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]
I think that quoting Anthill in the osnews comment this part was left out:
It would be only fair to include the part that was added to the FAQ too:
> It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different.
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)
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."
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?!?).
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.
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/
> 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) ;)
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.
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).
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
there are quite a few features like this. I actually did a comparison of chromium vs edge headers yesterday, it's a lot more than a rebrand. shame the source code is proprietary
All of them. UBlock Origin does not work on V3. There was a Lite version that used V3 but they stopped work on it because it was so limited. It looks like there's been some updates to it recently now.
The size of blacklists has gone from unlimited to a limited size. The blocking ability has been limited. And the worst of all, blocklists have to be bundled in extension updates and not downloaded. While they have increased the limited blocklist size for V3 overtime, I don't know if they ever changed the other limits.
Here is the official FAQ: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
For some context, I currently have 393,405 network filters ＋ 385,476 cosmetic filters.
"The current limit imposed by the various implementations is a guaranteed 30K. It is possible for an extension to use more rules, but anything above the global limit will not be enforced. Currently, the global limit in Chromium is 330K static rules."
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
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?
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 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.
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 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.
Just a bit, given that my boot SSD isn’t very big and the OS tends to substantially grow in size. As the sibling comment also pointed out, you can’t exactly swap Edge for Firefox either, only install it in addition to it.
Not going to be a big deal once I install the new 1 TB SSD, though I’ll probably also need to move to Windows 11 in the process, because of the EOL (will still dual boot with Linux).
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?
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).
But that is about google fucking over advertisers. Helping advertisers doesn't help me because I don't want to see any ads. Meanwhile the decline of end-user options in browsers remains completely ignored by anti-trus authorities even though that's what got Microsoft/IE slapped in the past.
> 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'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 microsoft wanted to spend the money required to maintain a browser on their own they wouldn't have moved to Chromium in the first place - the entire point of Edge vs. IE was that they gave that up.
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.
Readit News
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...
https://www.osnews.com/story/141825/mozilla-deletes-promise-...
https://librewolf.net/
Deleted Comment
Promissory estoppel maybe? Stronger case for it if you ever paid them for anything after this promise.
> 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.
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.
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-...
I removed it right away. I just want a browser, not whatever that was.
Maybe it's time
Deleted Comment
Although, if kagi fails, it probably won't matter.
Another browser option is Brave, but you have to disable the altcoins stuff :/
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/
-- 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.
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.
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.
Edit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-out-firefox-p...
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.
- 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.
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
https://github.com/pl4nty/msedge/commit/96aa52634072b12fa175...
Dead Comment
Too bad a lot of websites just don't work with Firefox. It seems web devs are not testing with Firefox anymore.
I see people complaining, I don't see concrete examples, only panic
The size of blacklists has gone from unlimited to a limited size. The blocking ability has been limited. And the worst of all, blocklists have to be bundled in extension updates and not downloaded. While they have increased the limited blocklist size for V3 overtime, I don't know if they ever changed the other limits.
Dead Comment
I wonder how long they’ll maintain manifest v2 compatibility. Once they throw in the towel, Firefox will truly be the last stand.
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.
They implement compatible features in the browser itself.
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...
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.
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).
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.
So, instead, we get companies like the New York Times thinking they're worth, what, $20/mo, per person, all by themselves?
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.
[0] https://github.com/adguardteam
Although I wish more browsers made it easier to selectively enable it per site, like Orion.
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.
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.
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.
I mostly use Edge for accessing the big streaming websites and Firefox for everything else. Video runs somewhat better on Edge for me.
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.
I use NextDNS on both my phone and laptop. Much easier setup, and much more portable (e.g. it'll work on cafe wifi).
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".
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.
My understanding is that adblockers: 1. block requests from certain domains 2. block elements matching certain criteria
Does this change just affect #1?
The current situation looks more like a deprecation brownout than a chance at continued support.
Huh? uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine.
I've seen absolutely no difference after switching.
I would encourage you to read their explanation.
Oh please. Change your DNS to AdGuard or NextDNS and job done.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
https://www.thelaughline.com/the-diary-of-an-aol-user/
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.
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
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
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.
Is that even a consideration nowadays? That's wild!
On Linux, you typically can install whatever browser and uninstall the default one that came with the OS if you want.
Not going to be a big deal once I install the new 1 TB SSD, though I’ll probably also need to move to Windows 11 in the process, because of the EOL (will still dual boot with Linux).
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.
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).
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.
The next step is start paying for Kagi...
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...
Shame that Microsoft just chose to no longer have a real browser. Oh well, long live MSIE I guess.
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.