Google never wanted to have these adblock extensions on their store in the first place, it just turns out that when chrome was released and had zero market share they had to make this huge compromise to gain territory in the browser arena and eventually overthrow Firefox and the competition. And when (not if, when – it will eventually happen) they do that I will jump off from the Chrome bandwagon.
"When" they do that, it will be because they have judged that they have, by then, thoroughly extinguished all competition. If you (the royal "you") want there to exist an alternative browser to which to jump to when the time comes, then consider making the jump today, when your influence might still make some small contribution to the competitiveness of the browser market.
Chrome serves me just fine nowadays. Unlike you, I'm not some kind of Gandhi of the tech scene or anything like that. If it serves me fine I won't stop using it. If Chrome ceases to support adblock extensions then I will go look for some other browser, I would probably change to Vivaldi or anything like that, or even Firefox, they sure as hell will be there.
For as long as you, I and everyone else continues to use Chrome, we effectively support Google's ability to monopolise the browser space.
Google's continuing monopolisation of the browser space will (and is?) leading to a dearth of alternatives.
So, by waiting for the time when Google finally puts that final straw on the haystack which makes this whole thing too onerous to bear - and then you say "right, now I've finally had enough - I'm switching ...."
... you may find that there's nothing left to switch to.
Chromium / Blink is open source, we should be doing everything we can to get as many users using non-Google Chromium browsers. We really shouldn't be having to worry so much about Google's conflicts of interests. Brave and Blink-based Edge are looking to be better and better options.
Chromium is still controlled by Google. Exhibit A: this ad-blocking API issue, where Google decisions will affect all Chromium browsers. (Sure, they can maintain patches against upstream, but over time that becomes non-viable.)
If Google's behaviour concerns you, you need to use Firefox or Safari.
This is a strange comment. On Linux at least, Firefox is far easier and quicker to get building from scratch than Chromium. I've done both relatively recently.
Maybe it's unfair, but I can't help but think of Brave as just a scheme to push their cryptocurrency. They're removing the website's ability to monetize and replacing it with their own system. That seems gross.
You're not wrong about what it boils down to, but, I'm all for it. I didn't mind ads, generally, until I did. Until they started hijacking your browser, redirecting you, doing popups. Ad people have shown they cannot be trusted on the whole. What Brave seems to be doing is doing their own 'safe ads' system, and sharing the money. It will likely be less for the content creators, but as a 'at-my-wits-end-with-ads' Brave user, I just don't care.
If you look at the benchmark results, aggressively stripping ads and tracking can result in pages loading twice as fast and hours of extra battery life. I'm happy to pay money to view your website, but modern web ads are a ridiculous and punitive payment scheme.
What you're doing is the equivalent of walking into a store, picking up $100 of merchandise, slapping $10 on the counter and walking out because "I'm happy to buy your products, but your prices are ridiculous". It's not a very moral position to take.
gorhill makes a moral argument on the other side of yours [1]:
That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft. Don't fall for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy.
Your analogy is flawed because it assumes the customer walking into the store retains their privacy and is not charged any hidden costs.
A more accurate example would be one in which the customer walks into a store that:
* data mines as much about that person as possible to profile them
* sells that data without consent to unvetted global buyers
* increases the risk that customer's devices are compromised (drive-by malware installs through ad placements on mainstream sites)
* charges them a hidden surprise fee (in the form of increased data usage, battery usage etc from poorly-designed ad systems).
Presenting naive analogies is harmful to our ability as a society to reason about the costs of systems like this.
I'd urge anyone to have a read and/or follow Ad Fraud Historian to understand how bad / harmful the existing ad-tech ecosystem is. [2]
It's truly awful, and anything that moves the internet away from this dystopian, incompetent and fraudulent monetisation approach to content is doing all of humanity a huge favor.
I'm much more sympathetic to the privacy point of view than the "pages loading twice as fast and hours of extra battery life" is my right so I'm going to remove your ability to make money so I can have your content faster.
The people most impacted aren't the entitled well-off first world citizens you allude to, but second and third world citizens and youth.
The rational choices of market participants do not remove the ability of sellers to sell, but they certainly do create more economic pressure for sellers to find and support better systems.
Also consider that the problem is not audiences vs publishers. It's corrupt middlemen harming audiences (privacy / malware / hidden costs) and defrauding publishers (fake traffic, bots, perverse incentives).
At this stage Brave's system of on-device ML in-browser for relevance and privacy, and opt-in ads seems a much better model, and I'm sure others will pop-up too.
We seem to be on the cusp of much better approaches to funding content, so it's really up to us to start advocating and supporting these new approaches.
What you're describing is clear theft. Blocking ads is much grayer, since there's no real cost being charged by the site. I'd say it's closer as an analogy to say going to a store and using the bathroom but not buying anything.
Society has created legally enforceable ways to be compensated for copyrighted content. If you choose not to take advantage of those mechanisms, whose fault is that?
I mean we would be paid for viewing ads this way instead of being paid nothing as it is now, and losing all our privacy instead.
Seems like a win/win to me. Advertisers would actually pay the eyeballs that should be paid for seeing ads instead of the middleman in the attention economy. The technology in the Basic Attention Token performs all the functions instead.
Maybe you will pay, but the market as a whole has been very clear here. Free wins. Personally I dont mind either. I'd prefer to see ads relevant to me rather within some limitations of privacy.
I feel government needs to set the limits here rather than expect business to self regulate. Nor will the market self regulate as this is more technical than most people are interested to understand, and back to free wins.
I use Brave and have never bought any cryptocurrency, nor do I intend to.
I think it will be a net positive if every targeted ad company stops using that model, so Brave shutting this down is a huge plus for me.
Note, I used a similar setup in chrome and Firefox that some might find gross as well as it removed the ability for websites to monetize me using ads or data from surveillance.
No, certainly not. I want an Internet with lots of business models including paywalls and large players, but also OSS, amateur bloggers, publicly funded sites, etc.
I remember an Internet back when there were only university sites and personal sites. It had a lot of flaws, but was better, I think than our situation where our data are sold and resold with no way of customer control.
UI in javascript = still to this day it can take 2-3 seconds when opening new tabs or going fullscreen. Plus they released a statement about "observing" Google adblock decisions instead of going hard in with "we will not deprecate webrequest usability in our fork".
Does the webRequest API deprecation also impact Chromium, and therefore Brave as well? Brave seems like it's willing to backfill in changes to Chromium, but I'm wondering how this impacts the browser overall.
I use Brave as my daily driver (with Shields Up and uBlock Origin), but I'm not sure what the actual impact will be when it comes.
I seem to recall that the Safari content blocking API is like the proposed Chromium API, but that doesn't alarm people because
a) Apple is less of an ad company than Google, so less of a perceived conflict of interest
b) Google is perceived to break stuff that is already working
c) Safari/Webkit aren't dominant outside of iOS where they're mandatory
The only thing I'm missing on Firefox is when I am on my Macbook, is that fling when using my touchpad. It's essential to any MacOS app and it feels weird not to have it. I'm used to it on Linux and Windows though.
That's in macOS System Preferences. I use it all the time. Go to Trackpad / More Gestures and check "Swipe between pages". You can also control how many fingers you want to use. I set it to three fingers so that it doesn't conflict with horizontal scrolling.
I mean, mobile Safari doesn't allow extensions, and only recently allowed content blockers. Safari also has essentially the same model that Chrome wants to adopt:
> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn't have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles Content Blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, Content Blockers have no knowledge of users' history or the websites they visit.
Do you have some reasons you prefer chrome dev tools to FF? I consider FF to have the more featureful devtools, for example the sheer amount of stuff under the styles tab, you can tweak fonts in browser.
I do remember back when I used chrome there would be new `console.x` features that were chrome only from time to time, but after I switched to FF I never really looked back
Chrome's DevTools handles developing large unbundled webapps better. When your loader is reaching to the fs for thousands of source files for a single page load, Chrome performs significantly better than Firefox. Same goes for Ctrl+P jumping to files and debugging performance.
It's gotten a lot better over the last two years, especially when FF DevTools got support for source maps and TypeScript debugging, but it still lags enough to keep me using Chrome for my job, Firefox at home.
Devtools are also in standard firefox. The developer edition just includes new features that haven't yet made it to the current release. The chrome analog is Chrome Dev (https://www.google.com/chrome/dev/)
I'm glad I already made the switch to FireFox. I only use Chrome to access Google apps, because for some strange reason they work a lot better in Chrome...
The only thing I miss is a Session Buddy equivalent. When my computer crashes, it's nice to be able to restore all my tabs and windows, and also it's nice to be able to close a bunch of windows when I travel and then go back to my tab state from three weeks ago.
Maybe wrap Firefox startup in a shell script that backs up your profile data before starting the browser, and then when the problem occurs send a bug report and work with the developers to give them the information they might need.
These bugs suck for everyone and I'm sure Mozilla developers would appreciate any help they can get to track it down.
Have you tried hitting Ctrl+Shift+N to restore the previously closed windows?
These will behave differently: (1) "Quitting" Firefox will multiple windows open. (2) Using your WM to close both Firefox windows. The latter will cause only the last-closed window to be restored, but you can pop the others off the stack too with Ctrl+Shift+N.
Just so you don't feel crazy, I've had this happen multiple times as well (on both Linux and Windows).
In fact, it's one of the larger reasons (tabs constantly crashing is the largest one atm) I leave Firefox for side jobs instead of being relied upon as my main browser.
Hm, I had session restore fail maybe every 3 years or so.
For more features, I'd recommend looking at either the Container feature, that might be able to help, or otherwise third-party extensions - maybe another commenter has a recommendation, since there's a giant number of tab management extensions, and it's hard to tell which ones do what perfectly.
Firefox has this if you are using a Firefox account at least.
If you search around a bit in the sidebar menu you’ll find a list of all the open and previously open tabs on any of your PC’s. Including ability to restore all of them at once.
It's not exactly sessions, but you can bookmark all open tabs (perhaps into a folder called sessions/worktrip_boston), and then later "open all as tabs" using that folder.
I find this useful when researching a particular thing, and wanting to save the resources for later. Sorry I can't remember the exact menu items, as I'm on Firefox mobile and it doesn't do it.
Yes! Thank you! I don't know why my searching failed to find this, but it is in fact exactly what I was looking for. If this were Reddit I'd give you Gold. You're my hero.
This impacts you if you're on FF too... if this works and Google is able to monetize Chrome more directly than FF then FF is going to have less development resources.
Former Session Buddy user. I'm using Session Sync and it's pretty neat. I think Session Buddy UI is still better and Session Sync needs some improvements (such as selecting multiple tabs in a session simultaneously). However, once I got used to it, I didn't miss it at all.
In addition, I like the integration with Firefox Bookmarks. It creates a folder "Session Sync" and stores sessions as sub-folders. So, if anything happens, I still have them as simple, curated bookmarks.
Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the
capability to block unwanted content, but this will be
restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome.
Never heard of a paid version of Chrome before! Can anyone elaborate on this?
I gotta say I'm kind of glad Google is doing this. It will force me to finally abandon Chrome, something I should have done awhile ago.
Googler here, but I do not work on Chrome and I’m speaking on a personal capacity.
I believe this is a misnomer. The enterprise deployment stuff I’m aware of in Chrome/Chromium is accessible by any user, as far as I know, and in the past I’ve used it to force private browsing on always for my own personal usage.
That said, I switched to Firefox when Quantum came out and haven’t looked back. Mozilla has done some annoying stuff over time, but imo the browser itself is really solid, and with some tweaks is very good.
Looks like some useful stuff for deploying to Enterprise, but actually as far as I know the enterprise functionality exists in normal installations. Like for example, this stuff:
ADM/ADMX templates with 300+ user and device policies
ADM/ADMXs are a list of settable policies (rules) that Chrome will read from the Windows Registry on startup[1]. I'm going to make a huge assumption that the Chrome.exe for Enterprise users is no different to the Chrome.exe that everyone else uses, and it switches into 'Enterprise' mode if it sees certain key policy entries in the Registry[2].
These polices are typically set on a Windows Domain Controller and are pushed to Domain member machines (and users) on the network on a regular basis.
However end-users can simulate the policies by setting these Registry entries manually (There are about 4 places in the Registry where they live). Depending on where Chrome looks, the user may need local admin privileges to do this.
So, what we really need is a 'Chrome Enterprise Enabler' tool, that does this automatically for non-technical users. They would run this tool, the required Registry keys would be enabled, and WebRequest API based Ad-blocking would continue to work.
Unfortunately, none of this helps Linux users as I don't see a Linux Enterprise Chrome package.
---
[1] I've got 25+ years of Windows domain administration under my belt, this stuff used to be my bread-and-butter.
[2] Even if not, extracting just the Chrome MSI installer from the Enterprise bundle is trivial.
> These are just features and settings, there's no requirement to use them.
I think you missed my point. Google say that the Enterprise version will continue to support WebRequest API. If the Enterprise version is the same codebase as the normal version, then it's a good educated guess that the Policy keys are whats controlling that.
Chrome MSI and chrome EXE installers work a little differently. The MSI installer by default installs to the program files directory. I've seen the EXE installer often installed to the local user profile. to convert a regular install to Enterprise you would probably have to uninstall the local version and then install the MSI.
ADM templates are something Firefox is sorely lacking at the moment. I remember reading that it is on the road map but that does not help out much. Nevertheless, I installed both chrome and Firefox and my organization. I like Firefox and use it myself, but sadly it's just not as easy to administer as chrome.
So two things. The MSI installer will convert a local (EXE) installation to a global install (updating shortcuts and removing the local profile install whilst preserving the chrome profile).
Second, Firefox does have ADMX policies (ADMX being used primarily after Vista): https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates. I believe it took them so long because they were initially reluctant, user freedom etc. But I guess Chrome's success in enterprise made them reconsider. Honestly I never considered Firefox for our Windows Domain because of the lack of Group Policy support. Now I deploy both and users have options :)
FWIW it Is supported under Linux I believe, but unfortunately the documentation is lacking. If I recall correctly, you have to drop JSON files in the right places.
One of my favorite things with Firefox is the ability to “edit and resend” requests in the browser devtools. I’m sure there are plugins that do something similar on chrome/chromium. But I use it all the time and my colleagues are always blown away when I show them this.
Ah yeah, on occasion I will boot Firefox at work for this capability.
Truth be told I know of nothing similar in Chrome/Chromium, but you can do something similar using the healthy number of “Copy Request As” context options. I like to copy as fetch and manipulate it in the console. It’s not perfect but it’s useful.
The one thing I always liked about Chrome dev tools was the ability to introspect WebSocket frames. Last I checked this couldn’t be done in Firefox :(
Otherwise, I have found Firefox dev tools to be fairly competitive. I liked the CSS Grid stuff they had around the launch of Quantum; it made it easier for me to jump into Grid.
I use Firefox personally, but develop with Chrome. I have a hard time getting stack traces from Firefox reliably. Oftentimes one of the following occurs on Firefox:
There is no error, but the page won't load.
There is an error, but the error message is generic.
There is an error message, but no stack trace.
When I switch to chrome, I always get the error and stack trace without any further code modifications.
I make sure to clean up for Firefox in releases. But it's just impossible to develop without error messages and traces. I'm on Ubuntu using the latest stable releases.
Ugh. Is this really still broken? I'm not a web dev but I remember having to switch to Chromium 6-8 months ago when I needed to debug a websockets issue.
I don't believe it's accurate to say it's "accessible by any user", the net effect of the policy will be (over a time span of months or years) to limit ad blocking only to the most technically capable users who understand how to do what you describe.
Moreover, extensions that continue to use this behavior are required to adhere to manifest v2, and support for that manifest will likely eventually be deprecated. Chrome blocked the store from serving and updating manifest v1 extensions after a deprecation period.
Google rapidly deprecated version 1, from Chrome 18's release adding version 2 in March 2012 to blocking updating in March 2013, to removal of all extensions that had not updated from the Chrome Web Store in September 2013.
If Manifest v3 follows a similar trajectory, Chrome is on a path to remove uBlock Origin from its web store in 2 years.
Just to clarify, what I am referring to is the claim that it’s limited to paying enterprise customers. I could be wrong but I believe that the enterprise policy bits are what matter, and as far as I know all of those are available in Chrome/Chromium today, via group policy systems. When I say “accessible” I am specifically referring to that bit, definitely not suggesting ordinary users should do that.
What platform are you on? I tried Firefox quantum yesterday and could not stand the text rendering. Gmail looks awful. But I don't have a 4k monitor yet...
Well, without live heuristics. Chrome ad blocking is basically now limited to a dumb, limited list of URI patterns. Better than nothing, but much less capable than before.
And without privacy invasion implications. Apple introduced content blocking 4 versions ago implemented nearly the same way. No one would accuse Apple of trying to help Google make more money.
Every application has privacy implications, and it isn't difficult to manage this one. Having a giant warning around installing extensions with this level of access would be a good way to protect people while also allowing them to make their own decisions.
Because warning people has historically worked well with PCs not to mention Android.
See Also Vista UAC.
It’s kind of amazing for people to say that they care about their privacy and then they install extensions that can record their entire browsing history and install VPN software on their phones that intercept all of their internet communications.
There's a mountain of difference between "can" and "will", and it's called "trust".
For decades, people have been using software on their PCs which can essentially delete all their data or worse, yet what are the chances of that actually happening? Of course malware would exist, but at the same time, the unrestricted nature lead to a seamless exchange of data and creativity unhindered by any bureaucratic permission-maze.
A world of "perfect" security in which malware and cybercrime cannot exist is basically a dystopian police state.
And we have found better ways on a newer platforms not to implicitly trust apps with unfettered access to user data and surprisingly enough, no one has started rounding up people en masse for looking at cat videos....
... That's how computers work, yes. If you have a way to make a VPN that doesn't see its own traffic, I'm all ears. In the meantime, I trust a VPN more than my ISP.
In my personal case, yes I have because I'm running it myself on a VPS. In general, though, the commercial providers that I would use have stood up to court orders / warrants, so I reckon they're fine.
Unfortunately, I don't have a fast enough uplink to comment on speed concerns.
You don't see any hazard to showing a giant warning to people when they install something that almost everyone should use? If people see a big warning when they install a legitimate ad blocker, people will start ignoring the warnings.
The 30,000 rule limit is a pretty big deal breaker for me, but what sort of live heuristics are you referring to here? Aren't e.g. uBlock Origin's filters entirely rule based (not unlike most other ad blocker extensions)?
"We are planning to raise these values but we won't have updated numbers until we can run performance tests to find a good upper bound that will work across all supported devices."
Is there such a thing? The "paid" part comes from the article's gloss, not from Google. I could see it instead being "this is a switch you can turn on in Group Policy."
Ungoogled Chromium is Chromium with all google domains and google-specific code removed. It keeps the nice things about Chrome/Chromium like the dev tools and is compatible with Chrome extentions, though you do have to download and install them manually. Unlike Chrome, it is also 100% open source.
I was under the impression that Chromium had some Google integrations but was pretty harmless from a privacy standpoint unless you sign in to Google. Is that wrong? Do I need to use Ungoogled Chromium instead?
People were predicting this as the Chrome endgame years ago. It's playing out exactly as everyone cynically expected.
It's time to eliminate Google from your life as much as possible if you haven't already. Too many wake up calls. They are not a tech company, they are data monopolists. Stop giving them your data.
I see hardly anything even about advertising in there? Let alone anything about ad blockers. It's just generic statements/quotes about monopoly, privacy, browser wars, etc... and a few notes about how promoting the web helps promote Google's products/services indirectly too, which helps their bottom line... which Google itself has been saying openly since forever. There's nothing there particularly predictive of this particular chain of events.
They mean Chrome extensions installed via gsuite - Google's enterprise management system. Ie - you can have managed Chromebooks and force install extensions. A lot of school's use it for web filtering.
Are brave in control of the web request API within their build? I know it's a fork of Chromium, just not sure how much is available for them to change.
I have been using brave for months and intend to continue if uBo keeps working. Braves internal ad blocking doesn't stop everything.
Vivaldi builds on top of Chromium. All Chromium browsers will eventually receive these extensions changes as well unless they fork their codebase. Most of them support extensions via the Chrome Web Store though which means they'll need to adopt Manifest V3.
> Firefox is available on all platforms (including Chrome OS via the Android or Linux app)
Maybe this is a viable solution on brand new chromebooks, but on my Acer R11 both Android apps and Linux containers run pretty poorly. I use an Android app as my password tool just fine, but trying Firefox was a rather poor experience. And the linux container just dogs trying to do anything.
I have Ubuntu loaded on via crouton (to use tools like GIMP or actual VLC), but if chrome gets rid of ad blocking that removes much of the point of ChromeOS for me entirely.
I found this post highly editorialized. Here's the actual response if you want to understand the context, instead of simply seeing bits and pieces with a journalist's spin.
Also, the headline seems mostly incorrect. The gist of it, as I understand, is that Chrome is enforcing a migration from the webRequest API to a new declarativeNetRequest API. The latter API doesn't currently have all the capabilities of the former, which is important for context blocking extensions. However, features are still being added and the team states that they are interested in more feedback from extension developers.
And if those features happen to never be implemented?
I really think it is a bad practice to force adoption of a new API that can't fulfill the same functions as the previous one.
Nobody would be here talking about this if they just made the new API without breaking add blocking (useful add blocking), and then forced people to move.
Even more so given that it looks really bad when your main goal is to serve people ads.
> I really think it is a bad practice to force adoption of a new API that can't fulfill the same functions as the previous one.
I agree, which incidentally is the reason I switched from Firefox to Chromium a couple years back as Mozilla dropped XUL extensions for their own development convenience, toward an ideal of cross-browser extension compatibility, and in hoping to win over Chrome users by making Firefox more alike in both looks and performance.
How many of those motivations have changed, and do we know that Mozilla aren't actually going to follow suit with a similar restructuring of APIs some time after such changes have settled into and been normalized in Chrome?
I'm tired of major corps doing this with their APIs, either the new API is a drop in replacement for the old API or you're doing shady shit in the guise of "it's coming! soonish~"
Microsoft might just have the horsepower to keep up with any particularly shitty changes that Google might potentially try to push through, better than some of the other Chromium skins. At least if they want to.
Unless they backfill it... I can see Microsoft going all out with Edge Chromium and Brave also trying their best. Both have manpower to try overcome Google's decisions on Chromium with their forks.
What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do.
This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3:
In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.
The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business.
The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome.
Indeed, almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. The fact that Eyeo has >150 employees tells us something about the amount of money to be made from ad blocking. Although they have only published the numbers from 2016, it seems they are quickly approaching around €50 million yearly revenue, with almost 50% of pure profit. For Google this Acceptable Ads Program may be more than a 100 million dollar business.
The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google's own software to eliminate their core business model.
Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved.
Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.
Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users.
In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads.
ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users.
Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don't see the stuff they recommend to you.
The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user.
ABP/Eyeo is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.
This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the embedded framework...
We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7/8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome.
The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in the browser space, not helped by the underlying HTML/JS spec becoming exponentially more convoluted to the point where building your own renderer is nigh impossible.
And since everyone is standardising on a Google, their decisions on ad blocking and supporting APIs are automatically going to flow down into every dependent product.
It’s frustrating that MS copped out and went Chromium. Like we never learned this lesson the first time.
We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least. These need to be protected if we don’t want Google and the ad network to totally control the browsing experience.
Although, controversially, we as a web dev collective have learned nothing if we continue to only develop for a single browser. Not for the web itself, but for one particular rendering engine. “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept.
The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork. (The train has already left the station for anything besides WebKit or Blink, since the lack of accessibility of Gecko means it will never be adopted by anyone else.)
But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground (e.g. Opera, Firefox).
And unfortunately no single player involved can gain much by going against Google. What would Microsoft gain from forking? Nothing.
I think 10 years in the future we might see WebKit and Blink merge together into a single core engine.
Modern Capitalism almost dictates this development, as corporations strive to save money at all costs.
Genuine question, will Apple leave all the tracking/advertising money on the table in order to best Google on privacy? Or, once they win enough market-share will they just sell out?
Is that true? IE was incumbent and Firefox unseated it. They had the legacy of Netscape, sure, but they didn’t throw the towel and reskin IE the same way other browsers of the time did.
Besides that, at which point does the dominant search and advertising company of the internet get an antitrust case for this? People think google is trustworthy yet they do nothing to earn that trust.
This kinda erases history. IE was riddled with security flaws and stagnant beyond belief when Firefox usurped it. There was a compelling reason to use an IE alternative back then - they actually offered something IE couldn't give.
Do these changes make Google less stagnant, as they disempower the discerning user who wants at least some control over their browsing experience?
Google's new security flaw is that they are going to moderate ad-blocking, become responsible for it, and then depend on their inhuman machine to ignore all of your complaints. No different to how you can't find a human connect when you get screwed out of Gmail or Google Wallet because of their mathematics.
As a total thought experiment on where I'm coming from with this: in Star Trek TNG, Data (the Android) spends seven years with us exploring the human equation. Strip out the narrative imbalance and do you think the current automation of help and support is anywhere near aligned to the ideals of that 30 year old TV show that didn't know better? Or is the algorithm an overfitting to Google's commercial needs?
It's tangential to this thread but for some reason it felt worth writing out.
Standards often shift be a substantial reconsolidation, in which numerous side features are discarded.
HTML itself emerged from such a consolidation (from SGML) and went through this process a few times. There are numerous other examples of technical recapitulation.
HTML and the menagerie of related standards has never, as far as I'm aware, become simpler. And the old versions have never been removed from a browser.
XHTML is hard-structured, and among its negatives, requires being fully downloaded to be parsed and validated.
HTML, including H5, has soft-fail modes.
At least that's the justification I generally see. See the Criticism section of the Wikipedia article:
You're responding to a thread pointing out that browsers are too complicated to implement, which has forced everyone but Google and Mozilla to give up on providing browsers and web standards.
And Google is currently the funding source for Mozilla, giving them a more or less complete monopoly on the future of the web.
Mozilla can (and does) offer putting the privacy concerns and an open web first.
Google has worked very hard over the years to make itself into an organization with deeply baked-in incentives to do the opposite. It'd take a decade of sustained effort working counter to powerful incentives to fix that.
This is distinct from making a capable well-performing browser, which Google has done. So has Mozilla.
Chrome might not have that many security holes, but if you browse without adblock you will quickly see just how festered the web is with horrible, horrible ads.
Chrome without adblock is essentially ie6, with tabs.
Microsoft basically shut down the IE team after they beat Netscape, which gave Firefox a chance to produce a better product. Web browsing is so closely tied to Google's core business that they're unlikely to mothball Chrome development.
I'm not sure this analogy works, because internet explorer was pure garbage. It was worse than garbage, it was like the nasty water left over at the top of the industrial drain, and by just looking at it you risk losing your eye sight. IE was more ripe for disruption like few products ever are, it was so ripe we got not one, but two competitors (chrome)!
Pound for pound, chrome is ridiculously far ahead of internet explorer mid-2000's. IDK what the hell someone is going to have to do to upend chrome and its rendering components but is going to have to be great.
It's not what someone had to do to upend IE or that they will have to do to upend Chrome, it's what Microsoft didn't do to keep IE in power: they didn't do anything.
I agree with that completely, but personally, I seriously doubt Alphabet is going to let its flagship product's flag ship delivery vehicle falter like ie did.
I mean, who knows. Never say never, but they are going to be tough competition. Not to mention that browsers are becoming so advanced it will be tough for a small team to match the engineering prowess of a company like google.
Crack the DRM and do it in a country that does not care about DMCA and has lax copyright laws. You could create an "illegal browser", and judging by how effective all the other antipiracy efforts have been to date (i.e. not at all), I doubt you'll face too much opposition...
Or go the "insert DeCSS here" route that some used back when that was a thing. "If you happen to have somehow acquired a WideVine lib, having hash [some string], stick it here if you want to watch Netflix."
What do you mean "lack of accessibility of Gecko"? Did you mean "lack of embedability"?
Gecko's embedability sucks ... on desktop. But that's not inevitable, it's just a matter of priorities and resources. On Android it's getting a lot better and something like GeckoView on Android could be made to work on desktop too ... if there's demand and perceived benefit.
(Mozilla's in the middle of upgrading Gecko's multiprocess support for fine-grained "site isolation" so now might not be the ideal time to stabilize embedding APIs.)
That might be true. They're all incredibly complex beasts. I don't think it matters much for adoption in terms of embedding or forking to create a new browser; the engine internals can and should mostly be hidden behind an API.
People depend on Chromium/Blink because there's no other options. You can't really embed Gecko, and WebKit (Safari) can sometimes lack desirable web platform features.
Speaking as someone who worked on Gecko at Mozilla for many years, that page is years (if not more than a decade) out of date and embedding Gecko is a rather miserable experience.
Disclaimer: Work for Mozilla but not on the browser core, thoughts are my own, grain of salt, etc.
My understanding is that on Desktop it's much more difficult than it ideally should be.
With that said we've got a pretty solid story being worked on for mobile via GeckoView [1] and Android Components [2], there's a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog about our use of them in Focus [3] and they're also what is being used for building the "next generation" version of Firefox for Android currently code-named Fenix [4][5].
I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to get some of the GeckoView work back onto our desktop platforms.
Yet still, we have Rust (a phenomenally innovative programming language) that was conceived, as far as I understand it, to build a new rendering engine. I've not checked in on Servo for some time but they were going for full on ACID2 compliance with CSS, meeting the specs for HTML...A lot of that work became Electrolysis and then Quantum. Mozilla has been a serious lab for innovation without the conflict of interest in ad revenue.
Even if that effort has changed focus, the community now has Rust and I don't think we've seen such a fresh language paradigm since we got Lisp, Haskell, Ocaml, F#, Scala...
In which case, the world has benefitted from browser competition as a total side-effect of competing with the incumbent browser; we got the various evolutions of C and C++. Exactly the same way we got V8 and then nodejs and the whole server-side rendering paradigm with React and JSX.
If we all fall back to Chromium for everything, then Google has achieved a Pyrrhic victory. They need a disruptor to up their game... and it isn't WASM either.
I've been really liking rust thus far, its pretty awesome and I like the community. I didn't know it was made for a rednering engine. It would be nice to have something built by someone other than Mozilla though, just purely for more competition. I could care less that IE sold out, they made their bed in the 2000's and there was no escaping it. As a corporate programmer I am glad they a
I've been really liking rust thus far, its pretty awesome and I like the community. I didn't know it was made for a rednering engine. It would be nice to have something built by someone other than Mozilla though, just purely for more competition. I could care less that IE sold out, they made their bed in the 2000's and there was no escaping it.
Servo is very promising, but not ready for commercial embedded applications yet (as of approx 3-4 months ago last time I checked it).
It will likely be a better engine than embedded Chromium when it's done (if for no other reason than that it seems to have fewer dependencies[0]), but I wouldn't start building an application on top of it today.
I am highly interested in finding a more performant alternative to Electron. I'm currently building a web-first game that will also be available as a fully offline native app. I'll probably use Electron unless the ecosystem changes drastically before I'm done. Some really interesting projects out there -- not just Servo, but also thin wrappers around OS web views, even a few re-implementations of CSS/HTML that just force you to cross-compile or port your Javascript to another language.
But I haven't found any that were mature enough that I felt comfortable using them. Servo was the most promising project I personally have seen so far, but it needs more time.
Note that charitable donations (of the 501(c)(3) variety) in the U.S. can only be employed for a very specific whitelist of purposes, and software development and marketing are not among those (the Mozilla Foundation uses donations to fund things like education programs instead). If you're a software developer who's interested in the health of Firefox specifically, consider instead donating your time by volunteering (not limited merely to Mozilla or Firefox; there are dozens of open-source projects whose development directly or indirectly ends up benefiting Firefox).
I'm told that this is incorrect and that the FSF has been doing it for 34 years, the EFF does it, the ACLU has done it and others have even paid for proprietary software development (their apps etc).
I'm willing to stay if we can get something mutual. Mineral rights payouts, or an end to Adsense bans.
Open source the platform behind their entire revenue.
What? They scared or something?
I know they have investors, and research into new medicine and energy depend on consumer driven revenue.
Instead of:
"In the long run, we are all dead."
I see it as:
"Until further notice, unless someone gets really really good at math, we are going to die in horrible horrible agony. Loosing all your wealth is the last of your concerns."
Yep, I'm about to ditch Chrome altogether now. I gritted my teeth and just handled a few of the more bone-headed changes the Chrome team made, but this latest change is a deal breaker.
The truth is, I actually don't need Chrome for anything. Firefox is faster now, gives me more freedom and has less corporate affiliations. I'll stick with Mozilla.
No. This is a misconception that is being spread around. I don't know what FF containers are useful for, but they certainly do not function to replace Chrome's profiles:
I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:
- New tabs do not inherit current container
- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)
- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.
- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.
Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.
As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
I don’t know about profiles, so I can’t speak to that. All I can do is say that I use containers to open multiple tabs of the same site with different users.
For example, I have multiple AWS accounts. To login to two different ones at the same time, I use different containers. Way better than opening one is FF, one in Chrome, etc. When I open a link from a container in a new tab it opens in the same container.
Yes, that use case sounds very much like what Profiles are for. You'll find that Profiles are an improvement over Containers for tasks like that (logging into the same URL as different identities) for all the reasons I list above.
> Way better than opening one is FF, one in Chrome, etc
> Yes, that use case sounds very much like what Profiles are for.
I'm not quite sure how profiles work in Chrome, but from a Firefox point-of-view this is only true if you also want to keep your history/bookmarks/settings/add-ons completely separate, too.
Yes, history, bookmarks and extensions are separate. I have one profile for "me in my personal life" and "me at work", and a few for testing logins to different interfaces at work. So this degree of separation is mostly what I want, although it can be a little annoying to maintain the extensions you want under both profiles.
Keeping history separate in particular is very valuable since nowadays the fastest / least hassle way to bring up a site is to start typing the beginning of the URL in the navigation bar, so you wouldn't want work URLs mixed in with non-work URLs.
Containers are great to "containerize" cookies but that's about it.
If you have multiple "personas", like a personal account with bookmarks and a work account with another set of bookmarks and settings, you'll want a separate profile.
On my low-end mac (Macbook) Chrome is still noticeable faster than Firefox. I ran Firefox the last year, but then I tried the new Opera and it was so much faster. Trying out others I realized it's the blink engine. So now I am using Vivaldi...
This is much less apparent on faster machines or on Linux/Windows though, but for me it is more efficient to use the same browser on all my machines.
For me, it was Chrome's peerless DevTools (although Firefox has been catching up recently) and the fact that entering full screen on Firefox freezes up the entire UI for me (it's probably some bad interaction with BSPWM).
oh, for sure. it's just that at this point in time, on my macos firefox is simply inferior to macos chrome.
fyi i'm a power user (tens/hundreds of tabs, lots of web development etc), so this might not apply to everybody.
I tend to have to use it at work. The reason I haven't shifted at work is a ridiculous one really - it's the way you can tear off tabs and move them to another screen - it doesn't tear the same way as Chrome. Like I say, ridiculous.
Drag the tab away from the title bar and to a different screen, it should just birth a new window and live in that. You can also drag tabs from one window to another, or drag a window with only one tab to merge it with another window
> This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink
Chromium is generally fine, until Google packages it as Chrome. The issues are not inherent to Chromium, they're failures of principle at Google.
I know people like the idea, in concept, of engine diversity on the web, but the alternatives are terrible.
Anyone who says that Firefox runs anywhere near as well as Chromium on Linux is either incredibly lucky, extremely knowledgeable about custom building Firefox, or just lying. On Windows, the story is a bit better, but it's still just not comparable. On top of this, in my experience, I've found the Firefox UI extremely frustrating.
My take is that when Mozilla ousted Brendan Eich, something changed culturally at the place; it's no longer a culture of competence, but one of paranoia, reluctance, excuse-making, distraction, and (sometimes) bullying.
Regardless of the causes, we are in a situation now where the only competent browser which handles basic webpages the way normal people expect, without much fiddling with configuration, is Chromium. Everything else relies on excuses and wishful thinking.
Brave is looking good, it has all of the extremely popular and well-thought-out UI of Chrome, total compatibility, and a backbone. In the worst case, it can survive on its own.
Chromium is really great, and whoever packages a principled, non-user-betraying browser based on Chromium (and convinces people to use it), will be on the most pragmatic path to preserving the open web.
My understanding is that this change in the extensions API will land in Chromium first, and so any browser depending on the extension mechanism of Chromium will be impacted, like Opera and Vivaldi. If I'm not guessing wrong, Opera and Vivaldi are compatible with Chrome extensions because they use the extension mechanism of Chromium, so they'll need additional maintenance burden to keep the `webRequest` API working.
Anyone who says that Firefox runs anywhere near as well as Chromium on Linux is either incredibly lucky, extremely knowledgeable about custom building Firefox, or just lying.
Firefox used to be much sluggish on linux, but I tried out quantum and it seemed just as snappy as chromium. This announcement is enough to make it my daily driver, I think (I'll have to figure out the dev tools, hopefully it's straightforward).
By default, google disables hardware acceleration for chrome on a large percentage of linux. As well, Ive never had it work well with open source graphics drivers or new products like wayland. And the desktop integration comes nowhere near firefox
> “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept.
Can't we, developers, do the opposite? Like introduce a small annoyance, like showing a pop-up, when visitors use Chrome? It could say something like "today is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"
It's largely proven by decades of experience at this point that you cannot make the average software user care about ideological concerns. Especially if you use terms like libre that don't makes any sense to people that haven't drunk the FOSS koolaid.
That's not the place to target such a change, if anyone's to do it.
If there's the support of a major maintainer of a popular library, merging changes which incrementally incur larger performance penalties in Blink may be more effective.
If there's no support from a major maintainer, then simply writing contributions which are largely tested in firefox for performance but are tested in Blink for mere functionality should succeed over time in inducing the same.
In the end, the libraries are lock-in for larger SaaS providers far more than they might be aware, and if such changes start making it into e.g. React, there's not all that much that many product teams can do to work around it other than replying via support channels that Firefox seems to take less of a performance penalty.
That's the black hat in me talking. Resuming white hat status now.
> If there's the support of a major maintainer of a popular library, merging changes which incrementally incur larger performance penalties in Blink may be more effective.
That library will get forked by industry.
If its license does not permit forking, it's incredibly unlikely that it can get traction in the first place.
No need to blackhat; rather than intentionally degrading it for one browser, just optimize for the other. I'm reasonably confident that there are areas where FFx is more performant; use them.
You could just add more intrusive ads to your site. The site owner will be thrilled, and the users not thrilled at all. It would work very well for all concerned!
We have that already! Except it goes the other way; using non-Chrome on Google properties gives you a slightly worse experience. YouTube on Firefox desktop is still terrible.
Well, if we're fighting fire with fire, they know because you put in a little dialogue on the page that says, "switch to Firefox for better performance".
Most sites and content are monetized by ads. Your suggestion is to slow down the browser that allows those ads to exist? What publisher would accept this?
What you, as Web developers, can do, is use Firefox while developing your site to ensure it really works well on non-Chromium browsers. And do your level best to encourage your developer friends to do the same. If they're on Mac and would rather use Safari, that'll do too.
Then, every time you see any site or any Web developer satisfied with "works in Chrome", do what you can to let them know that's not acceptable. In a polite, loving, and extremely firm manner of course.
A decent idea of course, but you are going to run in to the same issue as everybody else who tries that: unless Firefox has a significant market share, it is just not worth throwing resources after it.
What you can do is develop automatic filters to make chrome specific CSS prefixes general, etc. Those are probably worth using since a few hours/days of engineering time easily is worth the larger market share.
Firefox already implements a bunch of -webkit prefixed features for compatibility reasons. Are there specific Chrome-only features that aren't yet supported that you think should be? If so, file Firefox bugs!
I'm still working out the details, but when I get to the point where I'm selling software on my site, I plan to offer small discounts (maybe a dollar) to anyone I detect on a Firefox browser. I'm considering doing the same thing for Ad Blockers.
I know I can't convince normal people to care about the web ecosystem, and yelling at users about behavior is just another way to annoy them. I like the idea of having a small (likely secret) list of browser behaviors that reward users, rather than punishing them. It makes it feel more like a game or a cheat code or easter egg to me than a heavy handed lecture.
If someone is visiting on an unconfigured browser, or something I don't recognize, they won't get an error message or performance hit or any notification at all. But if someone visits and they're doing the right thing, maybe they get a "good job" and a discount or extra download. And then hopefully if they recommend my software to a friend they'll also let them know about the "secret."
> I like the idea of having a small (likely secret) list of browser behaviors that reward users, rather than punishing them. It makes it feel more like a game or a cheat code or easter egg to me than a heavy handed lecture.
While that is nice, you run the risk of nobody noticing.
For some strange reason, I wanted to comment to your post and you didn't have a reply button initially. I had to refresh and then is showed up. Huh, never seen that behavior on HN.
Agreed, but the point is specifically not to nag people -- I don't think that works for Open Source communities; people just get mad. So yeah, tradeoffs.
To put it specifically in advertising terms, I'm also optimizing for conversion rate, not impressions. I'll make a (light) prediction that the few people who know in advance about a system like this will be more likely to try out a browser to save a dollar than they will be to switch a browser to stop a negative experience they're already in.
And on a less practical note, I think I'm OK with fewer people discovering something like this if the ones who do notice end up feeling really good. I want someone's reaction to be, "You noticed! You're right, I am awesome for using an ad blocker!" I want the feeling to be, "sometimes people don't hate me for doing this, and sometimes doing the right thing has benefits."
When the reply button is hidden - to reduce arguments and "over-posting" - you can click the date to go to a page only showing that comment, that page always has a reply option.
> It could say something like "today is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"
Love it!
I'd suggest a small change: It could say something like "today and every other day is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"
You could make use of features that work in Firefox but don't yet work in Chrome, such as SVG favicons and position: sticky (Chrome supports but only on th elements)
There's probably a way to compile a list of such features from caniuse data.
Huh, developers using electron and/or whole NodeJS/ Javascript ecosystem for their products are already causing big annoyance for users.
If there were whole bunch of conscientious developers we would not be in place where browser engines embedded or otherwise would be the most dominant way to deliver services or products to users.
If it doesn't work in Firefox I don't use it. I've been using Firefox for as long as I can remember, probably shortly after it was made and Netscape died. And would never use Chrome. Chrome users are now going to be betrayed and just didn't see it coming. I look forward to Firefox' upcoming rebound which I have every faith this news will spur on.
I came back to Firefox a while back - maybe a year or two? - and have never regretted it. It's a fast, modern, respectful browser. Maintained by a non-profit. I do all my front-end dev work in Firefox, and also test in Chrome. Never had a problem. Come on back folks!
The “workspace” and “blackbox script” features in Chrome devTools are real paradigm shifters and a huge productivity boost for me when developing/debugging in JS/TS or SCSS/CSS. With Workspaces, most changes to source files are reflected immediately without reloading (no LiveReload-type tooling is needed).
Firefox has yet to release either of those features, as far as I know. I’ll switch dev browsers as soon as they do.
The only thing I miss is the ease which you can create and use different profiles in Chrome. Facilitates testing web apps. Firefox's support of multiple profiles is kludgy.
No, this suggestion is wrong. I looked into using FF containers as a chrome profiles replacement and they’re not the same thing at all. I can dig up my notes if you like, I think they’re posted on HN in fact. FF has true profiles and those are what you’d use.
I agree with GP. Chrome profiles are what’s stopped me switching to FF.
It does depend on exactly why you want profiles -- for my use cases, Multi-Account Containers (and Temporary Containers) do a much better job of helping me achieve what I want to do than either browser's implementation of profiles.
I maintain that it is a widely-propagated misconception that Firefox containers can be used to replace Chrome profiles. Here are my notes from when I investigated:
I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:
- New tabs do not inherit current container
- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)
- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.
- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.
Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.
As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
You're right about the limits of containers. When I'm browsing normally, the default is not to be logged into Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Things like my "Gmail this" bookmark fail because I set up Gmail in its own container.
However, I find it very useful to have specific containers for Facebook, banking, other social networks, most of my gmail accounts, etc. So I can be doing stuff for my son's soccer club's email without it affecting my own gmail.
I think of containers as a user tool. It seems like profiles are more of a developer tool.
> So I can be doing stuff for my son's soccer club's email without it affecting my own gmail.
In Chrome you could click on the profile icon in the top right and add a profile "Son's soccer club", and I believe that would also prevent it affecting your Gmail, etc.
> I think of containers as a user tool. It seems like profiles are more of a developer tool.
In Firefox, yes it seems like it. But not in Chrome. The point I'm trying to make (if by any chance there are Firefox people listening!) is that Firefox would benefit from making their hidden profile feature easily available to users, as Chrome does. But then they'd have the confusion of containers vs profiles, so it seems that they should just make containers behave like Chrome's profiles. But Firefox has Profiles! So why did they introduce Containers? IOW it honestly seems like they've made a mess there and the Firefox would be improved by fixing that mess.
I suppose a corollary of that is that Profiles are a poor substitute for Containers. And Containers largely match what I actually want to do, which is to have a shared history while being able to split out certain login (or cache) contexts, without needing a separate window.
This is funny - because I actually resisted switching to Chrome initially because it didn’t support multiple profiles at all.
FWIW, I find Firefox’s support for multiple profiles fine - it just requires the -P argument, which you can wrap up in a shortcut or launcher script. (On Windows, add -no-remote to force a new instance to launch). -P takes an optional profile name, so you can add it to your scripts to auto-launch a Firefox with a particular profile preloaded.
Sure, it could use a proper UI, but if enough people clamour for it I’m sure that can get added. The fundamental support for multiple profiles is quite good.
I switched to Chrome the same day the beta was released mostly because of the speed. Nowadays I stay because I keep my passwords synced over my Google Account and I'm not sure if Firefox works with that.
Sure it does. I keep my passwords synchronized with a Firefox account through my Windows, Linux and Android devices. Works like a charm. I won't trust google to keep them.
Did that years ago when I switched back when Quantum came back; Firefox still has the good old venerable "import passwords from another browser" functionality. You just need to have your passwords sync'd to a local install of Chrome and Firefox can read them all and sync them with FF Sync (which does not force you to use Mozilla servers, btw; you may host your own server for max privacy).
It's not just their service. You can run self-hosted service for sync [0] and fully control it. From privacy point of view that's far more interesting than any other solutions I've seen.
I've been doing this for a while but the part I haven't managed to solve is that using your own sync server on Firefox for ios seems to require you to also run your own Firefox accounts server - which is much more painful to set up. Is there a similar easy guide for setting that up?
Regarding speed: Firefox will soon switch to a new rendering engine, WebRender. It's at least as fast as Chrome's. Then Chrome's speed advantage should disappear.
The way I have switched password managers is to run both for awhile. Overtime you move the ones you need. Eventually if you leave a couple behind you can always reset them in the new browser/manager. It's not as big of a pain as it looks going in.
That is the second most important thing why I'm using Firefox, I sync my passwords via my own instance of the sync server https://jeena.net/firefox-sync-15. I don't even trust Mozilla not to do something stupid with my passwords (by accident) and Firefox was always the only browser which allowed to use your own sync solution.
Something I miss in Firefox, is that the webextensions `management` api does not allow to toggle off/on extensions other than themes. It's no secret that some of the most popular browser extensions require a wide range of permissions to work, while being useful only occasionally. This restriction prevents to have on Firefox a quick toggler without leaving the page like (author here) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extension-manager/...
How so? Either they already have access to my computer, in which case browser addons are the least of my concerns, or they've compromised Mozilla in some way in which case who's to say they can't sign their fake addon too?
Same here, once I started using Firefox in the late 2000s I never needed anything else. Even when Chrome was the new hotness, I never considered their speed benefits beneficial enough to abandon the privacy-conscious, open-source player I grew to love. Admittedly, I even contributed to their Fire Stick project on Kickstarter and don't feel even a little disappointed that they couldn't deliver.
I never needed anything more than a kick-ass web browser.
Firefox are bankrolled by Google, and seem to make changes according to that relationship.
FF seems to be "still give your data to Google" (or other partners we force install for you) but for people who have realised that Chrome is "give all your data to Google".
Firefox plugins are signed and quite tightly controlled, very easily blocked or banned for business or political reasons.
While there are workarounds to install/run plugins locally, they have been made quite inconvenient and inaccessible to the average user, as seen a few weeks ago with the expired certificate incident
Why do people act like this is all some great big accident, the result of eternal human fallibility?
It's not. This was planned. It was the objective all along. Why else do you think Google Maps is free? Gmail? Why did they drive around 1,000s of cities with cameras on a car taking photos for Street View? Was it really just to become the world's most comprehensive search engine? Hell no, it was to get people into the ecosystem and to stay there, and be content with doing so. Just think how much money and manpower went into each of those free products we take for granted, not the least of which includes the Google search engine; now think about how they make so much money off your attention that they can offer it free of charge, because sucking you into the ecosystem is just that profitable.
Chrome is the same thing. Why would a for-profit company develop a web browser more or less unprompted and give it away for free? To draw people into the system and get them comfortable with staying there. Now that they have monopoly power, they can start tightening their grip with the good old embrace, extend, extinguish.
Google isn't unique in this. Similar arguments could be made about Facebook.
To be sure, Google and Facebook have produced tremendous advances in science and technology. But let's not forget what funded them, or why they were developed in the first place. Lest we forget why these things play out the way they do.
So you claim that there are many people who have been hurt by Google's data collection, but Google has censored their cases away?
Can't you find them with Bing?
Give an example!
It's a problem if Google bans your account, and you built everything on your services. But that is not the same thing, and any other company banning you from doing business with them would also hurt.
> Was it really just to become the world's most comprehensive search engine? Hell no, it was to get people into the ecosystem and to stay there, and be content with doing so.
>Chrome is the same thing. Why would a for-profit company develop a web browser more or less unprompted and give it away for free? To draw people into the system and get them comfortable with staying there.
I think you're giving them too much credit, bordering on a conspiracy theory. There's no way they knew all of this would happen and that they would now be in the position to dictate the plug-ins we use.
I'm not saying they didn't want that and they are not happy to be in this position.
What I'm saying is that their initial plan with Gmail/maps/chrome was to gather more data and give themselves the competitive advantage in the ad selling business. If you remember, when most of these products started they looked nothing like each other, quite telling that there was no central plan to create an ecosystem.
The ecosystem idea started much later, with the failed attempts to make social network and with the not-so-failed Google Now which is when they finally started bringing all the data they had together.
Surely they took advantage of their position eventually and managed both to create an ecosystem and to successfully lock people in, but that doesn't mean that they planned it since 2003.
> I think you're giving them too much credit, bordering on a conspiracy theory. There's no way they knew all of this would happen and that they would now be in the position to dictate the plug-ins we use.
Think about it. The time when Chrome came around, Firefox was poised to become the dominant player in the market, barring Safari, which was big on mobile but small on traditional desktops. To some extent, Mozilla depended on Google's money, but was still an independent body, and I suspect, Google came to the conclusion that Mozilla could thrive without their money.
I would not rule out the possibility that their top management decided that it'd be better to have another, Google controlled browser in the market, just in case.
So the Idea would have to be there, to have another browser in the market, just so to make life tough for Mozilla. And being nerds, their engineers put focus on speed, performance, etc.
And Google put a lot of money into the Chrome branding. I remember seeing ad's for Chrome, on huge banners, on prime real-estate in Indian tier-2 cities. Nobody does that sort of advertising, just to get people to use their browser.
Google's thought process absolutely involved the concept of getting people into their eco-system and keeping them there.
May not be a 'conspiracy', but definitely wasn't simply "Hey lets build a great browser, just because we love technology and we can do it"
The ad-Blocker market blew up in response to privacy concerns. And it directly threatens Google's revenue bread and butter, Ads and data collection. Google will fight till death to maintain the status quo, disable any meaningful ad-blocking software. Even if it means risking being a monopoly and paying fines. Even if it means it gets branded as evil.
I agree with everything but Safari was never a contender for the status of "standard" browser. It's a browser limited to a single vendor platform and a relatively small one, expecially on the desktop. Apple never had plans to move it anywhere else, with the exception of an aborted version for Windows XP more than 10 years ago.
Alternate motivation: People stay engaged on the web more when pages are faster. One thing that makes pages faster is a faster browser. When people stay engaged on the web more, Google makes more money. Chrome's initial big selling point was being faster.
The core motivation wasn't speed -- it was ads. Chrome was designed to send people to Google Search instead of websites. The address bar auto-completion in Firefox would always suggest actual URLs, but Chrome's would send people to Google Search to click on ads on the way to their desired destinations. The ads started to become camouflaged so that most users couldn't tell them from organic results, and Google continued to make the ads harder to distinguish over time. I'm sure that Google also had long-term worries about ad-blocking and wanted to control the browser.
"We just want to make the Web faster" is what they tell their employees so that otherwise ethical people will write code that does unethical things. (AMP/portals is another example.)
As pointed out by another reply to your comment, Chrome was about pulling the users into googles ecoststem. By combining search bar with address bar, it blurred the line between a google search and a web address.
Just like Facebook, with its free basics internet deals with mobile providers in emerging markets, sought to confuse people into thinking Facebook is the internet, Google also sought to confuse people to think Google is the internet.
The investment in speed and other user benefits was a loss-leader for the goal of increased control. The speed and other benefits were indeed a net positive for users (and motivated Mozilla to focus on performance in Firefox) but they were investment made for payoff.
You've said it yourself: "the big selling point was being faster."
And yes, there is obviously some marginal value for Google in simply making web experience as fast as possible because it keeps people using the web. But that extended web use is of no good to them if users are doing so at non-Google properties that don't see Google ads, so it seems implausible that control was not a key motivator.
> That extended web use is of no good to them if users are doing so at non-Google properties
Extended web use is often punctuated by google searches, even if a lot of the engagement happens on non-Google properties. If slowness causes people to get bored and go do something else, Google suffers.
Google was frustrated giving Mozilla tens of millions of dollars and all they saw was that Mozilla was dicking around with the UI. And every year Firefox got slower. By losing the browser wars, the Google business model could be put to death.
There were efforts to make chrome faster and more portable but that wasn't the main idea.
Google considers itself the ultimate place for programming on Earth. The open Java reimplementation, the state of the art just-in-time compiler (I know the designer), and Octane and extension architecture were imho the main reason to take over the browser platform. Microsoft dominated PC programming. Google would dominate Internet programming. This is why they started the chrome team and de-funded Firefox.
It's more or less just capitalism in the tech era.
Google became 'evil' as soon as it realised that exploiting user data was the route to profit. We live in the information age - any for-profit business is going to pursue that which makes it the most profit.
Since most people are used to the idea of online services being 'free' - they got used to the relationship imbalance, and few companies ever really inform their users about exactly how much value their usage produces.
The surveillance aspect is definitely real - but I suspect it emerged over time as Google was forced to work with law enforcement, security services etc as its reach and power grew.
Bingo. Deanonymize the majority of users to the point where only privacy activists, power users, and grey/blackhatters are running adblockers, compile a comprehensive list of such users, and then either find another way to track them or straight up ban adblockers because "only the bad guys use them, what do you have to hide?"
Their concern about losing the ability to "personalize" ads smacks of NSA/GCHQ concern that they can't reliably track X percent of the population (UBO/pihole/etc users). Sure, Google makes a ton of money from ads, but with their stranglehold on the search, mobile, navigation, and video markets, do they really need to make such a controversial change just to squeeze a few extra million a year out of Ads?
No. There's plenty of other ways to make money for their business, there aren't many other ways to remain in good standing with and funded by the surveillance state. There's something else at play here.
This is compelling, but possibly too charitable to the ad tech industry. Google isn't a hapless vassal of the surveillance state. They make a fuckton of money off of your attention.
>Was it really just to become the world's most comprehensive search engine? Hell no
Many around these parts still believe this, and that Facebook is trying to connect everyone, and that Tesla wants to accelerate renewable energy. Such altruism!
It's the never ending cycle, they will start to tighten the grip and other options will pop up with time, people need to learn that losing a bit of convenience is not the end of the world.
> We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least.
Do remember though, Mozilla's income is heavily dependent on Google. If we want a browser engine that can remain completely free, we really need a engine that is community driven. Although that might not longer be possible given the complexity of the web nowadays.
>almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market.
This makes me wonder if there's any way we can give gorhill a bunch of money in donations. He's in a much more important position than I previously realized, and despite the statement in the uBlock readme ("Free. Open source. For users by users. No donations sought.") I think it would be an excellent idea to make sure he has permanent financial stability for as long as he continues to work on uBlock.
If he wants a multi-million dollar corporate buyer to come along, I'm sure he can get it. But as long as he's incentivized to continue building a truly pro-user ad blocker, we should at least make sure he's not in a situation where he could be forced to sell out.
That may be fair (though there's some ambiguity to me in the word "sought"), but I hope he knows that if he loses his day job or has health problems or something like that he can go to the community. uBlock origin is worth hundreds of dollars a year to me, and I'm by no means rich.
Well, I'm not seeking money when I walk down the street, but I wouldn't consider it rude if someone decided to throw some at me. (assuming cash, not coins thrown at my head though even then, if they're quarters, I'm picking those up)
This naming is a catastrophe. I just tried to find out which is which and it isn't easy, even if you know what you're looking for.
I'd think that uBlock Origin should consider changing the name. Yes, "it means giving up", but it's a battle they can't win anyway, and at least users will be able to tell which one is owned by eyeo.
EDIT: AdBlock and AdBlock Plus are similarly confusing.
Adblock plus have a committee that is supposed to be independent companies that they consult but they invested in some of them and made those people the head of each group so its not even independent
eyeo is a pure scam and they make 99% profit because they have no costs
Currently, we can go use Firefox or Joe's homemade browser to to back the features that Chrome removes, such as the ability for an ad-blocker to access and remove content. But we've already seen just last month [1] that Google actively prevents Firefox from using some features of Google products (need to find the HN link). Thus Google as a content provider can easily steep people into using the Google web browser.
This is really starting to smell similar to the Microsoft - IE debacle all over again.
This thing about Google preventing Firefox from using some features (Edge as well I believe) - I'm assuming this is all done using the user agent header? or are they detecting Chrome through another means. I guess I'm wondering how effective spoofing the user agent header would be in resolving that.
> I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers
It's quite shocking, anti-intuitive, and really shows what the web advertising business is really all about.
> Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.
That's ... well, so much for the internet ... :-(
It's really against what I imagine to be some of the core principles of the internet.
> Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.
If that is the case, it seems very short sighted.
While this change is obviously not in the interest of any user, there are multiple ways around it.. the alternative solutions are not so easy right now, but they will become more user friendly as they rise to the surface as the new way to block ads. The affect on Google's revenue will be short term (if any), but I suspect the affect on Google's public image will be significant and lasting. It doesn't seem worth the risk to Google for such a short term gain.
Yes we can ditch chrome. But what about general population? Now that websites may choose to give incompatiblity prompts to Firefox since it impacts there revenue through ads. They will ask users to switch to chrome. This might affect Firefox in long run. It's market share might drop.
I'll bring out the "computer has viruses" argument. As in:
"Remember how you asked me to clean your computer from these toolbars and make it faster? This problem may happen again if you browse the web without uBlock Origin installed. Chrome doesn't support it now, so you have to use Firefox. Ignore websites pleading you to switch back to Chrome. Some of them will try to sneak in this toolbar garbage to you. Actually, stop visiting such websites because they're staffed with assholes who want to abuse you. But if you must, do it in Firefox. Yes, preferably in Private Browsing."
As others said, regular people follow the tech crowd. My family uses Chrome because that's what I've been telling them to install and/or installing for them for the past few years. But the very first thing I also install for them is uBO, and if that stops working, Chrome goes out of the window.
How about Vivaldi? Or Opera with built-in ad-blocker (which I'm currently using and it works great, at least with uBlock Origin installed too)? Unfortunately I can't use Firefox on my system ( https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a42xei/state_of_fi... nothing changed for years with these problems and I believe it will unfortunately stay that way)
Aren't Opera and Vivaldi just a re-skinning of Chromium?
If yes, then it probably won’t save you.
And here you have the actual problem with Chrome — unless you fork it and have resources to maintain that fork, its open source nature is absolutely irrelevant. And even if you manage to fork it, you’re not operating at Google’s scale so your fork will be irrelevant.
PS: I use Firefox on top of MacOS and works just fine for me ;-)
I don't know how much different they need to be from Chrome/Chromium to not be affected (and if some built-in blocker like in Opera still will be fine), that's why I'm asking :) There is also Safari, but I would rather cook my CPU with FF than use Safari.
Basically everything except the fact that it doesn't eat huge amount of RAM. I can't stand iOS either, so not being able to sync tabs/bookmarks between my devices is probably the biggest drawback.
"The deprecation of the blocking ability of the WebRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome."
In the same way a company trying to determine what a user looks at on their computer screen is a privacy issue, this is too. Those filters should be private.
Welcome to the point when even free market people will no longer defend your monopoly, Google.
The number of egregious examples of their centralization backfiring against the freedoms within the day-to-day life of internet users keeps growing bigger at a seemingly exponential rate.
The barrier for competition may be high but history is littered with examples of giants withering under their own decision making. Nor will they forever be immune from antitrust laws.
I don't consider Google a monopoly. I figure many "free market people" define a monopoly pretty strictly. They're not forcing me to use their browser, search engine, maps, email, or many other services.
However, they do have a disturbingly high level of market dominance. So seeing as I am a part of the free market (after all, the "economy is us"), I have opted to minimize my use of Google products and services and encourage others to do the same. This wasn't the tipping point for me; I've been advocating alternatives for quite some time.
I don't want Google punished with anti-trust laws if that can be avoided. I'd much rather see users apply corrective pressure. Of course, that assumes users appreciate the importance of their privacy, which makes this a lengthy game of messaging and persuasion.
What we call "monopoly", is "being big enough to put a thumb on market scales" in legal theory these days (note that this doesn't even require a company to have even 50% of market share...)
Even if you decide to believe that Google is doing this for the "right reasons" (improving performance for instance) it should still be a huge red flag. Due their conflicting business model they have no incentive to improve the adblocking interface later on. You can therefore expect the adblocking capabilities to degrade every time they can come up with a reasonable reason to do so while they'll never take the time to actually come up with a better solution.
Switch to Firefox people, it's not perfect but at least it's not Chrome.
No, $24k gross per year does not even begin to cover the amount of work put in to create and maintain software at the level of Pi-Hole. Not even remotely close. Not even 1/10th.
Pi-Hole should be making $1m ARR at least. 53 releases (going back to 2015), 2,765 issues on Github, multiple devs, supporting multiple platforms, extensive documentation, and on and on.
The top contributer has 500 commits since 2015. Its clearly a side project so $24,000 per year for a side project is very nice especially if you live somewhere with a good cost of living.
You only need to set it up once per network, instead of once per browser, and it is capable of filtering (most) ads even on closed platforms (e.g. apps on non-rooted phones).
The downside is that it is much less granular and harder to set up exceptions.
Pi-hole will also catch all kinds of tracking and analytics requests that are sent via your mobile devices, non-browser apps, etc. There's a whole lot more of your data leaking out into the world than just the stuff that comes and goes via ad networks.
I'm not the maker of the app not can vouch for its integrity but you get a sense of how much network bandwidth ad and tracking takes up on your network.
This doesn't really explain how a PiHole compares to an ad blocking extension. Both block ads at the network level so your browser never has to download them.
Yes, it's an issue and there's nothing a pi-hole can do to solve the issue. YouTube is the most notable server of ads from content servers, but one can imagine more content providers following suit eventually.
However, you can have your pi-hole up and running in a few minutes and enjoy excellent network wide ad blocking for virtually every service that isn't YouTube.
Also related, I found by Bravia running Android tv would come to crawling halt if I used a pi-hole and loaded YouTube. I did the right thing by buying YouTube premium but still Youtube was doing aggressive pings back to their ad servers even with telemetry disabled. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have used a pi-hole based blocker for a while, and I have noticed increasingly ads showing up because they are using same domains, both in-app(iOS) and normal desktop. I've settled for a mix of network wide ad-block via pi-hole and adguard(uses mitm for https blocking) to remove almost all ads. In my experience uBlock Origin has made my aging laptop battery drain a lot quicker.
PS: I'm not sure if I would recommend Adguard, but works fine, but somehow the root certificate keeps me left a little bit dreary about possible future Adguard intentions.
This should be good news for Firefox and Safari. I'd be interested to hear from Gorhill on whether uBlock Origin works with the Content Blocker API for Safari and if not what needs to change to make it possible.
Yes but as far as I understand it doesn't actually use the native API. The Content Blocker API has benefits from a performance and privacy perspective.
Yes, content blocker extensions are many times more lightweight than old-style blocker extensions (virtually zero negative impact on resource usage and site load speed), can never be hijacked to do anything malicious, and know nothing about you or your web traffic.
I use them on my iOS/macOS devices and the their effectiveness is quite apparent, especially on the iPhone where CPU and bandwidth aren’t as abundant.
Development has stopped on the Safari extension due to the kneecapping of its capabilities in Mojave. Maybe the upcoming Chrome change will spark renewed interest in getting it to work to the extent possible.
Safari has essentially the same content blocking model that Chrome wants to adopt.
> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn't have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles Content Blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, Content Blockers have no knowledge of users' history or the websites they visit.
Another big issue is that if chrome makes it difficult to disable ads such that 99% of chrome users aren't able to do it, websites may simply choose to block Firefox as it would be easy to do so without losing a large part of user base while making sure no users are blocking ads. Right now there are far too many users using ad blockers.
That is rich!!! There are far too many companies selling my private information without my consent. As long as companies can sell user information, it is only fair for users to block access to such information.
Blocking a user agent? Oh no, whatever shall we do? Thankfully, we can still just change it, though I suppose a really insidious web site could use feature checks.
I mean, those annoying “join our newsletter”, “quit using adblockers”, and “allow us access to cookies and all your data or else” popovers went from nonexistent to everywhere in the span of 2 weeks.
I'm not a fan of antitrust as a tool to punish tech companies, but I think there would be great benefit in cleaving Chrome off of Google. The tension between Google's business model and what is good for users is just too great.
Ugh. Now I'm going to have to switch my passel of family members, neighbors, and friends who rely on me for tech support over to Firefox.
Not that Firefox isn't going the same way eventually. Firefox crippled the ability for real customization with Firefox 57 and it's only gotten worse since then.
For what it's worth, I've had a great experience with firefox for the past year (since quantum convinced me to give it another chance). All though, it recently basically factory-reset itself. Signed out of sync, extensions gone, custom settings gone. Any one else have this happen?
It's also got a weird memory leak, which I think is related to the pdf viewer. Never really checked in detail or tried to measure.
Yes!!! I've had this happen several times, and it's incredibly annoying! I was just about to comment on this issue before I saw your post (as a "this is a good opportunity for Firefox but they still have some seriously irritating bugs").
It seems like my entire profile (about:profiles) got switched out several times with a brand new one. Exact same symptoms as you - bookmarks, custom UI tweaks, extensions, etc. all gone (basically consistent with creating a new profile yourself). For a regular user, I think that only needs to happen once for them to uninstall and never come back.
Most of the time I've been able to restore it to my old profile, but one time a file was corrupted and I had to start from scratch again. It happened before the extension signing fiasco, and those two things combined led me to explore new options (Vivaldi, Chromium, etc.) although those didn't pan out for me so here I am, still on Firefox and crossing my fingers hoping it won't happen again.
Perhaps relevant: I do have Nightly and Developer Edition installed alongside the regular version. I used to use Nightly as my daily driver, but switched to the regular version after the first time my profile got messed up.
Hmm. My situation might have a weird circumstance as well: I installed a new version of manjaro, which ships a profile by default with manjaro homepage etc. bookmarked. I signed into sync; normal one pulled down. The manjaro one is what got mysteriously applied. Old profile gone. I can only imagine what would be causing it; don't remember changing anything whatsoever. Did you by any chance sign in on a new computer before it happened? My windows was the one that went wonky; linux was the newly signed in. Glad to hear it's not just me, though. I was to the point of thinking a rabid script went crazy and deleted my profile.
Firefox has been doing a few rather questionable things. They had the Mr Roboto add-on which was pushed out to advertise a TV show, they stuck ads in the "Recommendations" [1], they proactively destroyed peoples' bookmarks when they dropped support for RSS, they dropped support for RSS (because, apparently, a decentralized way to track website updates is anti-Google), and they destroyed a lot of useful add-ons.
Waterfox is good if you miss the old add-ons from pre-quantum Firefox. But it is the old model, and one lagging page will still hose the whole browser.
I tolerate it because I need my Downloadthemall extension, amongst others.
The new version that just came out added a new feature where different channels (Release, Nightly, etc.) have different profiles, and for some people it seems to have not picked the right profile for the channel they use. You can try looking at about:profiles. Your old profile might be in there, and then I think you can switch back to it.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadFor as long as you, I and everyone else continues to use Chrome, we effectively support Google's ability to monopolise the browser space.
Google's continuing monopolisation of the browser space will (and is?) leading to a dearth of alternatives.
So, by waiting for the time when Google finally puts that final straw on the haystack which makes this whole thing too onerous to bear - and then you say "right, now I've finally had enough - I'm switching ...."
... you may find that there's nothing left to switch to.
Another is UnGoogled-Chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Would love to see this latter option becoming something that appeals to a very large, mainstream market rather than just a few techies.
https://firefox.com
It would be especially nice if we can get the Vivaldi developers to fork Blink to keep the old API around.
If Google's behaviour concerns you, you need to use Firefox or Safari.
Brave: https://brave.com/
Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
It sounds like they would also be removing ad-blocking then
That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft. Don't fall for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy.
Your analogy is flawed because it assumes the customer walking into the store retains their privacy and is not charged any hidden costs.
A more accurate example would be one in which the customer walks into a store that:
* data mines as much about that person as possible to profile them
* sells that data without consent to unvetted global buyers
* increases the risk that customer's devices are compromised (drive-by malware installs through ad placements on mainstream sites)
* charges them a hidden surprise fee (in the form of increased data usage, battery usage etc from poorly-designed ad systems).
Presenting naive analogies is harmful to our ability as a society to reason about the costs of systems like this.
I'd urge anyone to have a read and/or follow Ad Fraud Historian to understand how bad / harmful the existing ad-tech ecosystem is. [2]
It's truly awful, and anything that moves the internet away from this dystopian, incompetent and fraudulent monetisation approach to content is doing all of humanity a huge favor.
[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#philosophy
[2]: https://twitter.com/acfou
The rational choices of market participants do not remove the ability of sellers to sell, but they certainly do create more economic pressure for sellers to find and support better systems.
Also consider that the problem is not audiences vs publishers. It's corrupt middlemen harming audiences (privacy / malware / hidden costs) and defrauding publishers (fake traffic, bots, perverse incentives).
At this stage Brave's system of on-device ML in-browser for relevance and privacy, and opt-in ads seems a much better model, and I'm sure others will pop-up too.
We seem to be on the cusp of much better approaches to funding content, so it's really up to us to start advocating and supporting these new approaches.
Automatic whiz-taker. That's what they should call add blockers.
Seems like a win/win to me. Advertisers would actually pay the eyeballs that should be paid for seeing ads instead of the middleman in the attention economy. The technology in the Basic Attention Token performs all the functions instead.
"I get paid for working a job. I don't want to pay the grocery store for my food"
Maybe you will pay, but the market as a whole has been very clear here. Free wins. Personally I dont mind either. I'd prefer to see ads relevant to me rather within some limitations of privacy.
I feel government needs to set the limits here rather than expect business to self regulate. Nor will the market self regulate as this is more technical than most people are interested to understand, and back to free wins.
You get paid in the free content you consume as it is now. It's literally the reason you don't have to subscribe to every website you visit.
I think it will be a net positive if every targeted ad company stops using that model, so Brave shutting this down is a huge plus for me.
Note, I used a similar setup in chrome and Firefox that some might find gross as well as it removed the ability for websites to monetize me using ads or data from surveillance.
So you want an internet dominated by large players only and full of subscription walls everywhere?
I remember an Internet back when there were only university sites and personal sites. It had a lot of flaws, but was better, I think than our situation where our data are sold and resold with no way of customer control.
https://vivaldi.com/
https://vivaldi.com/source/
I use Brave as my daily driver (with Shields Up and uBlock Origin), but I'm not sure what the actual impact will be when it comes.
I'm guessing this will make its way into Brave, but their built in ad and privacy blockers should continue to function.
... isn't the direction Google's taking here the same as what Apple already did with Safari? Is Safari actually any better in this particular regard?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics#Fire...
> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn't have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles Content Blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, Content Blockers have no knowledge of users' history or the websites they visit.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
I do remember back when I used chrome there would be new `console.x` features that were chrome only from time to time, but after I switched to FF I never really looked back
It's gotten a lot better over the last two years, especially when FF DevTools got support for source maps and TypeScript debugging, but it still lags enough to keep me using Chrome for my job, Firefox at home.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
Firefox: Nightly -> Developer -> Beta -> Stable -> Extended Support Release
Chrome: Canary -> Dev -> Beta -> Stable
Step 1: Enable "Built-In Ad-Blocker"
Step 2: Disable all other ad-blocks from store for some reason
Step 3: Allow only ads from Google ad-network
They can't do that, this is an anti-trust lost case for them.
The only thing I miss is a Session Buddy equivalent. When my computer crashes, it's nice to be able to restore all my tabs and windows, and also it's nice to be able to close a bunch of windows when I travel and then go back to my tab state from three weeks ago.
Also it lacks the granularity of session buddy, which has a list of every tab and window configuration I've ever had.
I do use nightly though. I have like 100 tabs open, and I would know if I was missing any of them. I need them all. ALL OF THEM.
These bugs suck for everyone and I'm sure Mozilla developers would appreciate any help they can get to track it down.
These will behave differently: (1) "Quitting" Firefox will multiple windows open. (2) Using your WM to close both Firefox windows. The latter will cause only the last-closed window to be restored, but you can pop the others off the stack too with Ctrl+Shift+N.
In fact, it's one of the larger reasons (tabs constantly crashing is the largest one atm) I leave Firefox for side jobs instead of being relied upon as my main browser.
For more features, I'd recommend looking at either the Container feature, that might be able to help, or otherwise third-party extensions - maybe another commenter has a recommendation, since there's a giant number of tab management extensions, and it's hard to tell which ones do what perfectly.
If you search around a bit in the sidebar menu you’ll find a list of all the open and previously open tabs on any of your PC’s. Including ability to restore all of them at once.
Not sure if it’s quite the same thing.
I find this useful when researching a particular thing, and wanting to save the resources for later. Sorry I can't remember the exact menu items, as I'm on Firefox mobile and it doesn't do it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
DOS 2.1 ain't done until Lotus won't run
In addition, I like the integration with Firefox Bookmarks. It creates a folder "Session Sync" and stores sessions as sub-folders. So, if anything happens, I still have them as simple, curated bookmarks.
I gotta say I'm kind of glad Google is doing this. It will force me to finally abandon Chrome, something I should have done awhile ago.
I believe this is a misnomer. The enterprise deployment stuff I’m aware of in Chrome/Chromium is accessible by any user, as far as I know, and in the past I’ve used it to force private browsing on always for my own personal usage.
That said, I switched to Firefox when Quantum came out and haven’t looked back. Mozilla has done some annoying stuff over time, but imo the browser itself is really solid, and with some tweaks is very good.
https://cloud.google.com/chrome-enterprise/browser/download
http://dev.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3
To be honest, I am not the most knowledgeable here; I just know I used the enterprise policy system on my personal laptop without issue.
These polices are typically set on a Windows Domain Controller and are pushed to Domain member machines (and users) on the network on a regular basis.
However end-users can simulate the policies by setting these Registry entries manually (There are about 4 places in the Registry where they live). Depending on where Chrome looks, the user may need local admin privileges to do this.
So, what we really need is a 'Chrome Enterprise Enabler' tool, that does this automatically for non-technical users. They would run this tool, the required Registry keys would be enabled, and WebRequest API based Ad-blocking would continue to work.
Unfortunately, none of this helps Linux users as I don't see a Linux Enterprise Chrome package.
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[1] I've got 25+ years of Windows domain administration under my belt, this stuff used to be my bread-and-butter.
[2] Even if not, extracting just the Chrome MSI installer from the Enterprise bundle is trivial.
The main point isn't listed on the page.
The Enterprise installer installs Chrome to the operating system.
Regular chrome installs in your user profile.
I think you missed my point. Google say that the Enterprise version will continue to support WebRequest API. If the Enterprise version is the same codebase as the normal version, then it's a good educated guess that the Policy keys are whats controlling that.
ADM templates are something Firefox is sorely lacking at the moment. I remember reading that it is on the road map but that does not help out much. Nevertheless, I installed both chrome and Firefox and my organization. I like Firefox and use it myself, but sadly it's just not as easy to administer as chrome.
Second, Firefox does have ADMX policies (ADMX being used primarily after Vista): https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates. I believe it took them so long because they were initially reluctant, user freedom etc. But I guess Chrome's success in enterprise made them reconsider. Honestly I never considered Firefox for our Windows Domain because of the lack of Group Policy support. Now I deploy both and users have options :)
Truth be told I know of nothing similar in Chrome/Chromium, but you can do something similar using the healthy number of “Copy Request As” context options. I like to copy as fetch and manipulate it in the console. It’s not perfect but it’s useful.
Otherwise, I have found Firefox dev tools to be fairly competitive. I liked the CSS Grid stuff they had around the launch of Quantum; it made it easier for me to jump into Grid.
There is no error, but the page won't load. There is an error, but the error message is generic. There is an error message, but no stack trace.
When I switch to chrome, I always get the error and stack trace without any further code modifications.
I make sure to clean up for Firefox in releases. But it's just impossible to develop without error messages and traces. I'm on Ubuntu using the latest stable releases.
Moreover, extensions that continue to use this behavior are required to adhere to manifest v2, and support for that manifest will likely eventually be deprecated. Chrome blocked the store from serving and updating manifest v1 extensions after a deprecation period.
Google rapidly deprecated version 1, from Chrome 18's release adding version 2 in March 2012 to blocking updating in March 2013, to removal of all extensions that had not updated from the Chrome Web Store in September 2013.
If Manifest v3 follows a similar trajectory, Chrome is on a path to remove uBlock Origin from its web store in 2 years.
Content can still be blocked with extensions, but it will be more difficult to handle large block lists.
See this comment from the author of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
Well, without live heuristics. Chrome ad blocking is basically now limited to a dumb, limited list of URI patterns. Better than nothing, but much less capable than before.
See Also Vista UAC.
It’s kind of amazing for people to say that they care about their privacy and then they install extensions that can record their entire browsing history and install VPN software on their phones that intercept all of their internet communications.
For decades, people have been using software on their PCs which can essentially delete all their data or worse, yet what are the chances of that actually happening? Of course malware would exist, but at the same time, the unrestricted nature lead to a seamless exchange of data and creativity unhindered by any bureaucratic permission-maze.
A world of "perfect" security in which malware and cybercrime cannot exist is basically a dystopian police state.
Did you also trust Onavo’s VPN back in the day?
I am, indeed, necessarily careful about VPN providers.
On a practical note, which VPN provider can reliably not reduce the speed of my gigabit up/down connection?
Unfortunately, I don't have a fast enough uplink to comment on speed concerns.
The quote from the article is here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897...
"We are planning to raise these values but we won't have updated numbers until we can run performance tests to find a good upper bound that will work across all supported devices."
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/chrom...
Is there such a thing? The "paid" part comes from the article's gloss, not from Google. I could see it instead being "this is a switch you can turn on in Group Policy."
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
It's time to eliminate Google from your life as much as possible if you haven't already. Too many wake up calls. They are not a tech company, they are data monopolists. Stop giving them your data.
Would you happen to have any links to previous discussions anticipating this exact endgame?
I have been using brave for months and intend to continue if uBo keeps working. Braves internal ad blocking doesn't stop everything.
Maybe this is a viable solution on brand new chromebooks, but on my Acer R11 both Android apps and Linux containers run pretty poorly. I use an Android app as my password tool just fine, but trying Firefox was a rather poor experience. And the linux container just dogs trying to do anything.
I have Ubuntu loaded on via crouton (to use tools like GIMP or actual VLC), but if chrome gets rid of ad blocking that removes much of the point of ChromeOS for me entirely.
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...
Also, the headline seems mostly incorrect. The gist of it, as I understand, is that Chrome is enforcing a migration from the webRequest API to a new declarativeNetRequest API. The latter API doesn't currently have all the capabilities of the former, which is important for context blocking extensions. However, features are still being added and the team states that they are interested in more feedback from extension developers.
I really think it is a bad practice to force adoption of a new API that can't fulfill the same functions as the previous one.
Nobody would be here talking about this if they just made the new API without breaking add blocking (useful add blocking), and then forced people to move.
Even more so given that it looks really bad when your main goal is to serve people ads.
I agree, which incidentally is the reason I switched from Firefox to Chromium a couple years back as Mozilla dropped XUL extensions for their own development convenience, toward an ideal of cross-browser extension compatibility, and in hoping to win over Chrome users by making Firefox more alike in both looks and performance.
How many of those motivations have changed, and do we know that Mozilla aren't actually going to follow suit with a similar restructuring of APIs some time after such changes have settled into and been normalized in Chrome?
It's not like MS is dependent on ads as much as Google.
If this is the last decision Google ever makes that their downstreams disagree with, then sure it's probably manageable.
> If this is the last decision Google ever makes that their downstreams disagree with, then sure it's probably manageable.
And if it's not, then it justifies the cost of forking.
What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do.
This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3:
In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.
The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business.
The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google's own software to eliminate their core business model.
Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved.
Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.
Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users.
In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads.
ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users.
Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don't see the stuff they recommend to you.
The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user.
ABP/Eyeo is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.
We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7/8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome.
The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in the browser space, not helped by the underlying HTML/JS spec becoming exponentially more convoluted to the point where building your own renderer is nigh impossible.
And since everyone is standardising on a Google, their decisions on ad blocking and supporting APIs are automatically going to flow down into every dependent product.
It’s frustrating that MS copped out and went Chromium. Like we never learned this lesson the first time.
We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least. These need to be protected if we don’t want Google and the ad network to totally control the browsing experience.
Although, controversially, we as a web dev collective have learned nothing if we continue to only develop for a single browser. Not for the web itself, but for one particular rendering engine. “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept.
But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground (e.g. Opera, Firefox).
And unfortunately no single player involved can gain much by going against Google. What would Microsoft gain from forking? Nothing.
I think 10 years in the future we might see WebKit and Blink merge together into a single core engine.
Modern Capitalism almost dictates this development, as corporations strive to save money at all costs.
They are competitors in the hardware space and Apple needs an 'enemy' to help target its pro-privacy agenda against.
Besides that, at which point does the dominant search and advertising company of the internet get an antitrust case for this? People think google is trustworthy yet they do nothing to earn that trust.
Chrome doesn't have that problem.
Google's new security flaw is that they are going to moderate ad-blocking, become responsible for it, and then depend on their inhuman machine to ignore all of your complaints. No different to how you can't find a human connect when you get screwed out of Gmail or Google Wallet because of their mathematics.
As a total thought experiment on where I'm coming from with this: in Star Trek TNG, Data (the Android) spends seven years with us exploring the human equation. Strip out the narrative imbalance and do you think the current automation of help and support is anywhere near aligned to the ideals of that 30 year old TV show that didn't know better? Or is the algorithm an overfitting to Google's commercial needs?
It's tangential to this thread but for some reason it felt worth writing out.
That ship has sailed.
HTML itself emerged from such a consolidation (from SGML) and went through this process a few times. There are numerous other examples of technical recapitulation.
At least that's the justification I generally see. See the Criticism section of the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML#Criticism
HTML5 breaks soft. It's easier to write, which is what drives content. A parser for which there is no content becomes moot.
(I'd prefer far more rigorous document specification. That's not the Universe I inhabit.)
And Google is currently the funding source for Mozilla, giving them a more or less complete monopoly on the future of the web.
Google has worked very hard over the years to make itself into an organization with deeply baked-in incentives to do the opposite. It'd take a decade of sustained effort working counter to powerful incentives to fix that.
This is distinct from making a capable well-performing browser, which Google has done. So has Mozilla.
It's not a product-making sale point for the vast majority of people.
It's not a completely ethereal concept like privacy, democratic freedom, etc.
Chrome without adblock is essentially ie6, with tabs.
Pound for pound, chrome is ridiculously far ahead of internet explorer mid-2000's. IDK what the hell someone is going to have to do to upend chrome and its rendering components but is going to have to be great.
I mean, who knows. Never say never, but they are going to be tough competition. Not to mention that browsers are becoming so advanced it will be tough for a small team to match the engineering prowess of a company like google.
It managed to get to around 20% marketshare[1] before Chrome surpassed it[2] and then also surpassed IE.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#W3...
Google can and does use DRM to block even this from happening: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
Even Mozilla needed to license Widevine from Google to support modern video: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm
Based on the policy evidenced in Maddock's post, it seems impossible to develop an open-source browser in 2019 that supports video streaming.
If a website is using Proprietary DRM A, your browser needs to be licensed to use DRM A.
There's nothing particularly modern about DRM.
You can also enjoy lots of high-quality, DRM-free content on YouTube, Vimeo, peertube, fosdem and god knows where.
There’s more to internet video than Netflix, Hulu and Prime.
Of course, I'm one of those who doesn't care much about mass media in general. Addictions could make this shift impossible.
These responses... Dont support amazon or netflix, twitch? Even FOSS needs to be realistic and see what is a solution and what is not.
A FOSS product needs to support the things people want to do. Otherwise it will not succeed. We should have learned this in the last twenty years.
Without Firefox and its compromises, Google would have 99% market share and FOSS people would browse wuth Lynx or wget
Gecko's embedability sucks ... on desktop. But that's not inevitable, it's just a matter of priorities and resources. On Android it's getting a lot better and something like GeckoView on Android could be made to work on desktop too ... if there's demand and perceived benefit.
(Mozilla's in the middle of upgrading Gecko's multiprocess support for fine-grained "site isolation" so now might not be the ideal time to stabilize embedding APIs.)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
My understanding is that on Desktop it's much more difficult than it ideally should be.
With that said we've got a pretty solid story being worked on for mobile via GeckoView [1] and Android Components [2], there's a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog about our use of them in Focus [3] and they're also what is being used for building the "next generation" version of Firefox for Android currently code-named Fenix [4][5].
I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to get some of the GeckoView work back onto our desktop platforms.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview
[2] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components
[3] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/
[4] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix
[5] https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.fenix
The truth is the browsers are complicated beasts these days for better or worst and so goes the complexity of building and depending on them.
Even if that effort has changed focus, the community now has Rust and I don't think we've seen such a fresh language paradigm since we got Lisp, Haskell, Ocaml, F#, Scala...
In which case, the world has benefitted from browser competition as a total side-effect of competing with the incumbent browser; we got the various evolutions of C and C++. Exactly the same way we got V8 and then nodejs and the whole server-side rendering paradigm with React and JSX.
If we all fall back to Chromium for everything, then Google has achieved a Pyrrhic victory. They need a disruptor to up their game... and it isn't WASM either.
It will likely be a better engine than embedded Chromium when it's done (if for no other reason than that it seems to have fewer dependencies[0]), but I wouldn't start building an application on top of it today.
I am highly interested in finding a more performant alternative to Electron. I'm currently building a web-first game that will also be available as a fully offline native app. I'll probably use Electron unless the ecosystem changes drastically before I'm done. Some really interesting projects out there -- not just Servo, but also thin wrappers around OS web views, even a few re-implementations of CSS/HTML that just force you to cross-compile or port your Javascript to another language.
But I haven't found any that were mature enough that I felt comfortable using them. Servo was the most promising project I personally have seen so far, but it needs more time.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/flibitijibibo/b67910842ab95bb3decdf8...
Open source the platform behind their entire revenue.
What? They scared or something?
I know they have investors, and research into new medicine and energy depend on consumer driven revenue.
Instead of:
"In the long run, we are all dead."
I see it as:
"Until further notice, unless someone gets really really good at math, we are going to die in horrible horrible agony. Loosing all your wealth is the last of your concerns."
Burn the boats. Get that hunger back.
The truth is, I actually don't need Chrome for anything. Firefox is faster now, gives me more freedom and has less corporate affiliations. I'll stick with Mozilla.
Here are my notes from when I investigated:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15688651
I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:
- New tabs do not inherit current container
- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)
- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.
- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.
Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.
As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
For example, I have multiple AWS accounts. To login to two different ones at the same time, I use different containers. Way better than opening one is FF, one in Chrome, etc. When I open a link from a container in a new tab it opens in the same container.
> Way better than opening one is FF, one in Chrome, etc
Agreed!
I'm not quite sure how profiles work in Chrome, but from a Firefox point-of-view this is only true if you also want to keep your history/bookmarks/settings/add-ons completely separate, too.
Keeping history separate in particular is very valuable since nowadays the fastest / least hassle way to bring up a site is to start typing the beginning of the URL in the navigation bar, so you wouldn't want work URLs mixed in with non-work URLs.
If you have multiple "personas", like a personal account with bookmarks and a work account with another set of bookmarks and settings, you'll want a separate profile.
This is much less apparent on faster machines or on Linux/Windows though, but for me it is more efficient to use the same browser on all my machines.
I keep seeing people write stuff like this, and I just don’t get it.
What’s keeping you? Why haven’t you switched already? I mean... it takes minutes at most.
Chromium is generally fine, until Google packages it as Chrome. The issues are not inherent to Chromium, they're failures of principle at Google.
I know people like the idea, in concept, of engine diversity on the web, but the alternatives are terrible.
Anyone who says that Firefox runs anywhere near as well as Chromium on Linux is either incredibly lucky, extremely knowledgeable about custom building Firefox, or just lying. On Windows, the story is a bit better, but it's still just not comparable. On top of this, in my experience, I've found the Firefox UI extremely frustrating.
My take is that when Mozilla ousted Brendan Eich, something changed culturally at the place; it's no longer a culture of competence, but one of paranoia, reluctance, excuse-making, distraction, and (sometimes) bullying.
Regardless of the causes, we are in a situation now where the only competent browser which handles basic webpages the way normal people expect, without much fiddling with configuration, is Chromium. Everything else relies on excuses and wishful thinking.
Brave is looking good, it has all of the extremely popular and well-thought-out UI of Chrome, total compatibility, and a backbone. In the worst case, it can survive on its own.
Chromium is really great, and whoever packages a principled, non-user-betraying browser based on Chromium (and convinces people to use it), will be on the most pragmatic path to preserving the open web.
I disagree with you after there.
Chromium is where this change is originating, not chrome.
Firefox used to be much sluggish on linux, but I tried out quantum and it seemed just as snappy as chromium. This announcement is enough to make it my daily driver, I think (I'll have to figure out the dev tools, hopefully it's straightforward).
Amen! I mean, the layout look as if it were something made in the early 2000s
Can't we, developers, do the opposite? Like introduce a small annoyance, like showing a pop-up, when visitors use Chrome? It could say something like "today is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"
Good luck convincing your product owner of the necessity of that change. Most large enterprises won't do something like this.
If there's the support of a major maintainer of a popular library, merging changes which incrementally incur larger performance penalties in Blink may be more effective.
If there's no support from a major maintainer, then simply writing contributions which are largely tested in firefox for performance but are tested in Blink for mere functionality should succeed over time in inducing the same.
In the end, the libraries are lock-in for larger SaaS providers far more than they might be aware, and if such changes start making it into e.g. React, there's not all that much that many product teams can do to work around it other than replying via support channels that Firefox seems to take less of a performance penalty.
That's the black hat in me talking. Resuming white hat status now.
That library will get forked by industry.
If its license does not permit forking, it's incredibly unlikely that it can get traction in the first place.
Yes we can, go ahead and do it. This is a "Do not do X" nudge not a "Do Y" command.
It is proven by thousands of years of history that humans are best served by negative commandments.
Then, every time you see any site or any Web developer satisfied with "works in Chrome", do what you can to let them know that's not acceptable. In a polite, loving, and extremely firm manner of course.
What you can do is develop automatic filters to make chrome specific CSS prefixes general, etc. Those are probably worth using since a few hours/days of engineering time easily is worth the larger market share.
I know I can't convince normal people to care about the web ecosystem, and yelling at users about behavior is just another way to annoy them. I like the idea of having a small (likely secret) list of browser behaviors that reward users, rather than punishing them. It makes it feel more like a game or a cheat code or easter egg to me than a heavy handed lecture.
If someone is visiting on an unconfigured browser, or something I don't recognize, they won't get an error message or performance hit or any notification at all. But if someone visits and they're doing the right thing, maybe they get a "good job" and a discount or extra download. And then hopefully if they recommend my software to a friend they'll also let them know about the "secret."
While that is nice, you run the risk of nobody noticing.
For some strange reason, I wanted to comment to your post and you didn't have a reply button initially. I had to refresh and then is showed up. Huh, never seen that behavior on HN.
To put it specifically in advertising terms, I'm also optimizing for conversion rate, not impressions. I'll make a (light) prediction that the few people who know in advance about a system like this will be more likely to try out a browser to save a dollar than they will be to switch a browser to stop a negative experience they're already in.
And on a less practical note, I think I'm OK with fewer people discovering something like this if the ones who do notice end up feeling really good. I want someone's reaction to be, "You noticed! You're right, I am awesome for using an ad blocker!" I want the feeling to be, "sometimes people don't hate me for doing this, and sometimes doing the right thing has benefits."
> you didn't have a reply button initially.
HN rate-limits replies to recent posts.
Love it!
I'd suggest a small change: It could say something like "today and every other day is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"
There's probably a way to compile a list of such features from caniuse data.
If there were whole bunch of conscientious developers we would not be in place where browser engines embedded or otherwise would be the most dominant way to deliver services or products to users.
Java didn’t cut it. Neither did Tcl/GTK/Wxwidgets.
Web apps won because of universality and zero touch deployment. Nothing to install, it just works (mostly).
Platform-native apps simply doesn’t achieve the major “it just works” goal, and always havw their own compromises.
Firefox has yet to release either of those features, as far as I know. I’ll switch dev browsers as soon as they do.
It’s not integral to my work, but it does contribute significantly to my productivity.
I agree with GP. Chrome profiles are what’s stopped me switching to FF.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15688651
I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:
- New tabs do not inherit current container
- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)
- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.
- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.
Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.
As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
However, I find it very useful to have specific containers for Facebook, banking, other social networks, most of my gmail accounts, etc. So I can be doing stuff for my son's soccer club's email without it affecting my own gmail.
I think of containers as a user tool. It seems like profiles are more of a developer tool.
In Chrome you could click on the profile icon in the top right and add a profile "Son's soccer club", and I believe that would also prevent it affecting your Gmail, etc.
> I think of containers as a user tool. It seems like profiles are more of a developer tool.
In Firefox, yes it seems like it. But not in Chrome. The point I'm trying to make (if by any chance there are Firefox people listening!) is that Firefox would benefit from making their hidden profile feature easily available to users, as Chrome does. But then they'd have the confusion of containers vs profiles, so it seems that they should just make containers behave like Chrome's profiles. But Firefox has Profiles! So why did they introduce Containers? IOW it honestly seems like they've made a mess there and the Firefox would be improved by fixing that mess.
FWIW, I find Firefox’s support for multiple profiles fine - it just requires the -P argument, which you can wrap up in a shortcut or launcher script. (On Windows, add -no-remote to force a new instance to launch). -P takes an optional profile name, so you can add it to your scripts to auto-launch a Firefox with a particular profile preloaded.
Sure, it could use a proper UI, but if enough people clamour for it I’m sure that can get added. The fundamental support for multiple profiles is quite good.
[0]: https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
upd: typo
In that regard, Firefox is not a worse option, just equally suboptimal.
I never needed anything more than a kick-ass web browser.
FF seems to be "still give your data to Google" (or other partners we force install for you) but for people who have realised that Chrome is "give all your data to Google".
While there are workarounds to install/run plugins locally, they have been made quite inconvenient and inaccessible to the average user, as seen a few weeks ago with the expired certificate incident
It's not. This was planned. It was the objective all along. Why else do you think Google Maps is free? Gmail? Why did they drive around 1,000s of cities with cameras on a car taking photos for Street View? Was it really just to become the world's most comprehensive search engine? Hell no, it was to get people into the ecosystem and to stay there, and be content with doing so. Just think how much money and manpower went into each of those free products we take for granted, not the least of which includes the Google search engine; now think about how they make so much money off your attention that they can offer it free of charge, because sucking you into the ecosystem is just that profitable.
Chrome is the same thing. Why would a for-profit company develop a web browser more or less unprompted and give it away for free? To draw people into the system and get them comfortable with staying there. Now that they have monopoly power, they can start tightening their grip with the good old embrace, extend, extinguish.
Google isn't unique in this. Similar arguments could be made about Facebook.
To be sure, Google and Facebook have produced tremendous advances in science and technology. But let's not forget what funded them, or why they were developed in the first place. Lest we forget why these things play out the way they do.
Nevertheless, they offer good products. I'm not sure the negativity is really warranted.
I've yet to hear about a case of anybody being hurt by Google collecting data to them and serving ads?
Can't you find them with Bing?
Give an example!
It's a problem if Google bans your account, and you built everything on your services. But that is not the same thing, and any other company banning you from doing business with them would also hurt.
>Chrome is the same thing. Why would a for-profit company develop a web browser more or less unprompted and give it away for free? To draw people into the system and get them comfortable with staying there.
I think you're giving them too much credit, bordering on a conspiracy theory. There's no way they knew all of this would happen and that they would now be in the position to dictate the plug-ins we use.
I'm not saying they didn't want that and they are not happy to be in this position.
What I'm saying is that their initial plan with Gmail/maps/chrome was to gather more data and give themselves the competitive advantage in the ad selling business. If you remember, when most of these products started they looked nothing like each other, quite telling that there was no central plan to create an ecosystem.
The ecosystem idea started much later, with the failed attempts to make social network and with the not-so-failed Google Now which is when they finally started bringing all the data they had together.
Surely they took advantage of their position eventually and managed both to create an ecosystem and to successfully lock people in, but that doesn't mean that they planned it since 2003.
Think about it. The time when Chrome came around, Firefox was poised to become the dominant player in the market, barring Safari, which was big on mobile but small on traditional desktops. To some extent, Mozilla depended on Google's money, but was still an independent body, and I suspect, Google came to the conclusion that Mozilla could thrive without their money.
I would not rule out the possibility that their top management decided that it'd be better to have another, Google controlled browser in the market, just in case.
So the Idea would have to be there, to have another browser in the market, just so to make life tough for Mozilla. And being nerds, their engineers put focus on speed, performance, etc.
And Google put a lot of money into the Chrome branding. I remember seeing ad's for Chrome, on huge banners, on prime real-estate in Indian tier-2 cities. Nobody does that sort of advertising, just to get people to use their browser.
Google's thought process absolutely involved the concept of getting people into their eco-system and keeping them there.
May not be a 'conspiracy', but definitely wasn't simply "Hey lets build a great browser, just because we love technology and we can do it"
The ad-Blocker market blew up in response to privacy concerns. And it directly threatens Google's revenue bread and butter, Ads and data collection. Google will fight till death to maintain the status quo, disable any meaningful ad-blocking software. Even if it means risking being a monopoly and paying fines. Even if it means it gets branded as evil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history#cite_re...
Disclaimer: ex-googler.
"We just want to make the Web faster" is what they tell their employees so that otherwise ethical people will write code that does unethical things. (AMP/portals is another example.)
Or also, faster ads. The explanation that faster web better compete with native apps and make for better revenue.
(I agree that it is likely not the only factor, but it a reasonable one)
Just like Facebook, with its free basics internet deals with mobile providers in emerging markets, sought to confuse people into thinking Facebook is the internet, Google also sought to confuse people to think Google is the internet.
You've said it yourself: "the big selling point was being faster."
And yes, there is obviously some marginal value for Google in simply making web experience as fast as possible because it keeps people using the web. But that extended web use is of no good to them if users are doing so at non-Google properties that don't see Google ads, so it seems implausible that control was not a key motivator.
Extended web use is often punctuated by google searches, even if a lot of the engagement happens on non-Google properties. If slowness causes people to get bored and go do something else, Google suffers.
Google considers itself the ultimate place for programming on Earth. The open Java reimplementation, the state of the art just-in-time compiler (I know the designer), and Octane and extension architecture were imho the main reason to take over the browser platform. Microsoft dominated PC programming. Google would dominate Internet programming. This is why they started the chrome team and de-funded Firefox.
disclaimer: ex-Googler 2013-2018
This is not "surveillance capitalism". It is surveillance in guise of capitalism.
Google became 'evil' as soon as it realised that exploiting user data was the route to profit. We live in the information age - any for-profit business is going to pursue that which makes it the most profit.
Since most people are used to the idea of online services being 'free' - they got used to the relationship imbalance, and few companies ever really inform their users about exactly how much value their usage produces.
The surveillance aspect is definitely real - but I suspect it emerged over time as Google was forced to work with law enforcement, security services etc as its reach and power grew.
Their concern about losing the ability to "personalize" ads smacks of NSA/GCHQ concern that they can't reliably track X percent of the population (UBO/pihole/etc users). Sure, Google makes a ton of money from ads, but with their stranglehold on the search, mobile, navigation, and video markets, do they really need to make such a controversial change just to squeeze a few extra million a year out of Ads?
No. There's plenty of other ways to make money for their business, there aren't many other ways to remain in good standing with and funded by the surveillance state. There's something else at play here.
Many around these parts still believe this, and that Facebook is trying to connect everyone, and that Tesla wants to accelerate renewable energy. Such altruism!
Do remember though, Mozilla's income is heavily dependent on Google. If we want a browser engine that can remain completely free, we really need a engine that is community driven. Although that might not longer be possible given the complexity of the web nowadays.
This makes me wonder if there's any way we can give gorhill a bunch of money in donations. He's in a much more important position than I previously realized, and despite the statement in the uBlock readme ("Free. Open source. For users by users. No donations sought.") I think it would be an excellent idea to make sure he has permanent financial stability for as long as he continues to work on uBlock.
If he wants a multi-million dollar corporate buyer to come along, I'm sure he can get it. But as long as he's incentivized to continue building a truly pro-user ad blocker, we should at least make sure he's not in a situation where he could be forced to sell out.
Well this is exactly why we wanted to hive him money. Hopefully if he gets bored someone else will carry the torch.
This naming is a catastrophe. I just tried to find out which is which and it isn't easy, even if you know what you're looking for.
I'd think that uBlock Origin should consider changing the name. Yes, "it means giving up", but it's a battle they can't win anyway, and at least users will be able to tell which one is owned by eyeo.
EDIT: AdBlock and AdBlock Plus are similarly confusing.
eyeo is a pure scam and they make 99% profit because they have no costs
Currently, we can go use Firefox or Joe's homemade browser to to back the features that Chrome removes, such as the ability for an ad-blocker to access and remove content. But we've already seen just last month [1] that Google actively prevents Firefox from using some features of Google products (need to find the HN link). Thus Google as a content provider can easily steep people into using the Google web browser.
This is really starting to smell similar to the Microsoft - IE debacle all over again.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586
> I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers
It's quite shocking, anti-intuitive, and really shows what the web advertising business is really all about.
That's ... well, so much for the internet ... :-(
It's really against what I imagine to be some of the core principles of the internet.
If that is the case, it seems very short sighted.
While this change is obviously not in the interest of any user, there are multiple ways around it.. the alternative solutions are not so easy right now, but they will become more user friendly as they rise to the surface as the new way to block ads. The affect on Google's revenue will be short term (if any), but I suspect the affect on Google's public image will be significant and lasting. It doesn't seem worth the risk to Google for such a short term gain.
The main reason Chrome is so popular is because tech people have been saying "just use chrome" for forever.
Firefox is taking back that role. It'll take time, but with google becoming such a PII hoarder, it's a change that will likely continue.
Utter bullshit.
Chrome is dominant due to two factors:
a) Distribution deals by Google to bundle Chrome everywhere they can. (Including shady crap like 'warez' sites, illegal music, OEMs, etc.)
b) Google aggressively peddling Chrome on their properties and making them deliberately slow and buggy with other browsers.
It's not a coincidence that Gmail suddenly became slow and buggy under Firefox with their latest redesign.
"Remember how you asked me to clean your computer from these toolbars and make it faster? This problem may happen again if you browse the web without uBlock Origin installed. Chrome doesn't support it now, so you have to use Firefox. Ignore websites pleading you to switch back to Chrome. Some of them will try to sneak in this toolbar garbage to you. Actually, stop visiting such websites because they're staffed with assholes who want to abuse you. But if you must, do it in Firefox. Yes, preferably in Private Browsing."
As others said, regular people follow the tech crowd. My family uses Chrome because that's what I've been telling them to install and/or installing for them for the past few years. But the very first thing I also install for them is uBO, and if that stops working, Chrome goes out of the window.
If yes, then it probably won’t save you.
And here you have the actual problem with Chrome — unless you fork it and have resources to maintain that fork, its open source nature is absolutely irrelevant. And even if you manage to fork it, you’re not operating at Google’s scale so your fork will be irrelevant.
PS: I use Firefox on top of MacOS and works just fine for me ;-)
In the same way a company trying to determine what a user looks at on their computer screen is a privacy issue, this is too. Those filters should be private.
The number of egregious examples of their centralization backfiring against the freedoms within the day-to-day life of internet users keeps growing bigger at a seemingly exponential rate.
The barrier for competition may be high but history is littered with examples of giants withering under their own decision making. Nor will they forever be immune from antitrust laws.
I don't consider Google a monopoly. I figure many "free market people" define a monopoly pretty strictly. They're not forcing me to use their browser, search engine, maps, email, or many other services.
However, they do have a disturbingly high level of market dominance. So seeing as I am a part of the free market (after all, the "economy is us"), I have opted to minimize my use of Google products and services and encourage others to do the same. This wasn't the tipping point for me; I've been advocating alternatives for quite some time.
I don't want Google punished with anti-trust laws if that can be avoided. I'd much rather see users apply corrective pressure. Of course, that assumes users appreciate the importance of their privacy, which makes this a lengthy game of messaging and persuasion.
Switch to Firefox people, it's not perfect but at least it's not Chrome.
There must be just way too much friction for a user to say, yeah, charge me $1/mo please.
No, $24k gross per year does not even begin to cover the amount of work put in to create and maintain software at the level of Pi-Hole. Not even remotely close. Not even 1/10th.
Pi-Hole should be making $1m ARR at least. 53 releases (going back to 2015), 2,765 issues on Github, multiple devs, supporting multiple platforms, extensive documentation, and on and on.
$24k/yr, come on...
The downside is that it is much less granular and harder to set up exceptions.
I'm not the maker of the app not can vouch for its integrity but you get a sense of how much network bandwidth ad and tracking takes up on your network.
However, you can have your pi-hole up and running in a few minutes and enjoy excellent network wide ad blocking for virtually every service that isn't YouTube.
PS: I'm not sure if I would recommend Adguard, but works fine, but somehow the root certificate keeps me left a little bit dreary about possible future Adguard intentions.
I use them on my iOS/macOS devices and the their effectiveness is quite apparent, especially on the iPhone where CPU and bandwidth aren’t as abundant.
> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn't have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles Content Blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, Content Blockers have no knowledge of users' history or the websites they visit.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
Once one major site does it, they all will.
Not that Firefox isn't going the same way eventually. Firefox crippled the ability for real customization with Firefox 57 and it's only gotten worse since then.
It's also got a weird memory leak, which I think is related to the pdf viewer. Never really checked in detail or tried to measure.
All my other settings seem fine, however.
It seems like my entire profile (about:profiles) got switched out several times with a brand new one. Exact same symptoms as you - bookmarks, custom UI tweaks, extensions, etc. all gone (basically consistent with creating a new profile yourself). For a regular user, I think that only needs to happen once for them to uninstall and never come back.
Most of the time I've been able to restore it to my old profile, but one time a file was corrupted and I had to start from scratch again. It happened before the extension signing fiasco, and those two things combined led me to explore new options (Vivaldi, Chromium, etc.) although those didn't pan out for me so here I am, still on Firefox and crossing my fingers hoping it won't happen again.
Perhaps relevant: I do have Nightly and Developer Edition installed alongside the regular version. I used to use Nightly as my daily driver, but switched to the regular version after the first time my profile got messed up.
I basically can't trust them anymore.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/7/17326184/firefox-ads-spons...
I tolerate it because I need my Downloadthemall extension, amongst others.
I'll install Firefox, they will see things are better and the switch is done. No need to talk about Quantum, freedom, etc.
Mozilla should be sending one of those cakes to the Chrome team.
We need a chrome install blocker...