I truly hope this leads to the collapse of Chrome’s sheer market dominance. Fuck Google.
I know I’m a drop in the bucket but I have always been a diehard Google fanboy and, in the recent years, have switched to iOS, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo. No regrets.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens! (Switched to Apple after 12 years of being an Android enthusiast.)
I also switched after about 10 years of dunking on iPhone users for accepting locked up phones with inferior hardware.
Turns out the software experience is a lot better and if you want access to your banking apps, you have to keep your Androids locked up nowadays anyway. I’d always ran custom roms, but one day I couldn’t anymore so I thought long and hard and in the end just went to the nearest Apple store and bought an iPhone.
If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox because of MV3, it wouldn’t make a single dent in Chromium’s dominance. We vastly overstate the amount of people that even know what an adblocker is.
It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.
If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?
Then why is Google fighting against ad blockers?
Because their an ad company and they don’t like any threats to their revenue stream. Same logic as video game companies using DRM. Selling a worse product at a bigger expense to tell shareholders their compelling pirates to pay (even tho most pirates will just not play the game rather than suddenly start purchasing it).
Because they want every little dime they can get, no matter what.
Nah it would make a big dent for sure.
Firefox has ~180 million users
Amount of users using adblockers is ~900 million.
It would massively change the market.
Numbers according to mozilla and statista
Im using Firefox because fuck Google’s monopoly, but Firefox seems to care little for some stuff I think is critical, namely AV codec support. Lack of out of the box support for HEVC and a few others, which my underlying OS supports perfectly, is a big turn off.
May be time to give Opera a spin
I wish Firefox would build a tablet/scalable interface. It’s horrible on a tablet and breaks on DeX.
If you’re gonna use Opera anyway, why not just use Brave and disable the crypto stuff? The native adblocker on Brave is on par with uBlock Origin and performs even better. Opera is probably the worst direction you can go from where you are right now…
There are at least 3.45 billion Chrome users (not chromium, chrome).
Out of those ~900 million adblocker users, how many are using those adblockers that let paid advertiser’s to get on a whitelist? How many are willing to make an effort to change browsers? Firefox’s 180 million users is the indicative of this, and not all of them user adblockers, so the numbers keep getting thinner.
It wouldn’t make a single dent in Chrome’s dominance.
If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox
This is the hypothetical we are talking about. This is obviously not realistic so i dont know what your point is.
Yes I agree. If you are using adblocker you are already not an average user. Using A adblocker with custom filters put you on the extreme end and most of those users are either already on FF or have migrated to FF since the MV3 announcement.
And let’s not forget adblock made for MV3 will work well enough for those users who aren’t using adblocker with custom filters.
Even if Google kill off adblock completely with its browser, chrome will still be dominating the market by a huge margin.
Over half of all Americans use an ad blocker. It’s time to recognize that average users do block ads.
What is there to recognize? This is a survey conducted on 2,000 Americans. 2,000 is just 0.00057% of the whole US population which is estimated at 345,426,571.
The average user absolutely do not use block ads unless it is enabled by default in the browser. Chrome with the largest market share does not block ads by default and if you are going out of your way to block ads or use a browser like brave that do that by default you my friend are already not an average user.
You…don’t understand how surveys work, I see.
According to both websites, the research was conducted on just 2000 USA citizens. In my opinion, that’s a lot of weight being pulled by claiming they represent the entire country. I am unable to download the research papers here, but what does it say about the sample? If they are researching solely on more tech savvy people, then I think the results are very likely to be skewed to one side
Frankly, I’m not sure about the quality of the Censuswide survey.
Market data from YouGov Global Profiles shows that 51-52% of people globally (in “48 markets”) use ad blocking on at least 1 device. That percentage is 45-46% for people in the US.
My point is that when a significant proportion of internet users have ad blockers, they’re not just niche tools anymore.
I’m not really trying to disprove or disagree with anything, I just think that knowing the sample is important. For instance, earlier in Hungary, we’ve had a lot of billboards and other media claiming that 99% of Hungarians were against things like sending aid to Ukraine and gender affirming politics. In a purely statistical sense, this was correct and could dissuade the common folk into thinking that’s representative of the country. However when you investigate further, their research was done on just a couple thousand citizens that were all either affiliated someway to Fidesz (the rulling party) or historically voted for them, which overwhelmingly skews the results towards one end.
Hey, I think you’re totally right to challenge a statistic when it looks questionable. Censuswide didn’t release the full data publicly, and the study was commissioned by the Ghostery ad blocker, so there’s reason to suspect that the data is biased.
I trust the YouGov data more, since YouGov is also a credible pollster and the data is being provided as market research data for businesses. However, since I don’t subscribe to their data service, I don’t have details of the methodology here, either.
That’s true. 2 years ago, I come by my friend’s house for a drink, and his kid is watching cartoons on YT. My friend’s been a gamer for +20 years. Spent most of his life around PC. All of a sudden, I hear ads.
What’s that? What? What’s with the ads? Oh that, that’s YT.
I know it is, but what’s with the ads? Well, they have ads. I know they do, but why do you have them…
Installed adblocker for him, he’s looking at it in shock. I’m looking at him shocked…
People have no idea, what we take for granted. 😅
It would actually.
Google makes money on ads. They think they can force more money make. People switching the Firefox makes that a wasted effort for Google as you descibed.
I just did research on this. Up to 33% (according to some sources) of Americans use an adblocker. That feels like a dent to me…
i don’t think it’s working
Unfortunately, I doubt it. Chrome made it as big as it did because it had one of the biggest tech and advertising companies in the world behind it. Other than Microsoft with building in Internet Explorer into Windows, thereor Apple doing that with Safari, isn’t anything else that could compete as easily, and we all how that went for Microsoft.
And it would only be harder today, since they’d not only have go contend with Chrome, but also that a lot of websites are being built around Chrome/browsers using the Chromium engine. People would go to a website that either refuses to work, or doesn’t work properly for their browser and hop over to Chrome instead.
Netflix requires specific DRM addons that are really only available for the major browser engines, as an example. If someone is rolling their own, like KDE does, then that’s going to refuse to work outright.
Opera, being owned by Chinese big tech is probably the only “mainstream” browser I find worse than Chrome and I doubt it will have any measurable effect on Googles market dominance. Don’t get me wrong Google would absolutely deserve to trip and fall for the enshittification route they’re taking, but I don’t see how Opera could do what Firefox can’t when Opera is very reliant on Google.
I was referring to Google banning ad blockers more than Opera’s move to bypass the block in chromium. I should have clarified that in my original comment, but I was quite sleep deprived when I wrote it.
If the chrome market share significantly degrades then google will stop pumping so much money into it.
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…
good. a massive shakeup like that would be great
Safari is WebKit, which branched off from Chrome when Google forked WebKit into Blink. So they’re like siblings.
Technically, Chrome branched off from Safari when they forked WebKit into Blink…
Yeah the way I phrased it was super awkward
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…
Opera Browser (before it was sold to a Chinese company) did have its own browser engine before it went Chromium. It was called Presto. source. The team that used to own/run Opera before the sale to China formed again to make the Vivaldi browser.
Vivaldi and Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 addons (like uBlock Origin) until July 2025. The article doesn’t say how long Opera will continue, but I’m guessing its the same deadline of July too.
So… basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?
Because if there is not massive amounts of money and resources pumped into Chromium development? Vivaldi and Brave will be up a creek
So… basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?
Yes.
Because if there is not massive amounts of money and resources pumped into Chromium development? Vivaldi and Brave will be up a creek
Well, the browser will function just fine with Manifest V2 support removed in July 2025, but lots of addons will no longer work.
without addons to control internet crazy, that word “function” is doing some heavy lifting.
Yes. Which was not the topic being discussed.
The idea was that Google Chrome would lose a significant market share because of this. And, on the off chance that somehow happens, that is basically a death sentence for all the browsers dependent on Chromium.
Yes. Which was not the topic being discussed.
The idea was that Google Chrome would lose a significant market share because of this. And, on the off chance that somehow happens, that is basically a death sentence for all the browsers dependent on Chromium.
Hmm, okay if thats the only thing you’re willing to discuss, I’ll respond directly to that then.
The idea that Google is going to have significant market share loss from removing V2 manifest support is laughable. This is especially true if you’re saying the market share for Chromium will decline specifically for uBlock Origin no longer working. As of right now there are:
- only 40 million users of uBlock Origin on Chromium browsers source
- over 5.52 billion people using the internet as of this month. source
So if 100% of uBlock Origin users stopped using Chromium browsers because of lack of uBlock Origin that would only represent a loss of .769%. Not even 1%.
Further, I’m betting Google would continue to keep development on Chromium going even with significant market share loss to some other browser. Google was around for the late 1990s and early 2000s when Microsoft absolutely dominated the web browser market and had the ability to literally change the specifications of the web on a whim and locking out non-Microsoft systems from the full web experience. A company Google’s size (and business model) cannot be safe if a competitor can change the web standards for the web client (browser) that Google products run in.
I say all of this as a loving user of Firefox with uBlock Origin, that I’m posting this comment with right now. However, I’m realistic about the situation as it exists today.
Presto era Opera was fantastic. At the time Firefox was kinda stagnating and Opera was just innovating.
You might like Vivaldi, they’re the most innovative chromium derived browser that I’ve used
I love Vivaldi. Am sad it’s Chromium. Wish Firefox would take a page out of Vivaldi’s features book and innovation approach.
They explain nothing. They’re in the same boat as all others: open source will let them keep MV2 longer than mainstream chrome, but that future is uncertain as the main project codebase starts to evolve around MV3 and backward compatibility to hack MV2 back in gets lost over time. Nobody here can make promises, and sites that make that make those judgments are naive.
Doesn’t even matter since it is a Chinese browser. Anyway, the only way to potentially save the www, is to massively take away market share for Chromium based browsers. And unfortunately I doubt this will happen. Since last year, Chrome market share went up, while Firefox market share went down. People are clearly too stupid to make their own fucking decisions.
A reminder that Opera is owned by a Chinese public company. I wouldn’t trust the browser for privacy reasons.
Not even just that, they also have a history with making loan apps with predatory rates. I wouldnt trust them even if I was a member of CCP.
s/owned by a Chinese public company/proprietary/Although another problem is that it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Yet another chromium browser with built-in proxies and data collection 🤷
What do you mean substitute Proprietary?
Is it not true?
I seam to remember they got bought, and then their Norwegian presence suddenly got much smaller
No, they’ve definitely been Chinese last time I’ve checked. It’s just that it seems a bit weird to me to distrust software just because it’s Chinese, since foss stuff from china can be trusted as it’s possible to audit it (say, shadowsocks or xray), and proprietary software from outside of china can send your data wherever it’s programmed to (e.g. windows or chrome). Besides, while it’s alleged China could influence Chinese developers to either hand over userdata or backdoor the software, it’s not like other governments can’t, and for an average Joe the consequences are, I suspect, more or less the same
Probably because they market to gamers, who tend to hate ads even more than the common pleb.
Opera is not a trustworthy browser and there has been no point in it existing since they stopped using presto.
~Why is that? Any extra resources on it not being trustworthy?~
Nevermind, I just read other comments below :)
Basically, owned by a Chinese company and based on Chromium. If you need something based on Chromium, I recommend Brave since it has a built-in ad-blocker. I use it as a backup, and it works well for the odd page that doesn’t work in Firefox. That said, I recommend Firefox or one of its forks over anything Chromium based.
Impostors, in other words.
Just use Firefox and its variants for more privacy. Done. Chromium is a dead road. Even with ungoogled chromium , brave , etc you have to trust the maintainers and their compiled version.
serious question: how does opera (the company) make money?
originally? a paid product. now? crypto!
Partner integrations from what I know - search engines, bookmarks and so on.
Partner integration? You mean a partner of them pays them to be allowed to look at your browsing habits?
Did opera leave Norway? Is this stuff worse after that, if they left? What country did they go to?
Treat it however you want - from what I know even Mozilla has the same arrangement with Google and Firefox.
Wait, so you are saying that being open source and having a default search engine is the same as being both proprietary and being owned by a Chinese owner?
I’m saying that the sources of income are the same regardless of what the company structure or the software licence is.
Zhou Yahui (Chinese: 周亚辉; born February 1977) is a Chinese billionaire and entrepreneur. In 2008, he founded Kunlun Tech Co Ltd (formerly Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd) one of the largest web game developers in China, where he was the chairman and CEO until 2020. Yahui Zhou currently serves as chairman and co-CEO of Opera. His estimated net worth is US$2.2 billion.
A better title: Opera explains shit on how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support. Will talk to developers so see if anyone has a good ideas.
They mention that the shared codebase means they can add functions back in, so there’s that. To me that reads like a hard fork that they’d have to maintain independently.
This is supposition but…
I imagine that disabling V2 is as simple as setting a flag during compile, at present. Obviously as the rest of the code base progresses it will become less simple to enable V2 support.
From a marketing perspective, the smart play is to say that you’ll continue supporting uBlock Origin and keep saying that for at least the next month or so, in order to gather up some refugees from chrome. Thereafter tell every one that your built in blocker is better than uBlock Origin anyway, and then drop support for V2.
I guess the current situation could be better if Opera and Brave coordinated among themselves a shared codebase for a patch that would allow both of them to keep v2 working. The thing is that Brave most likely doesn’t actually care, they’ve a built in adblocker so if v2 goes away then their marketshare will increase. Opera can’t do it alone because, well it is the Opera Chinese owned company after all.
I was really hopping that Microsoft would take on this, think about it, from a strategic PoV if Edge kept v2 and advertised it they could just snatch a big chunk of users from Google.
Opera browser? The one that everyone was making a stink about a few years ago? The one owned directly by a Chinese based company, and was supposedly sending telemetry to China?
People are still using it thanks to them forcing (ig sponsors from yt videos) and appealing to young generations with the opera gx browser and Twitter account mostly.
With the regular browser I assume they got it by accident while downloading adware(this might have happened to gx).Plus the whole exploiting poor people thing: https://www.engadget.com/2020-01-19-opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps.html?guccounter=1
I stopped using Opera the second it wasn’t Norwegian. I use Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile and Vivaldi as the “clean” browser when something k. Waterfox/Librewolf fucks up an important webpage I have to use
The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn’t mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.
I’ve been googling for a bit, and there are articles concerned this might happen from 2016 when the takeover was announced, and plenty of discussions on reddit, hacker news, y-combinator, quora and even on the official Opera forum (not deleted or redacted, mind you), but there wasn’t any clear evidence that telemetry is being shared.
While the concern remains valid, I’m also asking myself whether it’s that much worse than Chrome, Brave or Firefox sending telemetry to the US? I’m neither American nor Chinese, and would consider both governments hostile. Which one of them has access to my data is merely a choice between plague and cholera.
So in the end it’s on informed users to block transmission of telemetry themselves, regardless of their browser of choice.
I would rather give my data to Firefox than a company who’s entire business model is selling user data. That being said, you could use librewolf which removes telemetry. I use both Firefox and librewolf
Some people would rather give their data to opera then firefox 🤦♂️
Mozilla seems to be transitioning to becoming an advertising company so I wouldn’t want them to have my data either.
I’m using Fennec which also removes telemetry, but many standard users are not comfortable installing apps that aren’t on Google play.
The amount of people who only feel comfortable downloading on Google Play and also care about privacy I feel like is very small but I don’t know.
The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn’t mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.
I want to upvote this.
and would consider both governments hostile.
I want to downvote this.
So I guess I will do neither since I can’t do both.
It seems that many people here are not aware of how much Mozilla depends on Google, so switching to them is a small consolation. Maybe it’s time to support the development of new engines like Servo and Ladybird more. Servo even recently released an Android version (currently not very usable, but I downloaded it just to show support).
Sure, but it is still the most usable alternative we have for now. I would avoid stock FF and use either Librewolf or hardened FF because the default browser spies too.
Really have hopes for Servo/Ladybird!
Of course, I also use LibreWolf, Mull… but we expose ourselves to security risks this way (as is currently happening with Firefox and Mull), and besides that, you have to trust projects more and more whose code is not reviewed as thoroughly.
You won’t get me off adblock, as of recently i’ve come to find we get significantly more ads compared to friends and family.
My dad plays wordfeud, so i install and play a set with him…about 5 seconds in i get frustrated at the 4th ad and my dad goes: “which ads”.
My friends keep telling me i’m taking the youtube ads far too serious as they are only 10 seconds and show it to me too.
My youtube ads are 1 minute unskippable blocks before and after 1m 51s videos. I’ll get a 1min ad block halfway into a 5 minute video even though youtube themselves claim they don’t do that.
How the fuck am i so fucked when it comes to ads, my dads phone is almost completely ad free. Heck the google top suggestions that are basically paid for ads don’t even show up on his phone.
He can play those free apps (advertisement feeding software) without getting any ads and he’s adamant his phone isn’t modified.
If you use android, just use adguard private dns. It will get rid of third party apps ads. For youtube you need revanced or newpipe
Eh, I haven’t seen an ad on YouTube for years, I just use uBlock Origin on Firefox and they’re all gone. You can also do that on mobile as well.
That said, I use Grayjay on mobile because it eliminates ads and also lets me sub to videos from other platforms. I have a few subs from Odyssee, one from Rumble, and a half dozen or so from Nebula. None of them display ads, and I only occasionally have some weird issue where a video doesn’t load (usually just close and re-open the video and it works).
The DNS option is nice if you use an app that you don’t have any control over, but for videos and regular web browsing, you can just use an ad-blocker.
I wager your dad has a subscription or something he doesnt want to admit.
If you’re still using Chrome it’s a you problem.
Firefox + ublock origin + SponsorBlock for youtube is great. Works on mobile too!
I’ve been using a chromebook for the last 4 years and it’s been great for my needs (youtube, streaming, porn, etc), but I am shopping for a windows machine now because fuck google.
I’m not too familiar with chrome books, i know some of them are insanely locked down to prevent this… but see if theres a linux distro compatible with your chromebook, and if its possible to slap a linux install on it.
save you having to buy a new machine, possibly.
firefox doesn’t support HDR
Thanks choom, you reminded me to reinstall Sponsorblock.
To add to this- playback also continues with the screen off too. So ya, ff mobile with those extensions is basically yt premium XD
It works on Android, but I don’t believe it works on iOS.
The other day I got to pondering whether people who work for ad serving companies have ad blockers on their work computers.
I used to work for an ad heavy mobile game and ad serving company couple of years ago, and I had ad blocking at dns level in my house. It blocks not only ads, but also most tracking and telemetry. My bosses wanted to know why my devices were not displaying ads or dialing back to home, they were pretty fucking puzzled. They were terrified others like me were around. Basically their entire business model depends of people not knowing how to block ads and telemetry
I didn’t other than for testing, in fact I had to research and figure out ways to bypass ad blockers, to prevent social icons from being blocked etc. I even wrote that company a brand new admin website to replace their old one, they liked it so much that they laid me off a few months later even though they were already underpaying me because they wanted someone cheaper to maintain it. I found a 30% higher paying job a few months later and been there since. lol
just to be clear, for fear we mentally normalize this
- this is hostile behavior from Chrome
- what the customer does with the browser, in a sane world, is of no concern of the guy who made it.
to accept that another person has one sided authority to determine what you can and can’t do with a tool, after it is in your possession is weird.
