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Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

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Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's not against TOS I would imagine most ad network just refusing to serve ads that encourage people to install ad blockers.

Yeah, I guess. But I imagine there's so much volume of ads that they can't all go through human review. Maybe it could sneak in undetected and work for a short while, until the first tweet mentioning it goes viral.

I can put up a "pretend ad" on my two blogs and maybe I can be a bit creative and get it feqtured elsewhere too if someone provides "artwork" and somewhere to point it too.

Anyone else in?

PS: If you do it later, send me a mail (it is in my profile, click my username to see it.)

Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#122

As someone who is intimately familiar with the Chrome extensions internals and is not employed by a big tech company, I believe most of the changes seem like a step in the right direction.* I've been working towards implementing greater support for Chrome extensions in Electron which has involved reading and interacting with Chromium code [0]. - Using service workers instead of a hidden background webpage is more idi…

Are these changes actually needed, though? As much as it makes sense to use service workers, for instance, this seems like a rationalization to shoehorn in Google's anti-features.

It's not like background webpages are broken or even hard to use. It's not like everyone's clamoring for their ad blockers to use less resource or for Chrome to be faster.

There was a time when I switched to Chrome because I believed it to be superior. Now that I find the extensions I use to be nearly as important as the browser itself, I can't imagine why ad-hating privacy-focused individuals would punish themselves by using Chrome. Firefox has a few performance quirks in contrast to Chrome, but overall it's in a state where it competes in most cases. As much as I can complain about Mozilla's organizational issues, I can be far more assured that they aren't going to cause my extensions to become nerfed for A Good Reason (TM).

Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For literally the reasons we're already discussing: to offer an alternative to Chrome. If every browser is based on Chromium then you're not really offering an alternative to Google Chrome because Google still own the supply chain. Not only in terms of your new browser's rendering engine but also in terms of website owners being vindicated in targeting Chrome. The only way to offer a legitimate counterargument to Chr…

I think that's backwards. Gecko requires constant and expensive work to keep up with Blink. And it has been falling behind. Whereas Blink gets that work for free from Google. If you want to offer a legitimate counter argument to Chrome by using Gecko then you have to find some way to bring in the hundreds of millions of dollars of necessary funding to bring Gecko up to Blink's quality. If you want to create a counter…

> Whereas Blink gets that work for free from Google.

For now.

My bet is they are already planning how to boil the frog.

Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#124
post #99

As someone who is intimately familiar with the Chrome extensions internals and is not employed by a big tech company, I believe most of the changes seem like a step in the right direction.* I've been working towards implementing greater support for Chrome extensions in Electron which has involved reading and interacting with Chromium code [0]. - Using service workers instead of a hidden background webpage is more idi…

You think it is a step in the right direction while acknowledging it breaks adblockers. You're going to have to explain why you're cool with that, because as it stands your post just isn't cohesive at all (as far as I can tell).

This isn't a single, monolithic change, there's plenty of changes between manifest V2 and V3. GP said he thought most of these changes are a step in the right direction, while expressing concern about one of the others. That seems like a cohesive and nuanced opinion to me.

Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#125
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dev tools Chrome's devtools have been superior (faster, more reliable, more featureful) for years near as I can tell (and everyone I work with). I am curious what makes you feel firefox's devtools are better.

Alternative take: [dev]tools are only as powerful as how well you know them. I'd like to think both firefox devtools and chrome devtools as highly capable, but you'll get way more out of the one you're used to, whichever it is.

Another alternate take: everything since Firebug has been cake icing, what differences there are now on top of that base feature set are minimal.

Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair criticism of Firefox is that it is dependent on Mozilla 'the org' which is a pretty shaky foundation to base such a critical component on. Witness the exodus of even die hard supporters over the last couple of years. That has nothing to do with minor UI details.

I’d prefer Firefox, but some functionality works inarguably better in chrome. One example is YouTube, which slams my processor due to the lack of hardware decoding.

The h264ify add-on will let your computer load YouTube videos more efficiently on Firefox, if it supports hardware acceleration for H.264 but not VP8/VP9.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#127

if you haven't already use Firefox and recognize that this is a fundamental question of freedom and whether you want the internet to be controlled by dystopian corporate advertisement monoliths or institutions that care about your rights. Every time this comes up and 80% of discussions is about whether the tab bar in firefox is flat or three pixels wide instead of five makes me more depressed

Didn't Mozilla fire their devtools team ? FF devtools weren't up to Chrome as-is, and doesn't sound like they ever will be. FF seems like a sinking ship, not worth investing time in. TBH I'm perfectly happy with Chrome and using Google accounts. The benefits of my data following me around seamlessly far outweighs the downsides of Google having access to it.

I hope you like ads, cause Chrome will be choking on them.

Used Chrome on mobile once. Remembered why I don't.

Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to update, when the update is to something that looks horrible. (Last update I spent hours googling for scripts to reverse the appearance changes. Seems there were 1000s of people looking for the same thing!) But in FF preferences there are only 2 choices. 1. Automatically install updates (recommended) 2. Check for updates but let you choose to install them You would think I'd choose option 2, since I do…

FWIW forums like reddit's r/FirefoxCSS usually have solutions as soon as changes roll out on Developer Edition, which is months ahead of the release. It was like that for the ugly new tabs, for instance, which I never had to deal with.

Thanks, yeah, that's where I ended up last time hehe. I should've just asked about it on HN, of course.

Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to update, when the update is to something that looks horrible. (Last update I spent hours googling for scripts to reverse the appearance changes. Seems there were 1000s of people looking for the same thing!) But in FF preferences there are only 2 choices. 1. Automatically install updates (recommended) 2. Check for updates but let you choose to install them You would think I'd choose option 2, since I do…

Sniff your browser traffic to figure out which url they use to poll for updates and block that on your router or firewall. If that doesn't work, maybe you can redirect it in hosts file, and spoof the response to say there's no new updates.

Thank you.

Re: Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

#130
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair criticism of Firefox is that it is dependent on Mozilla 'the org' which is a pretty shaky foundation to base such a critical component on. Witness the exodus of even die hard supporters over the last couple of years. That has nothing to do with minor UI details.

Firefox open source. If the Mozilla foundation is as questionable as some like to claim then why isn't there any effort to fork Gecko. We have more than enough Blink/Chromium based browsers already.

Two forks exist, Waterfox and Pale moon.

They work beautifully for me but I don't dare to use them on machines that I type customer data, work credentials or use internet banking on.

Not because I doubt the mainteners but because Internet is an extremely hostile space - technically.

One missing patch and one exploit that snuck through one ad network and you can be compromised.

That said I'm happy to donate to see someone starting a soft fork of latest Firefox.

A good starting point could be to make a rudimentary fix for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447

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