Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

chromewebstore.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

851–860 of 1001 posts

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

#851

Post by derkster »

surajrmal wrote: post #843
derkster wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk about Google as if it's a person. You should take a step back and think to yourself why the changes were made to Manifest V3 that broke backwards compatibility, weakening ability to ad-blocking. Rule set based modification is one of the first features I'd think of when developing a systems of extensibility in browser, and they removed it. The reasoning is obvious, and "plausible deniability" is not enough to…

Manifest v3 is not going to lose any meaningful marketshare. There continues to exist working adblock and most users won't notice any difference in functionality. I sure don't.

Manifest V3 has 100% market share for all "full featured" browsers. My understanding is that just yesterday, YouTube made a change that allows them to apply DRM to videos, with even the client side buffer maintaining encryption until playback. How long until we start seeing similar applied to websites/articles?

Eventually, there will be an overstep that make enough capable people mad, and those people will get together and make/mod something better.

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

#853

Post by jack1243star »

NegativeK wrote: post #747
tomrod wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Kagi proves users are willing to pay for search (me included, recently).

Someone in an infosec podcast recently summed up the whole situation far better than I've been able to: The vast majority of people won't pay for privacy. Some people will pay for search. Some people will pay for content. It's really not many, though. Can you imagine if effectively everything on the internet was paywalled? I sure as hell don't know what the solution is, but we wouldn't've gotten to this spot right no…

>>The vast majority of people won't pay for privacy.

Depending on your threat model, paying (e.g. with credit card) destroys privacy.

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

#854

Post by zarzavat »

jorvi wrote: post #314
gruez wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conspiracy theory doesn't make sense because safari's content blockers (ie. the nerfed version of adblock) block most ads just fine, especially from google ads. The only ads that get through are first party ads (eg. youtube), but as of a few years ago adblockers could block those as well, so it's a moot point.

Yup. I understand that nerfing adblocking is definitely a big draw for Google, but Apple went the ManifestV3 route many years before, specifically to increase extension performance and privacy. Back then there was a big uproar too, but mostly because Safari extension developers charged for a new version because they had to rewrite the entire thing.

> specifically to increase extension performance and privacy

This reasoning is so bogus that it’s hard to believe anybody could believe it in good faith. Ad blockers are essential for performance and user privacy and security.

If Apple truly bought into this reasoning then they’d integrate an ad blocker like Brave does. Follow the money.

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

#855

Post by moi2388 »

basisword wrote: post #392
gruez wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conspiracy theory doesn't make sense because safari's content blockers (ie. the nerfed version of adblock) block most ads just fine, especially from google ads. The only ads that get through are first party ads (eg. youtube), but as of a few years ago adblockers could block those as well, so it's a moot point.

Safari content blockers are awful compared to UBlock and I’m a Safari user. Not only does YouTube either get through or cause weird issues, YouTube now blocks you until you completely disable the extension. Content blockers often block cookie banners too which can often result in broken functionality - a nightmare when you’re trying to buy tickets to something and have to “reload without blockers” for the website to…

That’s nonsense. AdGuard + SponsorBlock.

I almost exclusively use Safari and I havent seen a single ad in almost a decade

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

#856

Post by ac29 »

nine_k wrote: post #592
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then they would let people contribute money to the browser People keep saying things like this, but the truth is that direct contributions to any ad-supported system contribute more like 1%-10% (at best) of their income. You are not the majority you think you are.

It does not have to be the majority. It would suffice to produce enough funds to continue developing Firefox, with full-time engineers, infrastructure, etc. The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Let's assume that half of it was dedicated to Firefox; e.g. $60M/y. It would take 500k users paying $120/y (aka $10/mo) to support their favorite browser. The current audience o…

> someone with a good reputation could just start an organization to accept the payments and direct them to Mozilla developers, both Mozilla employees and significant open-source contributors

I had the same thought. I dont think such an org would be able to pull in nearly the same amount of money as Mozilla does, but even a few million dollars a year would fund a lot of development work.

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

#857

Post by willywanker »

timmytokyo wrote: post #717
yanis_t wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company optimises for profit. Real shocker.

s/company/monopoly/

Wrong. Every company exists to be profitable; how ethically they go about it is a different topic. Companies aren't charities.

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

#858

Post by ac29 »

glenstein wrote: post #387
Mailtemi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla diversifies by increasing the CEO's salary for nothing. Wiki: In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5 million, and again to nearly $7 million in 2022. The new CEO brings computing for AI money bleed that almost no one wants.

What's the news on them getting into AI?

Firefox translate uses an on device language model to do webpage translations.

There's also an experimental chatbot integration in Firefox. It seems to be opt in at least for now.

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

#859

Post by grimblee »

simpaticoder wrote: post #698
grimblee wrote: post #559

Just stop using chrome, fight the monopoly, don't be a sheep. It's inconvenient ? Convenience is a trap, stop giving away your freedom and agency for convenience.

This sentiment precludes discussion of incentives, the individual's relationship to the group, and the practical limits of agency. If you said the same about smartphones, you would be locked out of many services, including governmental ones. You unthinkingly, tacitly shift the onus onto the individual, which is naive. There is a reason the 5-day work-week, fire codes, and so-forth had to be legislated, because "just…

I do not deny that the system need to change but I disagree with saying "we have no agency", I think that like everything in life it's a balance of the two and you definitively can, as an individual, decide to use less convenient options like waterfox or librewolf that respect your privacy and do not try to enforce propaganda (or ads) unto you. And I think in this case, with one of the most powerful company in human history being the perpetrator, you can wait a long time for the system to change.

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

#860

Post by jpc0 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #612
carlosjobim wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a special case, which can be solved by buying YouTube premium. For general ad-blocking, the DNS filters work great.

What incentives does this enforce in the market? Strangling smaller players and reinforcing the dominant ones.

"We understand some users don't want ads so to monetize our product we allow those users to pay and not see ads"

Your response: "I want to keep my cake and eat it too."

I have a solution for you, stop using YouTube if you feel so strongly that a video platform should be free to use.

I'm paraphrasing in the quotes, they aren't real quotes...

Post reply on HN