If you are on Arch Linux, try ungoogled-chromium:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ungoogled-chromium or precompiled https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ungoogled-chromium-bin possibly with https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store and possibly using a .config/chromium-flags.conf like this:

--extension-mime-request-handling=always-prompt-for-install --enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL --wm-window-animations-disabled --animation-duration-scale=0

Timely updates, team defending manifest V2, no user data stealing or background scanning b/s, browser as it should be. Got a 10 year old machine with Intel iGPU and even video acceleration in the browser works.

https://contrachrome.com/

https://pi-hole.net/

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

To boil it down, the most dominant philosophy, whether peole know it or not, is idealism. In idealism, people, nations, corporations, etc have some inherent quality beyond their physical make up. It's almost spiritual in that way. Even the concept of a soul is an idealist position. It's largely a circular argument that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

So, the USA on the world stage is the good guy because we are the good guys, regardless of our actions or the consequences thereof. So an awful lot of effort is spent to label certain actors as "good" or "bad" to suit some objective. Superhero movies and a perfect example of idealism and it's no coincidence that they've had a renaissance since 9/11.

Materialism is simply the view that the physical world is all there is. The consequence of this is that we affect the material world and it affects us. There are no inherent qualities like being "good" or "bad". Instead, those are simply labels you apply to the actions of an entity.

My point here is that for years Google pushed this good guy narrative (ie "don't be evil") but any materialist understands that Google is a corporation so ultimately will act like any other corporation.

Google makes money selling ads. Ad blockers affect Google's bottom line. The relentless pursuit of increasing profits means fighting ad blockers was always an inevitability. Nobody should be surprised by that.

Now some will point to Google's control of Chrome as an antitrust issue and it probably is but that misses the point. A corporation that solely owns Chrome will ultimately act in a user-hostile way too because that's what corporations do.

The only long-term successful model for something like Chrome is to be something like the Wikimedia Foundation. The profit motive will always ultimately destroy it otherwise. If you can even find a business model for a browser, which I have serious doubts about.

A materialist knows all this because of how the workers relate to the means of production. A collective (which Wikimedia Foundation is, basically) is where the workers own the means of production. A corporation introduces capital owners whose interests are in direct opposition to that of the users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

It looks like I could turn on the linux vm and run firefox, but it "only" has a 16GB ssd of which like 12GB is "system space" (ridiculous) and I only have 1GB left which isn't enough to enable the linux dev environment.

I could look into seeing if I can get native linux on the hardware, but it's probably not worth the time and trouble for it.

I haven't used Chrome itself in years, but have had a hard time giving up Chromium-based browsers due to the rendering performance. It's always felt weird that the only way of getting extensions on these browsers was via the Chrome Web Store.

If there are viable alternatives I've not heard of, I hope folks let me know.

Like one day Wikipedia inserts ads on their pages to keep the lights on. We bash Google for blocking uBlock?

I feel like I'm missing out on something. Please help me understand.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

It didn't even catch any hype regarding this manifest support issue uBlock origin has, and it keeps silently working good without any interruptions, I wonder why is that?

(Old habits die hard)

There's https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium - is it a sound choice nowadays?

I also wonder when someone one will "hack" chromium to run whatever extensions they want - I could build my own extension, or build uBlock Origin from the source (if available) and execute the extension regardless of the store.

If it's too expensive to develop a viable alternative to chromium, just say that.

The Firefox that has been trundling along for years is really just an excuse to keep the chromium monopoly afloat.

I am getting high CPU usage with uBO since yesterday but I do have a lot of tabs so I was wondering if thats a bug that will get fixed.

Download and setup Brave browser on their device. I haven't seen an ad in years.

https://brave.com/

[0] https://adnauseam.io/

Edge is based on Chromium, so would that mean this breakage will eventually apply to Edge as the Manifest changes, uhm, manifest to Chromium-based products? Or is this just a Google Chrome thing?

FWIW I keep Firefox around but I have to admit I like Edge's smooth sync of bookmarks and settings across machines and even different platforms. I switched about two years ago when Edge was clearly faster and lighter. It's no longer as lightweight and there are slowly accumulating annoyances coming mostly from some Microsoft Clippy-esque attempts to make some tasks "easier" (mostly via Copilot) but I still prefer it to Firefox. My former employer/retiree benefits site, for example, won't open at all in Firefox. I've considered other Chromium based browsers like Brave but haven't (yet) been sufficiently motivated to switch. (Give Microsoft some time, I expect they'll eshit Edge eventually).

Either Python or PowerShell would work for the scripting.

It seems like it would have worked, but the danger was over time Google report less and less information to the extension, but as it is today, the extension would have worked the same on v3 as v2?

As I say - I am ignorant sorry, its hard to search for an answer to this specific question

Edit: Sorry the answer is here: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

Chrome is dead. Long live Firefox.

Safari on the Mac and Firefox on Linux and Windows it is for me.

> Switch to Chrome to install extensions and themes

Ignore the crypto; enjoy the integrated ad-blocking.

Most seamless ad-blocking I've ever experienced.

So, switch to something which has privacy respecting attitude or at least tries to have it and ditch everything who does not. It is not just the browser itself, but also the services and tools that you use to do your job: browsing. After some time, you will realize how horrible browsing the web with Chrome was in this respect and how easy it is to just browse the web without a bloated piece of advertising machine.

If uBlock Origin uses filters, would it not be possible to build a program that acts as a "proxy" for Linux/macOS/Windows, etc., that uses the same or similarly crafted filters to do something akin to what some of us did back in the Flash LSO supercookie days? I was a Linux user then and I recall creating a symlink from .macromedia and .adobe to /dev/null. The cookies were written to their folders but went into the event horizon of /dev/null and I never had to worry about them, but the websites worked like a charm.

Maybe I'm wrong, but would it not be possible to use filters similar, or even different than uBlocks, to "symlink" the addresses to /dev/null or other bit bucket like NULL on other OSes? I write automation code, so I don't have the chops to develop such a program/project, but I can see it in my head "how it might work". Thoughts, ideas, criticisms welcome.

I've also taken to using Violent Monkey and scripts to block quite a bit of nonsense on the web. Violent Monkey and the iFrame blockers work well with YouTube. I suppose it's also a matter of time before things like Violent Monkey are removed as well. There has to be a way to proxy the traffic through a filter list and /dev/null the offending objects.

Microsoft missed a lot by not keeping ManifestV2 in Edge.

I just re-enabled the one already installed on my devices.

Once it's legit gone gone though yeah I'm going to Firefox or use Edge for web dev stuff

Edit: I will say I am a hypocrite though I am trying to build a following by posting on YouTube... I don't control the ads on there, maybe you do when you are monetizable but yeah sucks I feel bad for the viewers. At the same time... I'll spend weeks/months on a project and no one cares so idk.

So far it seems to be the only general solution that can inject cosmetic filters into network requests while blocking on a request (not dns-only) level.

https://adguard.com/en/blog/mv2-extensions-no-longer-alterna...

Terrible sample size: I moved to FF as soon as I couldn’t use a cookie cleaner for web dev work, and ublock origin.

And you can, I believe, still just modify your hosts table to block out ads in Chrome. https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Or your router's DNS using something like NextDNS. https://nextdns.io/

Ads suck. Support content where you can, but even when you pay they still serve ads / tracking scripts. So fuck 'em. Block all the ads.

How long after the announced Windows 10 end of life will it be before all the software companies say 'Windows 11 is the minimum' like was seen with Windows 7?

uBlockOrigin “Lite” is a good(?) replacement afaict

>Switch to Chrome to install extensions and themes

"DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next"

<https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-...>

HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43323485>

AddBlock is still available. I was wondering if there is some issue with the extension itself that it got flagged? Maybe an update to the codebase would make the extension installe-able again?

Edge store doesn't even mention that, in fact it's featured.

I switched to edge canary on my phone because the dev options allow you to install extensions by id/crx, which I've used to get ublock origin, though it crashes sometimes, and doesn't work when you reload the whole browser, until you refresh the page or manually reactivate the extension....

Still doesn't do mhtml though.

For most websites I don’t care but there are many websites that I visit very often and removing annoying or useless elements and padding is practically mandatory at this point - I wouldn’t want to go back to not being able to do it.

So, answering your question, yes, “useless” was hyperbole.

uBlock Origin Lite blocks all ads on YouTube for me.

What are you using instead?

I kinda appreciate that you still apply some benefit of the doubt.

Everyone will call them on it. Why not be straight with their intentions?

An advertising company optimizing their technology to better support their business while improving security.

That's some fatalistic wording. How about:

Company that publishes a free product and business model relies on ads, stops distributing app that piggybacks on their free product while circumventing ads.

Mostly because they're peeing in the pool. Mozilla deleted their promise to never sell its users' personal data.

It's a browser.

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/397720842?pli=1

I haven't tried others like Ad Blocker etc...

Well the crappy copy does come with some extra text. (No judgement from me on whether the extra text improves the comic here; just that someone might think it does, and there's no arguing about taste.)

It's also interesting to see that XKCD itself explicitly supports eg hotlinking, and the license makes putting it into your own crappy creations rather easy. (Though I think the example linked to fails the 'attribution' requirement.)

The browser that is a literal drop-in replacement is the best way to do this. I think it's cool that other browsers are trying new things but now isn't the time. People have to be be in a place where they want something different in order to accept change. All of them got the notification while trying to something else and "install Brave, import, move Brave to where the Chrome icon used to be, and continue with what you were doing" is alarmingly effective.

10, 20, even 30 i can understand. More is the equivalent of forgetting to empty the kitchen trash can and still filling it until the smell is horrible.

someone got to tell her there is a cross on the right to close the tab.

IIRC, there was also a time when Netflix did not support its highest streaming quality on Firefox. I'm not sure if that's still the case since I also ended my Netflix subscription.

Otherwise I cannot think of any major site which is not supported on Firefox. Outside my employer's fragile intranet, I can't think of any sites which do not support Firefox.

My mom, who has Ublock Origin installed on her Chrome by me, will never know these details.

Windows is split off from Lenovo/Dell. How's that working out for the Windows OS, or the Edge browser?

There is an implicit agreement that using those websites (for free) means you watch ads. I think: if you don't agree with that, then you shouldn't go to those sites.

We complain about "enshitification" -- but then we take away all potential sources of revenue (and refuse to pay). So the only companies that can provide "free" services are ones that are already monetizing you in other ways.

That said, here's my current go to example: do an image search for "pixel 9".

Almost every picture DDG shows is wrong. That blue color all over the results doesn't exist. Nearly half the results are just the Pixel 8. Maybe a third are "leaked renders". Finding actual correct photos is a needle in a haystack and what's scary is this is a simple case to discern but what other results am I being mislead on.

I mainly use DDG but I do believe it is worse.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3lhftw36rac2x

For various functionality, there's also NeoLinker, UntrackMe, Intent Intercept, unalix, LinkSheet, and Open Link With. I believe Lynket browser, which uses the custom tab protocol, also has some basic rules-based choosing but it only works with two browsers and the rules are based on the app making the request.

It looks like LinkSheet added many of the settings I'm looking for at some point, so I'll be trying that out.

Call your senator and propose a bill, otherwise we'll keep doing what's legal.

>Lawyer: Okay, let's say my client killed his wife. What about the people he didn't kill?! That's six billion people! Don't they matter? Don't they matter?!

>Caption: In an alternate universe, Jeffrey Dahmer has a thank you parade every year.

https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=299

It seems to completely lose track of the face value significance of any individual instance of abuse because it gets lost in the comparative equation to hypothetical worst harms.

It also confusingly treats restraint as though X amount of restraint can then be cashed in for a certain amount of harm, rather than something that's supposed to happen by default under good stewardship.

And it shifts the whole question to whether or not that position is being abused when I think the criticisms are more fundamental about the fact that they shouldn't be in the position to have or not have that leverage in the first place.

So that, long and short, would be my detox from the assumptions at play here.

And it's not "altruistic" - it's because eval() and webRequestBlocking are bad for security and performance, so they're bad for a lot of users. Users who will switch to Safari or another browser without that extension API, because the browser is faster or didn't exfiltrate their banking credentials.

No, content blockers are specific to Safari. Third party apps can show ads just fine.

Source: pure speculation on my part

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/click-to-remove-ele...

For whatever reason, the UBOL creator chose not to include zapper/picker in order to make it as "lite" as possible. It wasn't a Manifest v3 thing, as they've explained.

I have no problem with using a separate extension for zapping.

My biggest DNS lag was before I used PiHole and was relying on my router, which upstream to 8.8.8.8. I've just assumed that little thing was overloaded or that Comcast was just having a "hiccup".

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-...

Disco Stu has something to say about that

Have you missed the part of my comment of my comment where I specifically mentioned "web advertising presence"? That's relevant, because ublock would only work on web ads. It can't block ads in the app store, or any other app (eg. spotify).

And it shouldn't take waiting until specific examples happen to understand the incentives and the possibilities that could ripen at some future date.

And just to throw in my little side hobby horse on this conversation, it's what I find personally frustrating about conversations with people who think that Brave counts as an alternative.

Being attached at the hip to the Chromium project is a ground level commitment to a long-term vulnerability, and it means that similar circumstances could "ripen" at some future date as the family of Chromium browsers become dependent on an increasingly vast foundation of code and web standards. To me, the combination of that capability and the incentive should be enough to be treated as a complete argument which disqualifies Chromium derived browsers from counting as alternatives.

But chrome is free to choose not to distribute that plugin. If you want you can download it elsewhere.

Sometimes works better than on the original Windows? I assume that's not what you meant though :-)

I killed the tab and tried it in Chromium where the UI was... not snappy, but in range for my expectations of a heavyweight frontend.

Same thing will happen in the billing portal or really any experience but I notice it the most in BQ.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

That one is already being pursued.

Sure, it doesn't rule out google was secretly intending on doing it, only internal memos or whatever can prove that definitively. But at the same time, to immediately conclude that google was "abusing its market position", you would have to be maximally uncharitable to google. That's a sad way to see the world. Take for instance, the flak that google got for banning third party cookies. If this is done by anyone else (eg. Firefox), this would be seen as a good thing. However, cynics have opposed this on the basis that such change would disadvantage third party ad networks more than google, thus google was "abusing its market position to their own benefit" and therefore the change was bad.

Generally, yes. Ads are an important function of commerce, tbh.

False ads, of course, are not ethical. But we do have laws in that area (not that people don't break them.)

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1938187

it's also trivial for anti-adblockers to dynamically try alternative domains till they find one that isn't blocked.

You're just pissed because I've chosen to block your code in software you created. Next, you'll tell me I have to watch your programming on a TV I bought with your code on it.

The idea that we have to do anything that evilCorp wants us to do is just insane that people have come to the point of accepting that.

When I maintained a hook-based plugin system, I learned that many programmers do not know data structures or algorithms and would slow down the whole software by writing plugins that looked up rules using extremely slow ways extremely often. And if users wanted to complain about the software being slow, they would always blame me first.

But when I replaced it with rule lists, now I was in control and could implement fast data structures.

The more things Google does to make gmail less useful, the better.

It’s no secret that Google is an ad company. Anyone still using gmail deserves what they get.

Gmail is not a government service. Google is free to make that work with only one browser, if they want.

You can't assert that Google must make Gmail work with any browser whatsoever, because that means supporting someone using Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 5.5.

did you give a try, is it even remotely comparable ?

Eventually, there will be an overstep that make enough capable people mad, and those people will get together and make/mod something better.

Brave is decent too if you want something Chromium-based but more privacy-focused (comes with minor controversies).

Safari works well if you're in the Apple ecosystem.

I actually run a dual-browser setup these days - Firefox for most browsing, and only fire up Brave for those annoying sites that Google has mysteriously "optimized" to run poorly elsewhere. Not ideal but gets the job done!

New management is aligned with breaking up big tech.

Founders Fund (Thiel), A16Z (Andressen [0], Horowitz), and YC (Gary Tan) have all been lobbying for some form of big tech breakup because it sucks up capital+oxygen needed for startups they funded to exit at respectable valuations.

Also, Andressen's Netscape was screwed over by Microsoft, so he has a grudge against large players.

[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/andreessen-more-tech-compani...

Use some kind of tab session manager addon, and start organizing things - no need to have them all open concurrently.

The vast majority of people won't pay for privacy.

Some people will pay for search. Some people will pay for content. It's really not many, though. Can you imagine if effectively everything on the internet was paywalled? I sure as hell don't know what the solution is, but we wouldn't've gotten to this spot right now, with all of the good and the bad of the internet, if the vast majority of sites and services on the internet charged for use.

(My best guess is that we can have the good that we have now with ads that aren't individually targeted. I literally have no guesses other than that.)

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Right now I'm at 181 and it's still buttery smooth.

  > Not really.

  In general, uBOL will be less effective at dealing with websites using anti-content blocker or minimizing website breakage.

UBOL is still blocking all the ads for me. It hasn't gone from 100% to 90%. It's still at 100%.

Google did not make Chromium from scratch, and so were obligated to use a license compatible with the previous source they used. That source can be traced back to KDE's Konqueror browser and its KHTML engine.

I don't understand why they ads are not spliced into the stream. It would be undetectable by extensions at all.

More news at 7.

No luck, and not for lack of trying. I’m not entirely certain what feature is missing in WebKit that results in the hamstringed adblocking capacity, but it’s definitely much worse than you’d hope for. You can get adblocking extensions on iOS that will block ads on most websites, but when it comes to the truly shady ads that do not even try to masquerade as being legitimate, iOS falls short. It’s likely something I could handle on the DNS layer if I wanted to dedicate a day or two towards, but I’ve similarly travelled down that rabbit hole to no avail as well.

It integrates as an ad blocker for Safari, so I don't actually use Firefox itself (since as you mentioned, all browsers on iOS are just a wrapper to Safari anyways).

I just browse using Safari and ads are blocked by Firefox Focus. Pretty neat.

Regardless it doesn't change the fact that these are static rules. It's trivial for anti-adblockers to dynamically get a url that is not in a ruleset. Without the dynamic logic that is allowed by the webRequest API we are completely dependent on static rulesets that need to be updated by updating the entire extension itself

The size of the rulesets is a distraction from the fact that adblockers can no longer run dynamic logic to filter web requests and block tracking

But who told you that there is a Fourth Estate? Was it the very “Fourth Estate”?

> That is exactly who you want running your browser and search company

Yes. “Does the CEO have strong opinions on public health? Are those opinions based more on public health fundamentals or is it vibes?” is the first line of inquiry I pursue when I am looking to download a program on the computer

Wiki: In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5 million, and again to nearly $7 million in 2022.

The new CEO brings computing for AI money bleed that almost no one wants.

All they need is to accept donations that go strictly to the browser and not to the latest blockchain/AI hysteria.

However, the majority of ads I’m discussing don’t adhere to that. Overall, people are pretty good about finding out about things! If it’s really desired, some will seek it out. Others will learn via word of mouth. Steam is a good example I think where people find games without having to see ads on TV, online, or other areas.

Must say I read over the bit about invisibly stealing IE clicks. That's obviously nonsense, Chrome was never malware

However they chose to do it in the open, side benefit they also got to use a ton of preexisting code.

I never said it was?

Chrome still has many ad blockers. While I use chrome/chromium fairly little, ublock origin lite has worked well for me when I do. I'm aware older manifest V2 extensions are theoretically superior at blocking a wide variety of undesired content but if your main concern is not seeing ads, that is absolutely doable.

You realize these people pay check depend on that, right?

It's a collective action problem: you'll have to persuade millions and millions of "normies", who have no idea what's going on, or what internet privacy is, or what's broken about the system, and who don't care to learn, and won't listen to us - or you'll have to impose regulation. Those are the choices. The second seems more possible than the first. Us nerds saying "walk away" is idealistic; we will, and always will, get squished, because the corps have the power and most folks won't (ever) care.

If you're dealing with spam originating from Gmail, without any helpful action from Google, that's not really your choice.

If you're dealing with difficulties sending mail to Gmail users, without help from Google, that's also not really your choice.

If vast numbers of other people stopped using Gmail, those problems would mostly go away.

Your post: > Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to.

No, it's clear that not everyone dealing with Gmail is doing so because they chose to. Repeating your incorrect statement does not make it correct.

Further, everyone has to deal with its impacts on the email ecosystem as it's practically impossible for somebody who works a 9-5 to run their own mail server that Gmail will deign to not only accept mail from but also successfully deliver it to its intended recipient.

So even if I never use Gmail I still have to deal with replies going to / coming from it.

Just going to copy/paste this part of the comment you replied to, because it seems like you may have missed it?

>My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.

Not my wife - her school board mandates it.

True, and applies to many other things as well. Anyone claiming otherwise is shirking responsibility for their own actions. Every single sibling comment here suffers from this.

Arguments in the form of "other people do it, so I must also" are unpersuasive and pathetic.

The development of Firefox costs around $200 million per year. That's more than what Wikimedia can get from donations, and Wikipedia is a website that everyone uses. And you want to rely on donations from people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.

And let's say that it manages to bring those costs down to $100 million per year or less and manages to get it from donations (when pigs will fly) … it still has to compete with a Chrome whose estimated cost goes over $1 billion per year.

In other words, Google pays Apple ~$20B per year to be default search engine because they make ~$53B in revenue from those searches. This is profitable for both Apple and Google -- no "wildly illegal under-the-table measures" required.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/apple-gets-36percent-of-goog...

Wikipedia has also been around as long as the internet itself and its current fundraising drives are the culmination of decades of momentum and cultivating a perception of the compact that exists between them and their users.

Also, I believe that even in the best of times Wikipedia is raising about half as much as it costs to run Firefox.

There's probably important caveats that relate to comparing software development projects with resources and content, because I think the most successful donation-driven examples are Wikipedia, NPR, and The Guardian. And what they seem to have in common is generating content to be consumed.

In terms of software development projects, to me the most natural analogy is something like VLC, which does indeed rely on donations and is orders of magnitudes smaller. Or maybe the Tor project which does rely on donations, but I think they're at the order of like 10 million or so, which is certainly promising, but not a like for like substitution for the revenue they get from Google.

*Although arguably the most important part of Wikipedia, and their other collaborative projects, are the volunteers maintaining and contributing to it, rather the developers.