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

Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

9to5google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 400 posts

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#351

Post by casefields »

polairscience wrote: post #40

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it w…

You mean the organization that advocated for deplatforming and more: https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need...

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#352

Post by krackers »

esskay wrote: post #20
ramijames wrote: post #8

Use Firefox. It's an excellent browser and needs your support.

Just a shame its a tiny bit slower than chromium based browsers still (the ui, not the web page rendering), and you dont have to take my word for it, a web search for something like 'firefox sluggish compared to chrome' will back this up too as I've tried switching multiple times but always end up back on a chromium variant because the firefox ui just doesn't feel like an upgrade. Personally I've just given up trying…

+1, I think (but may be wrong) this is because the firefox UI is non-native. This is especially visible on mac, it just reimplements everything on its own.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#353

Post by krackers »

63stack wrote: post #132
LiamPowell wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most ad blockers do already use MV3, uBlock Origin is the only one still using V2 as far as I know. There are some drawbacks to V3, however none prevent creating an effective ad blocker, as demonstrated by the fact that many exist. Though saying that doesn't make for nearly as effective clickbait...

If this is clickbait, you are a google shill. The limitations of v3 are very clearly explained on the ublock homepage: uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. Canno…

The part no one gets is that mv3 by design cannot do privacy protection by stripping tracking tags. Any sort of programatic URL manipulation or introspection is impossible by design. Advertisers can switch to a scheme of base64 query params inside URLs, and there's nothing MV3 based adblockers can do to filter this

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#354

Post by neves »

rafram wrote: post #11
neves wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current title is a lot better.

You mean the title of this post? It's much worse, in my opinion - plenty of strong ad blockers run on MV3. Even the developer of uBlock Origin (Lite) seems to have conceded that the MV3 approach is less resource intensive and didn't require sacrificing any of the features that 99.9% of users use.

MV2 and MV3 is completely uninteresting for me. But you'll have to take my advblocker from my dead cold hands

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#355

Post by rubslopes »

Insanity wrote: post #254
polairscience wrote: post #40

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it w…

I'm going to advocate for Zen here. https://zen-browser.app/ I've been using it for the past year or so and love using it so far. There's some bugs here and there but nothing that occurs often or breaks my workflow. And it's based on Firefox :)

I've been using Zen since almost the beginning of the project. I'm pretty happy with it! Great QOL features, and being Firefox, I have perfect ad block and syncs nicely with Firefox for Android.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#356

Post by majorchord »

water-data-dude wrote: post #141
polairscience wrote: post #40

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it w…

I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends. Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut th…

What other software have you stopped using because they added an optional feature you didn't use?

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#357

Post by majorchord »

lom888 wrote: post #158
water-data-dude wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends. Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut th…

I've been using Waterfox on deskop for years and adore it. Firefox for mobile does great. I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly aside from just inertia.

> I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly

The overwhelmingly vast majority of the world population uses Google Chrome with no adblocker, on Windows, and have no desire to change anything. Even if you actively try to persuade them towards other browsers or operating systems.

Why is that difficult to understand? Most people are not technical and do not have the same concerns or gripes as we do... their current software stack is familiar and does what they need it to, and that's all they care about.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#358

Post by ranger_danger »

jrm4 wrote: post #278
sheept wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you alluded to, many Chromium forks (notable exception is Ungoogled) are backed by tech companies. There's already plenty of intentional changes they maintain in their forks, like Privacy Sandbox,[0] so I don't think preserving support for v2 is a large hurdle for them. [0]: https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/10742158329613-W...

"Backed by tech companies" Yup, huge red flag. Non-profit is the long-term way to go.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, but people still find creative ways to crap all over them for some reason.

Someone else in this thread said they were "supporting the closed internet" by sending search queries to Google.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#359

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

pluralmonad wrote: post #228
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS adblocking doesn't catch everything.

Is it time to run every document we download through a sandboxed local LLM to clean it up on the fly? How long then before the ad tech companies start prompt injecting?

What a strange leap. There's rather a lot we can do to keep regular adblocking going and we don't have to just accept what Google deigns to give us. Wasting a bunch of GPU power to have an LLM hallucinate which parts of a page to delete hardly seems like a solution to me.
Post reply on HN