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uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

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Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#91
post #4

Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit... I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy, a joke coming from Google. Then the excuse was "well it improves performance", which they could easily do by marking extensions as low performance. If Google wanted to improve this they have an entire search engine where they could re-ran…

The issue I have is not that they did it; it’s that they lied about why.

Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it. People can use a different browser if they wish (I do).

This whole “better for users” bullshit is why I don’t respect Google as a company. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox as my main browser and it's not a viable alternative to Chrome if you have the very common usage pattern of keeping tens of tabs open.

What? Why? That's me, I use FF.

You can't see all 50-70 tabs on a normal 27" monitor; Chrome will squish them almost indefinitely, and Firefox forces a large minimum tab width that makes the tab bar scroll forever and then you forget half the tabs you have going and everything's bad. I tried to switch and stopped because of this. I'll hang on until ubo really stops working, I guess, and then try to figure something else out.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have come to accept dishonesty and sociopathy from corporations as normal and even acceptable unfortunately.

I view it as a symptom of the broader effort to villify the fourth estate and condition people to act(vote) on their emotions rather than a rational look at verifiable facts.

Nearly 20 years of attacks, from both the left and the right, across the anglosphere.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#94
post #51

I hear so many people IRL complaining about this. I tell them to switch to firefox, that the adblockers still work there, and they still won't switch to it because they are "used to chrome". I really feel like google won this battle. People will through a lot of abuse just to maintain their habits.

I use Firefox as my main browser and it's not a viable alternative to Chrome if you have the very common usage pattern of keeping tens of tabs open.

I have no problem with hundreds of tabs on Firefox.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#95

I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions, unlike the locked-down and hobbled Chromium ecosystem. I suspect they do realize this because they've been really leaning into extensions recently, but over the years I've worried that Mozilla's committment to Firefox isn't as serious as I would like. Regardless, I'd love to s…

It would be enough if Apple realized the same thing. They're in a position to have the best browser, and coast along ignoring the opportunity.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#96
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of what the DOJ is seeking against Google would severely impact Mozilla financially however, as they want to ban them from paying to be the default search engine.

That would be a good thing. If Firefox is funded by donations, rather than by Google, it ensures there is no enshittification in the future. And yes, donations can fund a big project, as evidenced by Thunderbird and Ladybird.

Nobody uses Ladybird, at this point it's vaporware. And Thunderbird is still based on Firefox.

The development of Firefox costs around $200 million per year. That's more than what Wikimedia can get from donations, and Wikipedia is a website that everyone uses. And you want to rely on donations from people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.

And let's say that it manages to bring those costs down to $100 million per year or less and manages to get it from donations (when pigs will fly) … it still has to compete with a Chrome whose estimated cost goes over $1 billion per year.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#98
post #39

I've been running firefox on my laptop for the last year, with Chrome on my desktop, as a way to head-to-head them. For folks contemplating the switch, it hasn't been bad at all. Some better, some worse, but overall I rarely notice major differences except for a very small handful of sites that won't work with FF. And I still have all of my uBlock origin happiness. :)

What sites don't work with FF?

I've been daily driving Firefox for several years. Everything I use on a daily basis works fine on FF, but every now and then you come across some random site that doesn't load or loads poorly.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#99
post #51

I hear so many people IRL complaining about this. I tell them to switch to firefox, that the adblockers still work there, and they still won't switch to it because they are "used to chrome". I really feel like google won this battle. People will through a lot of abuse just to maintain their habits.

I've been telling my IRL non-technical friends to use Brave. By far the easiest migration path, literally is Chrome, but with with a good built-in ad blocker and uBlock Origin. I've long since understood that any browser that I would use should be treated as an anti-recommendation for normal folks. I can already see the "but the crypto thing" and yeah, I don't love it but it's so out of the way that I don't even know how to turn it on in Brave if I wanted. Getting people weened off of Google Chrome (tm) is better than trying, and failing, to get them on the "ideal" browser.

Edit: Instead of downvoting actually try convincing a normal person to switch to Firefox and see how well it goes. I've been recommending it for 10+ years and they're all still on Chrome. But in two days I have 4 new Brave users.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#100

what ll it take to convert 80% of the world wide web users from chrome to firefox. can we write a super duper complicated migrator of sorts that literally installs firefox on behalf of the user, migrates all their data, migrates all extensions from chrome to firefox, even suggests alternative extensions for the ones that are not available and market the hell out of this migrator across x, bluesky, reddit etc?, One cl…

To migrate, the average user will need to see the problem first. Most people wouldn't care enough about it even if they magically could press a button and migrate.

In the attention economy the browser and the mobile OS (and soon your LLM/Perplexity agent) are the most important points to control the aggregate user data. So it's a lost battle.

For a sub 0.01% of the nerds there would be alternatives for the non-DRM content, but this wouldn't change the big picture.

It's like the junk food business. Yes it's bad for people, but it's so addictive...

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