- Google is transitioning Chrome’s extension support from the Manifest V2 framework to the V3.
- This means users won’t be able to use uBlock Origin to block ads on Google Chrome.
- However, there’s a new iteration of the app — uBlock Origin Lite, which is Manifest V3 compliant but doesn’t boast the original version’s comprehensive ad-blocking features.
KilledByGoogle up next: Chrome. You mean they pulled the plug on Chrome.
A lot of momentum to dissipate but the ad blocker defines a bearable web experience.
Nah, chrome will block “intrusive” ads to maximise Google’s revenue
Just finished migrating to Firefox this year to prep for this. See Ya later Chrome! Give my regards to Netscape.
Moved to Firefox years ago. I wish they could diversify their income though
I have said this in other threads about this issue in response to all the “use Firefox” comments.
Thousands upon thousands of school children are currently using Chromebooks they get from their schools. Now they will be forced to look at ads.
I was done with school before giving out computers to students was the norm, but my brother’s school district seems to be issuing Surface Laptops instead of Chromebooks. With Firefox preinstalled.
It must be a wealthier school district because Chromebooks are far cheaper, even in bulk, than Surface notebooks.
https://discountcomputerdepot.com/shop?product_listings=Chromebooks+For+Students
Wow those things can really get down in price. I think the district is issuing the original Surface Laptop Go, which went for about $500 when they were new and bought individually. No idea what kind of discount they could get for buying in bulk though, educational institution pricing is hidden behind having to “contact sales”.
given the typical IT inertia, that will be a problem when they update chrome in 5 years.
They’re forced to look at ads anyway, as the IT dept blocks installing extensions
The IT department at my daughter’s school allowed me to install the uBlock Origin extension last year. Granted, some extensions (and websites for that matter, no PornHub) were blocked, but not that one.
I’m willing to bet you’re the exception and not the rule. I can confirm from my own experience that we couldn’t even alter the system settings of the individual device.
I would personally push adblockers in a professional environment. They eliminate a lot of unwanted threat vectors.
There is a very rare occasion where it breaks things just one ticket later and a little education and it’s good.
Altering system settings wasn’t possible when I was in school, but browser settings weren’t so locked down. Extensions were freely available to install on the school computers.
That wasn’t the case for us, we couldn’t download anything that didn’t come pre-installed. If the teachers wanted to use a website that was blocked by the cartoonishly restrictive web filter they had to wait upwards of a week because all of the IT was done by one guy who was also a teacher.
Our IT team was pretty cool I think.
I had a technology class when I was there that only had 6 students in this little computer lab in the back of the cafeteria. There were way more computers than than students though, so the few of us that were there started unplugging monitors from the unused computers next to us and giving our computers multiple monitors. We couldn’t rearrange the monitors since they were physically attached to the tables, and they couldn’t be reordered in Windows since system settings were locked, so we just had to remember that to get to the left monitor we’d actually have to move the mouse to the right for example.
Not even a week later, someone from IT showed up to check on things. We thought that would be it for our multi-monitor setups and they’d make us put them back, but not a beat was missed between them noticing what we had done, realizing that the monitors were in the wrong order, and offering to fix it for us in the settings.
Yeah our IT guy was cool and always tried to be helpful, it’s just that he was given the job of a whole team on top of being a full time teacher, while also constantly facing criticism from the school board for being unable to keep up. You could tell he was only there for the students, because his bosses treated him like shit.
Except he was also a big time trump supporter and ended up losing his job after (from what I heard) bringing a gun on a school trip.
Sp nobody’s perfect I guess.
Thousands upon thousands of school children are currently using Chromebooks they get from their schools. Now they will be forced to look at ads.
I don’t want to be “that guy”, but the ads school-aged kids are viewing come from the apps they are using, not their web browsing on Chrome.
And they are even more heavily impacted when their favourite content creator hucks sponsored products, which can’t be blocked with an adblocker.
I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet by not being exposed to 99.9% of the ads out there, but that’s only because I don’t use toxic social media apps or YouTube in its designed form.
Except no they don’t because they have to do things like research for their essays, which requires using the web in general.
Maybe it depends on the school system, but my kid’s Chromebook was locked down, so they couldn’t really explore the full internet. Many sites are either white or blacklisted, so they were researching from a website designed to be used by students - not many ads, but yeah, going off script would get them into ad territory.
Still, they aren’t seeing the majority of ads from the few minutes they need to look up a research topic.
Now they will be forced to look at ads.
I’m pretty sure they would’ve been seeing ads anyways. I doubt that school IT administrators had uBlock Origins as an extension that was being installed and I really doubt they didn’t have the chromebooks locked down so students could install whatever extensions they wanted.
I was able to install it on my daughter’s Chromebook.
Good, smart IT would have installed ublock and locked that shit down. Saves bandwidth and protects the kids.
But you’re probably right, most IT departments are useless.
Don’t think it saves bandwidth unless it’s a DNS level block, which IT should also do but separately from uBO
Yeah, I’m not saying it’s not a good practice, but I just don’t see them doing it.
Gotta get 'em hooked while they’re young…
Tbh I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t a goal of the chromebook project
I used Firefox when it first came out. Google and Mozzila got into a hot race to make the best browser and they both did well. Somehow I ended up using Chrome a lot more even though I thought that by the time the race ended they were pretty even. Both were very fast and had great plugin libraries. Chrome looked nicer out of the box, but Firefox is highly customizable. Since the end of that race, Chrome has gotten worse and Firefox is about the same. I’ve switched back fully to Firefox, and the only thing I miss is the “Piss off publisher frames” plugin, that I haven’t found a replacement for. It’s a nice browser.
I switched to chrome for several years. Back then I was using Gmail and google docs et cetera. I naively thought Google were the good guys.
At that time the chrome ui was better. As an example, Firefox still had a separate search bar and address bar, although you could search in the address bar if you wished.
More recently I think the “nice ui” thing has tipped back towards Firefox. Chrome seems to have evolved some extra buttons.
As an example, Firefox still had a separate search bar and address bar, although you could search in the address bar if you wished.
The advantages of that was you could set the URL bar and search bar to different search engines. I would do a Google search with the URL bar while keeping the search bar set to Wikipedia. Eventually this feature was removed, and then the search bar itself (since there was no reason to search from the URL bar and a dedicated search bar.) It’s a feature I missed for a while, but I got over it.
You know you can set up custom strings to use different searches, right? E.g. typing w: and then your search string to search Wikipedia.
I’m aware there are probably a hundred different ways to do what I want in Firefox, and that 99 of them are probably easier than the way I do them already. Now I just keep a Wiki tab open for when I want to search something.
I have never understood the desire to combine the search and the address fields. I occasional search a url when I forget the rules for what it thinks is keyword. It just seems like a scheme to collect more data by bouncing your intended site to google and increase your reliance on them rather than being a real UI feature.
Yeah, it’s ironic that one of Google’s selling points was that Chrome didn’t have a lot of clutter. It’s even where the name comes from. Now it looks messy. It’s no Microsoft product yet, but it’s definitely one of the ways it used to be better.
I would be on Firefox myself except that I need Webassembly that functions at a decent speed and It’s about 30-100 times slower on Firefox than it is on Chrome and hasn’t changed in yeeeeears.
I’ve been using brave for awhile now (I believe it’s Chrome based or whatever). I’m not seeing any difference yet.
FYI TELL YOUR LOVED ONES ABOUT THIS
If you are on here you’re probably like me “the it guy of the family”
Mom and dad aren’t going to switch themselves, remove chrome for them as the default install Firefox and tell them to use that unless something absolutely refuses to work. Pick your battles.
I can’t even get my mom to stop believing that her bank would text her asking for her account info.
Good news for Mom, Firefox doesn’t really change functionality wise compared to Chrome.
Sometimes people just refuse common sense and have to be left to ruin their own lives, no matter how much you love them.
Cause theres no point drowning yourself, trying to keep idiots that refuse to swim above water.
If you are the IT guy just buy a raspberry pi or a cheap mini pc and install pi-hole at your parents place that you can access remotely. That way their entire network is blocked from ads and you can troubleshoot from anywhere.
Honestly that’s way too much work. Keep it simple imo.
And then it gets blamed every time something doesn’t work right with the internet
I gave my parents 3 "The internet stopped working so I reset the router"s before I stopped trying. If you can’t follow the simplest instructions you’re on your own. Enjoy your adds and paying for subscription services.
Susceptible to malware even
Stop making you extensions/site only work on chromium based browsers
okay, opera only, heard.
what do we do if a user isn’t running iOS? can it involve spiders?
Chromium got opera bruh…I’m sorry.
If it still blocks ads, use it. Don’t care.
right but can we still have spiders pop out of the phone of anyone who visits our website on an OS other than iOS? or did they put that off until HTML6?
Oh, well that I don’t know. That’s fun.
Use Firefox. If something you use ABSOLUTELY needs Chromium yell at whoever makes the thing. If that still doesn’t work use Brave. But then go back to Firefox for everything else.
Screw that. Use Firefox, but if you need Chrome, use brave, use Vivaldi, use Opera for all it mattwrs. Asanything that still works is fine.
This brave paranoia is just insane. You don’t want crypto, don’t use it. You don’t trust brave use Vivaldi, but spreading fake fear is BS.
You don’t want crypto, don’t use it.
I use Brave as my Chrome based browser when not using Floorp but there were other issues with Brave in the past like injecting their affiliate links unbeknownst to users so they could make money off them. They have reverted that decision but that they thought it was acceptable in the first place leaves some to question, rightly, what other shenanigans they might pull. They’ve also had issues with paying out Creators BAT tokens.
Yep company’s not totally trustworthy neither is Google neither is Microsoft. By the way, Firefox still sends all of your websites to Google to get safe traffic prompts.
Brave also got and slapped by the SEC for the handling of their crypto sales.
The link issue you’re speaking of was 4 years ago. The CEO issued a formal apology.
They’re a funded company they are trying to make money to pay the developers to stay solvent.
On the upside they’re using that money to fight Google’s ad blocking and to keep manifest V3 optional.
The way they block the ads happens outside of manifest so even if they take the manifest code they still won’t have ads. Of the chromium ancestry browsers they are the most likely to continue running long-term. They’re also the fastest solution for YouTube blocking when YouTube makes changes.
I main Firefox but still use brave over edge or opera.
Right now, we need all the boats we have. Not everything works in Firefox you need to have a backup,
Brave altered URLs clicked to add their own affiliate links. Browsers should go to where you click. That’s like their whole job. There are reasons to dislike Brave apart from crypto.
4 years ago
Also Firefox sends all of your browser data to Google for safe browsing checks Right now.
Are you talking about this? They say it only calls out to get updated lists and when you actually arrive at a phishing page to check if the page is still marked as suspicious.
Also, I agree it was 4 years ago. That’s a fair point. To me it’s super important and they’ve probably permanently lost my trust (or at least it’s always going to be besmudged). If you believe they’ve changed in that time period (or it’s not as critical to you) then that’s fine.
For what it’s worth, when I need a Chromium based browser because the site has a bug and won’t work with Firefox my (current) go to is Brave. I use it on a semi regular basis because dndbeyond.com works poorly with Firefox. So every 2 to 4 weeks I use it for that.
You can also disable FF from connecting to safe browsing with flags. I prefer to let my DNS handle that list.
My Work ADP portal also misbehaves in FF.
I’ve also made FF stop using Google search for anything.
I advocate people use whatever works for them. I’d advocate for Edge, but they have already clarified they intend to follow Chrome to the letter.
Vivaldi has claimed they intend to fork and not enforce V3, but acknowledge it’s no small feat and they may fail.
Operam I believe has claimed they intend not to enforce V3
Brave goes as far as saying that they’re immune to it even if they turned it on.
I don’t trust any browser 100% Firefox was close and is still my most trusted.
I’m down with pushing everyone into Firefox, but I’m not loving the chrome variant hate. Use whatever works unless the browsers are currently acting bad.
I’ve switched to Brave. I only use it for general internet use. What am i missing out on if i don’t go back to Firefox?
What you are missing out on? Probably not much. Some sites might even work worse if you switch, due to lazyness or sabotage by devs.
Using Firefox is good for the ecosystem in general, to have a counter balance to Google. I use both Firefox and chromium and see very little difference. Some extensions might be worth it (like the title says), so that might be a difference for you.
Thank you!
I know its everyone’s personal choice and all that but in my opinion people should stop using chromium engine browsers. It was a good engine however the fact that chromium has the majority users is the only thing holding lazy developers from porting websites to work with other browser engines gives google more control.
So what are the better options. I don’t know much (anything) about web engines. Privacy is my top priority.
Most “browsers” being marketed out there are based off of Google’s Chromium project. They are effectively re-skins of it (simplifying a little). Examples include Brave, Vivaldi, Opera I believe.
Firefox is completely separate and independent from this ecosystem (which is also why there’s a separate extension store for Firefox).
The third and last major (>a couple % market share) engine is WebKit, which is the basis of Apple’s Safari.
There’s tons of cool stuff out there, but it’s either niche (platform/use case), unstable to use, and/or both. Examples: Servo, Ladybird, Orion
To sum it up, if you’re a normal, average user:
- If you have exclusively Apple devices, probably try Safari (for the synchronization & battery efficiency)
- If not, Firefox!
- If you need it because of some really messed up development/compatibility issues, the last resort is Ungoogled/de-googled Chromium
While on the topic, here’s some cool browser extensions:
-
Consent-O-Matic (auto-deny cookie banners)
-
StopTheMadness / StopTheMadness Pro (macOS only)
-
Bitwarden or the browser extension of another, different password manager you (hopefully) already use
-
YouTube-specific extensions, if you use the platform
- SponsorBlock for YouTube (Firefox link)
- Stop AutoPlay Next for YouTube (Firefox link)
-
(optional) Privacy-heavy focus. Caution: Having these extensions may lead to some sites breaking – they are not necessary for most people.
- Privacy Badger
- CanvasBlocker (Firefox)
- Cookie AutoDelete (Firefox)
- AdNauseam advertisement & tracking blocker/obfuscator – if you use decide to use this, probably deactivate the others including uBlock Origin
-
(optional) Dark Reader
Edit: fixed a link
Wow, thanks! I had no idea there was Bitwarden extension.
fuck brave. use librewolf.
Cool, I’ll give it a shot.
Edit: is there a mobile version?
short answer: No
long answer: Most people just like to shout-out what they like, and don’t want to know your use case. If you need pc/mobile sync, Firefox will be your best choice here.
Support for Chromuin backed browsers ?
I keep Throriim there for the odd shit ball site thear refuses but then thats the point.
What a disaster… USE FIREFOX
The only thing that runs Chrome is my work computer only because they installed it and who gives a fuck if they get hacked? I don’t even discern search results because I don’t get paid enough to care.
Just make sure your router is updated. I recommend gl.inet routers if you’re a beginner - easy to keep up to date and their version of OpenWRT has AdGuard installed. Malware can affect more than just the computer you use
I never do personal stuff or even search for non-work related stuff on the machine, and when I’m at home it’s on a guest network by itself on a different subnet. Outside of work hours I manually turn off wifi on the machine and block it on the router.
This is as good a place as any to challenge firefox users: what are you doing to support the project?
Using their software doesn’t support them, unless you search with Google and I doubt many users reading this do.
Mozilla may be deserving of criticism, but criticism alone does not support them.
I fear that one day we will lose firefox.
What’s even worse is every time someone mentions Firefox, some chucklefuck has to go hardcore negative on everything Mozilla does that is 1/10th as shitty as Google. Just shut your piehole if you don’t like the only somewhat private open source browser.
Let’s be honest, Mozilla is only 1/10 as shitty as Google because they’re 1/100 the size. If they had the resources, they’d be just as awful. They’ve already shown us how awful they can be at their current size, I can’t imagine how bad they’d be if they were at Google’s scale. Firing your employees and giving your execs bonuses is 100% a Google-like move, and the only reason they stopped at a few hundred employees was because they didn’t have more to give.
Just because they make a good open source product doesn’t make them immune from criticism.
You severely underestimate how shitty Google is. I highly doubt Mozilla would try to pull shit like Web Integrity or making their sites work worse on competitor browsers on purpose even if they were as large as Google. (Though, maybe to become as large as Google they would have to start doing this kind of shit so you might be right in some way.)
I pay for Mozilla VPN and relay throwaway email addresses. And I seldom use either it’s basically just a donation.
Soooo you’re saying I should donate to the Mozilla foundation?
My biggest worry about Mozilla is that most of their revenue comes from Google. What’s stopping Google from demanding that Mozilla does certain things to Firefox, like forcing them to reduce the ad blocking capabilities, just like Chrome?
Could use Brave, built using chromium but has ad block built in.
No thanks. Brave got some serious problems and you might as well use Edge or something that isn’t owned by a bigot.
Oh shit, I’ve only got a few lines into the article but will read the rest soon. Ty.
If you want to avoid ads it might be a good idea to not use products from a company which primary goal is to make money on ads…
But hey, what do I know…
