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Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

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Re: Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only Mozilla (the parent organization) wasn’t horrible. Can’t a non-crazy nonprofit make a browser?

What are your qualms with Brave Browser?

At the very least, I do not trust a browser that was putting affiliate links to unsuspecting users' urls [0]. Plus I tbh I am really sick of everything tending to be chromium-derivatives nowadays and I think it is good to have greater diversity, to exactly avoid situation susch as the one here.

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10134

Re: Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

#172

There has to be google engineers here. Does this just fall on deaf ears? I realize it’s a massive corp but imagine high ranking staff have a say and input. Maybe they don’t and Sundar isn’t worried about that. Or they do a simple cost analysis and short-term they see the benefit and are willing to to risk long term erosion that maybe be minimal. Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I m…

So there are multiple factors here - I used to work on browsers so have some experience here :D

First off, there are legitimate security concerns with the kind of functionality required for effective ad blocking given the immense work the ad industry (i.e google) have put into preventing purely static filters is also very powerful for exploitation. Those powers can (and have been) abused: the recent news about "Honey" replacing affiliate links so that they are getting paid for ads on peoples page, but also there have been numerous examples over the last year of extensions being sold and then having the extensions getting malware, crypto miners, etc.

Second, there are real performance problems - the non-JS filter rules are vastly more efficient, for memory usage, cpu usage, and load time (I recall people doing benchmarks a while ago, showing ad blocker extensions that actually slowed down page loads).

So those are the engineering arguments for not supporting this model of extension.

However, the engineers on the chrome team are not stupid, or malicious, and understand that the trade offs are something users want. But those engineers work for Google, and google is an advertising company.

So it does not matter what those engineers want, or think is better, if the company management says "you cannot block our revenue model" they do not have a choice. Well, they could quit, but that's basically it.

Re: Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try out Zen browser, built on Firefox but closer to Arc.

It took a while to get used to vertical tabs but once that took, I have moved completely to Zen. It was good to see it move from alpha to beta recently.

Too bad they removed the ability to open the vertical tabs side bar on hover, that was a critical feature that caused me to go back to Firefox proper. I'll go back to Zen once they add it but to be honest, I'm not too sure what extra value Zen would bring me.

Re: Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

#174
post #135

Come join the Firefox revolution!

Uh, YT on FF is unusable now. They'll show the "adblockers not allowed" message if you have Ghostery enabled. Even if you disable that, they will add tons of artificial lag on things like key input, clicks and screen draw speed. I know it's artificial because it worked fine for years and then one day....

Just wait a day and uBlock will update its filters. That's what happened to me initially. In the meantime I had a yt-dlp script for videos I wanted to watch. Tubular on mobile also works fine.

Re: Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

#175
post #172

There has to be google engineers here. Does this just fall on deaf ears? I realize it’s a massive corp but imagine high ranking staff have a say and input. Maybe they don’t and Sundar isn’t worried about that. Or they do a simple cost analysis and short-term they see the benefit and are willing to to risk long term erosion that maybe be minimal. Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I m…

So there are multiple factors here - I used to work on browsers so have some experience here :D First off, there are legitimate security concerns with the kind of functionality required for effective ad blocking given the immense work the ad industry (i.e google) have put into preventing purely static filters is also very powerful for exploitation. Those powers can (and have been) abused: the recent news about "Honey…

Does MV3 do anything to stop the behaviour of Honey?

Re: Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

#176
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when the defense of a project is that you can turn off the bad features, you aren't really making a chase better than say chrome or anything else. A product built on trust, shouldn't involve having to go turn off untrustworthy elements.

You don't need to "turn off the bad features" because they are opt-in to begin with.

I shouldn't need to opt into or out of features that shouldn't exist in the first place, much less in a browser.

Re: Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

#177
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I wasn't clear - this bug affects me personally, it's not some random tale I read in a forum. No, it doesn't affect the site or page rendering at all. Only the Firefox-native dialogs - like the bookmarks dialog and the hamburger menu - are affected. The bug is likely in XUL. Unfortunately I am too busy to dig through Bugzilla, make an account, etc. only for the bug to be ignored for years like the others...

> Unfortunately I am too busy to dig through Bugzilla, make an account, etc. only for the bug to be ignored for years like the others... So, if no one reports the bug, how do you expect the bug to get fixed? Instead, you just keep harking back on that unfixed bug whenever Firefox conversations come up and you can be like "but this bug has been around and no one has fixed it"

> So, if no one reports the bug, how do you expect the bug to get fixed?

Maybe they should learn how to test software properly instead of squandering their money on nonsense features nobody asked for.

Re: Tell HN: I just updated my wife's Chrome, and uBlock is no longer supported

#179
post #135

Come join the Firefox revolution!

Uh, YT on FF is unusable now. They'll show the "adblockers not allowed" message if you have Ghostery enabled. Even if you disable that, they will add tons of artificial lag on things like key input, clicks and screen draw speed. I know it's artificial because it worked fine for years and then one day....

This is a youtube vs ad-blockers issue afaik, not a firefox one. Still not enough for me to ditch UB-O but prob enough to waste less time on youtube
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