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

Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

pcworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 752 posts

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#611

Post by culi »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #325
culi wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's necessary for the future of the web. Ever since Opera gave up on Presto and Edge gave up on Trident, we've seen a massive and sudden consolidation towards Chromium. It's sad how quickly we forgot the lessons we learned from the days of IE's dominance

Sad indeed. What trully pisses me off though is the fact Mozilla has like hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, possibly a billion dollars, and yet they continue to neglect Firefox.

I don't know why people say this. They've consistently improved firefox and done phenomenally on all of the WPT inter-ops for 5 years running

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021

This doesn't look like neglect to me at all. And in addition to all this, they've dramatically reduced their dependency on Google for funding.

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#612

Post by culi »

drewfax wrote: post #540
culi wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on a time limit. Chromium deprecated MV2 but still keeps the webRequest API in the codebase. Google could at any time decide to strip it entirely. Or it could just stop working due to lack of maintenance as Chromium grows. Brave is relying on a fork that takes advantage of the fact that the webRequest API is still technically there

That's why Brave probably built an in-built adblocker written in Rust. Works great on both desktop and mobile.

Brave's adblocker looks pretty good but it's not nearly as customizable or granular as uBlock Origin is. I don't use Brave but I think it'd be nice to be able to choose from a variety of adblockers instead of being forced to rely on the "official" one because of the MV2 stuff

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#613

Post by franga2000 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #43
avaer wrote: post #32

What's funny is that extensions were supposed to be a way to let you do the things the browser didn't want you to do. Guess that was a bit too much freedom for Google to accept, so they had to make a store with a gate, and destroy the APIs so that they're useless. Then they had to make up some reasons to justify that and ram it through the pipeline despite everyone's objections, and the frog got boiled. Now we're bac…

> Then they had to make up some reasons to justify that Hate to be the one to defend Google here, but the reasons weren't that unreasonable. I want my browser to prevent random extensions from directly reading web page data. The declarative API idea is pretty good. It's just that uBlock Origin is so insanely useful, important and trusted, it should get full access to the entire browser regardless. Honestly, it should…

Your browser does prevent random extensions from reading web page data - it prevents all of the ones you don't install!

More seriously: if you don't want X to do Y, the solution is to not give X the permission Y. The platform overlord removing the premission Y completely is a terrible solution.

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#614

Post by culi »

zarzavat wrote: post #316
culi wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically exactly what Brave (the only Chromium browser still supporting uBO) is doing to support uBlock Origin. But it's flimsy and likely has an expiration date.

AFAIK they are using the built-in support which Google still maintains even if they don't expose it. My point is that when MV3 was announced there was an assumption that maintaining a Chromium fork to continue supporting MV2 would be too much work and too expensive. But now with LLMs that's no longer a safe assumption. The non-Chrome chromium based browsers can fork chromium and add back MV2. No need for any expirati…

It's not because of LLMs. It's because Google only stripped MV2 support but didn't strip the webRequest API that is at the center of this whole thing. It's pretty simple to maintain a fork that just supports the MV2 standard if the APIs are still there. If Google ever decides to finally remove the API, it would certainly be a much larger challenge

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#615

Post by franga2000 »

jimmydorry wrote: post #189
codedokode wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but if you write your own extension maybe you want to read and modify the data. For example, patch fingerprinting script so that it gets the wrong result. Furthermore, malicious extension can read the data from the DOM, from forms (for example, password or credit card fields), and in some cases, from JS variables. They can insert fake information into the page. So preventing extensions from reading network data…

So you're saying that because Google didn't completely up-end the security model and break almost every extension in the one-go, we should have no-progress towards a more secure extension model? uBlock Origin via declarative blocks is almost as powerful as the original. While I would trust gorhill with almost unfettered control over my browser, I don't trust EVERY extension owner (no do I trust uBlock Origin in perpe…

Removing capabilities is not progress towards better security. Putting them behind opt-in permissions, making permissions more granular, more robust... those are security upgrades. Removing capabilities is a feature downgrade.

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#616

Post by culi »

einpoklum wrote: post #342
culi wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like telemetry being defaulted to opt-in but relax. It's anonymized and it's far and away the least intrusive of the major browsers

It's not anonymized, because your communication with Mozilla has plenty of identifying information. Also, Mozilla officially un-committed to not using sell this and any other data it collects from you: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-...

I'll repost my comment from elsewhere:

> They rewrote the terms almost immediately after the backlash. They also claimed the original terms were written in response to the overly broad legal definitions of "data sales" under laws like the CCPA. Which tbh sounds reasonable

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#617

Post by culi »

inigyou wrote: post #451
moebrowne wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is well over a year old. The current privacy FAQ right now explicitly states: > We never sell your personal data. Unlike other big tech companies that collect and profit off your personal information, we’re built with privacy as the default. We don’t know your age, gender, precise location, or other information Big Tech collects and profits from. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/

They pulled back on the websife change after backlash, but trust takes a long time to rebuild. Also, don't go by the FAQ. Go by the actual terms and conditions. Remember part of their original response to the controversy was to say "we don't sell your data, we just give it out in exchange for money" so I'm inclined to ignore anything from them that says "we don't sell" as they clearly don't know what it means.

The trust was lost because of the public's misunderstanding of the change. It was updated as a response to the overly broad legal definitions of "data sales" under laws like the CCPA. As your own link says, Mozilla explicitly stated:

> It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#618

Post by culi »

gilrain wrote: post #467
culi wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been taken down by DMCA copyright strikes on every western platform that could distribute it. That's why you can't find it on the Firefox extension store anymore

None of that means it’s “illegal”. You apparently think something being removed to reduce legal risk means it’s illegal, but that doesn’t follow.

It's illegal to distribute. Unambiguously. That's how DMCA works. If Mozilla were to add it back to the store, they would be acting illegally.

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#619

Post by colega »

firefax wrote: post #175

You can have my ad blocker when you take it from my cold dead fingers. I will literally move to a shack in the woods rather than go back to late 90s level of bullshit advertising.

I wouldn't need an "ad-blocker" if we just went to 90s level of advertising.

It's not really about advertising as much as it is about "bullshit" nowadays.

Re: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

#620

Post by leros »

ivraatiems wrote: post #69

For those who use uBlock Origin Lite, have you noticed any issues/deficiencies in what ads are blocked? I haven't.

I honestly haven't really noticed a difference in ads after switching to the Lite version. It seems to work well enough.
Post reply on HN