Google owns web browser with monopoly market share.
Google uses product with monopoly market share to limit tools that allow a user to block ads that harms their other half...of which they are also a monopoly in.
There is a strong argument that they are using a monopoly to control and prevent users from choice to display or not display content, removing their choice to not see Google ads.
I'm not sure that any of this would ever have weight in the US...but it does feel off.
Google used billions of dollars from its online ad dominance to gain a monopoly in a different market via Chrome. Google is now using the latter monopoly to juice profits in the former, to the detriment of users.
Having the best product is not the same as monopoly. The switching costs of web browsers is as close to zero as is possible. Downloading opera, Firefox, brave, or any of the others is free and takes less than two minutes.
This isn't standard oil where you either buy oil from them or freeze.
I am thinking "A pattern of anti-competitive actions leveraging Google's control in multiple parts of the web ecosystem to limit competition." Will this fly in the US?
I'd be off of Chrome in a heartbeat if it weren't for all the Google properties required by my work, which themselves cripple non-Chromium browsers. (Looking at you, Meet!)
Firefox, for all of Mozilla's faults, stands head-and-shoulders over Chrome in terms of good and respectful user experience.
you can use different browsers for Meet and for browsing. I use different browsers for basically everything, tech stuff, reddit and everything more salacious, banking, email
Just use something that lives outside of the browser and covers blocking at the computer level (or router for the whole home), but I prefer at the computer level if you are up to the blocker being proxy for all https traffic.
But a very small number of people will do that. I was surprised how small is the number of people running any adblocker at all.
For web browsing, these solutions necessarily cannot be as sophisticated as software running in the browser. They're also much less convenient to install and use.
DNS filters and firewall rules are crude tools by comparison but you can't install uBO on random apps or your TV.
It both is and it isn't. It moves people from different threat models to a middle ground, and for some people that's worse and for some people it's significantly better.
If you live in the U.S. for most major ISP users it's probably a wash and you're just letting a different party have your info. If you live in a nation that desires to control what you consume online then it probably is a net gain.
Isn't that worse though since your data would be spread across multiple potentially untrustworthy parties instead of just a single one? Given how many requests a browser makes and normal browsing habits like regularly visiting the same sites, it would eventually lead to each resolver having a full profile of what you browse.
DNS adblockers like PiHole are certainly useful, but they don't provide as clean or comprehensive of an experience as a proper ad-blocking extension. For example, bypassing adblock detectors, cleaning up pages that get mangled by the removal of ads, removing ads hosted by the same domain as the desired content, and other things that could never really be accomplished with a domain blocklist.
That option will be gone too. They already tried to go that way this year. They will succeed next time, unless people finally stop using browser made by an advertising company.
Unfortunately Firefox is just as caught up in enforcing unsolicited web advertising. I have sponsored urlbar suggestions off, but still Firefox enrolled me in a "Weather Suggestions Follow On" "study" which puts sponsored AccuWeather results ahead of normal URL bar autocomplete results.
It is possible for two things to be bad without pretending that they're equivalent.
And in any case, if you're worried about Firefox, use Librewolf; it will not have sponsored search suggestions. But either option is better than Chrome if you're trying to avoid advertisements.
But honestly it comes down to this: in one you have an option to disable stuff you dont like, in the other you hope there will an option. You can guess which is which.
I would like to be able to leave studies on to participate without having my trust violated. Part of me is willing to chalk this up to an error, but it feels bad faith and there is a definite pattern of Mozilla adding new intrusions that they know are not welcome without asking.
Yes, it's annoying to disable Firefox suggestions. The company shouldn't be doing it, it is a violation of trust. Yes, it is hypocritical for Mozilla to talk about privacy and then to run these experiments. But you won't be able to run uBO at all in Chrome.
Even if the settings were getting constantly unchecked over and over, and even if the end result was that you had to check your Firefox settings every single day, that's still a better position to be in than not being able to do anything about the advertising even on a short-term basis.
If I have to constantly remind someone over and over again not to slap me in the face, I am going to be annoyed at that person. That person's behavior is bad. But it's still going to be easier to deal that person than with someone who just starts slapping me and refuses to even temporarily stop no matter what I say or do. I still have more agency when dealing with the first person than I have when dealing with the second.
This doesn't feel temporary if I routinely have to study the Firefox settings to find out what new ways they have found to violate my trust.
And actually, I don't really like the idea of ad blockers, they do seem rather bad faith to me. I don't like ads, but Google is ad supported, I do a search, I go to Google, I accept the ads, they're part of the deal.
Firefox though, they get plenty of money from Google when I search via the Firefox search box. If they were having cashflow problems I would understand, but they're going to look for alternative revenue streams from AccuWeather? As if being in bed with Google weren't bad enough they're like "how can we work with more companies that solely exist to gatekeep access to public data." But being in bed with Google at least makes sense, I don't see a better way to provide the service. And similarly for Google, I don't see how they could run YouTube without ads, I get their motivation here.
> This doesn't feel temporary if I routinely have to study the Firefox settings to find out what new ways they have found to violate my trust.
I mentioned this already:
> If I have to constantly remind someone over and over again not to slap me in the face, I am going to be annoyed at that person. That person's behavior is bad. But it's still going to be easier to deal that person than with someone who just starts slapping me and refuses to even temporarily stop no matter what I say or do. I still have more agency when dealing with the first person than I have when dealing with the second.
---
> And actually, I don't really like the idea of ad blockers, they do seem rather bad faith to me.
Then just say that :) Why come on here and trying to create an equivalence if your actual point is that you don't mind what Chrome is doing? From a privacy and unsolicited advertising point of view, Chrome is worse than Firefox.
If you don't mind unsolicited advertising, then sure, use whatever you want. But it feels vaguely disingenuous to phrase "I'm OK with Google advertising to me" as "there's no point switching to Firefox if you don't want ads."
> Firefox though, they get plenty of money from Google when I search via the Firefox search box.
If your position is that Firefox is flush with cash and doesn't require any additional revenue streams, but you worry that Google is a struggling business that will kill Youtube if you install uBlock Origin, then I have very good news for you about Google's annual profits.
I don't understand someone complaining about Firefox being in bed with Google if they don't have an issue with Google's advertising. The reason we don't like that Firefox is in bed with Google is because we don't like Google. If we liked Google, we might even want the companies to be in bed together.
Similarly, if your view of Mozilla showing unsolicited sponsored content is that they're "getting in bed" with AccuWeather, then I have really bad news about how the entirety of Google Ads as a platform works. If you're morally offended that Firefox is working with one closed down weather forecaster, just wait until you find out that Google is currently taking money from all of the closed down weather forecasters. That is how Google Ads works, Google "gets in bed" with those companies and shows you sponsored content from those companies whenever you do a web search.
And I understand being upset that Mozilla would do the same thing, but Mozilla is still strictly speaking doing a lot less of this stuff than Google is.
Mozilla should be working on doing none of this stuff, not resting on doing less. I expect that from Google, they're a for-profit company offering a closed-source for-profit browser. Yes, I hold Mozilla to a higher standard.
Okay. That's not controversial, I have higher standards for Mozilla too. It makes me angry when they act hypocritically.
This is still factually false:
> Unfortunately Firefox is just as caught up in enforcing unsolicited web advertising.
And sticking with a browser that is worse on the issue of advertising just because the better browser is a bit hypocritical is cutting off your own nose to spite your face. You can be mad at Mozilla, that's fine. Just don't tell people that Chrome and Firefox are the same when they're not.
Look, the reason why people get angry at Mozilla about this and why they shrug at Google is because Mozilla is not as caught up in advertising as Google is. If Mozilla was actually equivalent to Google, then we wouldn't hold Mozilla to a higher standard than Google. We treat the two companies differently because they are different.
I have plenty of complaints about Firefox but equating this to what Google is doing is absurd. Mozilla running an ocassional annoying ad is thousands of times less bad than permanently crippling all content blockers forever.
I can recommend librewolf, firefox with all the mozilla crap stripped out and good default privacy settings. Can tweak the options easily too if there's anything too annoying.
> Binaries are unsigned, third party update service, Google safe browsing disabled unless you build from source, running unusual browser setups can actually make you more distinctive online, unencrypted DNS by default, speed of security patches is slower than base Firefox, etc.
Unsigned binaries is good, update service is good, google safe browsing disabled is mega good, unencrypted dns is comparatively good from what i understand compared to mozilla's imperfect solution. Speed of security patches is not great, but having non-mozilla vetting on security patches is a tradeoff that is worthwhile.
Librewolf is great, but an easy way to lock down regular Firefox is to generate a profile on something like ffprofile.com and replace the default config.
It’s been my browser for both web development and personal browsing for more years than I can remember. It is terrific. I don’t even have chrome installed on any of my computers.
The pay wouldn't be so egregious if it wasn't a constant pattern of pay raises, despite by their own stats, losing MAU and revenue. They also laid off 250 people (which is much more than $5MM, any way you cut it) but it seems in bad taste to give the CEO a raise in the same year.
The journalist has blamed all this on "editors" -- so we'll never know _who_ exactly did the stealth edits and lied about contacting for comment. In any case, it is pretty ironic, given the CEO of Mozilla seems to think we need more than de-platforming to combat "misinformation":
Fairly good choices from what I understand (although I'm not sure I would consider Safari is a good alternative for someone with complaints about corporate pay and structure, even if that was a concern of yours I suspect you don't have much of a choice on the device you're using it on).
For me, one of the most important reasons to use Firefox is to support one of the few remaining alternate browser implementations. Sure, Chrome and Safari and Edge have all likely diverged to a degree since their shared ancestry (which really wasn't that long ago), but I suspect they're far more similar underneath than different. I would prefer they not be political (but I can see how they get mixed up, as leaning in heavy on privacy is necessarily political in some ways, such as when it involves opinions of nations that disagree, and then there are probably some at he org that want to push in what they see as a similar direction on other topics), but I don't really care about the pay of the CEO in comparison to the vital importance I think heterogeneity in the actual engines browsers use is for many reasons.
I totally agree its important, so I hope it doesn't go the way of Netscape. If they focused only on privacy, that would be fine (since its advertised as such). It really wasn't one issue or another that caused me to abandon it, rather just reading post after post from the org about how they're tackling issue X, Y or Z.
I also don't care about the CEO's comp either _unless_ the business is just... sucking... for lack of a better word. When they let go of 250 people and then bump the CEO's salary by nearly 50%, it just looks a little self-serving.
If Brave or Safari end up sucking enough I look into trying another browser again, I'll give FF a shot. I used it from about 2008 to 2020.
Brave? So the cryptocurrency-laced browser made by the guy who donated $1000 to a Republican candidate who the year before said "our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide" and "homosexuals have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution"? [0] Huh. Really not seeing how that's somehow preferable over the company that.. checks notes.. demands transparency in funding for advertising, and calls for research into how centralized social platforms and their algorithms work and are affecting people -- none of which have anything to do with invading anyone's privacy.
It has built-in ad-block, reading lists and vertical tabs. That's about all I need from a browser.
As for the CEO's donations, I couldn't care less. I don't care who the CEO of Mozilla donates to. I used Firefox for years, even when they (individuals at Mozilla) donated exclusively to democrats: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/mozilla-foundation/recipien...
Mozilla (as an organization) has chosen to participate in political activism and pay their executives ridiculous wages. I don't agree with a lot of the decisions they've made, so I don't use their browser. Simple as that.
Perhaps if the browser was just so good, it was impossible to live without, their MAU wouldn't be dropping... but that's not the case.
Right? I find that ppl who are so afraid of this kind of stuff generally have a view like "I'm worried non-straight ppl will force their views unto me, sorta like I force my views onto them", one of those "seeing in others what is in yourself" kinda thing. Thus their constant fear and outrage about anything different. But seriously, don't worry guys, people just want to live their lives. You know, "live and let live"? What someone wears or who someone "gets it on" with is not an existential threat to your astronomically-inflexible views or values. (Though if your views/values are "LGBTQ ppl have less rights than others", yeah those are definitely going to be deeply and directly challenged, moreso every day, and I'm here to do my part in that, cheers)
I wonder how much of that is user aging out of active usage for one reason or another (retirement, switching to a tablet from a desktop, etc) and how much of it is people switching (and how much of that switching is to something newer and small (e.g. not Safari, Edge, etc).
It is definitely going to go back up in June. I don't use Firefox now, it's now a good experience when compared to Chrome but will definitely switch if that's how I get my clean web browsing back.
Firefox is my main browser for many years, and it's still good.
(The only main thing I don't use it for is for the DRM that my main streaming service wants right now. I dedicate Chromium to that, to keep the nastiness away from my main browser.)
With Firefox, you probably do want to change a lot of settings from the default, for privacy&security reasons.
Firefox is absolutely not holistically security&privacy-friendly overall -- there's a long history, of often behaving like a for-profit tech company, to grow out of -- but it's the closest I'm aware of that we have right now.
Not helping is that browser standards were captured and turned into both serving the needs of particular kinds of businesses, and as massive market moats for dominant players.
I don't know what to think of all the browser startups and open source forks. I know at least one person at Brave, and that person is a 100% straight-shooter true-believer in privacy&security (and intellectually formidable), but some things leadership has done are too trust-me and bad optics. Regarding the rest of the efforts, there might be gold in there, but we have to skeptical of each one by default, for two reasons: (1) our field is bad at what we do, and that's now reflected deep in our technology stacks, as well as in practices for new development; (2) our field has normalized a lot of sociopathic behavior in the last 25 years, so it's easy for even well-intentioned people to inadvertently do bad things, and there are also a lot people with not as admirable of intentions.
If you want to use uBlock Origin on iOS, there's Orion browser. Enabling extensions and installing uBlock Origin on it requires a tedious step and the app is noticeably slower to respond and just overall worse and buggier than Safari, but the ad blocking works.
If you're a duel monitor nerd it feels required if you want to do something besides internet surf on one monitor and stream something on other.
I dont have the most powerful computer but if I want to play baldurs gate 3 on one monitor while stream something on the other monitor it has to be in firefox over chrome.
HN vastly over estimates how many people use adblockers every time this comes up and it is getting tiring.
Google will likely not see any noticeable reduction in user count from the upcoming addon changes. If you value your software freedom you shouldn't have been on Chrome in the first place for any reason.
Is there a demographic skew to consider? There are billions online, but the most desirable eyeballs on ads are Western and young. I would guess that population uses ad-blockers at a much higher rate than the background population, but I won't venture to guess how much higher.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken."
35-45% of users worldwide use ad blockers, depending on the source. It is extremely common, otherwise Google wouldn't be doing this. The top few ad blockers in the Chrome store (uBlock, AdBlock, AdGuard, etc.) have tens of millions of users each.
As long as the paywalls have zero ads, I’m fine with that. If it is paywall + ads? No. Either charge enough that you don’t need ads, or only use ads. Never both.
No, of course there will be no ads. But yeah, I’m sure HNers will be ok with a paywall, considering they’re probably in the top 10% (if not 5% or 1%) of their respective countries. What’s a few more bucks on top of their dozen monthly subscriptions.
Now go ask someone with the median income in a developing country how they feel about getting pretty much all relevant content in the Internet paywalled in the next 10 years or so due to the ever increasing use of ad-blockers.
Don’t get me wrong, content creators/owners are as much, if not more, to blame than ad blocker users.
I always find this argument very odd. There's high quality, international ad-free public services and culture available for everyone. You even get commitments to factuality and neutrality, in this day and age!
sure streaming the <current year> blockbuster costs money, but then again somehow nobody ever complained they had to pay for a movie ticket. Private market pop culture isn't some sort of good that one ought to expect to be free.
Cable, without premium channels, was $20 a month when I was a kid and there were no commercials. It took about 20 years to grow to $100 a month and with 25% of time devoted to ads. Even discounting inflation, that's a significant decrease in consumer value and a massive increase in cable company profit.
Google's ad empire is almost 20 years old. The same level of enshittification should be expected.
HN vastly over estimates adblocker usage, yes. But also if adblocker usage was completely trivial and could be completely ignored, then Google would not be wasting resources trying to shut it down on sites like Youtube.
I don't think this is going to create a large change in browser stats, but I'm also not sure anything short of antitrust is going to create a large change in browser stats. The pickings are very slim for issues that are worth campaigning on to change general user behavior, and adblocking might as well be one of the ones we use, because while it's a minuscule percentage at least it's not nothing. It's at least a large enough percentage for Google to care about targeting it.
And at the very least, adblocking is an easier issue to campaign on for user rights than privacy or abstract notions like software freedom are. We shouldn't be so quick to throw away talking points around one of the very few user rights where exercising that right has an obvious benefit and doesn't just make the user's life more complicated or difficult in the short term.
I am not going to get many people to switch to Firefox over an adblocker. But I'll get more people to switch for adblocking than I would by telling them to care about privacy or web ecosystem health.
Chrome won because the won over the influencers, that is the developers and people who provide support to others. Those influencers recommended Chrome to friends and family. As soon as those influencers shift to another browser, everyone else will gradually follow.
The problem that will prevent this from happening is the browser engine monoculture that might result it websites blocking anything but Chrome or a Chromium browser.
I had to search UBOL and it is "uBlock Origin Lite" [0] from the same author of uBlock Origin.
uBO Lite (uBOL) is a *permission-less* MV3-based content blocker.
The default ruleset corresponds to uBlock Origin's default filterset:
- uBlock Origin's built-in filter lists
- EasyList
- EasyPrivacy
- Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list
It's mentioned at the very bottom of the article, dismissively. (Despite the fact that the FAQ linked to doesn't make it seem nearly as limited as the author of this article wants you to believe)
> I've seen mentions that uBO Lite (uBOL) is proof that MV3-based blockers are as capable as MV2 ones. I can't speak for other blockers but this is not the case for uBOL vs. uBO
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe YouTube's new strategy requires frequent filter list updates but with MV3 the filter list is embedded in the extension so the extension itself would need to be updated (and Google controls the speed at which extensions can be updated).
For a long time I assumed Google's approach to hampering AdBlockers with MV3 was going to be the rule count limits imposed by MV3 but I think now it's more about controlling the speed that filter lists can be updated.
Ugh so I couldn't even run my own filters anymore.
I use a lot of custom filters to reduce many sites I visit to a list of headlines similar to HN. Too many of them have attention grabbing crap like huge pictures.
But I'm on Firefox so this isn't a worry for me luckily.
If chrome limits ad blockers and provides some way to unambiguously determine whether or not you’re chrome that cannot be spoofed, i wonder if sites will explicitly start blocking Firefox and other browsers.
Right now, Safari being the only game in town on iOS is basically the only reason why websites don’t exclude non-Chrome browsers already. Now if Apple ever supported this in a way that broke or deprecated adblocking, I’d probably seriously consider switching to an un-Googled Android phone. Until then, though, I’ve switched to Firefox on my desktop computers and use Safari on mobile and am pretty darn happy with the adblocking of both.
Didn't browsers decide to block unsigned extensions back when Microsoft decided to automatically add the silver light extension to every browser on the system? I think at least for Firefox you have to download the nightly build to bypass the signing process. Side loading extensions Google doesn't want you to have will probably be as painful as possible.
Sites will for sure use the Web Integrity API(1) to blacklist "unsafe" user agents exactly the same way macOS blacklists apps from "unsafe" developers.
I was already working my way off of chrome but without a suitable adblocking extension I'm going to move to whatever I have to. I've been using firefox off and on and it seems great and I see someone in the comments recommending Librewolf. Going to have to check that out.
I have been planning for a while to setup a pihole but hadn't yet bothered because I have sufficient ad blockers but definitely going to be doing that now as well.
Well done Google, you succeeded in making at least one person up their adblocking game.
You can use nextdns [0]
pretty much to the same effect of a pihole, yet you can get up and running in minutes. You can then configure wherever you please: your browser, your laptop, your phone, or even your router.
Agreed. At the end of the day there is no one tool that will fend off all of it. However, NextDNS/Pihole + uBlock Origin gets you most of the way there. uBlock Origin is particularly helpful for blocking first-party ads.
Thank you for this! I had tried OpenDNS setup through my router but it blocked some stuff I didn't want it to and wouldn't, for anything, release the block so I moved back off of it. I'm definitely going to give nextdns a shot!
I use NextDNS in my network and I'd say it's well worth the price. I could of course accomplish it with PiHole, but NextDNS just works, and covers my phone when I'm not at home.
On Android 12+ (if my memory serves well), you can use DNS over TLS without having to install any additional software. It seems to cover all of the connections, but I don't think DoT is used when your phone connects to your network for VoWifi and eSIM provisioning connections (I didn't see them in my NextDNS logs)
NextDNS also has a free plan, albeit you'll hit the limit quickly.
I don't expect everyone to pay for a service like this, but I think that paying for a service like this is reasonable if you can afford it. There's always a modicum of trust that you must confer on the provider (they're resolving all your DNS queries, and you can view logs if choose to), but paying for it does better in aligning incentives. Otherwise self-hosting is the most privacy-friendly option of all.
I can see a sort of 'defense in depth' argument, especially for sending traffic from TVs etc. through your pihole. But in the browser (FF esp.), uBlock origin is excellent.
Pihole blocks stuff for everything on your network. No need to train your family or do anything to machines are devices. While it does not block everything, and sometimes too much. It does block a lot.
By blocking too much, for one of the banks I use blocking their app telemetry causes the app to crash. And sometimes I do want to click on an ad Google serves up when it matches my search and I am buying something.
Switched to Firefox recently and it was surprisingly painless. They've really catched up to Chrome in regards to usability, and of course surpass them in terms of privacy and integrity.
I actually like multi-account containers better than profiles. I know it isn't the same thing but I just want to open a work tab for work stuff and a personal tab for other stuff. Couple that with simple tab groups and you have an amazing single window workflow.
It's absolutely amazing with retarded services like MS Teams that don't allow you to be in two tenants at the same time. Same with their admin portals.
Funny how MS is pushing edge and Firefox is the best option to manage their services.
I do that: well, not pihole but I run unbound on a Pi and I've got my Firefox set to never use the "trusted resolver" (i.e. network trr set to 5... I think the default is still 0/off but you never know).
That way I'm preventing DNS over HTTPS and known ads (and known telemetry) domains cannot resolve sneakily through HTTPS.
I can still, if I want to, have unbound use DoH so that my ISP doesn't spy on me.
But on my LAN there's no DNS over HTTPS.
And unbound accepts wildcards to prevent domains from resolving, which is really sweet.
I wrote my own tiny script (in Clojure / Babashka) which combines several huge DNS blocklists, allows certain domains I'm okay with, merge what can be merged into a single line using wildcards, etc.
1. Its built-in Ad block still works on Youtube - before Google catches up, too small a browser competitor
Doesn't work in laptop browser.
2. Tab sync: port tabs from Edge from phone to laptop & vice-versa, regardless of OS version. This used to work on Safari from iPhone SE (1st gen) but now it doesn't with new iPhone/iOS
highly recommend librewolf as well. If you use youtube a lot, you should check out sponsorblock for youtube, youtube windowed full screen and improve youtube! extensions. They make youtube usable again.
This is how you get the DoJ to sue you for antitrust violations.
It starts with blocking ad blockers on Chrome. Then, to prop up Chrome usage you deliberately slow down other browsers, something that's arguably already happening [1] and has arguably already happened [2].
At some point the government takes the same actions they did with Microsoft over Internet Explorer: abuse of market power to require your browsers for the supposedly open Web.
What bugs me most about this stuff is the dishonestly.
This is about AdBlockers.
It's okay to say it's bad for your business and you don't want them. To make up all these other excuses is what is painful and just feels so patronizing.
It may not actually be OK to say that, since admitting it publicly could make antitrust regulators jobs easier when investigating how Google uses its stranglehold over the browser and search markets to enforce its stranglehold over the online advertising market.
There should be extra (and enormous) antitrust penalties for publicly lying. These lies can be proven with internal communications gained from discovery or from leaks (incentivized by large bounties).
Search engines have shown over and over that they'll talk all the money but hide behind the 'we're just the market' cover when one of their ads serves you with a virus.
It's both imo. The security issue is both true and a huge problem being actively exploited on a massive scale. Its a "Ah great, we can improve security _and_ cripple ad blockers" moment for Google.
My impression is that security people already consider Chrome a "virus" application. This is just one more nail the coffin for anyone who cares about such things. (To be clear, people should care)
Seems like an appropriate time to shamelessly plug my tiny Chrome extension, JS Toggle. It's just a low key button that makes it easy to toggle javascript that I made for myself, and use pretty much every day. It does refresh all open pages after toggling, so be mindful of toggling it when dealing with forms, etc.
I'm surprised more people don't use Firefox, even from a practical point of view.
The main reason I use it as my main driver is because I use Chrome for all my work stuff. I then use Firefox for all my personal stuff, so it separates the two, especially on my work laptop.
You can use Firefox for both work and personal stuff, with a couple options:
- Multi-Account Containers segregates cookies (i.e. enables multiple simultaneous logins to Gmail, GitHub, etc, any service, in different tabs of the same browser window)
- Firefox Profiles segregates everything (cookies, preferences, bookmarks, history), by running a separate browser instance.
Containers are more convenient for simple separation. Profiles are 100% separation.
I find that tedious. Mainly because it's really easy to switch between chrome and firefox via keyboard, but to switch between profiles/containers requires mouse clicks etc.
Not sure what platform you're on, but I switch between Firefox containers and profiles primarily from keyboard.
Profile switching is the usual app switching, handled by the desktop environment. Just like Firefox-to-Chrome would be.
Container switching is just tab switching, which Firefox handles well enough. If you need to go deeper in your tab history, you might need to scroll/click, but for the most-recent 9 tabs, it's right there.
Truthfully, I don't think that Firefox and Chromium look all that different, to me it seems like it's the same layout just different margins/colors/tab styles? So I'm not sure what the biggest issues would be to change.
Thanks for the links. The addon in the first link seems to get me much closer to the look I desire. I'll read the other links to see if I can tweak it further.
I don't even have Google Chrome installed. I have Firefox, Edge and Vivaldi. I pretty much switch between them throughout the day and it's unnoticeable really.
This goes beyond Youtube. Most ads are absolutely malicious and the web is unsafe and unusable without an adblocker. The FBI themselves recommend using an adblocker to stay safe online https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221?=8324278624
The few times I turned it off I started getting fullscreen highjacking adverts: one was convincing enough that unless I knew to tap F11/esc I wouldn't have noticed.
I'm aware of malvertising, and have also spent time in front line tech support. Why does this make the web "unsafe and unusable" without an ad blocker?
From the Wikipedia page you linked, it's clear all vectors for automatic intrusion and traditional pop-up fakery are well blocked. Even malicious spoof sites are being blocked at record speeds on the browser level.
In addition, ads are not the only (or even the primary) method of malware delivery. At best if you think an ad-blocker makes you "safe", this is a false sense of security.
If you apply common sense, there's no scenario where normal web browsing is "unsafe".
I haven't seen any ads actually try to exploit browser vulnerabilities (although I do believe many are engaging in illegal fingerprinting attempts - see how some web sites suddenly pop up a video DRM prompt if you aren't allowing DRM by default, even though they contain no DRMed video content).
But the amount of social engineering (trying to trick users into installing malware), scams, and obvious misinfo (the "you won't believe what car Greta is driving" ads for example) is mind-blowing. Even shopping ads often turn out to be worse-than-Temu "sell the worst piece of undersized crap China can crank out, promising a money-back guarantee that turns out to be worthless" scams.
Making sure tech-inexperienced friends and relatives have an ad blocker makes a night-and-day difference in the amount of damage control and cleanup you'll have to deal with.
> Making sure tech-inexperienced friends and relatives have an ad blocker makes a night-and-day difference in the amount of damage control and cleanup you'll have to deal with.
I understand there are people who need safety rails (or shouldn't be using computers at all), but that doesn't really negate my point.
Most ads are not malicious, and the web is perfectly usable and safe without an ad blocker, providing you use common sense.
Nah, the GP probably just forgot that it's polite to disclose that they're a googler working on ads.
I've personally been hit by malicious ad(s) at work. Definitely embarrassing as an engineer, especially when I wasn't looking at anything work-inappropriate (it's been ages, don't recall what I was looking for).
Google can spin this however they like, but this is blatantly anti-consumer behavior only enabled by their monopoly position. The FTC should already be investigating over this, but, alas, they seem distracted by other issues.
I've not tried Firefox in years, but this will likely be the catalyst to me switching. I assume Edge follow will follow suit (and I've no reason to see why they won't since it's chromium based).
I've switched to Firefox a couple of years ago because I was increasingly uncomfortable with Chrome effectively becoming the new IE, and honestly I find it works just as well in vast majority of cases. Now that Chrome is starting to become overtly hostile to users, I'm very glad I made the jump already.
None of the news sites I read have that. I haven't seen an automatic download attempt in almost a decade - all major browsers block that by default and have done for some time.
In the long run, as long we have general-purpose computers, ad-blockers will win. Suppose a ManifestV4 completely cuts off network filtering: so what? Run a GPU driver that uses an AI model to block out anything that looks like an ad. Sure, you won't stop ads distorting page layout or causing unnecessary network traffic, but as long as you control your computer a whole, you don't have to see them.
It's not simply about what you SEE. It's about tracking what sites you visit, where you are, what information can be collated to profile you in any and every way: your political preferences and likely interests can be gathered with some degree of probability from such things as your taste in music. Google buys your purchase history. Facebook has over 4,000 data points on you even if you don't use Facebook (use WhatsApp? people you know do? you're in their phone's address book?). Microsoft, Amazon and others likewise.
The data are for sale.
This is how Trump got elected and the UK got Brexit. Microtargeted political messages to persuade a proportion of the population to vote the way the very rich wanted them to vote.
Seems like having a browser monopoly is bad no matter who's in charge. It's also interesting to see how each company used its power. Microsoft wanted to keep people in the Microsoft ecosystem, so they crippled the web. Meanwhile Google wants you to use the web, just not modify it in any way to maintain the profitability of its ad business - so we get a feature-rich rendering engine and proposals like "Web Environment Integrity".
It's much better than IE6 in 07, but that also makes it much more dangerous. MS stopping IE development was a major strategic mistake (and unintended gift to free internet).
Business wise makes sense google's cashflow is based on shoveling mostly shitty ads at people and youtube allows people to self select for more profitable ads.
Longterm will continue to harm google's product of search and youtube media products as it will motivate some people to figure out more ways that are more costly to google to dodge ads.
Human side wise this is starting to feel like the strangest form of corporate bullying. I want to believe that the motivation is to push up the demand for the strange mix products that is youtube premieum.
230 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadI'm not sure that any of this would ever have weight in the US...but it does feel off.
This isn't standard oil where you either buy oil from them or freeze.
Definitely ground for breakup IMHO.
Firefox, for all of Mozilla's faults, stands head-and-shoulders over Chrome in terms of good and respectful user experience.
But a very small number of people will do that. I was surprised how small is the number of people running any adblocker at all.
DNS filters and firewall rules are crude tools by comparison but you can't install uBO on random apps or your TV.
If you live in the U.S. for most major ISP users it's probably a wash and you're just letting a different party have your info. If you live in a nation that desires to control what you consume online then it probably is a net gain.
That makes me think of the reason Tor has Entry Guards where the first hop is limited to just a few selected nodes instead of random: https://support.torproject.org/about/entry-guards/
Oh it also does dns over https which is a nice bonus.
It is possible for two things to be bad without pretending that they're equivalent.
And in any case, if you're worried about Firefox, use Librewolf; it will not have sponsored search suggestions. But either option is better than Chrome if you're trying to avoid advertisements.
But honestly it comes down to this: in one you have an option to disable stuff you dont like, in the other you hope there will an option. You can guess which is which.
You mention "study", in Firefox's settings (about:preferences#privacy) I can see "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" checkbox.
So yeah, I think you do have an option.
Yes, it's annoying to disable Firefox suggestions. The company shouldn't be doing it, it is a violation of trust. Yes, it is hypocritical for Mozilla to talk about privacy and then to run these experiments. But you won't be able to run uBO at all in Chrome.
Even if the settings were getting constantly unchecked over and over, and even if the end result was that you had to check your Firefox settings every single day, that's still a better position to be in than not being able to do anything about the advertising even on a short-term basis.
If I have to constantly remind someone over and over again not to slap me in the face, I am going to be annoyed at that person. That person's behavior is bad. But it's still going to be easier to deal that person than with someone who just starts slapping me and refuses to even temporarily stop no matter what I say or do. I still have more agency when dealing with the first person than I have when dealing with the second.
And actually, I don't really like the idea of ad blockers, they do seem rather bad faith to me. I don't like ads, but Google is ad supported, I do a search, I go to Google, I accept the ads, they're part of the deal.
Firefox though, they get plenty of money from Google when I search via the Firefox search box. If they were having cashflow problems I would understand, but they're going to look for alternative revenue streams from AccuWeather? As if being in bed with Google weren't bad enough they're like "how can we work with more companies that solely exist to gatekeep access to public data." But being in bed with Google at least makes sense, I don't see a better way to provide the service. And similarly for Google, I don't see how they could run YouTube without ads, I get their motivation here.
I mentioned this already:
> If I have to constantly remind someone over and over again not to slap me in the face, I am going to be annoyed at that person. That person's behavior is bad. But it's still going to be easier to deal that person than with someone who just starts slapping me and refuses to even temporarily stop no matter what I say or do. I still have more agency when dealing with the first person than I have when dealing with the second.
---
> And actually, I don't really like the idea of ad blockers, they do seem rather bad faith to me.
Then just say that :) Why come on here and trying to create an equivalence if your actual point is that you don't mind what Chrome is doing? From a privacy and unsolicited advertising point of view, Chrome is worse than Firefox.
If you don't mind unsolicited advertising, then sure, use whatever you want. But it feels vaguely disingenuous to phrase "I'm OK with Google advertising to me" as "there's no point switching to Firefox if you don't want ads."
> Firefox though, they get plenty of money from Google when I search via the Firefox search box.
If your position is that Firefox is flush with cash and doesn't require any additional revenue streams, but you worry that Google is a struggling business that will kill Youtube if you install uBlock Origin, then I have very good news for you about Google's annual profits.
I don't understand someone complaining about Firefox being in bed with Google if they don't have an issue with Google's advertising. The reason we don't like that Firefox is in bed with Google is because we don't like Google. If we liked Google, we might even want the companies to be in bed together.
Similarly, if your view of Mozilla showing unsolicited sponsored content is that they're "getting in bed" with AccuWeather, then I have really bad news about how the entirety of Google Ads as a platform works. If you're morally offended that Firefox is working with one closed down weather forecaster, just wait until you find out that Google is currently taking money from all of the closed down weather forecasters. That is how Google Ads works, Google "gets in bed" with those companies and shows you sponsored content from those companies whenever you do a web search.
And I understand being upset that Mozilla would do the same thing, but Mozilla is still strictly speaking doing a lot less of this stuff than Google is.
This is still factually false:
> Unfortunately Firefox is just as caught up in enforcing unsolicited web advertising.
And sticking with a browser that is worse on the issue of advertising just because the better browser is a bit hypocritical is cutting off your own nose to spite your face. You can be mad at Mozilla, that's fine. Just don't tell people that Chrome and Firefox are the same when they're not.
Look, the reason why people get angry at Mozilla about this and why they shrug at Google is because Mozilla is not as caught up in advertising as Google is. If Mozilla was actually equivalent to Google, then we wouldn't hold Mozilla to a higher standard than Google. We treat the two companies differently because they are different.
On a serious note - I’ve seen a lot of browser startups lately.
Are there any of them that really stand out?
> Binaries are unsigned, third party update service, Google safe browsing disabled unless you build from source, running unusual browser setups can actually make you more distinctive online, unencrypted DNS by default, speed of security patches is slower than base Firefox, etc.
Why?
It's always good to have a backup besides chrome/Firefox, in case Mozilla decides to commit yet another absurd move due to weird political trends.
Theres only one site I know of that doesn't 100% work in it, thankfully its not one I use all the time.
Surviving but continues to bleed users.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
The main ones being:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
The pay wouldn't be so egregious if it wasn't a constant pattern of pay raises, despite by their own stats, losing MAU and revenue. They also laid off 250 people (which is much more than $5MM, any way you cut it) but it seems in bad taste to give the CEO a raise in the same year.
And:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/
The fact that they're leaning so much into political activism.
On their homepage they're promoting a journalist involved in some misinformation controversy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220928230910/https://www.washi...
The journalist has blamed all this on "editors" -- so we'll never know _who_ exactly did the stealth edits and lied about contacting for comment. In any case, it is pretty ironic, given the CEO of Mozilla seems to think we need more than de-platforming to combat "misinformation":
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
Not a fan of statements that creep into invasions of privacy from a supposedly privacy focused browser.
So, to sum it up;
Wild executive pay for poor performance and too much political activism (that I tend to not agree with) for a web browser.
For me, one of the most important reasons to use Firefox is to support one of the few remaining alternate browser implementations. Sure, Chrome and Safari and Edge have all likely diverged to a degree since their shared ancestry (which really wasn't that long ago), but I suspect they're far more similar underneath than different. I would prefer they not be political (but I can see how they get mixed up, as leaning in heavy on privacy is necessarily political in some ways, such as when it involves opinions of nations that disagree, and then there are probably some at he org that want to push in what they see as a similar direction on other topics), but I don't really care about the pay of the CEO in comparison to the vital importance I think heterogeneity in the actual engines browsers use is for many reasons.
I also don't care about the CEO's comp either _unless_ the business is just... sucking... for lack of a better word. When they let go of 250 people and then bump the CEO's salary by nearly 50%, it just looks a little self-serving.
If Brave or Safari end up sucking enough I look into trying another browser again, I'll give FF a shot. I used it from about 2008 to 2020.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controver...
As for the CEO's donations, I couldn't care less. I don't care who the CEO of Mozilla donates to. I used Firefox for years, even when they (individuals at Mozilla) donated exclusively to democrats: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/mozilla-foundation/recipien...
Mozilla (as an organization) has chosen to participate in political activism and pay their executives ridiculous wages. I don't agree with a lot of the decisions they've made, so I don't use their browser. Simple as that.
Perhaps if the browser was just so good, it was impossible to live without, their MAU wouldn't be dropping... but that's not the case.
Nor their bedrooms. The gall of people to judge others by their consensual love is something I'll never understand.
(The only main thing I don't use it for is for the DRM that my main streaming service wants right now. I dedicate Chromium to that, to keep the nastiness away from my main browser.)
With Firefox, you probably do want to change a lot of settings from the default, for privacy&security reasons.
Firefox is absolutely not holistically security&privacy-friendly overall -- there's a long history, of often behaving like a for-profit tech company, to grow out of -- but it's the closest I'm aware of that we have right now.
Not helping is that browser standards were captured and turned into both serving the needs of particular kinds of businesses, and as massive market moats for dominant players.
I don't know what to think of all the browser startups and open source forks. I know at least one person at Brave, and that person is a 100% straight-shooter true-believer in privacy&security (and intellectually formidable), but some things leadership has done are too trust-me and bad optics. Regarding the rest of the efforts, there might be gold in there, but we have to skeptical of each one by default, for two reasons: (1) our field is bad at what we do, and that's now reflected deep in our technology stacks, as well as in practices for new development; (2) our field has normalized a lot of sociopathic behavior in the last 25 years, so it's easy for even well-intentioned people to inadvertently do bad things, and there are also a lot people with not as admirable of intentions.
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...
https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...
I dont have the most powerful computer but if I want to play baldurs gate 3 on one monitor while stream something on the other monitor it has to be in firefox over chrome.
I'd say the Android one is probably the weakest link but still usable and of course having ad-block on mobile is a huge quality of life improvement.
Other than that I don't notice any slowdowns compared to Chrome, the UI is very similar anyhow and the addon ecosystem is decent too.
Google will likely not see any noticeable reduction in user count from the upcoming addon changes. If you value your software freedom you shouldn't have been on Chrome in the first place for any reason.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Now go ask someone with the median income in a developing country how they feel about getting pretty much all relevant content in the Internet paywalled in the next 10 years or so due to the ever increasing use of ad-blockers.
Don’t get me wrong, content creators/owners are as much, if not more, to blame than ad blocker users.
sure streaming the <current year> blockbuster costs money, but then again somehow nobody ever complained they had to pay for a movie ticket. Private market pop culture isn't some sort of good that one ought to expect to be free.
Cable used to cost $100 per month AND had ads.
The enshittification will continue. Especially since the low hanging fruit of the internet are becoming rarer.
Google's ad empire is almost 20 years old. The same level of enshittification should be expected.
I don't think this is going to create a large change in browser stats, but I'm also not sure anything short of antitrust is going to create a large change in browser stats. The pickings are very slim for issues that are worth campaigning on to change general user behavior, and adblocking might as well be one of the ones we use, because while it's a minuscule percentage at least it's not nothing. It's at least a large enough percentage for Google to care about targeting it.
And at the very least, adblocking is an easier issue to campaign on for user rights than privacy or abstract notions like software freedom are. We shouldn't be so quick to throw away talking points around one of the very few user rights where exercising that right has an obvious benefit and doesn't just make the user's life more complicated or difficult in the short term.
I am not going to get many people to switch to Firefox over an adblocker. But I'll get more people to switch for adblocking than I would by telling them to care about privacy or web ecosystem health.
The problem that will prevent this from happening is the browser engine monoculture that might result it websites blocking anything but Chrome or a Chromium browser.
"The media is exaggerating Gorhill's opposition to Google's Manifest V3 changes" is just about the wildest take I've seen on Manifest V3 yet.
----
Just to be clear, here's the author of that FAQ describing how the FAQ has been covered: https://nitter.privacydev.net/gorhill/status/172563316907064...
> I've seen mentions that uBO Lite (uBOL) is proof that MV3-based blockers are as capable as MV2 ones. I can't speak for other blockers but this is not the case for uBOL vs. uBO
For a long time I assumed Google's approach to hampering AdBlockers with MV3 was going to be the rule count limits imposed by MV3 but I think now it's more about controlling the speed that filter lists can be updated.
I use a lot of custom filters to reduce many sites I visit to a list of headlines similar to HN. Too many of them have attention grabbing crap like huge pictures.
But I'm on Firefox so this isn't a worry for me luckily.
I remember when I was young thinking it would be impossible to out-asshole Microsoft. Ah, the innocent days.
1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...
I have been planning for a while to setup a pihole but hadn't yet bothered because I have sufficient ad blockers but definitely going to be doing that now as well.
Well done Google, you succeeded in making at least one person up their adblocking game.
[0]: https://nextdns.io
[0]: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome#getting-started
I wonder if the apple configuration generator would work better?
https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
I don't expect everyone to pay for a service like this, but I think that paying for a service like this is reasonable if you can afford it. There's always a modicum of trust that you must confer on the provider (they're resolving all your DNS queries, and you can view logs if choose to), but paying for it does better in aligning incentives. Otherwise self-hosting is the most privacy-friendly option of all.
By blocking too much, for one of the banks I use blocking their app telemetry causes the app to crash. And sometimes I do want to click on an ad Google serves up when it matches my search and I am buying something.
In what way was it behind?
And before someone comes here saying container tabs, it's not the same thing.
Funny how MS is pushing edge and Firefox is the best option to manage their services.
That way I'm preventing DNS over HTTPS and known ads (and known telemetry) domains cannot resolve sneakily through HTTPS.
I can still, if I want to, have unbound use DoH so that my ISP doesn't spy on me.
But on my LAN there's no DNS over HTTPS.
And unbound accepts wildcards to prevent domains from resolving, which is really sweet.
I wrote my own tiny script (in Clojure / Babashka) which combines several huge DNS blocklists, allows certain domains I'm okay with, merge what can be merged into a single line using wildcards, etc.
1. Its built-in Ad block still works on Youtube - before Google catches up, too small a browser competitor Doesn't work in laptop browser.
2. Tab sync: port tabs from Edge from phone to laptop & vice-versa, regardless of OS version. This used to work on Safari from iPhone SE (1st gen) but now it doesn't with new iPhone/iOS
It starts with blocking ad blockers on Chrome. Then, to prop up Chrome usage you deliberately slow down other browsers, something that's arguably already happening [1] and has arguably already happened [2].
At some point the government takes the same actions they did with Microsoft over Internet Explorer: abuse of market power to require your browsers for the supposedly open Web.
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-reportedly-slowing-...
[2]: https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/google-denies-alte...
This is about AdBlockers.
It's okay to say it's bad for your business and you don't want them. To make up all these other excuses is what is painful and just feels so patronizing.
That's why I run an AdBlocker.
More over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361758
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamol...
The main reason I use it as my main driver is because I use Chrome for all my work stuff. I then use Firefox for all my personal stuff, so it separates the two, especially on my work laptop.
Profile switching is the usual app switching, handled by the desktop environment. Just like Firefox-to-Chrome would be.
Container switching is just tab switching, which Firefox handles well enough. If you need to go deeper in your tab history, you might need to scroll/click, but for the most-recent 9 tabs, it's right there.
That could always change, but it’s probably safe to say a mass exodus to Firefox would only cement Google’s interested in continued “investment”.
Truthfully, I don't think that Firefox and Chromium look all that different, to me it seems like it's the same layout just different margins/colors/tab styles? So I'm not sure what the biggest issues would be to change.
Notably, Firefox also has userChrome.css (https://www.userchrome.org/), so if themes aren't able to get you where you want, it's possible that there's a more extensive change that someone has compiled in a user style. https://firefoxcss-store.github.io/index.html, https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox might be good places to start looking, although I don't have personal experience with either source so this isn't a recommendation.
I haven't used an ad blocker in a decade. The web is perfectly safe and usable. What do you believe makes it unsafe and unusable?
From the Wikipedia page you linked, it's clear all vectors for automatic intrusion and traditional pop-up fakery are well blocked. Even malicious spoof sites are being blocked at record speeds on the browser level.
In addition, ads are not the only (or even the primary) method of malware delivery. At best if you think an ad-blocker makes you "safe", this is a false sense of security.
If you apply common sense, there's no scenario where normal web browsing is "unsafe".
But the amount of social engineering (trying to trick users into installing malware), scams, and obvious misinfo (the "you won't believe what car Greta is driving" ads for example) is mind-blowing. Even shopping ads often turn out to be worse-than-Temu "sell the worst piece of undersized crap China can crank out, promising a money-back guarantee that turns out to be worthless" scams.
Making sure tech-inexperienced friends and relatives have an ad blocker makes a night-and-day difference in the amount of damage control and cleanup you'll have to deal with.
I understand there are people who need safety rails (or shouldn't be using computers at all), but that doesn't really negate my point.
Most ads are not malicious, and the web is perfectly usable and safe without an ad blocker, providing you use common sense.
I've personally been hit by malicious ad(s) at work. Definitely embarrassing as an engineer, especially when I wasn't looking at anything work-inappropriate (it's been ages, don't recall what I was looking for).
Google can spin this however they like, but this is blatantly anti-consumer behavior only enabled by their monopoly position. The FTC should already be investigating over this, but, alas, they seem distracted by other issues.
I've not tried Firefox in years, but this will likely be the catalyst to me switching. I assume Edge follow will follow suit (and I've no reason to see why they won't since it's chromium based).
I'm not sure why I need to be to think that the web is not "unsafe and unusable" without an adblocker.
FWIW, anyone can enable this policy. All you have to do is drop some files in /etc. See https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9027408?hl=en
Chrome doesn't look in your home directory for enterprise policy manifest files, sadly.
The data are for sale.
This is how Trump got elected and the UK got Brexit. Microtargeted political messages to persuade a proportion of the population to vote the way the very rich wanted them to vote.
Longterm will continue to harm google's product of search and youtube media products as it will motivate some people to figure out more ways that are more costly to google to dodge ads.
Human side wise this is starting to feel like the strangest form of corporate bullying. I want to believe that the motivation is to push up the demand for the strange mix products that is youtube premieum.