It won't. But not because this is desirable. All these anti-user measures are small and gradual steps that regular folks won't immediately recognize. Something about a frog and boiling water.
Beyond that, how many ordinary non-techie people are ever checking the actual changes of their app? I'd bet basically never unless a changelog page opens immediately after the update. And that's not exactly going to be worded in an understandable way like "we're doing this to screw over your ability to do what you want on the web".
The frog boiling analogy doesn't work long-term though, because humans don't live forever, and new ones keep replacing the old ones. A new crop of college kids is going to look at Chrome and say "nope"
Or the college kids are acclimated to the Google ecosystem because they been using Google Classroom on the Google Chromebooks in their K-12 classes for years.
Chromebooks happen to be a perfect example of a product that’s only ever used by people forced to, in this case by their school, as opposed to something people buy with their own money.
I don't understand why Google counteracts indirectly. Why can't they just ban adblockers from the Chrome Web Store? If that's not possible, why not just remove specific adblockers one by one? Removing the big ones would probably stop most people from using them.
My assumption is that banning them outright will make it super obvious you can’t run adblock on chrome. With Manifest V3 limiting their capabilities but not getting rid of them, the layman user will still feel like they have adblock and aren’t likely to know it’s not as powerful as it was before.
Google might be trying to have their cake and eat it too - hamstring adblocking enough that their sites and ad networks can work around it but other sites and ad networks will remain blocked.
Help people save money on their insurance by playing as the Geico lizard! Find out the dirt on used cars as the CarFax fox! Yesterday's annoying mascots are today's folk heroes.
Ads will never be the 'new content'. If I want to read a news story, or find some key information, do you really suppose I will appreciate being confronted with "Avoid the Noid" or other fatuous games?
That would get them a lot of bad press and many people would leave. It might even get AGs attention. If they just do ambiguous annoying things, that's safer for them.
They benefit from people blocking ads, just not their ads. And they can't just build something into their browser to block everyone else's ads by default because that'll be uncompetitive.
Is it? I've seen ad blockers try that "privileged ads" model. It's hilariously unpopular and unprofitable due to product market mismatch.
Maybe I am cynical about the law, but I assume the only reason they don't block other networks is because it would be their same advertisers, and they would be furious enough to take action.
Note however that they get to decide this criteria, I as a user does not have any input as to which ads are "disruptive". And hey, it just so happens that their criteria allows for their own ads.
Yes, which is not "block everyone else's ads". Your own first link says that websites eventually fixed their ads to comply with their "Better Ads Standards" and thus became able to show them again.
Not sure about the second part. Considering they have a dominant market position/gatekeeper/whatever, they probably have to actually make an argument for "why not" in the case of tracking blockers (age restricted content is another discussion entirely).
Otherwise, abusing dominance in the phone app store market to benefit their (also dominant) ad surveillance business sounds very, very much like something the DMA could and should punish.
If Google had their own porn app in the Chrome or Play stores, but banned all other porn apps, I guarantee they'd lose quite a few anti-trust related lawsuits, and quickly.
There is a baseline assumption that this is motivated by ads. I really don't think Google is coordinated enough for ads to exert pressure between orgs in that way. People in chrome really are just optimizing for security and safety.
And if you've ever worked for 'em, even in a department related to neither Chrome nor Ads, you'll soon know the influence of the Ads team. Prestige, high-pressure jobs, top people, and influence everywhere.
I am not sure if this is not a sarcastic take, but I will bite.
Google are generally not coordinated well on anything, but this current war on adblockers is a notable exception. Consider the following 3 things all happening in the same time frame:
1. Youtube's rollout of detecting adblockers and updating their code a couple times a day to prevent you from running an adblocker
2. The manifest v3 standard
3. The Privacy Sandbox trash
They are using the dominant position of Youtube as video content platform (point 1), chrome/chromium (point 2) as a browser engine and their current dominant position in the ads market (point 3) to achieve a couple of goals. With the privacy sandbox, they force ads to go through their ecosystem, with the manifest v3 they deliver a big kick to the adblockers, and with Toutube, they are using one of their most successful platforms to further push their ads agenda.
To me, unskippable ads are going to:
- make me hate the brand that's wasting my time by advertising crap I don't need and making me watch it
- make me hate the platform on which this ad is played, especially knowing the platform jumped through specific hoops to make the ads unskippable for even the power users
> Why can't they just ban adblockers from the Chrome Web Store?
The answer is legal antitrust lawsuits. Chrome has a near monopoly and Google is the largest advertising actor, banning ad blocking altogether risks giving ammunition to the inevitable antitrust lawsuits.
What they prefer to do instead is degrade their effectiveness step by step, it's way less risky for them.
That would also prevent lots of if not most people from using Chrome too. They have to pretend to care privacy & security so that they can put more into their pocket.
Perhaps that’s exactly why they don’t. They know there would be an exodus because they know what the install-base of ad blockers are in Chrome. Their market dominance is worth more than the marginal lost revenue from some ads being blocked.
Google has of course considered doing this. We can't know their exact calculus, but whatever it was, they came to the conclusion that playing cat-and-mouse is financially advantageous to them. Maybe it's a legal concern, maybe it's a market share concern, maybe adblockers don't actually erode their overall ad profitability to the degree we think it does. But whatever the reason, Google decided they will profit more this way.
Banning them will invite antitrust regulation, because there's a conflict of interest between giving away the browser and crippling it to benefit their advertising business. I suspect that for the legal department, it's too close to the historical example of Microsoft leveraging its operating system dominance to benefit Internet Explorer and hurt competitors like Netscape. If they bury the anti-adblock strategy under layers of technicalities, they can plausibly deny that they're targeting particular vendors.
Not exactly. Edge is fork of Chrome and diverged a lot from actual Chrome. You can load Manifest v2 extensions in Edge while it's not feasible in Chrome
Not only does Google take a long time to review extension updates, but Chrome pulls extension updates infrequently. So even if you manage to get an update pushed to the store in 24 hours, it may take another day or more before your users actually get the update.
All of this put together means you really shouldn't trust Chrome extensions for anything important. If there's a security vulnerability in something like your password manager, the update is going to take days to reach your system.
> Manifest V3 will stop this by limiting what Google describes "remotely hosted code." All updates, even to benign things like a filtering list, will need to happen through full extension updates through the Chrome Web Store. They will all be subject to Chrome Web Store reviews process, and that comes with a significant time delay.
So the author can't think of any other reason for this change other than to "slow down ad blocker updates"
MV3 does not stop those monetization offers. I don’t understand why you think they would stop.
Source: I have two open-source extensions with almost 1,000,000 active daily users combined, and the MV3 versions still elicit offers for me to sell them
Malicious extensions are less likely to make it passed the review process.
That in turn should deter bad actors from monkeying with their extensions but more importantly it makes it less likely that malicious extensions make their way to users browsers.
Yes, there seem to be really valid security concerns about the current extension interface. Perhaps Google is making the wrong tradeoffs here. I don't know, it's very complicated, but the article is not really engaging with those tradeoffs.
DDG for the time being but honestly I am tempted by Kagi as well. Ad tech is cancer on the internet. I decided to quit Google after the trusted devices bullshit, but if I could remove junk listicles from my results that would be a big improvement.
What about MV3 requires going through the Chrome Web Store to update block lists? A quick look at the declarativeNetRequest docs (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/decla...) shows that there are indeed static rulesets which need to be declared in the extension's manifest, but also dynamic rulesets which can be updated via JavaScript (and so presumably can be fetched and updated dynamically). I can't seem to find any specific limitation of dynamic rulesets vs. static rulesets.
You're just making stuff up at this point with no evidence or source. If the intention was to forbid dynamic fetching of declarativeNetRequest filter lists, Google could also just... not have dynamic filter lists.
Google's playing the long EEE game. They do small things like this so people like you go around telling us it's not a big deal.
Will you say the same things 5 years from now? Google needs to be kicked out of consideration for web standards. They keep treating it like they own it.
I think the article is talking specifically about downloading and running scripts for working around a particular site dynamically, such as Youtube ad blockers.
That said, I don't know if this really is a technical block from e.g. adding a script tag to a YouTube page to pull in a third party resource. My impression was that it was blocking arbitrary scripts specifically within the extension context, and not in the browser context.
> I think the article is talking specifically about downloading and running scripts for working around a particular site dynamically
The article specifically mentions "filter lists" being subject to review time.
> All updates, even to benign things like a filtering list, will need to happen through full extension updates through the Chrome Web Store.
> Is a filtering list update, which is essentially just a list of websites, really something that needs to be limited by the "no remotely hosted code" policy?
> So since all filter list updates now need to go through the Chrome Web Store, how long does a review take?
To me, this seems pretty clear: don't inject anything "executable" into a webpage except CSS.
It does look like you could maybe use a sandboxed iframe and ask it about page features and whether they should be blocked, and that this might be permitted.
Okay, refresh probably won’t help, but you can build logic gates in css, and css has for example, the ability to animate things forever:
animation-iteration-count: infinite;
Hypothesis - you can find a way to use animations and logic gates to build a very crappy cpu complete with program counter, and then use that to run arbitrary code.
If I'm trying to be gentler and more useful: I think some people are too excited to find Turing completeness, and don't really think through the necessary components and what you can and can't fudge before it doesn't count anymore. Many Turing machines are so barely functional to begin with that even slight reductions in capability will ruin their computational ability.
As to your hypothesis, you'd need a way to have an animation conditionally turn other animations on and off each time it loops. I don't think anything like that exists in CSS.
I've edited my comment to also include a link to the Chrome docs, but that FAQ entry also has the link to an issue in the webextensions repository indicating it's a limitation of MV3: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/112
But that issue has nothing to do with the question of whether the "filter lists" could be updated dynamically without store review. It's asking for a way of programatically triggering the update to the latest version of the extension in the store.
That feature request being fixed would do nothing to enable updates without store review. And likewise the feature for doing updates of the ruleset without a store review already exists but is not used by UBOL.
So the link doesn't actually support your claim of it being a limitation of MV3. The link is just irrelevant.
The FAQ hints at why UBOL doens't make use of that feature, but doesn't actually state it outright.
> So the link doesn't actually support your claim of it being a limitation of MV3.
From the issue: "In Manifest V3 remotely hosted code is no longer allowed."
Altought the parent was talking specifically about network requests, in which case you may be right and I missed it, but that's not the general problem. Blocking network requests is not sufficient for modern ad/tracking blocking and to be able to run effectively they need to inject scripts into the page, thus "remotely hosted code" is necessary, and the Chrome docs above says that it's not allowed.
The new complaint in the article was about dynamic updates not being possible. That is just demonstrably incorrect, and not countered in any way by the FAQ link.
But you're now trying to switch it to just a relitigation of switching to declarative blocking in general.
For an extension to be entirely declarative, it must package all the scripts to inject anywhere, the scripting.registerContentScript API doesn't allow injecting code as string[1], the content scripts must be part of the package.[2]
There is userScripts API which allows injecting code as string, but it's impractical as in Chromium-based browsers this requires extra steps by the user to enable the API.[3] In Firefox, the documentation for this API has the following note[4]:
> When using Manifest V3 or higher, use scripting.registerContentScripts() to register scripts
That chrome.com page talks about not loading remote code and literally describes loading remote configuration as the correct fix:
> Alternative approaches are available, depending on your use case and the reason for remote hosting. This section describes approaches to consider.
> Configuration-driven features and logic
> Your extension loads and caches a remote configuration (for example a JSON file) at runtime. The cached configuration determines which features are enabled.
The uBlockOrigin FAQ seems to be mixing scripts to run as part of a page with declarative filter lists. I thought the whole point of Manifest V3 was to prevent extensions from snooping on online banking, email accounts, etc...
Nothing here seems to say that you couldn't update a declarative filter dynamically.
I use Brave, Safari, Arc and Firefox, basically in that order. I never even installed Chrome once Apple introduced their own chips. Brave has always felt just like Chrome once you turn off their rewards stuff.
Arc is doing some really thoughtful integration of Chat-GPT, including cleaning up tab titles, that is worth paying attention to. I actually look forward to their ~weekly YouTube updates.
I wish. Likely most people just won't notice this happening, and won't realize their experience could be better with a different browser. Only people like us will. And if you read a lot of the comments here, seems like a lot of people who should know better still use Chrome.
Are there any decent alternatives for the Chrome Web store? Are there unified extension hubs for chromium/firefox with version history similar to how android has apk websites
Now, right now, this is the moment for Mozilla to pull their heads out of their asses and really push to improve Firefox. Google is cranking up the user hostility, but if there's no viable alterative, people are gonna be stuck being spied on and tracked everywhere by chrome.
If we had an alternative, this would be the time for an organized push to get people on it. But Mozilla has either become complacent or been quietly bought out behind the scenes and Firefox isn't really competitive anymore.
Sure, you can still use Firefox. I do, begrudgingly. But it's not good enough to convince people to switch. It hasn't been for a very long time which is why we're in this mess in the first place.
I expect nothing will change and everyone will suffer for it.
Maybe people will get offline more. The internet as a whole is becoming exponentially shittier as time goes on. How much longer before it's completely intolerable?
Microsoft Teams (which I don't think many people use voluntarily) in particular breaks in stupid ways - and then in others if you spoof your user agent.
I use Microsoft Edge - have added their apt repository so updates are automagical. Edge, though based on Chrome's engine, still supports manifest V2 so adblockers such as UO still work fine. Even better, Edge let's you "appify" sites like Teams and Outlook - perfect for work. I use Edge for all my WFH needs, turning off UO for most MS sites (to avoid any subtle issues), and Firefox for all personal needs. Works for me. Oh, and Teams on Linux using Edge works a treat.
There are several web apis that Mozilla refuses to support, for example webhid or webusb, which all chromium browsers have had for years at this point. Same for little css features and some bits in the webaudio and webrtc implementations.
Trezor is... a crypto hardware wallet? I can't imagine this sort of thing is popular enough to block firefox from mainstream adoption.
The pixel repair site is an interesting example, but AFAIK, Pixel phones have about 2% of the US market share and this website is only useful to a small number of those users (those who encounter a serious error) and isn't something even those users would be using often. If I had to use this website and couldn't get my phone fixed another way, I could install and use Chrome (or I presume another Chromium browser) and use it for this single purpose. It would take me only a few minutes/hours(?) and then I'd be done with it. Why would a site like this keep me using Chrome permanently? I just can't imagine that.
I think this is pretty typical of these niche web features. Like most users have no need for web midi and most likely don't even own a midi device that it would work with. But niche websites can find great value in the api being available and offer sites to users which bring them value without having them install a native app. Also I'm not sure if it's a good idea to give people a reason to install and use a competitors browser.
I don't think either of these are examples of websites that might plausibly be holding Firefox back from mainstream adoption. I was expecting something like "[popular feature] of facebook or youtube doesn't work"
I'm sure I'm not the only person who has Chrome installed as a backup, just in case I run across a site that doesn't work right in Firefox, or if I just suspect such a problem exists. Having an alternate browser installed is trivial; it's not like using a different OS.
I doubt your average user cares about whether WebHID or WebUSB are implemented. What popular sites (popular enough to cause significant browser market share disruption) use those APIs? (For the record, though, I fully agree with Mozilla's rationale behind not implementing them.)
Not sure what little CSS features you mean, but I haven't found any mainstream websites that don't render properly in Firefox. It's possible that the website maintainers have to do extra work to get them working in Firefox, but regular users don't care about that.
I do recall some things missing from WebAudio and WebRTC, but in practice I'm not sure I've run into any issues with Firefox's implementations. And, again, if website maintainers are doing extra work to make things behave properly with Firefox, regular users aren't going to notice or care.
Nothing is substandard in Firefox. Manifest 3 in Chrome is actually giving Google the ability to make Chrome substandard. I know it annoying to hear but I really think its better if people switch to Firefox.
Sorry but lots of things are substandard in Firefox. On the rare occasion that I do use it the first thing I'm always promted with is "there's an update available - click here to restart" like it's 2003 again. Numerous pages have rendering problems with Firefox. Performance is not good enough. Dev tools have fallen behind. It aggressively pushes shitty "value-adds" like that lame bookmarking service (Pocket Mark or something). And the never ending UI refreshes are exhausting.
> Show me these pages that Firefox doesn't render well.
I'm not doing homework for you. Lots of pages don't render well in Firefox, it's a well known issue which is why it comes up in every thread about Firefox.
> Show me pages that tank Firefox performance.
Firefox in general performs poorly. Again, known long-term ongoing issue. Look at this thread where almost every top-level comment is sceptical that Firefox is even close to Chrome in performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883
You can find ongoing performance benchmarks between Chrome and Firefox here, and it's not flattering for FF: https://arewefastyet.com
> How many of them will have -webkit-* and other engine-exclusive markup/CSS?
I don't care, at all. It's not my job, as a user, to debug performance problems.
> Firefox updates every 6 weeks, just like Chrome.
Check the y axis labels on arewefastyet. When FF is winning, it is often by a large multiple. When chrome wins it is usually by under a factor of two. It wins by a factor of three on one benchmark that I could find.
I don’t think many users will notice a factor of 2-3 in page render time, even if the benchmarks where firefox wins are all somehow not representative of real world use, but the chrome ones are.
As for pages that don’t render, I simply don’t see this problem at all. One bank I use refuses to let you log in if Linux appears in the user agent string, but that hits Chrome too. Do you have a single example?
>One bank I use refuses to let you log in if Linux appears in the user agent string, but that hits Chrome too.
So why do you do business with this bank? I have a bunch of accounts at different banks and other financial institutions, and have never had this problem. I'd never open an account at a bank this incompetent with IT issues.
Open and use more than 10 aws console tabs actively on Linux and Firefox will crash (all tabs).
Chromium can do more than double without crashing.
I still use ff whenever possible
Chrome is the standard. Any feature in Firefox that is not 1:1 with chrome is by definition substandard.
And I didn't say it was substandard, I said it wasn't good.
I find the UI to be bad. When you ask for customization, like disabling excess tabs from scrolling off the edge of the screen, forum users treat you like an idiot. Performance has always been worse, particularly on mobile. Session state is less reliable. WebUSB is missing. Microphone support is unreliable. Updates under Linux cause any link you click to softlock the browser with an error page until you manually restart. Linux support in general is very poor. Firefox recently fixed a bug with tooltip rendering that's been reported for what, 15 years?
Chrome has been better than Firefox for a very long time. That's why we all switched to chrome in the first place.
Now that chrome is the scourge of the internet, there's really just one alternative. Unless you count safari, but that's a different story.
We're in a bad situation and Mozilla isn't doing enough to make it better. They haven't been for a long, long time.
A majority of Firefox's funding comes from Google. I doubt they're willing to aggressively market their browser as "the one to use to get around Google's ads". I'm not sure of the exact figures but as I recall, losing Google's funding would be a company-ending event.
Good luck with that. This kind of approach might work with some projects where you don't need responsive updates and continuous development to keep up with changing standards and new vulnerabilities being continuously found, such as vim, but for a really big software project I'm not aware of this working at all. The Linux kernel is maybe comparable in size and scope, but it's developed by a bunch of corporate developers too, though they're scattered across different companies that all need the kernel. A web browser isn't really like a kernel; how many companies are going to contribute developers to a project like that?
Lots of people here disagreeing with you that Firefox is worse, but I'm with you. I'm on an M1 MacBook Air, been a Chrome user forever, but when they started getting aggressive with adblocking on YouTube, I switched over to Firefox, both on macOS and iOS.
Boy, it is...worse. I really gave it the old college try. Brought over all my extensions, dove into the really good ones (some of which really are incredible), even customized the Firefox interface, etc. I went hard.
But eventually I ended up back on Chrome, purely due to performance. Firefox is simply very slow and choppy. It's not a good experience.
I'd love to go Safari full time, but I use so many Linux and Windows machines in addition to my Macs that I really need something cross-platform, and so Chrome has always been the best solution for me. It's a bummer but I think I'm on Chrome for the foreseeable future.
Absolutely clickbait. Nothing in the article suggests that review times are increasing, they’ve always been “from a few minutes to a few days”.
Also filters do not depend on extension updates at all, they are plain text files that can be updated at any time. Not to mention that they can contain “scriptlets”, which make them quite literally “remotely hosted code” and still allowed by MV3 (because they’re not raw JavaScript)
> We've covered this already. But we haven't talked about the other side of the equation: Ad block rules can't be updated quickly anymore. Today, ad blockers and privacy apps can ship filter list updates themselves, often using giant open-source community lists. Manifest V3 will stop this by limiting what Google describes "remotely hosted code." All updates, even to benign things like a filtering list, will need to happen through full extension updates through the Chrome Web Store. They will all be subject to Chrome Web Store reviews process, and that comes with a significant time delay.
If this is factually incorrect, it would absolutely warrant a correction to the article.
> If this is factually incorrect, it would absolutely warrant a correction to the article.
It is incorrect. MV3 definition updates go through an automated fast-track process for safe rules. See the presentation[1] and Q&A[2] at the recent Ad Blocking Summit.
I wouldn't hold my breath on a correction. Ron never corrects his articles, like when he confused the Privacy Sandbox with the Topics API a couple months ago[3].
Then it would make sense to write such articles if and when that happens. Until that point, the claims being made in this article are simply incorrect.
The only real part is that MV3 does not allow actual remote JS to be run on web pages. However you could still run it in a sandboxed iframe (not super helpful to adblockers though)
What "other browsers"? I know there's Firefox (it's my main browser, in fact), but where is the rest? Edge is Chrome, Safari is only available for iThings, so it's not like there's a big selection...
The video ranks different web browsers on a tier list from spyware tier to base tier based on privacy, usability, and other factors.
Brave is placed in excellent tier for its good default privacy settings and built-in ad blocking, though some dislike its use of cryptocurrency.
Firefox is only decent tier due to its many annoying default features, but can be excellent with the right privacy-focused user.js file.
Icecat is decent tier for free software purists due to its use of LibreJS blocking non-free scripts, though this breaks many sites.
Librewolf is excellent tier as an easy to use private version of Firefox without much configuration needed.
Chromium-based browsers like Vivaldi can be good but have limitations from not being fully open source.
Closed source browsers like Chrome, Edge and Opera are automatically placed in spyware tier due to privacy concerns.
Qutebrowser is decent tier for power users due to its keyboard-focused design but has issues with advanced ad blocking.
Waterfox is excellent tier as a lightweight Firefox fork, though its ownership by an ad company concerns some.
Overall, Brave, Librewolf and hardened Firefox are recommended as having the best balance of privacy, usability and customizability.
There won't be any anytime soon. As per HN folk, whenever this discussion comes up there's always an massive angst outcry of "its impossible to create a new browser".
Brave is an ad company with weird crypto stuff sprinkled in. Not to mention that their past actions have shown that privacy to them is a marketing thing, not something that is at the core of how they operate.
There have been a few too many new things they introduced that run counter to a user centric privacy minded approach where they only did backpedal after enough negative publicity.
I generally agree. It's not a great situation. As a browser to use when something's broken in Safari, it works, and to my knowledge doesn't send history directly to Google.
Yes but “takes money from” is fundamentally different from “shares the ideology of”. Do you think Google agrees with everything their advertising customers promote there and on YouTube?
Weirdly, earlier today I had a bunch of problems loading Google web properties on Firefox - GMail hung completely (wouldn't even load all the way! no more basic HTML option!) and Sheets was showing half-rendered documents (even after several refresh attempts). All the other sites were fine.
This happens periodically, where google services act funny with a Firefox user agent. Just use edge or chromes user agent string, and Google sites will work again.
This is such an annoying approach for Google to force people to using Chrome... I get that they're not testing stuff on Firefox, so much is obvious. But there are so many times things don't work properly in Firefox (YouTube loading slower, lag in Gmail, Drive having weird UI<>backend synchronization bugs) at a first glance, but as soon as you set the user-agent to Chrome, things just magically work perfectly fine, and all issues disappear.
Someone should really be doing a deep dive into this issue, because it's been going on for a long time, and is clearly anti-competitive. My guess is that they're really good at hiding this/making it look accidental rather than on purpose.
Gmail’s always very nearly unusable on mobile safari, mostly due to their user-hating decision to use custom scrolling. Constant accidental touch events when trying to scroll, and it breaks in weird ways that require reloads to fix. And that’s aside from the scrolling itself working poorly to begin with, but short of outright breakage.
IDK if it’s better in iOS Chrome, but it’d be pretty damning if it is, since they necessarily use the same engine on that platform.
Google might as well skip all this dancing around and build their ads straight into Chrome. Good luck doing some work while you have to watch a video ad every hour or so, and every page has ads literally in browsers "chrome".
Is there a way to backup current Chrome version + settings + extensions, preferrably in a portable app/container. I'm pretty content with my setup and wouldn't mind running it for as long as possible. Hopefully in a few years we can have AI convert currently chrome exclusive extentions onto another browser. But right now it's still hard to swtich.
I actually tried to do the switch this week, still too many essential plugins/addons missing. I have some basic technical skills to rewrite some functions into userscripts. But it's still a fairly subpar experience.
I just kinda don't get this. I don't really think there are "essential" addons, aside from ad-blocking/privacy-related things (and Firefox is at least as good, and possibly better, than Chrome on those).
Like... sure, web browser UX isn't always the best, but by rejecting Firefox on the merits of optional addons, you're just saying that the convenience of how you prefer to interact with a browser is more important than your privacy and ability to block ads. Which is fair, I suppose, but let's call it what it is.
Meanwhile, we're back in the IE days: alternative browsers don't have enough market share to do much but accept whatever Google wants to do with the web.
Frankly I'm just tired of people making excuses for using a browser made by a company that is actively making the web worse and eroding our privacy, bit by bit.
Without getting into details there's a few niche extentions for my daily productivity that saves me a few hours every week. It's not critical, but it automates a bunch of things that would make switching cost for those tasks too high. Most of the missing things I can probably do without an adapt. I actually firefox UI more.
>we're back in the IE days
Reminds me of when Asian banks still required IE activex well into 2010s and one had to keep IE around, which was easy since it comes with Windows. I can probably use get used to firefox for most of my use case, but have to keep chrome around for some sites.
My use case, primarily for research/keeping up to date in my domain is auto copying 100s of articles curated through feedly/other sources that gets automatically appended to daily text document by clipboard watch from balabolka (text to speech program), with meta data comment of url/title and visible confirmation dialogue confirming successful text copy (no firefox addon does this after search), which balabolka also automatically read to me at 3x speed. Basically, everything I'm interesting in reading gets converted into a reasonably labelled/chaptered podcast and digest with searchable transcript. Chrome with combined with tab groups and extensions that sort/order/dedupes tabs by domain also streamlines the process. Combination of tab groups sorting behavior and ability auto label auto copied text cuts daily chore from to a fraction of the time it use to, which saves hours each week.
Google lens also very useful for OCRing text, or translating images of foreign language. I can also do that with powertoys, but it's more finicky and add extra steps, require hot keys to do efficiently vs on Chrome I can do most of it with just a mouse.
> Is it true that Manifest V3 will increase privacy and security of the browser?
> Honestly, I wouldn’t say so. I see the advantages of MV3 in terms of unification, cross-platform compatibility, and performance, but *I don’t see any advantages in terms of increasing user security, unfortunately*. *The amount of scam extensions in the Chrome Web Store remains high despite the fact that it has been a long time since the store stopped accepting non-MV3 extensions.*
And what, people are more likely to get virus from Google Ads or Ads overall than those improved security:
Well, it hasn't happened yet. Judging by many comments here, a lot of HNers still use Chrome. If people here still use Chrome, I see little hope of regular users ditching it for these sorts of reasons.
Because many tech people who are sticks in the mud like this don't actually care about the browser, or the implications of what's happening in real time.
They'll eventually leave and wonder why nobody told them sooner.
Ugh, that's a bad analogy and you know it. No actually what you're doing is a classic case of "it's in the EULA, so they can do it". Like, if tomorrow Google puts a clause in their EULA that they have the right to harvest the eyeballs of everyone who lives on Earth, you'd be scrambling for passage to Mars. "It's in the EULA! Corporations are all-powerful and can do anything, as long as they state it in the EULA!"
I no more fear Google banning ad-blockers than I fear Toyota putting spikes on all of their steering wheels. It would be much more painful to their bottom-line than any Toyota drivers, because people would do this magical thing called... not using that product.
I still don't get why people who care about privacy (and ad-blocking) use Chrome. Firefox works really well these days, even if Mozilla's track record isn't the greatest of late. I haven't had a need to open a website in Chrome in... years? I can't even remember the last time.
I don't think not having enough versions of IE was ever a problem. The problem starts when everyone builds their app to a platform that is very dominant and controlled by people who's interest are not always aligned with the user's interests.
You don't have to compile Chromium to have a browser incompatible with the websites that people build for Chrome, you can just use Firefox or Safari or write your own browser if you want to have a web browser that won't be able to run Microsoft Teams.
Chrome != Chromium. The vast majority of the planet is using Chrome, not Chromium. Most average joes have no idea about Chromium.
Either way, whether you're using Chromium or Chrome, you're still entrenching Google's monopoly over the web.
Like the sibling said, the problem was IE's monopoly itself not the lack of more IE-based variants which wouldn't have helped at all, the same way how Chromium isn't helping counter Google's monopoly.
IE held back the development of the WWW. That would be the spot Safari has today. What Chrome is doing is much worse, since it is strangling the web, not just holding back new features.
Not true at all, IE what is the most innovative browser until it wasn’t. For example They invented Ajax, One of the core technologies that made the web what it is today.
i mean just because they arent supported doesnt mean they dont work just fine. the vmware bug is 2 years old.
honestly slowing down updates for adblockers sounds like a dangerous idea. sooner or later, someone will send you to court for an appstore monopoly, and sooner or later youll lose that case. in the meantime people lose interest in your ecosystem because of the increasingly predatory chicanery that makes their browsing experience suck. sending more eyes to firefox makes firefox better. eventually, better than even you.
This all smacks of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." Manifest V3 is dead on arrival if youre going to bury the average google user in an avalanche of unskippable ads and full screen GPU testers. nobody wants this modern hell, and you've everything in your power to reform or amend it to dial back the surveillance capitalism and hyper consumption.
Yeah, I only use Chrome once in a blue moon and have had a few dozen interviews through teams on web. Haven't had a problem yet (or, no more problems than Google meet/Zoom). My last role used teams on the day to day and Chrome wasn't even installed on my work machine.
Why would anyone want to use ms teams? I understand employers stuck in the fax age might demand it but it’s their problem if they want their data leaked. For personal and outside work no one should use ms teams.
Companies like to use Teams because it's basically free: they already subscribe to Microsoft's Office365 services, and Teams comes with it. To use a competitor, they'd have to pay for that separately. "Teams is shitty and buggy" isn't enough of a justification to convince upper management to shell out big bucks for licenses for something like Zoom when they're already getting Teams effectively for free.
The Teams doc from Feb 2023 is a bit out of date, or is just legal cya.
Still limitations, but I joined a Teams meeting the day before this comment with my microphone and external cam, and participated fully, using Firefox on MacOS.
Yes, some client functionality is still missing (I didn't share a screen, for example), but both sides (MS and FF) appear to be making improvements.
I use Teams fairly regularly in Firefox on Linux. Everything seems to work completely fine, with the exception of 1-on-1 calls. You can't send them, you can't receive them, and you can't even see when someone is calling you until the missed notification pops up. I have no idea why group calls work fine but those don't, but that's how it is.
not supporting a particular browser just means that if a bug report comes up about your product with that browser then nothing gets done, but since everyone develops towards standards bugs in FF will probably be minimal, especially if they do support Safari (because unlikely something does not work in both Safari and Chrome)
also the Teams link describes ways to work around limitations with teams on a particular browser that does not support the teams web app, which is what the article says FF etc. does not support.
Mock me, or teach me.. but.. I use it still because it's very easy, quick, and good.. to use the translate page functionality.
Yes, I am also aware that Firefox has some technology (in the works?) that will do offline translation even. Cool.. except I still have yet to find a good, easy, fast, accurate translation feature for Firefox. There are some extensions, but none are as good.
Translation is the only reason I still break out Chrome now and then.
Firefox finally sort of has it, but it's not that good. Often it won't believe you that the page is in another language, so you can't translate at all, even by trying to force it. The translations can be weird and miss parts of the page.
I'm sure it'll get better, though, and once it does, I can delete Chrome entirely.
It has about 10 non-beta languages, and even amongst beta and non, the language is not available. Unfortunately. I would use it if it were. Thank you for taking the time to reply though.
Firefox doesn't have support for AppleScript and this is crucial to my browser habits/workflow. Both Safari and Chrome/Chromium-based browsers have it. Once/if Firefox adopts it, which I doubt but hope so, I'll consider using it.
I don't bother because Mozilla is just controlled opposition at this point, I'll stick to Chromium based ones like Brave for now as I don't consider there to be a meaningful difference.
Also Firefox mobile doesn't seem to have tab groups and is the only browser I've tried which doesn't have a proper Android tablet UI.
Brave mobile and Vivaldi mobile have it built in. Hell, Vivaldi even has its super useful two layer tab bar available on Android.
Firefox mobile's plugin support doesn't make up for it missing other basic usability features.
Similarly, Vivaldi mobile doesn't allow custom search engines, so Brave is the only one with the minimum feature set I need (tab grouping, vertical tab bar or two layer tab bar, ad block, custom search engine, android tablet UI), and since I want to be able to sync between all my devices, I use Brave on everything.
Same question for Firefox. Because Firefox is both not privacy respecting (has telemetry by default) and not privacy protecting by default (does not block ads). Both are paid by the world's largest advertising company, not their users.
A browser that cares about privacy would be both zero telemetry and ship with an ad/tracking blocker by default. Ideally you would also be able to pay for it to align incentives (vs a third party paying for your browser on your behalf).
There's some friction in moving my passwords, which are stored in my Chrome profile. Before you say "just use Bitwarden to sync passwords", I can't, because they block me from logging in based on "unusual network activity". I don't want to spend $3/mo for 1Password. I _could_ spend the first day after migrating resetting all of my passwords as I use different sites and probably will once ad blocking stops working for good on Chrome, but until then it's simple inertia.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadHumans aren't this smart, however.
Ads are the new content.
The killer app for LLMs is generating new and innovative ads that are entertaining and feel like content.
Imagine fun games like "Avoid the Noid" (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1095/avoid-the-noid/), "Cool Spot" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Spot), and "McKids" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.C._Kids), but with modern graphics and sound and promoting the most annoying brands and products.
Help people save money on their insurance by playing as the Geico lizard! Find out the dirt on used cars as the CarFax fox! Yesterday's annoying mascots are today's folk heroes.
Maybe I am cynical about the law, but I assume the only reason they don't block other networks is because it would be their same advertisers, and they would be furious enough to take action.
https://blog.chromium.org/2018/02/how-chromes-ad-filtering-w...
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com...
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com...
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com...
Otherwise, abusing dominance in the phone app store market to benefit their (also dominant) ad surveillance business sounds very, very much like something the DMA could and should punish.
Google are generally not coordinated well on anything, but this current war on adblockers is a notable exception. Consider the following 3 things all happening in the same time frame:
1. Youtube's rollout of detecting adblockers and updating their code a couple times a day to prevent you from running an adblocker
2. The manifest v3 standard
3. The Privacy Sandbox trash
They are using the dominant position of Youtube as video content platform (point 1), chrome/chromium (point 2) as a browser engine and their current dominant position in the ads market (point 3) to achieve a couple of goals. With the privacy sandbox, they force ads to go through their ecosystem, with the manifest v3 they deliver a big kick to the adblockers, and with Toutube, they are using one of their most successful platforms to further push their ads agenda.
To me, unskippable ads are going to:
- make me hate the brand that's wasting my time by advertising crap I don't need and making me watch it
- make me hate the platform on which this ad is played, especially knowing the platform jumped through specific hoops to make the ads unskippable for even the power users
The answer is legal antitrust lawsuits. Chrome has a near monopoly and Google is the largest advertising actor, banning ad blocking altogether risks giving ammunition to the inevitable antitrust lawsuits.
What they prefer to do instead is degrade their effectiveness step by step, it's way less risky for them.
and they will just look slow instead of actively targeting ad-blockers
However, as someone who manages a couple extension, I rarely update the Edge version for one and didn't bother ever uploading the other.
All of this put together means you really shouldn't trust Chrome extensions for anything important. If there's a security vulnerability in something like your password manager, the update is going to take days to reach your system.
So the author can't think of any other reason for this change other than to "slow down ad blocker updates"
Well how about stuff like this: https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670
Where an extension dev details offers to "monetize" his extension and basically perform a bait and switch and make it malicious.
Pretending that V3 is all about ad blockers is more than a little disingenuous.
Source: I have two open-source extensions with almost 1,000,000 active daily users combined, and the MV3 versions still elicit offers for me to sell them
If you are offered 2 meals, it's YOUR choice to take 1 or 2, it's all about yourself.
MV3 won't even prevent this one bit.
That in turn should deter bad actors from monkeying with their extensions but more importantly it makes it less likely that malicious extensions make their way to users browsers.
Chrome is the new IE6.
Will you say the same things 5 years from now? Google needs to be kicked out of consideration for web standards. They keep treating it like they own it.
I think the article is talking specifically about downloading and running scripts for working around a particular site dynamically, such as Youtube ad blockers.
That said, I don't know if this really is a technical block from e.g. adding a script tag to a YouTube page to pull in a third party resource. My impression was that it was blocking arbitrary scripts specifically within the extension context, and not in the browser context.
The article specifically mentions "filter lists" being subject to review time.
> All updates, even to benign things like a filtering list, will need to happen through full extension updates through the Chrome Web Store.
> Is a filtering list update, which is essentially just a list of websites, really something that needs to be limited by the "no remotely hosted code" policy?
> So since all filter list updates now need to go through the Chrome Web Store, how long does a review take?
Chrome explicitly recommends downloading remote configuration.
To me, this seems pretty clear: don't inject anything "executable" into a webpage except CSS.
It does look like you could maybe use a sandboxed iframe and ask it about page features and whether they should be blocked, and that this might be permitted.
CSS has arithmetic. It does not have iteration.
And even if it had full compute capabilities, the output is still just choosing CSS rules to apply.
Edit - would it be considered cheating to use: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10">
Okay, refresh probably won’t help, but you can build logic gates in css, and css has for example, the ability to animate things forever:
animation-iteration-count: infinite;
Hypothesis - you can find a way to use animations and logic gates to build a very crappy cpu complete with program counter, and then use that to run arbitrary code.
If I'm trying to be gentler and more useful: I think some people are too excited to find Turing completeness, and don't really think through the necessary components and what you can and can't fudge before it doesn't count anymore. Many Turing machines are so barely functional to begin with that even slight reductions in capability will ruin their computational ability.
As to your hypothesis, you'd need a way to have an animation conditionally turn other animations on and off each time it loops. I don't think anything like that exists in CSS.
Edit: Chrome docs on the matter explaining the limitations (from sibling mlyle) https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/migrating/impro...
That feature request being fixed would do nothing to enable updates without store review. And likewise the feature for doing updates of the ruleset without a store review already exists but is not used by UBOL.
So the link doesn't actually support your claim of it being a limitation of MV3. The link is just irrelevant.
The FAQ hints at why UBOL doens't make use of that feature, but doesn't actually state it outright.
From the issue: "In Manifest V3 remotely hosted code is no longer allowed."
Altought the parent was talking specifically about network requests, in which case you may be right and I missed it, but that's not the general problem. Blocking network requests is not sufficient for modern ad/tracking blocking and to be able to run effectively they need to inject scripts into the page, thus "remotely hosted code" is necessary, and the Chrome docs above says that it's not allowed.
But you're now trying to switch it to just a relitigation of switching to declarative blocking in general.
There is userScripts API which allows injecting code as string, but it's impractical as in Chromium-based browsers this requires extra steps by the user to enable the API.[3] In Firefox, the documentation for this API has the following note[4]:
> When using Manifest V3 or higher, use scripting.registerContentScripts() to register scripts
* * *
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
[2] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/tree/main/chromium...
[3] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/userS... ("Availability Pending")
[4] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
> Alternative approaches are available, depending on your use case and the reason for remote hosting. This section describes approaches to consider.
> Configuration-driven features and logic
> Your extension loads and caches a remote configuration (for example a JSON file) at runtime. The cached configuration determines which features are enabled.
The uBlockOrigin FAQ seems to be mixing scripts to run as part of a page with declarative filter lists. I thought the whole point of Manifest V3 was to prevent extensions from snooping on online banking, email accounts, etc...
Nothing here seems to say that you couldn't update a declarative filter dynamically.
You have to enter an email address to get a download link??? Also the homepage was laggy on firefox nightly for Android.
Right now it's unclear to me how much Edge extensions are tied to the Chrome Store policies.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-...
More discussion here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38494451
I run Chrome as little as possible. Sadly, there are a few places where it is the best still.
Since the Keystone saga I‘m not using Chrome anymore. Google Chrome can go the way of the dodo.
As for third-party marketplaces, I couldn't say, but I'm aware of some work in that direction for Nixpkgs.
If we had an alternative, this would be the time for an organized push to get people on it. But Mozilla has either become complacent or been quietly bought out behind the scenes and Firefox isn't really competitive anymore.
Sure, you can still use Firefox. I do, begrudgingly. But it's not good enough to convince people to switch. It hasn't been for a very long time which is why we're in this mess in the first place.
I expect nothing will change and everyone will suffer for it.
Maybe people will get offline more. The internet as a whole is becoming exponentially shittier as time goes on. How much longer before it's completely intolerable?
Microsoft Teams (which I don't think many people use voluntarily) in particular breaks in stupid ways - and then in others if you spoof your user agent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38430102
In short: It has zero respect for the user, so little that it regularly gaslit me into thinking I had agreed to things I did not.
They also signaled intent to simply merge the ripping out of MV2, so as soon as Chrome drops it, Edge will too.
Mozilla refusing to support webhid in any way: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webhid
Chrome adding it to stable in 2021: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/new-in-chrome-89/
The sad thing is, if FirefoxOS would still be a thing they wouldn't bat an eye.
Serious question, because I can't think of any.
https://pixelrepair.withgoogle.com/
Are 2 that pop in to my head
The pixel repair site is an interesting example, but AFAIK, Pixel phones have about 2% of the US market share and this website is only useful to a small number of those users (those who encounter a serious error) and isn't something even those users would be using often. If I had to use this website and couldn't get my phone fixed another way, I could install and use Chrome (or I presume another Chromium browser) and use it for this single purpose. It would take me only a few minutes/hours(?) and then I'd be done with it. Why would a site like this keep me using Chrome permanently? I just can't imagine that.
Not being compatible with those sites is definitely not the barrier to widespread adoption of Firefox.
Not sure what little CSS features you mean, but I haven't found any mainstream websites that don't render properly in Firefox. It's possible that the website maintainers have to do extra work to get them working in Firefox, but regular users don't care about that.
I do recall some things missing from WebAudio and WebRTC, but in practice I'm not sure I've run into any issues with Firefox's implementations. And, again, if website maintainers are doing extra work to make things behave properly with Firefox, regular users aren't going to notice or care.
This is Google's attempt at our privacy thru Embrace, Engulf, and Extinguish strategy.
https://www.creativebloq.com/features/google-apis
Show me pages that tank Firefox performance.
How many of them will have -webkit-* and other engine-exclusive markup/CSS?
Firefox updates every 6 weeks, just like Chrome.
What do you want in the devtools that Chrome has and Firefox doesn't?
I've been using Firefox for nearly two decades and aside from the WebExtensions and some UI changes, it's been solid.
I find most criticisms of Firefox on websites are lacking links and profiling data.
I'm not doing homework for you. Lots of pages don't render well in Firefox, it's a well known issue which is why it comes up in every thread about Firefox.
> Show me pages that tank Firefox performance.
Firefox in general performs poorly. Again, known long-term ongoing issue. Look at this thread where almost every top-level comment is sceptical that Firefox is even close to Chrome in performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883
You can find ongoing performance benchmarks between Chrome and Firefox here, and it's not flattering for FF: https://arewefastyet.com
> How many of them will have -webkit-* and other engine-exclusive markup/CSS?
I don't care, at all. It's not my job, as a user, to debug performance problems.
> Firefox updates every 6 weeks, just like Chrome.
Ok? I didn't say anything about update cadence.
I don’t think many users will notice a factor of 2-3 in page render time, even if the benchmarks where firefox wins are all somehow not representative of real world use, but the chrome ones are.
As for pages that don’t render, I simply don’t see this problem at all. One bank I use refuses to let you log in if Linux appears in the user agent string, but that hits Chrome too. Do you have a single example?
So why do you do business with this bank? I have a bunch of accounts at different banks and other financial institutions, and have never had this problem. I'd never open an account at a bank this incompetent with IT issues.
They offer the only credit card that offers 5% cash back at a retailer that I spend lots of money at.
I don't use them for anything other than that card.
And I didn't say it was substandard, I said it wasn't good.
I find the UI to be bad. When you ask for customization, like disabling excess tabs from scrolling off the edge of the screen, forum users treat you like an idiot. Performance has always been worse, particularly on mobile. Session state is less reliable. WebUSB is missing. Microphone support is unreliable. Updates under Linux cause any link you click to softlock the browser with an error page until you manually restart. Linux support in general is very poor. Firefox recently fixed a bug with tooltip rendering that's been reported for what, 15 years?
Chrome has been better than Firefox for a very long time. That's why we all switched to chrome in the first place.
Now that chrome is the scourge of the internet, there's really just one alternative. Unless you count safari, but that's a different story.
We're in a bad situation and Mozilla isn't doing enough to make it better. They haven't been for a long, long time.
The fact that they choose not to implement some apis because they're harmful to privacy doesn't seem to hurt me in any way.
Boy, it is...worse. I really gave it the old college try. Brought over all my extensions, dove into the really good ones (some of which really are incredible), even customized the Firefox interface, etc. I went hard.
But eventually I ended up back on Chrome, purely due to performance. Firefox is simply very slow and choppy. It's not a good experience.
I'd love to go Safari full time, but I use so many Linux and Windows machines in addition to my Macs that I really need something cross-platform, and so Chrome has always been the best solution for me. It's a bummer but I think I'm on Chrome for the foreseeable future.
Also filters do not depend on extension updates at all, they are plain text files that can be updated at any time. Not to mention that they can contain “scriptlets”, which make them quite literally “remotely hosted code” and still allowed by MV3 (because they’re not raw JavaScript)
> We've covered this already. But we haven't talked about the other side of the equation: Ad block rules can't be updated quickly anymore. Today, ad blockers and privacy apps can ship filter list updates themselves, often using giant open-source community lists. Manifest V3 will stop this by limiting what Google describes "remotely hosted code." All updates, even to benign things like a filtering list, will need to happen through full extension updates through the Chrome Web Store. They will all be subject to Chrome Web Store reviews process, and that comes with a significant time delay.
If this is factually incorrect, it would absolutely warrant a correction to the article.
Looks factually correct-- though exactly how Google interprets rules will affect how limiting this is.
It is incorrect. MV3 definition updates go through an automated fast-track process for safe rules. See the presentation[1] and Q&A[2] at the recent Ad Blocking Summit.
I wouldn't hold my breath on a correction. Ron never corrects his articles, like when he confused the Privacy Sandbox with the Topics API a couple months ago[3].
[1] https://youtu.be/Vw1eIaRuy7w?t=24745
[2] https://youtu.be/Vw1eIaRuy7w?t=26552
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227
For now. Sounds like it would be to Google's advantage to play funny buggers with that though.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/migrating/impro...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5r6jFE8gic
The video ranks different web browsers on a tier list from spyware tier to base tier based on privacy, usability, and other factors. Brave is placed in excellent tier for its good default privacy settings and built-in ad blocking, though some dislike its use of cryptocurrency. Firefox is only decent tier due to its many annoying default features, but can be excellent with the right privacy-focused user.js file. Icecat is decent tier for free software purists due to its use of LibreJS blocking non-free scripts, though this breaks many sites. Librewolf is excellent tier as an easy to use private version of Firefox without much configuration needed. Chromium-based browsers like Vivaldi can be good but have limitations from not being fully open source. Closed source browsers like Chrome, Edge and Opera are automatically placed in spyware tier due to privacy concerns. Qutebrowser is decent tier for power users due to its keyboard-focused design but has issues with advanced ad blocking. Waterfox is excellent tier as a lightweight Firefox fork, though its ownership by an ad company concerns some. Overall, Brave, Librewolf and hardened Firefox are recommended as having the best balance of privacy, usability and customizability.
There won't be any anytime soon. As per HN folk, whenever this discussion comes up there's always an massive angst outcry of "its impossible to create a new browser".
https://ladybird.dev/
Example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38394995
It's probably just a coincidence...
Someone should really be doing a deep dive into this issue, because it's been going on for a long time, and is clearly anti-competitive. My guess is that they're really good at hiding this/making it look accidental rather than on purpose.
IDK if it’s better in iOS Chrome, but it’d be pretty damning if it is, since they necessarily use the same engine on that platform.
Addon sideloading is only possible on Firefox Developer edition (which I use, so it didn't bother me much).
Like... sure, web browser UX isn't always the best, but by rejecting Firefox on the merits of optional addons, you're just saying that the convenience of how you prefer to interact with a browser is more important than your privacy and ability to block ads. Which is fair, I suppose, but let's call it what it is.
Meanwhile, we're back in the IE days: alternative browsers don't have enough market share to do much but accept whatever Google wants to do with the web.
Frankly I'm just tired of people making excuses for using a browser made by a company that is actively making the web worse and eroding our privacy, bit by bit.
>we're back in the IE days
Reminds me of when Asian banks still required IE activex well into 2010s and one had to keep IE around, which was easy since it comes with Windows. I can probably use get used to firefox for most of my use case, but have to keep chrome around for some sites.
I'm curious. Would you share which niche extensions?
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/auto-copy/bijpdibkl...
My use case, primarily for research/keeping up to date in my domain is auto copying 100s of articles curated through feedly/other sources that gets automatically appended to daily text document by clipboard watch from balabolka (text to speech program), with meta data comment of url/title and visible confirmation dialogue confirming successful text copy (no firefox addon does this after search), which balabolka also automatically read to me at 3x speed. Basically, everything I'm interesting in reading gets converted into a reasonably labelled/chaptered podcast and digest with searchable transcript. Chrome with combined with tab groups and extensions that sort/order/dedupes tabs by domain also streamlines the process. Combination of tab groups sorting behavior and ability auto label auto copied text cuts daily chore from to a fraction of the time it use to, which saves hours each week.
Google lens also very useful for OCRing text, or translating images of foreign language. I can also do that with powertoys, but it's more finicky and add extra steps, require hot keys to do efficiently vs on Chrome I can do most of it with just a mouse.
https://adguard.com/en/blog/chrome-manifest-v3-where-we-stan...
> Is it true that Manifest V3 will increase privacy and security of the browser?
> Honestly, I wouldn’t say so. I see the advantages of MV3 in terms of unification, cross-platform compatibility, and performance, but *I don’t see any advantages in terms of increasing user security, unfortunately*. *The amount of scam extensions in the Chrome Web Store remains high despite the fact that it has been a long time since the store stopped accepting non-MV3 extensions.*
And what, people are more likely to get virus from Google Ads or Ads overall than those improved security:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/10fi01q/nft_gods_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17p68i7/set_networ...
The writing is on the wall, why are you so keen to wait til the last minute?
They'll eventually leave and wonder why nobody told them sooner.
I no more fear Google banning ad-blockers than I fear Toyota putting spikes on all of their steering wheels. It would be much more painful to their bottom-line than any Toyota drivers, because people would do this magical thing called... not using that product.
However, the day that MV2 is removed in Brave I will switch to Firefox.
Not sure why anyone would use Chrome over Brave though.
Or the VMware console: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1769175
There's probably a bunch of other web apps that exclusively support Chromium-based browsers, unfortunately.
You don't have to compile Chromium to have a browser incompatible with the websites that people build for Chrome, you can just use Firefox or Safari or write your own browser if you want to have a web browser that won't be able to run Microsoft Teams.
Either way, whether you're using Chromium or Chrome, you're still entrenching Google's monopoly over the web.
Like the sibling said, the problem was IE's monopoly itself not the lack of more IE-based variants which wouldn't have helped at all, the same way how Chromium isn't helping counter Google's monopoly.
While it was innovative, I would argue it's made the Web worse, given the impact of Javascript and surveillance on the Web.
honestly slowing down updates for adblockers sounds like a dangerous idea. sooner or later, someone will send you to court for an appstore monopoly, and sooner or later youll lose that case. in the meantime people lose interest in your ecosystem because of the increasingly predatory chicanery that makes their browsing experience suck. sending more eyes to firefox makes firefox better. eventually, better than even you.
This all smacks of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." Manifest V3 is dead on arrival if youre going to bury the average google user in an avalanche of unskippable ads and full screen GPU testers. nobody wants this modern hell, and you've everything in your power to reform or amend it to dial back the surveillance capitalism and hyper consumption.
Still limitations, but I joined a Teams meeting the day before this comment with my microphone and external cam, and participated fully, using Firefox on MacOS.
Yes, some client functionality is still missing (I didn't share a screen, for example), but both sides (MS and FF) appear to be making improvements.
Way back before huddles were implemented it used to work. Then they broke it and now it's Chromelike-only.
also the Teams link describes ways to work around limitations with teams on a particular browser that does not support the teams web app, which is what the article says FF etc. does not support.
Yes, I am also aware that Firefox has some technology (in the works?) that will do offline translation even. Cool.. except I still have yet to find a good, easy, fast, accurate translation feature for Firefox. There are some extensions, but none are as good.
- It's slow.
- Automatic language detection rarely works.
- It only supports a few languages.
- For many sites it breaks the page.
Firefox finally sort of has it, but it's not that good. Often it won't believe you that the page is in another language, so you can't translate at all, even by trying to force it. The translations can be weird and miss parts of the page.
I'm sure it'll get better, though, and once it does, I can delete Chrome entirely.
Here is the 22 years old ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125419
That was 3 whole CPU architectures ago, damn.
Firefox is probably the worst browser in the terms of feeling native to macOS.
These aren’t minor, cosmetic issues but glaring omissions in functionality.
Here’s one on the missing support for the macOS password autofill api. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650212
Safari and Orion are much better options.
Also Firefox mobile doesn't seem to have tab groups and is the only browser I've tried which doesn't have a proper Android tablet UI.
Firefox mobile's plugin support doesn't make up for it missing other basic usability features.
Similarly, Vivaldi mobile doesn't allow custom search engines, so Brave is the only one with the minimum feature set I need (tab grouping, vertical tab bar or two layer tab bar, ad block, custom search engine, android tablet UI), and since I want to be able to sync between all my devices, I use Brave on everything.
A browser that cares about privacy would be both zero telemetry and ship with an ad/tracking blocker by default. Ideally you would also be able to pay for it to align incentives (vs a third party paying for your browser on your behalf).