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Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

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Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#141

Post by msla »

mises wrote: post #75

For what it's worth, I've had a great experience with firefox for the past year (since quantum convinced me to give it another chance). All though, it recently basically factory-reset itself. Signed out of sync, extensions gone, custom settings gone. Any one else have this happen? It's also got a weird memory leak, which I think is related to the pdf viewer. Never really checked in detail or tried to measure.

Firefox has been doing a few rather questionable things. They had the Mr Roboto add-on which was pushed out to advertise a TV show, they stuck ads in the "Recommendations" [1], they proactively destroyed peoples' bookmarks when they dropped support for RSS, they dropped support for RSS (because, apparently, a decentralized way to track website updates is anti-Google), and they destroyed a lot of useful add-ons.

I basically can't trust them anymore.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/7/17326184/firefox-ads-spons...

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#142

Post by AaronFriel »

I think it's time for Microsoft to rethink their decision to base Edge on Chromium.

It's a painful decision, to be sure, but the Microsoft team has to make a decision here: fork or adhere. The immediate benefit of forking and not following Chromium on this change is obvious. However, the cost of the fork will grow over time and it will be in Google's interest to deprecate and replace all of the infrastructure that supports the webRequest API to make it maximally painful to maintain the functionality in a fork.

On the other hand, had Microsoft decided to base Edge on Gecko, they wouldn't be working off a forked codebase whose owner has a perverse incentive to make the fork as painful and expensive as possible.

How many engineer hours, months, years are going to be wasted just shoring up features like this?

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#143

Post by joshschreuder »

milkytron wrote: post #90
jchw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googler here, but I do not work on Chrome and I’m speaking on a personal capacity. I believe this is a misnomer. The enterprise deployment stuff I’m aware of in Chrome/Chromium is accessible by any user, as far as I know, and in the past I’ve used it to force private browsing on always for my own personal usage. That said, I switched to Firefox when Quantum came out and haven’t looked back. Mozilla has done some anno…

One of my favorite things with Firefox is the ability to “edit and resend” requests in the browser devtools. I’m sure there are plugins that do something similar on chrome/chromium. But I use it all the time and my colleagues are always blown away when I show them this.

Whoa, never knew that was a thing. I found FF's dev tools quite bulky and clunky in the past, but I might have to give it another go.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#144

Post by teh_klev »

BearsAreCool wrote: post #138

Is there a good way to convert chrome saved passwords/history to firefox? Thinking I'll switch back to firefox.

I don't know how current this is:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-chrome-firefo...

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#146

Post by o10449366 »

irrational wrote: post #85

I don't get it. I've used Firefox and Chrome for years. Firefox is easily as good and capable as Chrome. The barrier to switch from Chrome to Firefox is almost non-existent. Is Google counting on the majority of people not being knowledgeable enough or motivated enough to switch browsers?

It's not "as good." I've tried every release of Firefox for the past decade. On Linux and Mac the video performance is noticeably worse than Chrome with significant frame drops, lag, and tearing. Yes, I've tried enabling/disabling hardware acceleration, flash, and all sorts of other flags and options, but the two are still incomparable. Furthermore, even with the quantum update Firefox is still slower for general web browsing and usage than Chrome. I've measured both dropped frames and load times to confirm this.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#148

Post by Solvitieg »

burtonator wrote: post #132

I propose we create a new browser fork due to this issue and back it by the main ad block developers. The other issue is that Chrome on mobile doesn't support extensions. They tried to away with not having ad-block on mobile this way. No extensions means no ad-block. Let's just have a new browser based on Chrome that supports mobile + extensions and ad block and tell Google they can go pound sand.

How about Brave or Dissenter?

Edit: I've just been informed this will effect all Chromium browsers. My goodness.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#149

Post by xythian »

president wrote: post #99
laminar_flow wrote: post #41

Definitely time to ditch Chrome, but also even more of a reason to set up a PiHole https://pi-hole.net/

I've thought about using pi-hole but wonder about ads being served from the same domains as the content providers. Is/has this been an issue at all?

Yes, it's an issue and there's nothing a pi-hole can do to solve the issue. YouTube is the most notable server of ads from content servers, but one can imagine more content providers following suit eventually.

However, you can have your pi-hole up and running in a few minutes and enjoy excellent network wide ad blocking for virtually every service that isn't YouTube.

Re: Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users

#150

Post by m-p-3 »

ljm wrote: post #98
user17843 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. The fact that Eyeo has >150 employees tells us something about the amount of money to be made from ad blocking. Although they have only…

This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the embedded framework... We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7/8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome. The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in t…

I ditched Chrome and came back to Firefox, next step is to donate to Mozilla.
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