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Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

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Re: Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

#31

Post by gpm »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #28
gpm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. There's no good technical reason why ublock and similar addons are being un-supported, merely Google's whims. If a non-advertising company buys it they won't have any reason to go through with this. I can only imagine that there will be a whole new can of worms though, trying to maintain a technically complex project with no revenue stream, likely loss of a lot of the core developers, and chaotic management…

I realize something as complex as a browser can never be done, but would it be so bad if new feature development slowed to a crawl? I suppose I only want a faster horse, but few of the cutting edge developments of Chrome seem like they have much to offer me.

New feature development? No. Security fixes slowing to a crawl though, that would be a disaster.

There's such a huge user base around chrome that I feel pretty confident it will land in a position where that isn't a problem - eventually. The transition could be rough though, right now I imagine it's quite heavily tied to google infrastructure and engineers.

Re: Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

#32

Post by gpm »

shiroiushi wrote: post #29
gpm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. There's no good technical reason why ublock and similar addons are being un-supported, merely Google's whims. If a non-advertising company buys it they won't have any reason to go through with this. I can only imagine that there will be a whole new can of worms though, trying to maintain a technically complex project with no revenue stream, likely loss of a lot of the core developers, and chaotic management…

Why exactly would a non-advertising company buy Chrome? Unless they're an OS company and want to use the browser to force everyone to buy their OS?

OS companies (particularly microsoft, who maintains a chrome fork already) seem like a good bet.

There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested, though it would be quite a gamble for them to buy chrome in my opinion.

There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron), which means a lot of money that cares about what happens to it, which could easily influence things.

Re: Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

#33

Post by shiroiushi »

gpm wrote: post #32
shiroiushi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why exactly would a non-advertising company buy Chrome? Unless they're an OS company and want to use the browser to force everyone to buy their OS?

OS companies (particularly microsoft, who maintains a chrome fork already) seem like a good bet. There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested, though it would be quite a gamble for them to buy chrome in my opinion. There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron), which means a lot of money that cares about what happens to it, which could easily influence things.

>OS companies (particularly microsoft, who maintains a chrome fork already) seem like a good bet.

Great, so we go right back to the days of IE6. No thanks.

>There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested

These companies are viable because they get to outsource the bulk of the browser development and maintenance to Google for free. I don't think they can afford to buy and run the whole browser.

>There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron)

This is honestly the best scenario I can see of all the discussion I've read about this, and I'm surprised I haven't seen it brought up before. Still, from what I read on Wikipedia, Electron was spun off from Github (owned by MS now) and is run by a foundation with a bunch of tech company members, so going from this to a whole for-profit company for something that is basically just an open-source wrapper over Chrome's engine seems unlikely.

Re: Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

#34

Post by quickslowdown »

gnat wrote: post #11

Anyone have a recipe for running pihole on one’s laptop and proxying traffic through it? One you’ve used and can endorse pls. I too can Google. :)

I don't think that's a good idea, it should be a separate, ideally hardwired device (or VM on a host with an Ethernet connection).

But I wonder if you could run the PiHole (or Technitium, or AdGuard Home, etc) in a container with Podman or Compose, and set your DNS to 127.0.0.1? I feel like that would create some kind of feedback loop.

Re: Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

#37

Post by kkfx »

AFAIK there are no Chrome uBlock alternatives, while there is a Chrome alternative with uBlock, Firefox. Beside that, you can set

    "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" = 3;
as see https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/ apparently till June 2025 to keep Manifest v2 extensions like uBlock fully working, I've rebuilt my NixOS with Chromium this morning and uBlock was there so it's not removed at least if you have the aforementioned option set.

Re: Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

#38

Post by tyingq »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #36

As nobody has linked to it jet https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/... That is the v3 manifest version of uBlock origin by the same author. In my couple week usage it's the same in blocking as uBlock Origin.

It is the hobbled version of uBlock origin, missing features.

It may do about the same for general ad blocking now. But, advertisers are now aware there's much less potential to drive people to heuristic-capable ad blockers because that now requires more than "install this plugin".

So now, they can be more aggressive about going around ad blockers.

Re: Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

#39

Post by rnd0 »

HKH2 wrote: post #24
_blk wrote: post #7

The move to the API seems motivated more by keeping the ad profitability model up than being about technical/security reasons. While I'm glad we're not in the IE4 vs. web standards days anymore, with Edge now also being on Chromium-base, there's too many interests in that one hot spot. How did the old saying go? Power corrupts, absolute power ...

Corruption exists because people refuse to do inconvenient things.

Corruption exists because key internet infrastructure is maintained by corporations with perverse incentives (eg browsers owned by advertisers).

Re: Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

#40

Post by HKH2 »

rnd0 wrote: post #39
HKH2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corruption exists because people refuse to do inconvenient things.

Corruption exists because key internet infrastructure is maintained by corporations with perverse incentives (eg browsers owned by advertisers).

We don't need Google, but it offers convenience.
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