Live data from Hacker News

Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

9to5google.com

301–310 of 909 posts

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Ungoogled Chromium, it's pretty great.

Chromium will still contain this change, in fact its where it will appear first.

I wonder how they're going to make it hard to maintain the current webRequest API capabilities.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#302
post #75

For what it's worth, I've had a great experience with firefox for the past year (since quantum convinced me to give it another chance). All though, it recently basically factory-reset itself. Signed out of sync, extensions gone, custom settings gone. Any one else have this happen? It's also got a weird memory leak, which I think is related to the pdf viewer. Never really checked in detail or tried to measure.

Yes!!! I've had this happen several times, and it's incredibly annoying! I was just about to comment on this issue before I saw your post (as a "this is a good opportunity for Firefox but they still have some seriously irritating bugs"). It seems like my entire profile (about:profiles) got switched out several times with a brand new one. Exact same symptoms as you - bookmarks, custom UI tweaks, extensions, etc. all g…

Hmm. My situation might have a weird circumstance as well: I installed a new version of manjaro, which ships a profile by default with manjaro homepage etc. bookmarked. I signed into sync; normal one pulled down. The manjaro one is what got mysteriously applied. Old profile gone. I can only imagine what would be causing it; don't remember changing anything whatsoever. Did you by any chance sign in on a new computer before it happened? My windows was the one that went wonky; linux was the newly signed in. Glad to hear it's not just me, though. I was to the point of thinking a rabid script went crazy and deleted my profile.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#303

Why exactly would anyone use the "enterprise" version of Chrome over the regular one, or vice versa? As far as I can tell, it's the same browser... https://cloud.google.com/chrome-enterprise/browser/download/

It's mostly a thing for companies that deploy Chrome in their images and want to retain control over it (group policies). It's not for your common end user.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#304

Another big issue is that if chrome makes it difficult to disable ads such that 99% of chrome users aren't able to do it, websites may simply choose to block Firefox as it would be easy to do so without losing a large part of user base while making sure no users are blocking ads. Right now there are far too many users using ad blockers.

If that happens then ad blockers will just also change the user agent to say chrome.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. This makes me wonder if there's any way we can give gorhill a bunch of money in donations. He's in a much more important position than I previo…

If he explicitly says "No donations sought", wouldn't it be kind of rude to throw money at him?

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don't-you-accept-... Here is the official explanation of why donations are not accepted.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#307
I see a lot of comments saying to switch to Firefox, or people saying they're already using Firefox. This is fine, but I don't think people should be totally comfortable with this. Switching to the one other choice still leaves us in danger of the whole web being controlled by a few programs. We should encourage other browser projects as well. I've seen some cool browser projects, but mostly they use webkit still. I'm not sure what you call that part. The core maybe. We need more browser cores. I think this[1] is one, I encourage people to share more that they know of.

[1] https://robinwils.gitlab.io/articles/sbcl-browser-engine.htm...

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#308
post #10

I'm glad I already made the switch to FireFox. I only use Chrome to access Google apps, because for some strange reason they work a lot better in Chrome... The only thing I miss is a Session Buddy equivalent. When my computer crashes, it's nice to be able to restore all my tabs and windows, and also it's nice to be able to close a bunch of windows when I travel and then go back to my tab state from three weeks ago.

Former Session Buddy user. I'm using Session Sync and it's pretty neat. I think Session Buddy UI is still better and Session Sync needs some improvements (such as selecting multiple tabs in a session simultaneously). However, once I got used to it, I didn't miss it at all.

In addition, I like the integration with Firefox Bookmarks. It creates a folder "Session Sync" and stores sessions as sub-folders. So, if anything happens, I still have them as simple, curated bookmarks.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#309

Slightly off topic, I'm finding it very disingenuous that people in this thread(and any other threads that come up about Firefox) have actually had significant performance issues with Firefox. No bugs that are noteworthy, sans that fiasco with the expired certificate that disabled addons briefly. I've been using Firefox since "quantum" on both my MacBooks(one of which is old AF) and on Linux. I've yet to have problem…

I just switched to Firefox today after a few years hiatus, and I agree that it is hugely improved, and rendering speed is at least on part with Chrome if not faster. They've done a great job with it, and the dev tools seem greatly improved in the developer edition as well.

The issue I have with firefox on both Linux and Windows is not speed, but stability. I think it's the process model. Windows freeze if I open too many tabs, and is an issue I've not really had much with Chrome (though it had its own issues). I've noticed it a few times today as well. I wonder if that's the speed issues people are describing?

With that said, removal of ad blocking is a deal breaker for me and Chrome will no longer be my default browser.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#310
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork. (The train has already left the station for anything besides WebKit or Blink, since the lack of accessibility of Gecko means it will never be adopted by anyone else.) But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground…

Is that true? IE was incumbent and Firefox unseated it. They had the legacy of Netscape, sure, but they didn’t throw the towel and reskin IE the same way other browsers of the time did. Besides that, at which point does the dominant search and advertising company of the internet get an antitrust case for this? People think google is trustworthy yet they do nothing to earn that trust.

I'm not sure this analogy works, because internet explorer was pure garbage. It was worse than garbage, it was like the nasty water left over at the top of the industrial drain, and by just looking at it you risk losing your eye sight. IE was more ripe for disruption like few products ever are, it was so ripe we got not one, but two competitors (chrome)!

Pound for pound, chrome is ridiculously far ahead of internet explorer mid-2000's. IDK what the hell someone is going to have to do to upend chrome and its rendering components but is going to have to be great.

Post reply on HN