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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

#111
post #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.

Their engineers genuinely believe that shit too, which is just absurd bullshit.

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

#112
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…

They had the market position and option to do that for years now. "Told you so" whenever a patterns matches, and ignoring the times when it does not instead of providing a good model that encompasses both, is a fairly lame way to reason about the world.

"They didn't immediately abuse their market power!"

Great. Very few companies do. What difference does it make?

We don't give bankrobbers credit for all the days they could've robbed a bank but didn't.

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

#114
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…

Well hopefully Google will pay the price for their greed soon enough.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-...

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

#115
Fortunately, at least so far, uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine on Chrome.

I know people have made a lot of arguments as to why it might not be as good in theory, or why things might change in the future. But so far, ever since I was forced to switch, I have seen exactly zero difference. Lists are updated often enough that I haven't seen anything get through. Adblocking works on YouTube. If anything, pages seem to load even a little faster. I've had no complaints.

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

#116
post #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.

Actually I have a problem is both. Chrome/Chromium is Google's product and it's theirs to do with what they please, but if they do user-hostile things with it, that's enough to criticise them for me, even if they're honest about it.

Of course lying about why makes it worse, but I don't think it would've been that much more okay if Google was honest and said "users' ability to install highly effective ad blockers hurts our bottom line so we're removing them".

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

#118
post #86

Related if anyone is switching over. I like to run Firefox Developer Edition[0] as my "work" browser, with work related bookmarks, etc. and then regular Firefox for nonwork. This makes it really easy to keep the two separate. I know there's a lot of ways to segment within the same browser but this works well for me. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

FYI developer edition has a ton of additional data collection that I don't believe can be disabled, if that matters to you.

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

#119

if you are in tech do your friends and family a favor: Download and setup Brave browser on their device. I haven't seen an ad in years. https://brave.com/

Still the same engine as Chrome, so it doesn't do anything against the monoculture of Chromium. Firefox works just as well, admittedly they'd have to install an extension instead of ad blocking being there by default.

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

#120
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 was using Firefox exclusively for years, but when I sold my Macbook and bought a Thinkpad and installed Linux on it, I grew pretty annoyed by Firefox.

Specifically, I couldn't view my 360 videos or photos on Google Images or Immich at anywhere near acceptable performance. The videos, recorded at 30fps, would get maybe 5fps. This was weird, because I have a fairly beefy laptop, it should be able to handle these videos just fine (especially since my iPhone handled it just fine).

After a bit of debugging, it appears that there's a bug in how it's writing for the shader cache, and as such there was no hardware acceleration. I found a bug filed about my issue [1], and I didn't really feel like trying to fix it, because I didn't want to mess with Mesa drivers. I just installed Chromium and that's what I'm using right now, and it worked with my 360 videos and photos absolutely fine.

I want Firefox to succeed, but that really left a bad taste in my mouth; it's not like it's weird to want my browser to be hardware accelerated.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1921742 Looks like it might be fixed now, or at least they figured out it was an issue with Mesa

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