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Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

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Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#581

Post by IAmBroom »

robhlt wrote: post #485
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the networks (although preferably also the networks) but also the publishers. If a newspaper took money to advertise blatant, obvious scams, I assume a judge would consider them at least partially responsible for restitution, if not an accessory to the crime. Looking away really hard (and delegating the task of looking away really hard) shouldn't get you out of this. Hold the publisher responsible, they can…

This kind of thing has come up before with "murder for hire" advertisements [1]. The publishers were only found liable when the advertisement was very explicit. Seems like the bar is quite high and courts are currently unwilling to impose "undue burden" on publishers. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_Fortune_(magazine)#...

There is a conflict between "publishers should be responsible for everything they publish" and "a free press".

If you have to buy a newspaper to publish your info, that is quite a high bar.

At the same time, none of us* want malware scum to use newspaper ads to fleece people.

*OK, some of us write malware scum. I don't count their opinions as valid.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#582

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

I don't understand why anyone uses Chromium browsers other than being part of the herd.

Firefox-based browsers are the last bastion of safe web browsing. Even vanilla Firefox is starting to falter, but it's still worlds better than ANY Chromium based nonsense.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#583

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

sirfz wrote: post #35
gardnr wrote: post #7

I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it. Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.

Firefox was amazing even when Chrome was released

No, it wasn't. I was there.

At the time, Firefox's old engine was getting quite tired. It was single core, no sandboxing, a lot of cruft under the hood. Extensions had deep integration which would weigh it down. Load times were really rough, and things needed rewriting.

The Firefox you see now is part of the 2017 Quantum rebuild. that said, Quantum wasn't great either (because it jettisoned a LOT of great extensions), but it was necessary for survival. They did work on it and things got better over time, but there are still scars from that rug pull that was the extensions fiasco. I wish they had a better solution. RIP Tab Mix Plus.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#584

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

inglor wrote: post #229
sunaookami wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.

Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users. This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.

I seriously doubt that "100m active users" metric. I haven't even heard of this OS, and if it truly had that many users, we would at least hear SOMETHING about it in the tech world (we do not).

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#585

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

BeetleB wrote: post #124
xandrius wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was just less of everything than Chrome. First install experience for an average user was much better in terms of speed and snappiness. That was one of the keys to its success.

> It was just less of everything than Chrome. This is insane. As a power FF user, I don't think Chrome ever "got ahead". There were 2 reasons for its success (in order): 1. Made by a respected company that was killing everything in those days. 2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable. Feature-wise - it was always worse.

I was also a power FF user at that time. It was not fast. Not at all.

Chrome was simply touted as an insanely fast browser. At the time, Firefox was an absolute dog when it came to performance and heaviness.

That was enough to win - Chrome kneecapped Firefox over that metric alone.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#586

Post by BeetleB »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #585
BeetleB wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was just less of everything than Chrome. This is insane. As a power FF user, I don't think Chrome ever "got ahead". There were 2 reasons for its success (in order): 1. Made by a respected company that was killing everything in those days. 2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable. Feature-wise - it was always worse.

I was also a power FF user at that time. It was not fast. Not at all. Chrome was simply touted as an insanely fast browser. At the time, Firefox was an absolute dog when it came to performance and heaviness. That was enough to win - Chrome kneecapped Firefox over that metric alone.

> I was also a power FF user at that time. It was not fast. Not at all.

For me, the speed improvement in Chrome was marginal. Perhaps my PC at the time was simply too slow to notice the difference.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#587

Post by saghm »

rjzzleep wrote: post #455
saghm wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks…

This isn't about users not being tech savvy enough. Ad Blocking has always been a safety issue. Many of the ransomware infections in enterprises were actually drive by ad driven exploit networks. Sandboxes get better, yeah, but this is akin to leaving your door open in a neighborhood with violent crime and then saying I built this awesome laser guided Kevlar chamber that scans introducers upon entry instead.

No disagreement here! My point is more that the bar for what's enough to be a safety issue in ads is actually extraordinarily low, which is exactly why I don't have any qualms about using the strictest measures possible to block all ads even as someone who, at least in my own perception, is pretty tech savvy.

In my mind, the entire ad industry is basically not worth enabling. I'm not nearly as concerned with the hypotheticals of "what if literally everyone started using ad blockers and ad-supported content disappeared?"; that's firmly in the "I don't know, but it's a problem I'd definitely prefer to have to what we have right now" bucket.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#588

Post by saghm »

jxramos wrote: post #313
saghm wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks…

Low resolution conflation of things is a very understandable outcome. It’s a lot of vocabulary to absorb to speak precisely about UI in general. I’m glad your grandmother has someone like you in her life.

Not at all evident from the story I told, but she had a stroke a few years ago and then only survived another year after that. She lived a long and from what I could tell happy and fulfilled life though, and to the end seemed far more concerned about how others were doing than herself (during my last conversation with her, the first thing she wanted to know about was how my then-girlfriend-now-wife was doing because she had developed an autoimmune issue out of nowhere around the time that they had met a few months prior).

On the whole, she was actually pretty admirable in how gracefully she aged. In her 80s she decided on her own to move into an elder living community not because she actually was having any issue doing things on her own, but because she knew that it was inevitable that she would start needing help and wanted to make sure she was somewhere that was equipped to handle it when it happened. She also decided on her own to surrender her license because she didn't think she should be allowed to drive anymore and took advantage of the community's shuttle buses when she needed to go places. I think she would have been the first one to say that she did not think she should not be the one trusted to make sure that she could use her computer safely and that systems that required people like her to know what to click are unethical!

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#589

Post by lelandfe »

Lovesong wrote: post #11

Few years ago when google announced their MV2 plan I moved to Firefox. I don't think in all this time I ever missed Chrome for anything in particular outside of maybe 1 or 2 websites that didn't have proper support. Switch to Firefox if you haven't already really.

I switched to Firefox and have regular problems with sites not supporting it. I wound up having to cave and download Chrome for backup.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#590

Post by godshatter »

ndiddy wrote: post #371
shevy-java wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the current cronies that run the USA may seem to have won for the time being, but sooner or later the population in the USA will realise how much fudged up the orange clown is. Only about 30% approval rating - that will continue to dwindle.

The Democrats already tried out the idea that Trumpism would blow over and everything would go back to "normal" with Biden's 2020 campaign, but it didn't really turn out that way. Right-wing reactionary politics has been overrepresented in the US since its founding due to state based representation, and I expect that this will continue to be the case for as long as the US exists in its current form.

It would help if they actually ran a candidate that leaned more moderate than extreme. They seem to choose candidates specifically to rile up the Republican base. That makes sense if this is actually a football rivalry or something but if they want to get elected they need to appeal to the middle, which doesn't seem (at least from my perspective) to happen very often.
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