Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers(9to5google.com) |
Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers(9to5google.com) |
Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking.
Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.
> Update: As of v1.81, we host the following Manifest V2 (MV2) extensions on Brave’s backend: AdGuard, uBO, uMatrix, NoScript. These extensions operate independently from the equivalent versions that are currently present on the Chrome Web Store, and have to be downloaded separately. Users can download and enable these 4 extensions from the brave://settings/extensions/v2 page.
Mozilla is extremely friendly to content blockers, and does everything they can to make sure they are well supported as first class citizens.
Yesterday I wanted to get a brave search api key on the free tier and they require a credit card even for that. That pissed me off a bit but still gonna test the browser a little bit more. Firefox is really pissing me off and I don't want to keep using it forever just because there is no other browser engine. Can't wait for Ladybird to become usable.
Does Mozilla have a contract with Google to not build one in as part of the search contract?
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/mobile/focus/
The only thing I use Firefox on iOS for *is* its ad blocker.
If free computing and user control are a priority for you, consider switching to GrapheneOS. You get better security than iOS, a UI/UX that does not assume you are mildly retarded, and full freedom to run any program from any source, including IronFox (a hardened Firefox fork).
[0]: https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/10742158329613-W...
So will be interesting to see how many other browsers actually do keep this support alive.
uBlock/uMatrix functionality should be built into the core. Every domain and PSF should be sandboxed to its own profile. User agents and many js queries should return standard responses. Forcing display of video controls should be trivial. Manipulating pages to show/hide elements and customize feeds should be trivial. Right clicking to download any asset should just work.
And so, so much more.
The browser is my agent, not your mole.
That was always the plan with Chrome. Put B$ of engineering efforts into creating a nice browser and pushing people to switch over.
Once everyone is addicted and forgot about the competition, start to quietly make it more and more of a Spyware.
Chrome has always and will always be an attempt at controlling the client side of the funnel to be in charge of how much ads they can deliver to your brain. It's 100% a spyware with a side-effect of a browser.
Switch today. Firefox works well.
No. The original plan for Chrome was to save money on "traffic acquisition cost" (The cash they give to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine) by moving users away those company's browsers.
Buuuuut, once Chrome turned out to dominate the browser market, the temptation to abuse that dominance was too much.
There are more details available on this fan site of ublock[1]:
> What Was Manifest V3?
> Manifest V3 was Google's major update to the Chrome extension platform. The most significant change was replacing the webRequest API with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. While Google cited security and performance benefits, this change removed capabilities that content blockers like uBlock Origin relied on for effective ad and tracker blocking.
> How This Affected uBlock Origin
> uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. As a result, the full uBlock Origin extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Chrome permanently disabled all remaining MV2 extensions in July 2025.
[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
There are some drawbacks to V3, however none prevent creating an effective ad blocker, as demonstrated by the fact that many exist. Though saying that doesn't make for nearly as effective clickbait...
uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective.
Cannot use all filter lists simultaneously (rule limits apply)
No cosmetic filtering in the default mode
No scriptlet injection by default
Limited dynamic filtering capabilities
Requires broader host permissions upfrontMy understanding is they're doing this in the name of security, though it obviously has some benefit to ads. this policy more closely aligns with what Safari does today. And it prevents add-ons from scraping information since they have to put in the block list ahead of time.
I've been using manifest v3 version of Adblock and it's worked just fine for me. But obviously is not perfect, but it fell into more towards security and privacy of the user against malicious extensions.
Have people actually noticed worse performance from uBlock Origin lite?
This article isn't nuanced enough. Ad blockers will continue to work.
The only browser I would switch to away from Brave is one that, as was described by another user in here, sandboxes all pages/domains and ensures that no data leaks outside unless you are actively allowing it. Think Qubes OS but for browsers. I imagine a nice "drag this domain-box into the Facebook domain blob of a tree structure to allow linking and sharing of data" would be a cool feature. That would make it easy to select and confirm which FAANG company gets your data on which domain.
Employees at companies using corporate computers love a good malicious popup, right?
I think it's one of those "once you get used to it, you never go back" technologies, but I also think it takes a bit of time to get used to it. Thoughts?
Unfortunately, I found it had some unfortunate video playback bugs for me on Linux, so I ended up bouncing back to Firefox. I'm also bit leery of relying on smaller projects with all the supply chain issues these days...
This is story about browser Chromium browser monoculture and Google's influence over it.
(also, 450+ comments is not little notice!)
Restricting webRequestBlocking (but it's not going away, just needs a policy extension) and synchronous executeScript did in practice make adblockers unreliable though.. I partially worked it around by using a custom extension that uses the recent userScripts API..
BTW, it's not possible to inject scripts to workers like a ServiceWorker or to replace it's content (DNR let's you redirect but this redirect breaks SW origin + it's visible when you disallow redirects), but MV2 was no better, chrome extensions never had advanced capabilities for ad blocking, a bug about not being able to access POST data via webRequest was open for 10+ years and will probably never be fixed.
But still, firefox is not the alternative, even WebKit is much better.
They do built in Adblock that keeps up in the YT arms race. If they’re losing and I get an ad I restart the browser and we’re winning again.
It does lack elemental control of the DOM to manipulate pages on the user chrome, but dev tools is there. Though there are some CSS rendering options in a drop down like inverted colors and sepia and such. You can screenshot any page section with its screenshot tool.
Video controls can be shown on any image/video element with a right click.
Incredibly configurable. It offers email, RSS feeds, profiles. Exposed and granular user privacy controls in the settings window.
Its open image in new tab is pretty consistent, though some sites pull all the tricks and it’s just impossible to get the image (looking at you Reddit)
Their business model is a cookie swap on purchases made through their built in speed dial options. That doesn’t happen if you don’t click on them directly.
They could honestly stand to be fully transparent about that in the browser UI in the wake of Honey. I for one would love a popup that says “using this link sets us as the affiliate for this purchase. Thank you for supporting the development of your Vivaldi browser”
It also seems to happen if you type the domain name in the address bar but hit enter when the suggested URL autofills. For me, typing out aliexpress.com fully will send me directly to AE, but typing aliexpress.c and hitting enter (with the autofill completing "om") redirects through vivaldi.com/bk/aliexpresscom-us
Sorry, Google says no, and who are you to disagree?
Sarcasm aside: this what people who wax poetic about the market miss. In the 21st century, where products have "minds" of their own (software), they are developed to serve their manufactures first. The consumer is a distant second. And competition won't align the market with consumers, because all manufacturers have similar incentives (aka "enshittification").
Personally I've just given up trying with firefox and I now put up with brave - its certainly not perfect but at least the ad blocker isnt about to break.
And that automatically disqualifies it? I find that wild. I've been using Firefox since it was at v2 I think, and never once considered switching for some speed gain. I actually use Vivaldi on the side sometimes for sites that aren't very Firefox-with-my-extensions-friendly, and find no difference in performance.
(Personally I find Firefox is plenty fast! And the benefits vastly outweigh trying to deal with a Google-powered web browser.)
This is no longer the case, at least not uniformly. My Speedometer 3.1 results are:
- Chromium: 30.0 (± 1.2)
- Firefox: 32.1 (± 1.6)
Using the latest browser version on Arch Linux.
IIRC, it's got a much smaller memory footprint.
You can start with this page[4] for an examples of simple, but elegant styling.
And /r/FirefoxCSS can demonstrate all kinds of crazy options userChome.css enthusiasts can come up with.
[1] https://www.userchrome.org/
[2] https://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserChrome.css
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/wiki/index/tutorials
[4] https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/googles-next-chrome-update-will-f...
Actually, I'll take that back. I used to see far more stuff get blocked (e.g., when clicking links) than with Lite. Which is to say, Lite feels like it has fewer false positives.
I've realized over time that people on the internet love finding things to be mad about, because raging against evil is fun. They'll make up an injustice if they can't find one today.
OTOH it's not out of the question that some open source non-extension Chrome mod emerges that will then block those kinds of ads. Brave is already shipping this anyway.
"Closing the door" on ad blockers is quite an exaggeration.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/document-pict...
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/element-captu...
This Firefox Focus on iOS does effectively block adds on a recipe site unlike plain Firefox. I just did a cursory head to head test on the same recipe site url.
Thank you for sharing this!
For instance:
> Last year, Google/YouTube ramped up its efforts against ad-blockers, preventing playback for users with the software installed on their devices, coercing them to disable it.
Users continued to exploit loopholes in browsers and third-party extensions, such as Firefox, that allowed them to bypass YouTube's ads while watching videos. However, the tech giant has seemingly doubled down on its efforts against ad-blockers, closing the few remaining loopholes
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/streaming-video...
They don't boil you fast, because they can't: you would balk at that.
In other words, taken together, they do all they can to boil you on that issue and kill ad-blockers.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#per...
That's incorrect, and Firefox doesn't blame Apple for this. Many 3rd-party iOS browsers do ad blocking natively and/or via extensions. https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/ios
But its obvious that these guys are semi shady and they will show sooner or later. I liked chrome derviates and used them over a decade. I got tired of feeling forced to switch after vivaldi/brave so I went the firefox way last year.
The circle is completed.