There has to be google engineers here. Does this just fall on deaf ears? I realize it’s a massive corp but imagine high ranking staff have a say and input. Maybe they don’t and Sundar isn’t worried about that. Or they do a simple cost analysis and short-term they see the benefit and are willing to to risk long term erosion that maybe be minimal.
Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.
FAANG engineers in general are remarkably well informed as to who is buttering their bread.
You may assume that Google engineers are excruciatingly aware (particularly after several rounds of layoffs) that their continued paychecks and stock grant value depend on continuing to firehose advertising into the face of the general public from every possible angle.
I ditched YouTube entirely since this year because I got fed up with the commercial breaks but I am 41 I no longer need to know about the memes and trends.
> Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.
I fear that Firefox’s days are probably numbered at this point, as it’s (imo) too late to turn the ship.
Firefox/Mozilla gets something in the region of 80% of its revenue from a single source, Google, for the default search engine placement. But with the court finding Google being a Monopoly those payments will probably come to an end.
Apple will be able to tank the loss, sure it will sting, but it’s not like those payments from Google where its main revenue stream.
Firefox/Mozilla on the other hand… It’s one of the reasons they have been other paid for offerings. But once the Google money goes away, who is going to step in to replace it? Bing probably, but without having to compete with Google, you can be sure Bings offer won’t be anywhere near that of Googles.
And that’s even before going into any of the other “happenings” going on.
(I say this as a long term Firefox user, I just fear that its days are numbered at this point, so while I’ll welcome you aboard, and we are not sinking yet, I have worries about that large looking iceberg we seem to be heading for.)
I think losing the Google money will be the only thing that could save Firefox... although it'll be a tough year or two while all the execs flee and side projects get axed.
I recently made Safari my default browser for this reason. If Firefox’s days are numbered, I figured I’d get ahead of it than be forced. Ublock origin isn’t available for safari, but I was able to use the same content blocker that I use on iOS and it seems to be doing the job.
It's a giant corporation. Everyone who had a managerial role in one of these mega corporations should know how such decisions are made. Sundar sees finance numbers, numbers go up if we do strategy x (block adblockers) , someone gets a promotion for turning these numbers up. It's simple as that. Those people have no clue and don't care about how you hackers here use chrome.
Why do you think in the anti-trust lawsuit they're desperate to avoid Chrome divestment? A project that on the surface surely must be a massive cost center for them that doesn't benefit their advertising arm one bit. No sir, made out of the goodness of their hearts and given away for free for nothing other than promoting the open web.
> A project that on the surface surely must be a massive cost center for them that doesn't benefit their advertising arm one bit. No sir, made out of the goodness of their hearts and given away for free for nothing other than promoting the open web.
I don't think they ever claimed it was out of the goodness of their hearts. From the horse's mouth:
"Our business does well if people are using the Web a lot and are able to use it easily and quickly," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.
So there are multiple factors here - I used to work on browsers so have some experience here :D
First off, there are legitimate security concerns with the kind of functionality required for effective ad blocking given the immense work the ad industry (i.e google) have put into preventing purely static filters is also very powerful for exploitation. Those powers can (and have been) abused: the recent news about "Honey" replacing affiliate links so that they are getting paid for ads on peoples page, but also there have been numerous examples over the last year of extensions being sold and then having the extensions getting malware, crypto miners, etc.
Second, there are real performance problems - the non-JS filter rules are vastly more efficient, for memory usage, cpu usage, and load time (I recall people doing benchmarks a while ago, showing ad blocker extensions that actually slowed down page loads).
So those are the engineering arguments for not supporting this model of extension.
However, the engineers on the chrome team are not stupid, or malicious, and understand that the trade offs are something users want. But those engineers work for Google, and google is an advertising company.
So it does not matter what those engineers want, or think is better, if the company management says "you cannot block our revenue model" they do not have a choice. Well, they could quit, but that's basically it.
Hard disagree. I've been using ublock across the board with Chrome and with absolutely no problems with malicious nonsense or even performance. These are real risks in a general sense, to be sure, but many extensions are run well enough to be relatively safe.
In any case, if such were Google's logic, they'd do more, or other things to mitigate said threats, which can also be extrapolated to any number of other widely used and permitted extensions, not conveniently remove a specific, well-run and widely trusted extension that conspicuously works at removing the firehose of utter garbage that they push at you through various parts of their platforms and on YouTube.
> First off, there are legitimate security concerns with the kind of functionality required for effective ad blocking given the immense work the ad industry (i.e google) have put into preventing purely static filters is also very powerful for exploitation. Those powers can (and have been) abused: the recent news about "Honey" replacing affiliate links so that they are getting paid for ads on peoples page, but also there have been numerous examples over the last year of extensions being sold and then having the extensions getting malware, crypto miners, etc.
Who controls the accounts and the distribution for all chrome plugins? Who allows automatic updates with no security screening to all chrome plugins? Who charges developers a fee to participate in the chrome extensions store?
The change was mostly procedural, removing apis that were old and replacing them with more modern variants. Gorhill decided to take the opportunity to make a political stand against chrome. Good for him I guess. Given the popular sentiment against google, there was no serious pushback against his stand, including from the independent media and so on. But a google engineer would presumably know the "both sides" take on the subject, and hence not see it as reflecting especially poorly on google.
Whereas a normal extension maintainer would transparently update their extension to a new API, removing any features that could no longer be supported, gorhill elected to let the old extension go out of support, and replace it with a similarly named extension under the same organization. The features in the old extension removed in the new one were minor to non-existent. The main worry was originally that they wouldn't be able to cram all the network filtering rules they needed into the limited number that were permitted. However I believe this issue was mostly worked around.
The rest of the issues raised were a masterstroke of politiking on gorhill's part. Basically, google's justification for this removing of apis business was in part to increase privacy/security. Such improvement of course could only arrive if extensions didn't demand broad permission to see all the data on every page a user visits. So gorhill designed the new "ublock origin lite" around not needing to demand this permission. Of course, such an extension necessarily must have much more limited features than the original "ublock origin". Gorhill then presented this loss in functionality as somehow a necessary casualty of the "Mv3" upgrade.
Of course, the original uB0 extension demanded the same broad permission, so this loss in functionality wasn't really a casualty of the new manifest version. Rather, it was an accusation by gorhill against google that their justification for bumping the version was false. The new uB0l extension incidentally supports a mode that demands this broad permission, so in fact the total amount of lost functionality is practically non-existent. The result is that everyone has the opportunity to flame google for their seeming anti-user behaviour. However, to a google engineer this would presumably come across as unfair, and they would presumably feel as if they were being targeted.
by now they have made tons of user-hostile changes, just to see the line keep going up, they know that there is a loud vocal minority, but most users are totally fine with MV3 if they even notice a change at all.
Maybe people could start actually using internet like it supposed to be used instead?
Like we all should move to IPv6 and if someone wants to share videos with friends and family they could do without big corporations. If they want to serve their content for profit that should also be easy.
But we got what we have it sucks but seems either pay up or don’t use what big corps provide.
Only thing i miss from chrome, is ... compatibility. a lot of sites made in the past 15 years are focused on chrome-support. especially the government-websites i use (not US) but i just use another chrome-based browser for that. Firefox is my main-boy!
Google is deliberately doing this to break ad blocking for Google ads while still allowing ad blockers to work for non Google ads. Most users probably won’t care enough to change browsers or many won’t really notice
> Google is deliberately doing this to break ad blocking for Google ads while still allowing ad blockers to work for non Google ads.
That's the best way to get antitrust breathing down your neck.
So, with talks of Google monopoly ramping up, either this is extremely shortsighted and reckless, or they will choose to not throw oil on the fire and will not go down that road.
to block sites without understanding that this is fundamentally different from adding this to browser UX.
A lot of Google engineers struggle with the conflict of interest where the world’s #1 advertising network — by far — is making it more difficult to block ads in the world’s #1 browser, which they just happen to own. Good job guys. /s
>It’s so weird to observe how Alphabet doesn’t seem to even try to keep its parts separated.
"Your Honour, it's simply impossible to break up our company into separate entities. Everything is just too entangled together! Can we get a fine instead?"
I don't ship any Electron app at $dayjob so while I could afford to sit on a high horse I don't think it's warranted. Electron really isn't an issue, it doesn't really help Chrome's position as a browser in any meaningful way. It doesn't drive people to use the Chrome "chrome" which is where the money is.
It's why despite Edge being built on Chrome they're pushing it hard because owning the space around the browser window is the goal.
Ironically the only thing I use Chrome for is when I have to have a telecon with Microsoft Teams (which, at least last time I tried, had a nonfunctional Linux client and worked terribly in Firefox). Fortunately it's only when I have a call with NASA people that I have to use Teamms.
Situation: People are getting fat from choosing to eat too much bacon
"Pitiful, though with a thankfully straightforward cure. We arrest all pig farmers, meat packers and delivery drivers while inspecting all refrigerated cargo at checkpoints. We shall demolish any restaurant serving pork, blame each person who has ever eaten a slice regardless of their health, and demonize every salty and fatty food."
"Yes, my stance is drastic. But once we remove the burden of choice from our citizens, they will be empowered to make new, more valuable decisions with their life. Bacon will never be a problem again."
New situation: People have quit bacon and started smoking cigarettes
Chrome is going full on user hostile. But, most people use it, so webpages "just work." It's also reasonably good on battery use and memory (as of late 2024 - it's come a long way).
Safari is resource efficient but has very few browser extensions, and sometimes webpages just don't work correctly with it.
Firefox has uBlock but has noticeably worse battery life, and does not honor the host OS UI conventions (right click, look up... is something I use all the time sigh).
For me Firefox with uBlock works just fine. It boggles my mind that so many people are willing to put up with all these ads. Unfortunately, most people don't even know that ad blockers are a thing. I cringe everytime I see a friend of mine opening a youtube video and wait until they can skip the ad. I aleays tell them about Firefox + uBlock Origin, but they typically just shrug it off... Never underestimate the power of inertia.
Ad-blocking, etc, are too important to me personally to delegate to just an extension, hence I use NextDNS, but naturally it can’t manipulate the DOM to tidy up the page.
Luckily I have long-preferred Firefox but I recognize that it’s not for everyone, or hardly anyone for that matter.
What do you mean by "just an extension"? It does the job very, very well. NextDNS is great, but especially with embedded ads you get a lot of 404s, which the extension can remove without any trace.
Is there any benchmarking of Firefox vs Chrome?I have not seen any hard data, only anecdotal evidence. I use it on android with no noticeable difference.
but it ends up being very user-workload-specific. Every webpage is different - e.x. Pintrest may be more battery efficient on Safari, but if I never go there, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
For my workflow, Safari and Chrome seem about the same, Firefox seems to land me 10-20% lower on battery after 4 hours or so of use. Unfortunately, I don't have any more scientific data than that.
In windows start regedit as administrator and navigate to/create HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome.
Under the Chrome key, create a DWORD value named "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" with hex value 2.
Restart Chrome. If successful, you'll notice the ExtensionManifestV2Availability entry with value 2 in chrome://policy and the settings page will mention "managed by your organization".
I'm not sure but a lot of people hypothesize that they will have to keep this feature for enterprise customers (not for UBO but other custom enterprise extensions that use manifest v2)
The bigger question is how the Chromium forks are going to respond long-term. I suspect the APIs enabling ad blocking are only going to get more clamped down requiring additional work for forks.
Policy-installed extensions can continue to use the WebRequest blocking APIs on Manifest V3 [1], so I would expect that the underlying code for the API would remain available for forks to use.
How can I swap ^W and ^D in Firefox? For Chrome I found an extension that works (…worked?) fine, the only thing for Firefox I found would be compiling it myself, which I find a much worse experience than compiling Chromium myself (neither of which I like doing)
Joined the revolution 20 years ago and never looked back!
BTW, Firefox still has over 10% market share in German speaking countries, compared to 3% worldwide. To the rest of the world: stop being lazy and try other browsers!
It really is amazing how things have come full circle from the point where chrome positioned itself as a "Libre" alternative to the IE near-monopoly
There was a point between IE and chrome when Mozilla was always in the near-foreground offering alternatives to every internet hegemony, right around web 2.0, kinda makes me optimistic for the internet to see a resurgence of recommendations
From how I remember it, we started with Netscape, IE outcompeted that by adding new features until they had enough share to strangle the competition. By that time IE became mandatory because of their extensions. Windows systems couldn't get updates without opening IE.
Eventually it (IE) fossilized and Firefox became the better browser with more features (remember that debugging extension?) but was still pretty slow.
Then came chrome. Way way faster, sleek and modern UI, removing the search and tool-bars. Hiding bookmarks by default and putting everything into the Omni bar.
Really, that was what everyone I know of cared about: responsiveness/speed and that sleek UI.
Finally Firefox improved its resource usage/speed and adjusted it's UI, taking inspiration from chrome... But by that time, it's popularity had already dropped massively.
It took a while to get used to vertical tabs but once that took, I have moved completely to Zen. It was good to see it move from alpha to beta recently.
If you want vertical tabs, built-in adblocker, and more generally are looking for a lightweight and free (as in free speech and as in free beer) browser, you may look at https://www.falkon.org/ (made with QTwebengine i.e. Blink)
Uh, YT on FF is unusable now. They'll show the "adblockers not allowed" message if you have Ghostery enabled. Even if you disable that, they will add tons of artificial lag on things like key input, clicks and screen draw speed. I know it's artificial because it worked fine for years and then one day....
I’ve had zero issues or ads lately using Firefox + uBlock origin. For a while I had to update the Adblock lists manually sometimes, but for months now it’s been flawless for me.
Just wait a day and uBlock will update its filters. That's what happened to me initially. In the meantime I had a yt-dlp script for videos I wanted to watch. Tubular on mobile also works fine.
Disable ublock origin on Youtube, or pay for Youtube.
As for artificial lag, I suspect it is because it using the web standard version of Youtube. Had this issue with Google Sheets where paste did not work correctly (forget exactly what it is) and it did work on Chrome. Google uses non-standard things to optimize the experience.
It is not acceptable, but it is also an issue that will go away once more people go back to the fox.
Both Brave & Opera have built in adblockers that are not dependent on Manifest to run. I haven't played with Opera too much, but Brave lets you add custom lists and works quite well. Combine that with a DNS based adblocker such as HaGeZi [1] or OISD from free DNS providers like ControlD or NextDNS and you'll be golden.
No, and it shouldn't. Firefox is a general purpose browser, so it should display web pages as the author intends. Security/anti-malware is expected, but changes in content are outside its scope. That's what extensions are for.
If you're installing Brave or Opera, you're not interested in a general purpose browser. Adblock is part of their advertised feature set.
Readit News
Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.
I ditched YouTube entirely since this year because I got fed up with the commercial breaks but I am 41 I no longer need to know about the memes and trends.
I fear that Firefox’s days are probably numbered at this point, as it’s (imo) too late to turn the ship.
Firefox/Mozilla gets something in the region of 80% of its revenue from a single source, Google, for the default search engine placement. But with the court finding Google being a Monopoly those payments will probably come to an end.
Apple will be able to tank the loss, sure it will sting, but it’s not like those payments from Google where its main revenue stream.
Firefox/Mozilla on the other hand… It’s one of the reasons they have been other paid for offerings. But once the Google money goes away, who is going to step in to replace it? Bing probably, but without having to compete with Google, you can be sure Bings offer won’t be anywhere near that of Googles.
And that’s even before going into any of the other “happenings” going on.
(I say this as a long term Firefox user, I just fear that its days are numbered at this point, so while I’ll welcome you aboard, and we are not sinking yet, I have worries about that large looking iceberg we seem to be heading for.)
I don't think they ever claimed it was out of the goodness of their hearts. From the horse's mouth:
"Our business does well if people are using the Web a lot and are able to use it easily and quickly," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/why-google-c...
First off, there are legitimate security concerns with the kind of functionality required for effective ad blocking given the immense work the ad industry (i.e google) have put into preventing purely static filters is also very powerful for exploitation. Those powers can (and have been) abused: the recent news about "Honey" replacing affiliate links so that they are getting paid for ads on peoples page, but also there have been numerous examples over the last year of extensions being sold and then having the extensions getting malware, crypto miners, etc.
Second, there are real performance problems - the non-JS filter rules are vastly more efficient, for memory usage, cpu usage, and load time (I recall people doing benchmarks a while ago, showing ad blocker extensions that actually slowed down page loads).
So those are the engineering arguments for not supporting this model of extension.
However, the engineers on the chrome team are not stupid, or malicious, and understand that the trade offs are something users want. But those engineers work for Google, and google is an advertising company.
So it does not matter what those engineers want, or think is better, if the company management says "you cannot block our revenue model" they do not have a choice. Well, they could quit, but that's basically it.
In any case, if such were Google's logic, they'd do more, or other things to mitigate said threats, which can also be extrapolated to any number of other widely used and permitted extensions, not conveniently remove a specific, well-run and widely trusted extension that conspicuously works at removing the firehose of utter garbage that they push at you through various parts of their platforms and on YouTube.
But, that did require a specific permission.
And the permission/ability to inject arbitrary JavaScript into any page is still there. As are other abilities that can be abused.
Meaning, the security argument for removing blocking onBeforeRequest was always a diversion. It is not nearly the highest risk thing in the api.
Who controls the accounts and the distribution for all chrome plugins? Who allows automatic updates with no security screening to all chrome plugins? Who charges developers a fee to participate in the chrome extensions store?
Yes. Extension that blocks Google from making money from ads? It's a no-brainer to upgrade the browser infrastructure to make it obsolete.
Whereas a normal extension maintainer would transparently update their extension to a new API, removing any features that could no longer be supported, gorhill elected to let the old extension go out of support, and replace it with a similarly named extension under the same organization. The features in the old extension removed in the new one were minor to non-existent. The main worry was originally that they wouldn't be able to cram all the network filtering rules they needed into the limited number that were permitted. However I believe this issue was mostly worked around.
The rest of the issues raised were a masterstroke of politiking on gorhill's part. Basically, google's justification for this removing of apis business was in part to increase privacy/security. Such improvement of course could only arrive if extensions didn't demand broad permission to see all the data on every page a user visits. So gorhill designed the new "ublock origin lite" around not needing to demand this permission. Of course, such an extension necessarily must have much more limited features than the original "ublock origin". Gorhill then presented this loss in functionality as somehow a necessary casualty of the "Mv3" upgrade.
Of course, the original uB0 extension demanded the same broad permission, so this loss in functionality wasn't really a casualty of the new manifest version. Rather, it was an accusation by gorhill against google that their justification for bumping the version was false. The new uB0l extension incidentally supports a mode that demands this broad permission, so in fact the total amount of lost functionality is practically non-existent. The result is that everyone has the opportunity to flame google for their seeming anti-user behaviour. However, to a google engineer this would presumably come across as unfair, and they would presumably feel as if they were being targeted.
Like we all should move to IPv6 and if someone wants to share videos with friends and family they could do without big corporations. If they want to serve their content for profit that should also be easy.
But we got what we have it sucks but seems either pay up or don’t use what big corps provide.
If so, they are doing a crap job of it because uBlock Origin Lite successfully blocks all of the search ads on google.com
That's the best way to get antitrust breathing down your neck.
So, with talks of Google monopoly ramping up, either this is extremely shortsighted and reckless, or they will choose to not throw oil on the fire and will not go down that road.
defaults write com.google.Chrome URLBlocklist -array-add https://example.com
to block sites without understanding that this is fundamentally different from adding this to browser UX.
A lot of Google engineers struggle with the conflict of interest where the world’s #1 advertising network — by far — is making it more difficult to block ads in the world’s #1 browser, which they just happen to own. Good job guys. /s
Dead Comment
Amazon at least tries keeps its companies separated from each other. AWS account teams doesn’t know what Amazon teams do and vice versa.
While Google Cloud account team constantly gets involved with Workspaces, Ads and Google Play related stuff.
If I remember right just few years ago Google was told to stop giving cheaper prices on Google Cloud based on customers Ads and Google Play revenue.
"Your Honour, it's simply impossible to break up our company into separate entities. Everything is just too entangled together! Can we get a fine instead?"
Not sure what you mean. Do you have a couple of concrete examples of that?
> If I remember right just few years ago Google was told to stop giving cheaper prices on Google Cloud based on customers Ads and Google Play revenue.
This one you've definitely just made up.
It's why despite Edge being built on Chrome they're pushing it hard because owning the space around the browser window is the goal.
"Pitiful, though with a thankfully straightforward cure. We arrest all pig farmers, meat packers and delivery drivers while inspecting all refrigerated cargo at checkpoints. We shall demolish any restaurant serving pork, blame each person who has ever eaten a slice regardless of their health, and demonize every salty and fatty food."
"Yes, my stance is drastic. But once we remove the burden of choice from our citizens, they will be empowered to make new, more valuable decisions with their life. Bacon will never be a problem again."
New situation: People have quit bacon and started smoking cigarettes
/s
Chrome is going full on user hostile. But, most people use it, so webpages "just work." It's also reasonably good on battery use and memory (as of late 2024 - it's come a long way).
Safari is resource efficient but has very few browser extensions, and sometimes webpages just don't work correctly with it.
Firefox has uBlock but has noticeably worse battery life, and does not honor the host OS UI conventions (right click, look up... is something I use all the time sigh).
None of them make me a happy user.
Luckily I have long-preferred Firefox but I recognize that it’s not for everyone, or hardly anyone for that matter.
Maybe a local pi-hole would do the job properly.
I use Firefox everywhere, haven't had a problem.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/12n7162/part_3_fin...
but it ends up being very user-workload-specific. Every webpage is different - e.x. Pintrest may be more battery efficient on Safari, but if I never go there, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
For my workflow, Safari and Chrome seem about the same, Firefox seems to land me 10-20% lower on battery after 4 hours or so of use. Unfortunately, I don't have any more scientific data than that.
Will save you for another year.
Under the Chrome key, create a DWORD value named "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" with hex value 2.
Restart Chrome. If successful, you'll notice the ExtensionManifestV2Availability entry with value 2 in chrome://policy and the settings page will mention "managed by your organization".
The bigger question is how the Chromium forks are going to respond long-term. I suspect the APIs enabling ad blocking are only going to get more clamped down requiring additional work for forks.
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w...
Not really an expert but PowerShell always seemed kind of more “powerful” and/or complex than bash
Can’t a non-crazy nonprofit make a browser?
BTW, Firefox still has over 10% market share in German speaking countries, compared to 3% worldwide. To the rest of the world: stop being lazy and try other browsers!
There was a point between IE and chrome when Mozilla was always in the near-foreground offering alternatives to every internet hegemony, right around web 2.0, kinda makes me optimistic for the internet to see a resurgence of recommendations
From how I remember it, we started with Netscape, IE outcompeted that by adding new features until they had enough share to strangle the competition. By that time IE became mandatory because of their extensions. Windows systems couldn't get updates without opening IE.
Eventually it (IE) fossilized and Firefox became the better browser with more features (remember that debugging extension?) but was still pretty slow.
Then came chrome. Way way faster, sleek and modern UI, removing the search and tool-bars. Hiding bookmarks by default and putting everything into the Omni bar. Really, that was what everyone I know of cared about: responsiveness/speed and that sleek UI.
Finally Firefox improved its resource usage/speed and adjusted it's UI, taking inspiration from chrome... But by that time, it's popularity had already dropped massively.
you're misremembering history. chrome was always just faster and had newer features that people liked.
I use Firefox with uBlock and I don't see any slowdowns or breakages. Just another data point.
As for artificial lag, I suspect it is because it using the web standard version of Youtube. Had this issue with Google Sheets where paste did not work correctly (forget exactly what it is) and it did work on Chrome. Google uses non-standard things to optimize the experience.
It is not acceptable, but it is also an issue that will go away once more people go back to the fox.
[1] https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists?tab=readme-ov-file#...
Can someone kindly speak up and explain?
What's wrong with talking about Brave?
If you're installing Brave or Opera, you're not interested in a general purpose browser. Adblock is part of their advertised feature set.