Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension? Today I noticed uBlock origin is removed from Chrome. Can someone explain why? What are the alternatives to uBlock? |
Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension? Today I noticed uBlock origin is removed from Chrome. Can someone explain why? What are the alternatives to uBlock? |
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
You should switch to a browser that maintains support for good ad-blockers.
This behavior just pisses me off. “Don’t do evil”, my ass.
It’s pretty easy to see how this could be abused by malicious extensions, and security is the stated reason behind many of the Manifest v3 changes.
So it’s not clear that this is Google “being evil”, so much as it is trying to force web security forward, at the expense of user experience.
There's no good technical reason why ublock and similar addons are being un-supported, merely Google's whims. If a non-advertising company buys it they won't have any reason to go through with this.
I can only imagine that there will be a whole new can of worms though, trying to maintain a technically complex project with no revenue stream, likely loss of a lot of the core developers, and chaotic management.
It might well recover and turn into a fine project. In the meantime though, firefox seems like the best bet whether chrome is removed from Google or not.
"ExtensionManifestV2Availability" = 3;
In my couple week usage it's the same in blocking as uBlock Origin.
It may do about the same for general ad blocking now. But, advertisers are now aware there's much less potential to drive people to heuristic-capable ad blockers because that now requires more than "install this plugin".
So now, they can be more aggressive about going around ad blockers.
But I wonder if you could run the PiHole (or Technitium, or AdGuard Home, etc) in a container with Podman or Compose, and set your DNS to 127.0.0.1? I feel like that would create some kind of feedback loop.
In fact, AdGuard app for iPhone does basically this, it install itself as an always on VPN to hijack DNS queries from apps..
You dont even need containers or VM for AdGuard, it have a windows version that you can install as a service and then just point the DNS to localhost..
For Pihole i seen guide that use WSL to run it locally, but using containers in this case might be easier..
I dont know Technitium so cant comment on it, but quick search it look like it also have a windows version so it might not require containers as well..
It is not the usual configuration but it work.. In this case i would point AdGuard to use whatever DNS is available in the local network so you do not loose access to local stuff..
If you are on a laptop it will require some manuall managing unfortunatelly, but if you are on a fixed network you just need to set it up once and forget about it..
There's such a huge user base around chrome that I feel pretty confident it will land in a position where that isn't a problem - eventually. The transition could be rough though, right now I imagine it's quite heavily tied to google infrastructure and engineers.
There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested, though it would be quite a gamble for them to buy chrome in my opinion.
There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron), which means a lot of money that cares about what happens to it, which could easily influence things.
Great, so we go right back to the days of IE6. No thanks.
>There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested
These companies are viable because they get to outsource the bulk of the browser development and maintenance to Google for free. I don't think they can afford to buy and run the whole browser.
>There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron)
This is honestly the best scenario I can see of all the discussion I've read about this, and I'm surprised I haven't seen it brought up before. Still, from what I read on Wikipedia, Electron was spun off from Github (owned by MS now) and is run by a foundation with a bunch of tech company members, so going from this to a whole for-profit company for something that is basically just an open-source wrapper over Chrome's engine seems unlikely.
iOS unfortunately does not have a way for those apps to hijack the OS level DNS... so they fake a VPN to configure thenselves as the VPN DNS server to allow then to capture all the local DNS traffic..
they do this because it is, as far as i know, their only option to do ad blocking for the whole device instead of just for safari..
Clearly it won’t be MSFT or AAPL, and given other DOJ investigations, unlikely to be AMZN. So I at least feel we have a fighting chance in someone else’s hands.
Fingers crossed of course. But it’s a chance.
I do see MS buying it but keeping it as an independent foundation and letting other join to vote and help steer development... I could see Google itself doing this to chromium to avoid loose chrome..
Apple is more unlikely since they do not use Chromiun or Blink for Safari, but give that Blink is a fork of WebKit that is what Apple use in Safari i would not say chances are zero..
My guesses would be Oracle, IBM, or Private Equity.