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Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

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11–20 of 256 posts

Re: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

#11

I wonder if that is sustainable as features are built on top of the new system and their codebase diverges further and further from chrome as a result.

I won't worry about that. I'm guessing this effectively creates a fork of Chromium that does not have the anti-ad blocker changes in question, which Opera/Brave/Edge will use instead of the main one. On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?

This might be sustainable for a couple of months but Google will keep on developing chromium with the assumption that those APIs aren't available and maintaining and back porting patches will not be sustainable in the long run. And we've seen Opera and Edge shying away from too much work with their own webengines, why would it be different this time?

Re: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

#12
post #10

I feel like things would be easier if Firefox could be embeded in another browser just like chromium can. Let Google cripple their browser for themselves, and Mozilla provide the good and strong de facto browser engine.

What is currently stopping its adoption? Iirc there were several browsers based on Gecko engine. Is it drm?

Re: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

#13
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they'd simply be maintaining separate sets of backported code, since Enterprise Google Chrome won't be open source.

WebKit/Blink is a mixed LGPL/BSD licensed project, with KHTML and other KDE developed parts being LGPL. Google likely can't keep most of their patches stripping support secret.

Well, an enterprise would have to ask for the source code to Chrome, wouldn't they?

Re: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

#14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't worry about that. I'm guessing this effectively creates a fork of Chromium that does not have the anti-ad blocker changes in question, which Opera/Brave/Edge will use instead of the main one. On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?

This might be sustainable for a couple of months but Google will keep on developing chromium with the assumption that those APIs aren't available and maintaining and back porting patches will not be sustainable in the long run. And we've seen Opera and Edge shying away from too much work with their own webengines, why would it be different this time?

It’s gonna be different when people leave chrome. The public followed the tech crowd into using chrome in 2008 and the public will similarly follow us out from using chrome in 2018 (yes I haven’t used it in a year and couldn’t be happier)

Re: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

#15
post #12
post #10

I feel like things would be easier if Firefox could be embeded in another browser just like chromium can. Let Google cripple their browser for themselves, and Mozilla provide the good and strong de facto browser engine.

What is currently stopping its adoption? Iirc there were several browsers based on Gecko engine. Is it drm?

Firefox is probably still a legacy mix of XUL, cpp and migrating to rust. I'm pretty sure chrome is easier to adapt.

Re: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

#16
post #12
post #10

I feel like things would be easier if Firefox could be embeded in another browser just like chromium can. Let Google cripple their browser for themselves, and Mozilla provide the good and strong de facto browser engine.

What is currently stopping its adoption? Iirc there were several browsers based on Gecko engine. Is it drm?

Unfortunately, Embedded Gecko is not supported anymore... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...

However, the new Servo engine will be embeddable.

Re: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

#18

I wonder if that is sustainable as features are built on top of the new system and their codebase diverges further and further from chrome as a result.

I won't worry about that. I'm guessing this effectively creates a fork of Chromium that does not have the anti-ad blocker changes in question, which Opera/Brave/Edge will use instead of the main one. On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?

Maintaining a fork takes effort and this effort grows when the codebases diverge from each other. If the affected code is at a busy location in the source code then other changes can also affect it which makes maintaining the fork harder in the long run.

Re: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

#19
post #17

This one[1] and the likes will prevent vast majority of ads, regardless of which browser you have chosen to use this morning. [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...

Except mobile browsers, arguably the most critical place where you need blocking to get any kind of reasonably decent experience (load times, viewable area, battery life, etc.).

Extensions like uBlock target people who don't want to bother with editing hosts files and keeping them updated.

Re: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes

#20

I wonder if that is sustainable as features are built on top of the new system and their codebase diverges further and further from chrome as a result.

I won't worry about that. I'm guessing this effectively creates a fork of Chromium that does not have the anti-ad blocker changes in question, which Opera/Brave/Edge will use instead of the main one. On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?

> On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?

Not sure why power users ever left Firefox as their default browser when surveillance tech came along. I sure didn't. Firefox was always the more competent and customizable browser. Happy to see users returning. Among other things, the current "Welcome Chromium/Chrome users!" megathread in the Firefox subreddit[1] seems to indicate there's something going on. :)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bvh4pq/welcome_chr...

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