like to use a web browser as a document viewer instead of an operating system? This ship has sailed a decade ago, at least.
This is not practical for common folks. I wouldn't be able to get into ebanking, buy anything in eshops, probably most stuff I use daily would be at least half-broken. Imagine this for my elderly parents, just endless desperation and frustration, I am happy if they manage to use internet as it is and not fall for some scam or hack.
Heck, stuff sometimes breaks without me even trying to disable anything, like airbnb login via facebook popup stopped working suddenly few months ago (biggest internet mistake I ever done many years ago, as a host I am locked to specific well-rated account and airbnb support told me they can't migrate my account to another form of auth).
Edit: just saw its 'per site' - that would work for me, but not for my parents who live far. But damn I don't want to do this active fight of cat and mouse with whole internet. Firefox/ublock origin user here, on both desktop and phone for many years. Internet looks utterly horrible when I open it somewhere without those, hell youtube with all those ads is absolutely ridiculous shit service. Apple devices I've seen aren't that good either, shame that would be a great selling point for me.
Disable JS in 2025 does NOT work. Petty much every site only works properly with JS, with some exceptions.
JS is a core part of the modern web experience. 10 years go MAYBE Noscript would work, I never bothered, you end up having to whitelist a bunch of sites anyway even 10 years ago.
There are also "upstream" options, like PiHole or NextDNS which block requests to ad/tracking/malicious domains at the network (local machine, router, etc.) level.
My issue with upstream options is that it prevents ads from coming through but their "place" on the page is still preserved so you still need uBlock to remove the elements.
DNS based blocking is a good front-line, but in my experience, it's not sufficient on the modern web.
I can't say I understand why that would be the case -- probably naivete on my part. Are browser/JS apps loading ads via proxies or websockets or something? Is uBlock Origin somehow able to intercept those?
IIRC, Firefox at least has its own DNS-over-HTTPS client configured out of the box? So they aren’t using your DNS servers at all?
What actually changes? ublock origin is still available, right? But it just can't block requests?
My understanding is that adblockers: 1. block requests from certain domains 2. block elements matching certain criteria
Does this change just affect #1?
Anyone tried uBlock Origin Lite, the v3 compatible version?
But at this point, why not switch to Firefox?
I've got used to the google lens thing. If you click the address bar then the lens icon and then highlight part of the page it visually analyses it, ocr's text, searches for the text, optionally translates it etc. I use it all the time because people will post text in image form.
Some sites have issues with Firefox, it is rare, but it happens. Some streaming services may not work at full resolution on Firefox because of DRM. You may also want sync with your Microsoft or Google account and not your Firefox account (if you even have one) for whatever reason.
Yes, it's fine.
Yes. I switched to it a couple of months ago. Saw no difference in usage compared to regular one.
It will get worse with time. Now certain types cannot be blocked which will become more common.
What can't be blocked?
Ads that use dns cnames to bypass block lists. Only Firefox has an API for this.
Ads that previously were blocked at the HTTP Response level. ManifestV3 removed this API.
A world where the number of ad rules exceeds the new limit. Which is 500 dynamic rules, 50 static rulesets, 30,000 rules. This may sound high but its not.
This is really really important now that server side tracking is rolled out at the major Ad providers. Keeping up a block list of the custom domains every site uses to mask their tracking will lead to an unsustainable cat and mouse game.
One thing I heard it it doesn't have the custom block element feature which would be a shame as I like the thing.
Can't say i have big problems using Edge in combination with a pihole, but i do agree that Firefox with the very nice plugins like uBlock origin does look so much better.
I mostly use Edge for accessing the big streaming websites and Firefox for everything else. Video runs somewhat better on Edge for me.
DNS-level blocking doesn't work very well. It only blocks requests to 3rd party domains; however, publishers can just turn to 1st party solutions, and many do just that.
E.g., DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links in Google's Search or the ads on YouTube. And while my NextDNS has blocked ads on my Samsung TV, it was unable to block ads on the new Max streaming service (former HBO).
I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking. If it's for privacy, I guess it's fine, but 1st party requests can and do share your data with first parties, with just one more level of indirection.
I, for one, block ads because ads can be dangerous for my family and even for myself. I don't want ads because I don't want behavior modification, or malware. I also don't want my son to watch ads for services that should be illegal, such as gambling services. And don't get me wrong, I'm one of those people that actually pays for subscriptions to avoid ads, I'm against freeloading as well.
So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those websites anyway.
Not sure what you're using but I found that Google streaming devices hard code their 8.8.8.8 and .4.4 DNS addresses into their products. Blocking those IP addresses at the router forces the device to default to your router's DNS.
"DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links in Google's Search". It's true i see the weblink in Google results, but you can't click them.
"or the ads on YouTube" i use other methods for that on Firefox.
"I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking." I do not need any reason to block or allow any form of communication on my own infrastructure. I get to decide what connects to it and what comes in and gets out of it. I am fully aware some info will always get passed because otherwise i cannot consume the things i want to consume.
"So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those websites anyway."
So far my list of 5 million blocked sites serves me quite well in pihole.
To your point, ads are brain malware.
> Can't say i have big problems using Edge in combination with a pihole
I use NextDNS on both my phone and laptop. Much easier setup, and much more portable (e.g. it'll work on cafe wifi).
Well, with it, it is just barely bearable still, if you do not pull yourself back radically and are paranoidly picky. Crap with ad vs crap without ad is the typical choice nowadays. The web is murdered by those whose livelihood depend on it, like a virus. Leaving alone only tiny safe heavens like this.
On my work laptop (not an old one), Chrome easily consumes a huge amount of RAM when I go to a page with lots of ads (including this article). I don't have an ad blocker on it.
Essentially, if I open 2-3 pages with these types of ads, I run out of RAM (16 GB) and the whole laptop slows down. I simply can't browse the web while working (which may be a good thing!).
Of course, part of the problem is Outlook and Teams and some other apps using a lot of RAM, but Chrome is the real bottleneck.
So no, not "just bearable". I couldn't even read this article. It's the norm that I just close the tabs without reading because I don't want a laggy PC.
Or the third option "you can still make them work by clicking "Manage extension" and toggling it back"
Until the Manifest V2 code is ripped out.
The current situation looks more like a deprecation brownout than a chance at continued support.
Safari with [0]AdGuard works very well as well. Been using it for around 4 years now without any issues.
[0] https://github.com/adguardteam
It’s not UBO, but it does work well. Safari is my default browser except for Google sites and development.
Safari does Manifest v3 blocking, exactly the same as Chrome except with fewer filters, and is otherwise worse in every way.
Use uBlock Origin Lite, it works fine and in some ways is more efficient than the regular extension. Most people won't notice much of a difference if anything.
Firefox is debatably less bearable than a Chromium based browser with uBlock Lite at least on Windows.
Once most people run the lite version the trackers will change in a way that v3 extensions can't block.
Brave.
Ah yes, the crypto shill browser. I'd rather take the thousand buggy stabs of Firefox than get down to that level.
> or the biggest web detox ever
I'm slowly thinking that this might be the correct way forward. It's difficult, at least for me, because I am addicted to the internet, but recently I realized that I need to be more mindful about my internet time, simply because it became shit, and using it actually has hugely negative impact on my life. I'm not sure how to phrase it, but it's not "ah yeah I'll do that someday", but rather "ok, things are getting serious, I am making a decision and starting to follow though right now".
There is a ublock manifest v3 and it seems to be working ok (though you need to change the level and allow the permissions)
> Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable
Huh? uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine.
I've seen absolutely no difference after switching.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
I have pihole in a docker container and it works pretty nicely.
What about an "AI" browser? You put in a URL, it fetches the page, re-renders the page without ads, cleans up any mess as much as possible, and passes the result to your screen? Could that work?
I don’t think this is possible with V2 extensions.
> Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable
Oh please. Change your DNS to AdGuard or NextDNS and job done.
I’ll route this to my grandma and my gen Z relatives who never touched anything outside of an iPhone, thank you for your very insightful comment.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls#...
Not exactly the simplest instructions, to your point, but you can still just do it once for them or get on a call and walk them through it. They might even notice that websites load faster when they don't make dozens of requests to advertisers and trackers.
Simple DNS blocking has been insufficient for some time thanks to cnames. They also can't block first party ads.
uBlock origin is so much better than just DNS-level blocking can ever be
AdGuard also has a browser extension for blocking inline ads. The combo of AdGuard extension + DNS blocking is good enough that I haven't missed uBlock Origin
Does that work with DoH (DNS over HTTP)? It's my understanding that using systems like AdGuard or NextDNS or even PiHole fail to handle DoH requests. In that case the only solution is something like uBlock Origin.
https://help.nextdns.io/t/x2hmvas/what-is-dns-over-tls-dot-d...
> NextDNS supports all 4 protocols. See the setup tab for more information on how to use them.
It’s just a dns server, they use DoH themselves.
If you are trying to intercept dns traffic that ignores your dns setting that’s a separate issue.
ISPs make it difficult or impossible if you're using their router.
What? You can set a DNS server on every OS and device. It works for Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
But that’s really only viable if you have a very small number of devices and those devices only have one user. Let’s say you have a family of 4, each with smart phones, two tablets, three computers, each with myltiple user accounts… setting DNS on each individually becomes extremely cumbersome. Not to mention all the other connected devices that want to throw ads at you these days, TVs gaming systems, etc. And god help you if you’ve invested in any kind of crazy connected thing like a fridge with a screen on it, setting device level DNS there might be so obfuscated t’s not possible.
Point is that using any kind of DNS based blocking is far better at the router level but the above poster is right in that a lot of ISPs these days make it impossible to adjust your router level DNS and even for someone tech minded setting up some kind of downstream secondary router can be become so convoluted that they just give up.
Lot of noise today over Firefox claiming license to use anything you transmit with it ...
Tbf though, UBO Lite works well enough in the 'optimal' filter mode. On the pages I visit regularly I see no difference to UBO.
Why are you being fair to a company worth billions of dollars that are trying to control your computer and what you see? Do you regularly advocate for the devil as well? Who does that help?
The only alternative is giving up web browsing completely, because the 'new' Mozilla isn't any better than Google or Apple.
If you're not trying to be fair with your arguments then what's the point of making an argument at all? If you're deliberately introducing a bias to your arguments then you completely invalidate them to anyone seeking to find a grounded understanding. This can cause people to completely discredit any criticisms of products by Big Tech as just whining by the open source community. I hate this kind of mentality and unfortunately you're not the only one.
Places for which you would need to use ublock origin are ai generated seo spam or funnel to some product, why visiting them in the first place
Have you ever used YouTube?
Or any website in EU. Those idiotic cookie popups are half the reason I have uBlock installed.
You don’t really believe that, do you?
Recently I've been asking myself, what do web browsers and the web look like in twenty years? I've been applying this to all "free" software (e.g., VSCode) released by the large tech companies who ultimately are incentivized by profit.
I really have no clue, but as far as I can see the answer is never better. More centralized, more bloated, more invasive, less choice, and less freedom.
Personally, I wish it was more like 20 years ago.
I've always held AOL fondly. You paid per month, and get access to a giant ecosystem including forums, chat, email, news, zines, games, etc. Mostly ad free as I remember.
In fact, when NetZero became a thing, people mostly weren't interested. They were turned off by the stupid permanent ad bar, and the lack of community.
I wish something like AOL would come back around. Charge me $20 a month, give me a community, email, etc. Don't dare show me an ad.
We're just now getting back to pay for no ads, but its 5 dollars here or there for disparate services.
Man, AOL was ahead of its time. All it needs today that it didn't have was the 'wall', 'profile', whatever. And of course vid/pic sharing.
I remember when moving off AOL to broadband, my family hated it despite the speed. They thought it was clunky and stupid to have to download separate programs or visit different websites to do one thing at a time, in what was in AOL an integration.
FB is probably closest to that experience today, but of course is ad and data driven, and somehow still doesn't feel very community like.
I'd love to see a new, electron based AOL type service come about today. It'd cost a crapton to get the network and content up to attract any user base, else I'd try it myself.
As an avid AOL user, that is the worst version of the internet. I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet. Whatever some large corporation had paid AOL so they could build a shitty little Visual Basic type app that controlled everything you looked at. There were no ads because the entire experience besides the chat rooms and IM was an ad. It was a lot of people's first email accounts but spam blocking was so bad back then I count that as advertising.
I remember being blown away by discovering people would randomly make private chats and trying to guess at what the chat name would be for things I was interested in as a kid. Then I remember having my mind blown that AOL had a built in browser where someone had built a website, not a keyword, that actually had my niche interest that no one in real life did. Then I discovered you could download a much better version of that experience called a browser.
Your idea is just Facebook where you can't link out and is fully corporate controlled. Which I guess is actually Twitter.
I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
> I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet
Is it really that different from having the .com of a word today?
> I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
I struggle to see how you got to that conclusion, but it's an absolutely true statement nonetheless so I cannot complain.
20 years ago, but with gigabit Ethernet speeds and 5g WiFi. Oh, and modern dev tools in the browser. I’d hate to go back to only Firebug.
I can say my family never once paid for AOL or cared about its basket of features. But we did pay for NetZero for a long time until broadband become more affordable in our area.
> I wish something like AOL would come back around
https://www.thelaughline.com/the-diary-of-an-aol-user/
Yeah, that was the sentiment at the time.
It reminds me of that meme, maybe called the midwit meme?
On the left you have the dumb guy, saying AOL does everything. On the right you have the hooded guy, saying AOL does everything.
In the middle you have the crying guy saying no you should use Netscape browser, and ICQ for messaging, and usenet for forums, and dogpile for search, etc.
can anyone find this?
Its not just the internet. Its almost everything in your life. Financialization of products and services seems to keep pushing products to get cheaper while providing additional supposed 'value'. In reality, you are usually paying more for less but are fooled into believing that you are getting more.
I was reminded of this recently by comparing an old 90s Toyota to the latest models. The 90s cars were over-engineered and 30 years later, had more breathing room to keep going. Meanwhile the latest stuff is all plastic pieces that have been engineered to perform many tasks using just one piece. The idea was that they could focus on making that one piece as robust as possible and still save money on reducing parts and making the operators life easier during assembly (no one cares about the plight of the repairman). All in the name of saving costs to keep the product competitive in the face of the declining value of fiat money.
Well even though its supposed to be better, the new stuff still sucks. People are holding onto their old cars, we lost so many wonderful 2000s cars due to cash for clunkers. The designs and colors are also more boring.
How do you fight this?
Well as software people we have an out: Homemade software and open source. Homemade software allows us to cut the cruft out of products that companies add. We pay for in our time but if it is important enough to us then it has to be done.
This applies to everything: You can make your own food instead of accepting the declining garbage from takeout/restaurants, you can buy raw materials and do your own woodwork/electronics/metalworking.
Even something like cars can be somewhat pushed back on. Communities form around popular cars to document and better understand the issues prevalent with certain models. Use this info to self select on a vehicle that has a large community and to help anticipate problems that can be coming down the pike with that particular model.
Again, no one has infinite time so you have to decide for yourself what things are important to you and take back control while trying your best to minimize nonsense in other areas.
VSCode futures doesn't look good, OSS wise. "Microsoft loves open source" is the joke of the century.
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
VSCode is still a very competitive text editor even without its proprietary plugins.
Ootb VSCode is already a superior experience to Emacs, which I only begrudgingly move away from because of subpar TypeScript + JSX support like 6 years ago. However, after I started using VSCode for work there was just no going back. I use VSCode a lot for text manipulations. I find its regex search replace much easier than using sed in the terminal. Multiple cursors, Git integration, beautiful diffs, command palette is just like Emacs M-x.
Without its proprietary plugins it's still a great gift to the public and forks like Cursor is a good showcase of that. Thanks to monaco almost every web editor nowaways have great usability, syntax highlighting and the keybindings that I'm familiar with.
I think the bigger joke of the century are open source beneficiaries that only take and give nothing back, but still have the audacity to demand for things and hound open source developers to implement what they want. You can't have your cake and eat it too
>take and give nothing back
Then don't release under MIT or BSD, and use GPL.
Ladybird, Servo, etc... offer a brighter future. Servo takes donations if you want to help put our collective thumbs on the scale.
Yes! Please support good paid software companies if you can afford them. Jetbrains, Sublime Text, others.
Agreed. Open source is great, but the only way we build the software world we want to see is by supporting the software projects which align with your values. Using software is not supporting it; contributing to it is, but that simply isn't viable for many people; paying for it also is, and that's viable for most people, especially software engineers.
It’s at the point now where basically everything you do is online owned by some online mega-corp.
20 years? no jobs for sure. AI will do everything
Mobile web will be dead and Google will have neutered whatever's left with WEI when they get around to trying it again.
I've moved to using systemwide Adguard on my home PCs and Macs. It's not a solution for work devices (my employer doesn't have ads on internal websites so this is not much of an issue), but it frees me from worrying about browser APIs and having to copy my custom filters to every single browser I want to use.
It's a tradegy antitrust enforcement isn't forbidding advertising networks owning / having undue influence on browsers.
I think this is heading to a point where lot of power users are simply not updating their browsers any more.
Personally I'll take the miniscule chance of being infected with malware due to a security bug on an older version of Firefox over the inability to run uBlock Origin any day. I can recover from malware installation. I can not use the web without an ad blocker.
What I'll probably do is use an isolated sandbox environment for any web browsing I need absolute security (e.g. online banking/shopping).
The doj v Google ad tech case is awaiting resolution and possible remedies, so we don't know what antitrust allows right now.
Thorium (https://thorium.rocks/) is a fork of Chromium that maintains a patchset that reverses functional and UI regressions introduced by Google (such as the tabs and menu styling from the 2023 refresh). The author has committed to maintain manifest V2 support for as long as possible.
Time to go back to Firefox.
I switched to Edge on my Windows machine for a while, because that meant that I didn’t need the disk space for an additional browser (same as when just using Safari on Mac) and it was reasonably pleasant and worked well. Guess that’s ending, I liked the DevTools in Firefox a bit more anyways.
> because that meant that I didn’t need the disk space for an additional browser
Is that even a consideration nowadays? That's wild!
This is because Microsoft Edge is embedded deeply into the Windows operating system, with no way to remove it.
On Linux, you typically can install whatever browser and uninstall the default one that came with the OS if you want.
Firefox is the best browser on Windows IMO
I find Firefox much more heavy on resources vs Edge. I’m always get disappointed when trying to make Firefox my main browser.
Chromium devtools has more features but more cluttered and more annoying to work with.For the common devtools tasks Firefox works better IMHO. But that can be my bias after using Firefox/Firebug devtools for over 15 years.
How many tabs do you have open? I am often surprised at such statements, because my browser have basically never been slow the last 20 years. Like, never. Sometimes they crash / hang. But then I view on screen sharing colleagues who have like 200+ tabs open, and then I'm like "ah, this must be it". Not discarding your case but maybe try to have better digital hygiene?
Yes, it is the 200+ tabs (probably closer to 500) over multiple windows.
My latest move was to merge every tab in all windows to one window only (with an extension) and start using vertical tabs (better scrolling and overview of tabs) Then sort tabs by title with another extension (Edge built in AI tab sort sucked on sorting so many tabs). With sorted tabs I could start create tab groups, Edge AI tab sort worked better when the tabs was already sorted alphabetically and managed to create most of the tab groups for me. With all this reorganization it was easier to manage all of them and to start closing tabs.
I’m not done yet but it is much better and number of opened tabs has been significantly reduced. Now I have one main window with all the tabs and some temporary windows that is only used for temporary stuff that get closed within a day.
What makes things a bit more complicated is that I also use two profiles, private and work. Firefox always sucked on multi-profile setup. Firefox’s new container stuff is somewhat improvement but not fully (at least when I tried last)
I usually have at most 10 or so tabs open. Anything more than that and that tab gets buried visually and cognitivly. I like to be able to read the first bit of the title page. Anything else I make folders of 'tosort' and bookmark them. Then every few months I do an 'open all' in that folder. Usually I find that only one are two were really worth keeping. The rest I was just hoarding and are just clutter.
My problem with bookmarks is that I tend to forget about them.
What would be nice is a browser where tabs, history and bookmarks blended together seamlessly.
Check out the Auto Tab Discard extension for Firefox. It removes the contents of tabs from memory after a period of time, but keeps the tab icon/title around. Next time you click the tab, it acts like a bookmark and reloads the page it was on. As a tab hoarder, I've found it very helpful to keep CPU/memory usage down.
You can install uBlock Origin Lite [1], and get literally the same blocklists but with better security properties.
[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
It's not an exact drop-in replacement. There are many filtering capabilities that cannot be ported [1] to MV3, filtering lists can only be distributed through extension updates [2], and filtering is unreliable.
> Injecting content scripts in a non-declarative way is unreliable in MV3 due to fact that extensions are really service workers which can be suspended at any time.
[1]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
[2]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
Tbh, I trust uBlock Origin more than Edge and Chrome. The security properties of uBo Lite are better but the blocking properties are worse.
Last time I checked it did nothing on YouTube. Has that changed?
I'm going to be honest, but this is a really weird way for Microsoft to announce Edge is EOL and they can't afford to even hire two or three more developers to perma-fork Chrome and bring the rest of the Chromium community under one roof, away from Google (who is an extremely bad steward of the project).
Shame that Microsoft just chose to no longer have a real browser. Oh well, long live MSIE I guess.
It is also a collossal missed opportunity. When Google eventually kills it on Chrome, everyone will switch to the next best thing. Microsoft could have put Edge ahead of Firefox in that game and collected all those users. Since Microsoft's business doesn't revolve around ad-revenue, they don't even have any skin in this game. It's pure lazyness that will only hurt them long-time.
Yep. And they don't even have skin in the Windows game.
They haven't been the Windows company for... Oh Christ, I'm getting old, since 2014. The day Sataya became CEO they officially became a cloud company.
If it wouldn't literally fuck over the entire world, they'd just stop Windows entirely.
> If you use the uBlock Origin extension in Google Chrome or Edge, you should probably start looking for alternative browsers or extensions—either way.
I've used Firefox on android for a while as android chrome hasn't had adblocking for a long time.
Am pretty anti-google these days but it'll take some time to untangle myself from the ecosystem.
Anyway, I've largely moved back to Firefox on the desktop too, swapped a few icons about so my muscle memory now opens Firefox instead of Chrome and it's been totally painless. An easy win.
I think Firefox on Android could be better, but even in its current state is better than Chrome.
The next step is start paying for Kagi...
Good call, I've been meaning to try it for a while.
It feels a bit like ~25 years ago when Yahoo was this bloated do everything company with a bad search engine and someone showed me this simple website with just a search bar that was super quick with clean results...
I think that we'll need to adopt network-level filtering if we want to outsmart the browsers. I haven't looked back since adopting NextDNS and configuring my router to filter all traffic through it. It does a great job of stripping ads out of all my devices connected to it, and that's something I don't mind paying a few bucks for a year (I think it's like $19/year).
Check it out here: https://nextdns.io/
Unfortunately, the browsers are one step ahead of you. They already have a way to ignore your DHCP-provided DNS and instead use DoH, which you can't inspect and filter easily, especially since it's over the HTTPS port. There is also a proposal for individual web properties to tell the browser what DNS (DoH) servers should be used for further requests to them, so even blocking a few well-known DoH resolvers could become impossible: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9462/
This is why Firefox's changes are so frustrating[1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096
The perfect opportunity to attract more market share, but instead they are shooting themselves in the foot at exactly the wrong time.
If MS continues to support ManifestV2 in edge, I think the usage would increase.
Sadly they chose not.
Microsoft don't really invest the right kind of resources into Edge to make that happen. There are sound technical reasons (aside from the obvious financial reason) why Google wants to make this change, I suspect this'll unblock the Chromium team making a very substantial refactor of the networking layer which Microsoft can't feasibly maintain a fork of.
> I suspect this'll unblock the Chromium team making a very substantial refactor of the networking layer
I'm curious as to why you suspect this. Have they stated so?
I wish all Chromium forks would band together to maintain a base that supports Manifest V2, it shouldn't be that difficult to each chip in some funding.
They could do something really funny and just fork Chromium like Google forked WebKit.
The reality is that no business likes ad-blockers so why go through that trouble only to get less money?
What's a good Webkit browser to switch to that supports ad blocking?
Don't want to use Firefox, too many rendering bugs and performance issues we've run into.
Brave. Either the built in adblocker or you can enabled manifest v2 ublock.
Isn't that Blink/Chromium though? Just worried they'll eventually be affected by the Manifestv2 deprecation too.
This arms race between users and ad companies is lost. The users have lost utterly.
We DO have an ace up our sleeves should we choose to use it:
Stop using any of it
Does anyone have (educated) qualms about ungoogled chromium? I started using it on a whim awhile ago, and it works great on MacOS and Linux for me with uBlock installed.
Honest question since I am not exactly of a skill level that really understands what goes on under the hood of popular browsers, but I am baffled as to why people are so resistant to just switching to Firefox.
Every time this conversation comes up here and elsewhere, you get a huge swath of comments decrying Mozilla or suggesting Brave instead, which is Chrome in a trenchcoat last I checked. I've used all sorts of browsers over the years, and I keep returning to Firefox, at this point being able to configure it for good level of privacy in less than a minute with each install on a new machine.
My experience is perhaps skewed, but I view Google and Microsoft as modern enemies of the Web I want to see happen, perhaps having started off the hero, but living long enough to see themselves become the villain. Their products seem actively and aggressively hostile to users and compliant with websites that demand we use them for "best experience" which, by now we should all know means harvesting our data.
Again, I have some ignorance here that needs to be rectified, but where are the true apples to apples comparisons of all browsers so that users can use to evaluate which is best? I don't mean just surface level features and marketing woo, but what's happening at the code level that allows the developer or websites we visit to treat us like data thralls. Where are the resources to learn about that in these discussions?
>but I am baffled as to why people are so resistant to just switching to Firefox.
Somehow Chrome has fried my brain and I can't stand the UX of other browsers. I understand you may be asking "how bad can it be? Its just a browser?" but when I use other things (even Safari) it just doesn't cut the mustard.
The Firefox feature set is limited compared to other browsers and Mozillas business model is literally hush money payments to keep google out of anti-trust litigation. While I hear you that they are a lesser evil, its part of a greater system that is working against consumers
I'm a fan of Brave and Arc. The LadyBird announcement is great.
I had issues with Firefox sometimes not showing Google Docs / Sheets (which I use extensively) in other words, would not show any text / values, whereas Edge worked fine. So I switched and didn't go back.
Why would Google bother to make their apps work with a competitor? I used have to install an extension in Firefox to not have Office365 applications throw a fit about the user agent.
I wouldn't expect them to. But Chrome is such a memory hog that I dumped it long ago.
If you enjoy FF, check out Zen browser, it’s gathering attention
Why, though? I suppose the point of my original comment was to ask that in broader strokes. I'm happy with Firefox and do not see a compelling reason to switch to Zen without an apples-to-apples comparison, which seems like a ridiculously taboo ask in this space.
I appreciate your recommendation, I'm just frustrated with the level of discourse I see in these discussions.
Because, as a society, we like to complain about things but not actually do the necessary effort to change things, even at small scale. It's part of our society-wide drive towards enshittification in every aspect of life. Our society and our experience in the world is made up of millions of small individual choices that happen every day, but we all see ourselves as lacking agency rather than doing something about it.
I have more issues with Mozilla management and more reasons to do so than almost anyone on HN, and yet I still use Firefox as my predominant browser, as I have done so since 2003. I worked at Mozilla and then quit over some of my concerns, yet at the same time it's blatantly obvious that Firefox very much empowers you as a user to configure anything you like in `about:config` regardless of what the default settings may be.
I predict this will only get worse as the iPad Kids in Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha come of age and accept the soulless shitheap that is modern corporate software without question. You're on the right path, all you can do is make your own individual choice and continue pointing out the sheer laziness and hypocrisy of those who complain but do nothing about it, including in their own lives.
There is no way uBlock Origin users suddenly accept seeing ads. They will switch browsers.
There is no way someone smart enough to use Ublock Origin was using Edge in the first place.
FreeTube works very well for watching YT videos. They have adblock and sponsorblock. You can subscribe without logging in. You stay out of the ecosystem as it were.
This is a cat and mouse game. The overarching issue here is the web embraced the monoculture of Chromium as the basis for browsers. Can we really expect any less?
I've had good success with Violent Monkey and scripts from Greasy Fork on every browser I run, which is Edge (work becoz SSO), Chrome, and Firefox. They have never been detected.
The day my webbrowser cannot run an adblocker anymore is the day I'm saying goodbye to the www.
Together with the recent FF news, this is terrible news for the open, user-controlled web.
The current boat I am on is relying on Firefox for most of my devices: Windows Laptops, Android Phones/Tablets with Ublock Origin and NextDNS set over DNS mode for all of the devices in my family.
For iDevices relying on Orion Browser paired with Ublock Origin and NextDNS set up. As good as Safari but without the annoyances of Plugins. Their compatablity mode seems to work on sites where Safari seems to have issues.
Ungoggled Chromium for sites that seem to break on both Firefox and Orion, unfortunately there are loads out there. It's a shame that Firefox isn't as effecient with Battery Consumption as Orion is.
Brave/Edge just never cut it for me.
Edge is much worse than chrome anyway. Chrome just screws the user behind their back, with hidden tracking.
Edge has all the user-hostile stuff much more in your face. Like the shopping bar that keeps popping up with coupons or tries to get you to buy at a shop that pays more for advertising. And it tries to trick the user into getting bogged down with loans by offering buy now pay later schemes.
All the sneaky tracking stuff from chrome also happens. So why would you bother?
The only reason it's still popular is that companies love it because they can lock it down in full BOFH mode. At my work I can't even choose to reopen the last tabs anymore on launch. That and pretty much every other setting is "managed by your organisation"
Is Portable Firefox still an option, or is that sort if thing possible to lock down too now?
(I've only very briefly worked with restrictive Windows, and it was years ago.)
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable
It's not allowed in our policy. However Firefox is still on my system from the time when it was officially supported. I've heard they want to schedule a removal though.
Safari + Wipr is perfect and fast.
This is the same combination I'm using, and it works so well that I really have to wonder if all this handwringing over the move from Manifest V2 to V3 is really worth it. What is uBlock Origin supposed to be able to block that Wipr isn't already blocking?
See this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43207606
Safaris ad blocking APIs have the same limitations as ManifestV3
It gets 100/100 blocking in my tests, not same for V3.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn’t have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles content blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, content blockers have no knowledge of users’ history or the websites they visit.
This is the same change that ManifestV3 brings - ad blockers can no longer run code to determine if they get to block content or not, they have to supply lists that the browser applies.
If you're getting good results that just means you're using good lists.
As one of the few (only?) HN users who uses Edge, I'll wait until this actually reaches the mainline Edge build. If it even does. And then, I'll evaluate the Manifest V3 compatible ad blockers. And if those are inadequate, I'll switch to another browser. But I'm expecting that, as always, this is largely a nonexistent scenario.
TIL people are using Edge.
Also - there are people forced to use Edge ... Like me. To look at my payslips. Because InTune.
I use Firefox for everything else :)
>We are deprecating the blocking version of the webRequest API. This required extensions to proxy all network traffic to provide filtering capabilities, which came at a performance and privacy cost. The new declarativeNetRequest API provides a safer alternative for many use cases.
This is from manifest v3 google page. Is this declarativeNetRequest API not able to provide any filtration ? Proxying traffic does affect privacy, I agree, but that also means that Google is trusting all traffic by default which is another privacy concern. So the privacy concern seems to not make sense except that in one of the two, google loses money because of ads being blocked.
It allows for filtering, but in a less powerful way.
It'll still block some ads, but anti-ad-blocker tech will have an easier time.
Serious question: Would it not be possible to build an adblocker that is not browser based but installable? The browsers control what they allow to be loaded (extensions, add-ons). They are forever changing internally. If the blocking was outside the browser, they could do nothing about it. Yes, a type of proxy perhaps, whereby the stream was filtered. Could a type of uBO or similar be created that has lists to filter all traffic through the program?
Pihole?
I've ran a Pi-hole for years, but increasingly there is 1st-party content and Pi-hole cannot handle this. Likewise for YT videos. Pi-hole cannot handle this issue.
DNS ad blockers like Pi Hole and AdGuardHome have been around forever. However, in non-free browsers like Edge and Chrome, they can (and do) play all kinds of tricks such as hardcoding DNS servers, cert pinning, fixed DOH routes, etc. which means it's only a matter of time until those stop working as well.
Not surprising since they're gearing up to inject ads into their office suite (free tier anyway)
Today I moved from Firefox & DuckDuckGo to Orion + Kagi.
After 21 years of Firefox, that was rather bitter goodbye moment.
For users who will miss custom filtering in uBlock Origin, AdGuard supports custom filtering and is compatible with Manifest V3. Custom filter lists from uBlock Origin can be imported into AdGuard. However, AdGuard lacks the element picker function.
[dead]
I still somewhat miss the old Edge(trident-based). IME it worked perfectly on low power netbooks.
YES! it was great for those old under powered win8 tablets. I had an acer with a amd c50 and edge was actually fast!
I gave up and started using ControlD instead of uBlock or PiHole. It's been great and well worth the price. Clean, fast page loads.
Speaking of Edge, every so often it resets by default search engine to Bing (from Kagi), and it requires about 10 clicks in a well hidden away setting to restore it.
"every so often" Microsoft does this on purpose but when one has a monopoly, they do anything they want
Anyone have suggestions for which other browser is best for power saving? I’ve been using Edge on my Surface as it seemed much better on the battery than Chrome.
Does anyone know if any of the Firefox forks avoid this problem? Librewolf, Waterfox, etc. I know this might not be a long-term solution if Firefox continues to degrade, but it does seem like a valid short term measure.
All of them do, including Firefox.
Lazy web reminder try Brave or Arc. Ladybird is also looking promising
this is funny. This is an opportunity for Microsoft (and other browsers) to gain some marketshare/goodwill and they fumble it.
I just moved my main browser on Android to Edge using the uBlock Origin installation trick. It will not have a happy ending as I hoped. I will consider moving away from Edge on my PC now.
Sadly, I still cannot add custom filters to uBlock Lite.
Have you tried Kiwi browser on Android? It's supported installing extensions for many years but for some reason never gets much traction. I guess they don't have enough of a marketing budget.
I was long time Kiwi user, then changed to Cromite recently. But I missed uBlock Origin so I decided to give Edge a try. And fyi, Kiwi browser is discontinued. [1]
[1]: https://browsernative.com/kiwi-browser-discontinued-7097/
firefox for android works wonderful
Kiwi browser is abandoned
Firefox is still here for you, folks. It's been here the whole time and it's been great.
they want to track your ass, whatever it costs.
Edge is only good for its support of cleartype on Windows. Now it's nothing.
I have been on firefox since forever. Not quite sure why people would even bother with Edge unless of course its the "approved" browser in your org.
The internet is unusable without uBlock. At this point I don't have a browser preference, I only have a uBlock preference. I'll use whatever browser that has good uBlock support.
Is the timing only a coincidence, with Mozilla pulling another of its multiple-personality-disorder moves?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43201096
There really isn't a trustworthy Web browser anymore.
There is always a massive push when Mozilla does something dumb for large numbers of people to say that they are the devil incarnate and it's a waste of dev time to care about anything besides Chrome and we are all better off just letting Google control the browser. Just assume Mozilla has the worst possible intentions and Google, Microsoft, or a crypto browser are the same choice.
It's good to call Mozilla out for doing something shitty, but it always feels chicken little at best when people yell about switching to any Chromium varient. Usually it just feels kind of like Astro turfing,
The best version of ublock origin is the one that is banned by Google but allowed in Firefox, Ad Nauseum
You're too generous to Mozilla, and too ungenerous to people tired of being betrayed repeatedly.
LibreWolf.
Gotta admire the way they worded the dialog box.
"uBlock Origin was turned off. This extension is no longer supported. Edge recommends that you remove it."
I have a few decades of experience with the Internet, and even I understood the dialog box as saying that Ublock didn't work anymore. In reality, as the text says, it still works if you click "Manage Extension" and turn it back on.
This infuriates me.
uBlock Origin always worked best in Firefox anyhow:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
This was the drop in the bucket I was waiting to migrate my daily use to Firefox, and keep a vanilla Chrome installation around to test my frontends.
It's funny how Chrome became practically my new Internet Explorer.
Sometimes a webpage works only on Chrome somehow. Would be fun if Firefox had some kind of extension to emulate Chrome for those scenarios.
For me it's Safari. In Firefox, everything works as I expect almost always. Chrome requires weird workarounds from time to time. And Safari is just all kinds of screwed up.
hando wehn
Time to put a dns sinkhole on your network
Firefox is an alternative, just saying.
Well I guess that will be the last time I use edge. KUNTZ
agenda-->
next: kernel code deployment _MUST_ go thru them, namely internet or offline storage for clients paying more (A LOT more).
next: app installation _MUST_ go thru their store (or the ones from their big tech friends).
next: "validated" hardware will have to have _NOT_ "secure boot" you can disable.
And now we have a "MicrosoftStation", the new video game console.
I’ve not followed this issue with ad blockers being blocked. Is there any legitimate reason for this or is it just a corrupt change from big tech?
Any “legitimate” reason is a smoke screen. It’s about the dolla dolla bills.
You guys are using Edge?
Yeah, I use everything else MS at work, why wouldn't I?
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Oldest play in the Microsoft book.
I sincerely think Microsoft can't be trusted.
Actually this is Google's doing, you know the folks that do Chrome, that Chrome Edge builds upon.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2595287/ublock-origin-is-off...
But by all means, keep the EEE story.
Microsoft doesn't have to do this. The chromium-based Brave has committed to supporting uBlock Origin: https://x.com/brave/status/1725622768262128006
I really doubt Brave will be able to support manifest v2 for long after chromium deletes that part of the codebase. Brave does not have the resources to maintain a fork in perpetuity. They are really just a reskin with a marketing team (privacy conscious individuals being the mark).
>They are really just a reskin with a marketing team
I dunno their adblocker is the best one I've ever used. AFAIK they built it themselves.
My policy is: don't talk about Brave. If Brave ever gets enough share to be a problem for Google et al. it will get ruined, one way or another.
Yeah and Firefox is completely under Google control already through the funding chain.
This same conversation is being held about Vivaldi as well, as they are subject to the same thing. Unless and until people move en masse to Firefox or other, the monoculture invites abuse by those who control it. This is the new milieu of control.
How much is actually removed? And even supporting the single main callback uBlock needs would be very meaningful.
It’s not just a reskin though…
Sure, lets see for how long they will keep their fork.
They’ll cave eventually and walk it back if history is anything to go by.
They implement ublock origin compatible adblocking in the browser, not as an extension. Manifest v2/3 is irrelevant to brave's adblock capabilities.
And we all know what a credible organisation they are.
It is their original play. However I think this is just “Chrome is going to do this anyway and we’re not about to write custom code to work around it.”
This. It's extremely expensive to keep core functionality like this in a fork. Every single surface that manifest v2 touches (js runtime, extension hosting, permissions, network, APIs, chrome even) that gets changed upstream has to be redone to account for v2. Every new system built into Chrome that only works with v3 has to be effectively back ported to v2.
The only other option is to keep v2 in chromium itself and have Chrome disable it... While still paying the cost of supporting it in all new feature dev.
There's no world where Microsoft spins up a new engineering team solely to deal with the extra cost of keeping v2 around.
That said this sucks. I got my first internship on the Internet Explorer team by talking about how hard it was to install an ad blocker in IE, compared to Chrome.
No one cares for specifically V2, it's just V3 is intentionally crippled. Just allow functionality required for more feature-rich extensions like uBO and everyone will forget V2 very fast. V3 does allow extensions to monitor and sell network data (no privacy improvements), but blocks modifications (no cutting out ads)
> It's extremely expensive to keep core functionality like this in a fork
Modularity in SW is still a challenge after 50 years of progress.
This play is actually in Google's book. Microsoft is going along for the ride.
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