Ad blocking is the only thing that makes the web bearable. I hope the extension rejection was a mistake or over something unrelated to blocking functionality.
Nowadays ad blocking isn't even enough anymore. It feels like every website with news articles of any kind has some scrolling, autoplaying video embedded into the site, sometimes even with audio enabled. Unfortunately I haven't seen a blocker for that because it's not considered an ad. It is definitely more annoying than most ads, though.
You can block both video and audio from autoplaying in Firefox by going into about:config. It works. But in Chrome AFAIK you can only mute the audio and not the video from autoplaying.
On the other hand, the GDPR has made tracking diminish a lot. It’s just time the web became bearable, and that could have a synchronous effect on Google’s decisions.
Well no, instead you get a giant banner saying "will you please accept these 10 billion trackers we've installed?" With some websites you can't even say no (which mind you is against GDPR) but who's gonna sue them?
And before you even begin to complain about it being "too slow", "slower than Chrome", <other statement of the month>, tell us that after you're running Chrome without an ad-blocker.
And even if it really is still slower by some miracle - this is a community containing world-class software engineers. Donate some of your time to bring it up to speed. Pun intended.
> And before you even begin to complain about it being "too slow", "slower than Chrome", <other statement of the month>, tell us that after you're running Chrome without an ad-blocker.
I run Brave without an adblocker and have found it to be much faster than Firefox (with adblocker and pi-hole).
Also, as someone whose startup has both Chrome and Firefox extensions, I have to say the Firefox reviewers (who review releases and hold up the process — not end user reviewers) can be hugely annoying, and we deploy there as infrequently as possible. As a result, our Firefox customers don’t get all the latest bells and whistles. Wish it weren’t that way, but the process takes months!
Edit: clarified the annoying reviewers are not end users reviewers, but the people who suck up months of time for every minor update, making confused complaints about our code, and even UI implementation.
Yep, just pointing out that one cannot defend Firefox as the best just by saying Chrome requires and adblocker. There are other browsers, like Brave.
And for the record, I used Firefox for decades, up until last year. I just spend too much time in my browser to use anything other than Brave, given how much time it saves me.
Brave has add blocking features but isn’t an ad blocker. I think it’s useful to compare for speed base vanilla brave to other browsers with and with addons.
Is that really true? I thought Brave was a novel ad sales platform that allows users to bid against ad companies for user time. It's inherently wrapped up in the cryptocurrency ethos (trying to inflate a Token) which will not really lead to profit for users, but for a founder.
To clarify, I mean the people who review (and hold up) releases, not our end users. We wish we could release more rapidly but are discouraged from doing so by the months-long process that results from any tiny update on Firefox.
Not parent but in my case at least Twitch consumes twice as much memory to stream a video in Firefox as compared to Chrome, and still manages to stutter more. But it is possible it could be something to do with my extensions (uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere) since they're installed on Firefox but not on Chrome.
For twitch.tv I highly recommend the 'Alternate Player for Twitch.tv'[0] extension for both Firefox and Chrome. It runs a million times better in both browsers.
Two finger pinch zooming on a Macbook stutters enormously in Firefox and is much smoother on Chrome.
I use this feature all the time and it's made switching to Firefox difficult.
Another example:
I'm not a fan at all of how Firefox handles displaying huge amounts of tabs. Tiny arrows to scroll your tabs left and right is really a disorienting nuisance and I much prefer Chrome's system of making tabs smaller. I'm sure there's a way to change this, but I'd rather stay on the default path that they're actively iterating on and improving.
Just tried installing Firefox on my mac and pinch-to-zoom doesn't even seem to be enabled by default. I had to insert 4 obscure config values in the right place [1] to get it to even start working, and as you say it's very jerky. It jumps in 10% increments, rather than being a smooth transition.
Roughly two months ago. Windows and Android. A few things that make it very tough for me:
Autofilling. Chrome is just so much better and it's something I have to do a lot for my business. I'm always buying random parts from random places and a lot of them don't have the best-designed forms. Chrome handles them much better. There's just so much friction removed when you don't have to type all your info, especially on a phone, or pull out your credit card. I now have my credit card number memorized thanks to having to do so so much with Firefox. I had the same credit card for years, but with chrome I so rarely had to actually pull it out that I couldn't have told you more than the last 4 digits.
Chrome's built in password management is just better at picking up logins and passwords too when forms aren't designed really well.
I get a lot more performance issues with Firefox. I have to force close it sometimes. Never happened with chrome. It's not super frequent by any means but it happens.
Lot of websites don't work in Firefox and I have to open them in Chrome which is likely not Firefox's fault the majority of the time, just developers not testing in Firefox, but still quite annoying to me.
I had all these same issues as well except I run Linux. Tried to switch to Firefox 2 months ago, used it for about a month before going back.
In addition to the issues above, I noticed terrible battery performance on my laptop and the fans would frequently spin up even with a single tab open.
I've been using Firefox for several years. Switched from Chrome after Quantum released. I've had the opposite experience. I have not had many issues and the performance is great.
One thing Firefox recently did was overhaul their GPU acceleration code (webrender) - it makes a massive difference in rendering speed and is faster than Chrome in many situations, though it needs to be manually enabled on some machines.
Mapbox and Hangouts as well - both products I use on a daily basis. I'd say Mapbox is about 20% performant in comparison to Chrome, and Hangouts w/video chews up 50%+ CPU utilization.
Page-loads in chrome are usually really slow if you have an adblocker. ABP runs a bunch of JS on every load and the page load performance goes from being seemingly instant when the mouse button is released to having a noticeable delay. Sure, this is isn't really noticeable when the page already have a noticeable delay, but it sure slows things down for pages without a bunch of tracking and ads that blocks rendering.
If you do decide on using it, I recommend editing the browser so it doesn't display tabs on top, so the tree style tabs is the only place your tabs are located.
I cannot emphasize enough how big an improvement this has been to my browser experience, once I got proffecient with it.
Aah why did they complicate tree style tabs. I tried once again to use it after they changed it but I'm not going to create some userChrome.css file on all my systems to hide the native tabs, and the plugin looks stupid now with some big "Tree Style Tab" header :( Why doesn't Mozilla just implement this natively. Do that Sherlock thing! Its just a super feature. I want to do Prefences->Show Tabs as a Tree, get it synced, and just never use Chrome!
Also try out container tabs. Firefox supports running multiple containers (isolating your cookies etc between), and the extension means you can open different tabs in different containers. For example instead of using multi-account login for Gmail, I open personal Gmail and work Gmail in different containers. I have a container just for banking, and there's another container extension to isolate your Facebook
"And before you even begin to complain about it being "too slow", "slower than Chrome"... "
That was undeniably true, though ages ago. Probably those thinking along these lines didn't run Firefox for some time.
A ton of code has changed in the two products and since about two years Firefox has filled the gap then surpassed Chrome.
And BTW even if Firefox wasn't faster than Chrome (it is), I would happily trade say a 20% loss in speed with a close to 100% gain in privacy.
More "The end of Chromium for not being able to run uBlock Origin". Running a browser without a functional ad blocker is like running around without vaccinations - you're bound to catch something nasty.
I used to use Chromium and Firefox side by side but stopped doing so when they started acting up in this way. When I need to test with Blink I use Vivaldi (which still supports uBlock Origin), Firefox otherwise.
Google has already expressed their intention to stop supporting ad blocking extensions with Version 3 of their add-on manifest. So the writing has been on the wall for awhile, they're just turning the screws now.
It's an older rule[1]. It does technically apply here, but it's not a great look that they're only enforcing it now.
If Gorhill needed to, some of that extra functionality could be moved out into a separate extension. uBlock has done this before with uBlock Origin Extra[2]. Most of the extra features (eg. remote font blocking) aren't a huge deal, in my opinion.
> Remote fonts can be used for tracking and fingerprinting
Isn't it the reverse, local fonts can be used for fingerprinting?
(There are some snags with remote fonts — rendering bugs/exploits — but they're not exactly low hanging fruit anymore)
EDIT: I see what you mean by tracking. If the fonts are loaded with a third party script, this is indeed a problem. If the font files are served by a third party directly (without some intermediate script), this could be remedied with an extension that strips headers. It would obviously run afoul of this only do one thing rule from Google, the company that once attached Google+ to its search results.
Actually, my Creative Director and I have noticed some Google Fonts have changed over time, producing significant enough (read: negative) changes to the UI of clients’ experiences we have out there that we decided to start downloading and storing them locally to lock in state (and for perf, but that’s another topic). The average user who comes to the site once will never notice it, but we have.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it were a hidden vector of some sort, but I haven’t put effort into digging into it.
I recently switched to Safari on Mac. Safari has a native content blocking mechanism (on Mac and iPhone) which works quite well without giving the extension open access to the page content. It works simply by a JSON file that describes the blocking rules, and doesn't require running any third-party code on the web page.
So far, I've not missed any features of Chrome except opening accidentally closed tab again. You might want to change few settings though: "show full urls" and "show favicons".
Apple Pay also works remarkably well, just click "Pay with Apple", and the authentication request pops up on your iPhone, requesting Touch ID / Face ID.
I've not seen anyone implement the new "Sign in with Apple", which automatically generates burner email addresses, but that's another reason to switch to Safari.
Also, one feature which I like is the automatic generation of strong passwords.
Both works. I personally prefer Cmd-Z, as it feels like a natural choice, but Cmd-Shift-T also works when I'm editing a text field like when I'm writing a comment now.
For the record, Chrome is switching to the same content blocking mechanism (declarative blocking) as Safari is currently using.
I do personally think this lends some plausibility to Google's assertions that they're doing it for performance reasons rather than to make adblockers worse. It's not like Apple's doing it for the ad revenue.
> I do personally think this lends some plausibility to Google's assertions that they're doing it for performance reasons rather than to make adblockers worse.
I don’t know that I buy this.
Chrome has a bunch of restrictions that Safari doesn’t, which make ad-blocking in particular impractical.
Safari has, iirc, a hard 100,000 rule limit per blocker rule list. 1Blocker splits itself into 7 such lists to have enough room for all of the rules needed to be effective.
Chrome has a hard global limit of 150,000 across all extensions. Multiple adblock authors have indicated that’s probably too tight.
Safari also lets content blockers reconfigure rules on the fly, so I can add a rule or make an exception for a site as I browse as a user.
Chrome requires the lists to be totally static and pre-approved by reviewers. Change a rule requires resubmitting the extension for reapproval.
All-in-all it looks to me like Chrome’s changes are designed to look like what Safari does on the surface, while actually adding onerous new conditions that effectively cripple the effectiveness and usefulness of adblockers.
I really like Safari. Underrated browser. Unfortunately it lacks one feature that _to me_ is a dealbreaker: a way to have multiple identities/profiles.
This is true, but personally I've often found that this also prevents me from forcing a link to open in a new tab (via cmd-click) and have that new tab share cookies with its parent. Clicking on a link with target=_blank does work, though, which actually makes it more annoying that cmd-click does not.
shims/redirects some known trackers for their benign versions
rewrites incoming resource on the fly
injects custom javascript
injects/modifies CSS on the fly
> shims/redirects some known trackers for their benign versions
Well, all content blockers for Safari that I have used block trackers.
> rewrites incoming resource on the fly
Pure interest, may I ask why it's needed?
> injects custom javascript
> injects/modifies CSS on the fly
AFAIK injecting custom JS & CSS is available for Safari extensions, it's just that Safari Content blockers don't have them. (So that you can just only use content blockers, or you can opt-in to enable the ones that also inject JS. 1Blocker uses injected JS/CSS to add custom rules by pointing to DOM elements in-browser.) And that's a good thing(TM) IMO, so that non-technical users can't get faked by malicious extensions that injects malicious scripts.
I worked in a few AdShops for few short projects when I had to leave electronics for some time after my last employer in Canada was unable to secure a new work visa.
All and every were very very aware how adblocks can block double digits of their revenue with each new release, and it was considered an issue of existential importance. C-levels had weekly conference calls on dealing with adblocks.
In one of those companies, a senior was calling Google, and was pretty much receiving directions like "you can get around this block if you randomise this part of URL," "next months we will change this and that API, this will give you some breathing room."
Google is well aware of UBO, and for years tried to covertly subvert it.
AdBlockers are the modern Anti-Virus. It's the same cat'n'mouse game.
The next step will be isolating "sponsored content" in news articles and educational content.
Chrome has the user share and momentum to do whatever they want at this point, and since the majority of end users are unaware of developmental & software details and will continue using Chrome, their overwhelming user share will mean developers will continue to develop for Chrome whether or not they like the direction the browser is going. While ad blocking is the most widely used extension functionality remember that there are other adequate replacements in the Chrome store. Most users are probably already using the more popular (numerically) ones and even if every Chrome's uBlock Origin user migrated to another browser it will probably not make a significant blip on the radar. Only a corporate rival can challenge Chrome at this point and practically the only one who can do so is Microsoft's Edge team, and they will most likely establish a duopoly with Chrome instead of holding out for the sake of user freedom.
If this keeps up I might just give up and stick to Links2 or something for my daily browsing. There's Firefox for now but I'm really increasingly pessimistic about the state of the web.
This is probably a good thing. Google is declaring war on adblockers, uBO is their first target but not their last. Tech savvy people are going to end up dumping Chrome en mass. Chrome has dominated the browser market by being so good, but development of non-Google browsers is about to become exciting again, and everybody benefits from that.
Firefox development has hardly been boring: Quantum (Rust) & container tabs (and some big improvements to Dev Tools, I understand). Not a new development but addons on mobile is pretty damn cool.
A lot of people are probably only reading the headline and assuming uBlock Origin was removed from Chrome Webstore, but what actually happened was a version update to the dev extension entry was rejected. We have yet to see if this is just a flake, but reading the issue it seems gorhill intends to just see what happens next dev version.
However, I think most of that debate surrounds Manifest v3 is misleading. I’m not a huge fan of Manifest v3s limitations, but it’s basically the same limitations as Safari as far as I understand, and the justification does make some sense. So I am hoping that things will work out. I don’t know about any other things that would impact adblocking on Chrome.
Personally, I am happy with Firefox on desktop, and Safari on iPhone, and I don’t think there are any threats, perceived or actual, towards adblocking on those platforms.
Switched to Firefox on Android just to have a luxury of ad absence, will do the same on a desktop the moment uBO turned off by Chrome. There was a day or two when all extensions stopped to work because of some certificate expiration - it was a horrible experience, never again.
The double standards are getting way out of proportion here:
The functionality of the advertising browser is a bundling of functionality as well: one one hand the browser functionality to let the user browse and view what he wants, and on the other hand the functionality that lets advertisements and trackers function on the user's browser willy nilly.
So we have a functionality bundler (Chrome) demanding a lower level unbundler plug-in (uBO) stop bundling it's unbundling features together, while the only reason the latter exists is because of the organised bundling at a higher level...
> Hey all, I'm Simeon, the developer advocate for Chrome extensions. This morning I heard from the review team; they've approved the current draft so next publish should go through. Unfortunately it's the weekend, so most folks are out, but I'm planning to follow up with u/gorhill4 with more details once I have them.
107 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadI do sometimes just leave the site instead of clicking the single "I Agree" option.
And before you even begin to complain about it being "too slow", "slower than Chrome", <other statement of the month>, tell us that after you're running Chrome without an ad-blocker.
And even if it really is still slower by some miracle - this is a community containing world-class software engineers. Donate some of your time to bring it up to speed. Pun intended.
Sadly they don't seem to have world-class managers
I run Brave without an adblocker and have found it to be much faster than Firefox (with adblocker and pi-hole).
Also, as someone whose startup has both Chrome and Firefox extensions, I have to say the Firefox reviewers (who review releases and hold up the process — not end user reviewers) can be hugely annoying, and we deploy there as infrequently as possible. As a result, our Firefox customers don’t get all the latest bells and whistles. Wish it weren’t that way, but the process takes months!
Edit: clarified the annoying reviewers are not end users reviewers, but the people who suck up months of time for every minor update, making confused complaints about our code, and even UI implementation.
And for the record, I used Firefox for decades, up until last year. I just spend too much time in my browser to use anything other than Brave, given how much time it saves me.
Maybe, just maybe, they're sick of you because you ignore their platform?
I don't think I could use the modern web without it.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitch_5/
Two finger pinch zooming on a Macbook stutters enormously in Firefox and is much smoother on Chrome.
I use this feature all the time and it's made switching to Firefox difficult.
Another example:
I'm not a fan at all of how Firefox handles displaying huge amounts of tabs. Tiny arrows to scroll your tabs left and right is really a disorienting nuisance and I much prefer Chrome's system of making tabs smaller. I'm sure there's a way to change this, but I'd rather stay on the default path that they're actively iterating on and improving.
[1] http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011032210281240...
Autofilling. Chrome is just so much better and it's something I have to do a lot for my business. I'm always buying random parts from random places and a lot of them don't have the best-designed forms. Chrome handles them much better. There's just so much friction removed when you don't have to type all your info, especially on a phone, or pull out your credit card. I now have my credit card number memorized thanks to having to do so so much with Firefox. I had the same credit card for years, but with chrome I so rarely had to actually pull it out that I couldn't have told you more than the last 4 digits.
Chrome's built in password management is just better at picking up logins and passwords too when forms aren't designed really well.
I get a lot more performance issues with Firefox. I have to force close it sometimes. Never happened with chrome. It's not super frequent by any means but it happens.
Lot of websites don't work in Firefox and I have to open them in Chrome which is likely not Firefox's fault the majority of the time, just developers not testing in Firefox, but still quite annoying to me.
In addition to the issues above, I noticed terrible battery performance on my laptop and the fans would frequently spin up even with a single tab open.
One thing Firefox recently did was overhaul their GPU acceleration code (webrender) - it makes a massive difference in rendering speed and is faster than Chrome in many situations, though it needs to be manually enabled on some machines.
But yeah as a Firefox user it still lags behind safari and chrome for speed. I don’t use Adblock either...
If you do decide on using it, I recommend editing the browser so it doesn't display tabs on top, so the tree style tabs is the only place your tabs are located.
I cannot emphasize enough how big an improvement this has been to my browser experience, once I got proffecient with it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
That was undeniably true, though ages ago. Probably those thinking along these lines didn't run Firefox for some time.
A ton of code has changed in the two products and since about two years Firefox has filled the gap then surpassed Chrome. And BTW even if Firefox wasn't faster than Chrome (it is), I would happily trade say a 20% loss in speed with a close to 100% gain in privacy.
https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/insider-addons?hl=en-US
I used to use Chromium and Firefox side by side but stopped doing so when they started acting up in this way. When I need to test with Blink I use Vivaldi (which still supports uBlock Origin), Firefox otherwise.
The last sentence of the article starts with words "While it is certainly possible that the stable extension update would be allowed by Google".
If Gorhill needed to, some of that extra functionality could be moved out into a separate extension. uBlock has done this before with uBlock Origin Extra[2]. Most of the extra features (eg. remote font blocking) aren't a huge deal, in my opinion.
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2013/12/keeping-chrome-extensions-...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-extr...
I shouldn’t need separate extensions to each block css, JavaScript, fonts, cookies, pixels, etc.
Remote fonts can be used for tracking and fingerprinting (hence why private browsing modes aren’t private).
Am I missing something here?
Isn't it the reverse, local fonts can be used for fingerprinting?
(There are some snags with remote fonts — rendering bugs/exploits — but they're not exactly low hanging fruit anymore)
EDIT: I see what you mean by tracking. If the fonts are loaded with a third party script, this is indeed a problem. If the font files are served by a third party directly (without some intermediate script), this could be remedied with an extension that strips headers. It would obviously run afoul of this only do one thing rule from Google, the company that once attached Google+ to its search results.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it were a hidden vector of some sort, but I haven’t put effort into digging into it.
So far, I've not missed any features of Chrome except opening accidentally closed tab again. You might want to change few settings though: "show full urls" and "show favicons".
Apple Pay also works remarkably well, just click "Pay with Apple", and the authentication request pops up on your iPhone, requesting Touch ID / Face ID.
I've not seen anyone implement the new "Sign in with Apple", which automatically generates burner email addresses, but that's another reason to switch to Safari.
Also, one feature which I like is the automatic generation of strong passwords.
I do personally think this lends some plausibility to Google's assertions that they're doing it for performance reasons rather than to make adblockers worse. It's not like Apple's doing it for the ad revenue.
I don’t know that I buy this.
Chrome has a bunch of restrictions that Safari doesn’t, which make ad-blocking in particular impractical.
Safari has, iirc, a hard 100,000 rule limit per blocker rule list. 1Blocker splits itself into 7 such lists to have enough room for all of the rules needed to be effective.
Chrome has a hard global limit of 150,000 across all extensions. Multiple adblock authors have indicated that’s probably too tight.
Safari also lets content blockers reconfigure rules on the fly, so I can add a rule or make an exception for a site as I browse as a user.
Chrome requires the lists to be totally static and pre-approved by reviewers. Change a rule requires resubmitting the extension for reapproval.
All-in-all it looks to me like Chrome’s changes are designed to look like what Safari does on the surface, while actually adding onerous new conditions that effectively cripple the effectiveness and usefulness of adblockers.
> shims/redirects some known trackers for their benign versions
Well, all content blockers for Safari that I have used block trackers.
> rewrites incoming resource on the fly
Pure interest, may I ask why it's needed?
> injects custom javascript
> injects/modifies CSS on the fly
AFAIK injecting custom JS & CSS is available for Safari extensions, it's just that Safari Content blockers don't have them. (So that you can just only use content blockers, or you can opt-in to enable the ones that also inject JS. 1Blocker uses injected JS/CSS to add custom rules by pointing to DOM elements in-browser.) And that's a good thing(TM) IMO, so that non-technical users can't get faked by malicious extensions that injects malicious scripts.
I hope this is a mistake, since I can't imagine browsing the web without uBlock Origin.
All and every were very very aware how adblocks can block double digits of their revenue with each new release, and it was considered an issue of existential importance. C-levels had weekly conference calls on dealing with adblocks.
In one of those companies, a senior was calling Google, and was pretty much receiving directions like "you can get around this block if you randomise this part of URL," "next months we will change this and that API, this will give you some breathing room."
Google is well aware of UBO, and for years tried to covertly subvert it.
However, I think most of that debate surrounds Manifest v3 is misleading. I’m not a huge fan of Manifest v3s limitations, but it’s basically the same limitations as Safari as far as I understand, and the justification does make some sense. So I am hoping that things will work out. I don’t know about any other things that would impact adblocking on Chrome.
Personally, I am happy with Firefox on desktop, and Safari on iPhone, and I don’t think there are any threats, perceived or actual, towards adblocking on those platforms.
The functionality of the advertising browser is a bundling of functionality as well: one one hand the browser functionality to let the user browse and view what he wants, and on the other hand the functionality that lets advertisements and trackers function on the user's browser willy nilly.
So we have a functionality bundler (Chrome) demanding a lower level unbundler plug-in (uBO) stop bundling it's unbundling features together, while the only reason the latter exists is because of the organised bundling at a higher level...
> Hey all, I'm Simeon, the developer advocate for Chrome extensions. This morning I heard from the review team; they've approved the current draft so next publish should go through. Unfortunately it's the weekend, so most folks are out, but I'm planning to follow up with u/gorhill4 with more details once I have them.
Even if I am a Firefox user I don't see a sense in using Chrome. The 'features' that Chrome can but Chromium cannot are these that we everyone love:
* DRM * Centralized extension managment