Chrome pushes forward with plans to limit ad blockers in the future

Post by anonymouskimmer » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

StableAlkyne wrote: post #94

fbdab103 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is truly unbelievable how bad it has become. Even informational articles might only have a paragraph of text between ads. Plus, the frequent animations/pop-unders/whatever. Everyone can decry the loss of the "small web" as much as they want, but the cram-ads-into-every-pixel dystopia means why should anyone bother? Even big brands are not immune to this behavior. At least if someone stays on the Instagram/Reddit/T…

> Even informational articles might only have a paragraph of text between ads. The thing that made me realize how bad it's gotten was ironically an inability to use ad blockers. At one job, we weren't allowed to install any adblockers to the browser (there was a lot of bureaucracy so I never figured out why). Ended up writing my own JS bookmarklets to remove ad elements from sites I commonly visited. Also started bro…

Post by blueridge » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

sharps1 wrote: post #67

blueridge wrote: post #48

I like Firefox a lot (with Privacy Badger and uBlock) but sometimes the browser slows to a crawl. New tabs are slow to open, takes way too long to select and activate a text input field, and so on. A restart fixes this, but it's still annoying. I think I might go back to Safari. I like the way it looks and it feels snappier all the way around.

Try installing the auto tab discard addon (It is a recommended addon so it gets checked by Firefox). I’ve noticed certain tabs may slow FF down if they aren’t unloaded in the background. I had FF slow to a crawl and when I checked it was using 7gb’s of ram. Turns out a site I had turned off uBO in had opened up a sub frame that was blasting ads. So it is interesting to try to see what is going on with about:processes…

Post by sharps1 » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 8:18 PM UTC

timetraveller26 wrote: post #105

sharps1 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge is following chromes lead. Vivaldi and Brave are going to maintain the code so at least uBlock Origin can work. Nobody knows how this will play out as the forks won’t want to stray faraway from the chromium code as that would add a lot of overhead. I tried a bunch of the forks, didn’t like Vivaldi, don’t like some of Braves crap, and won’t use the Chinese browser Opera. Ended up moving our family back to Firefox…

You should check https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox and Firefox Container Manager extension :)

Post by antonok » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 8:20 PM UTC

Vinnl wrote: post #138

antonok wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on adblocking at Brave. 1. Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera have all announced they'd maintain support for Mv2 past Google's deprecation date [1]. 2. Your guess is correct - one of Google's stated motivations is to make the extension review process easier and less error-prone; having a way to opt-out would be counterproductive in that regard. I strongly doubt they'd accept the PR upstream; there is a chance other pla…

Will you be working together with Vivaldi and Opera to maintain the fork of MV2's request interception, or will we have multiple independent implementations?

Post by Vinnl » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 8:30 PM UTC

insanitybit wrote: post #145

Vinnl wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how one follows from the other. Attackers are using malicious extensions to eavesdrop on networks... therefore we need better reviews and not restricted APIs? I get why you might want to advocate for the latter over the former, but certainly it seems like restricting APIs also has positive impact. As I understand it, the APIs that are removed only remove the ability to modify network requests; the remai…

Ah, thank you. So the idea here is that extensions will still have the read access to requests, which is all attackers care about (typically). Confirmation would be interesting - at minimum I thought that inspecting requests (read only) Was being limited, but I'm just a casual observer.