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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

#181
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to be revisionist. Chrome brought amazing work to the table. The multiprocess, sandboxed system was incredible - it's not to say that Chrome was the first (IE did it earlier) but it was certainly way ahead of Firefox for a long time. Chrome is the reason we have Seccomp V2 on Linux. Chrome made "software is always up to date" the standard. Before Chrome, Blackhole and PoisonIvy absolutely ruined people's comp…

Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead. Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had…

I doubt there are many things in this universe that are unambiguously good, but Chrome's sandboxing is certainly as close as anything.

You can make your arguments about noscript if you'd like (I have a great respect for the project) but I think it was essentially irrelevant to user security at the time, real users were really harmed by malware that exploited Firefox, Java, and Flash, and Chrome killed every one of those attack paths in virtually no time at all.

Computers were far more dangerous before Chrome. You watch old TV shows and it's a joke that people would visit a site and get hacked - that's unrecognizable today, it simply doesn't happen. It used to, Chrome changed that.

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

#182
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.

The webRequest extension API -- the one that uBlock Origin uses and was removed in Manifest v3 -- was not added until 2012. All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there. It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.

It's only strange because you interpreted "Chrome made the web so much better for everyone" as "Chrome had a webRequest API", which is probably not what the original poster meant.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android need to be separate companies. As well as youtube, and the combination of google drive/docs.

YouTube really could hold up as its own company these days.

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

#184
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android, Youtube need to be separate companies. It's not the only company that needs this treatment.

I'm quite torn on this. The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe. In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world. I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) internat…

Why are these two points, countering China and keeping Europe safe, the framing for this? Who is needed to counter the US and keep foreign countries, like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and so on, safe from the US? And who needs to be strong to counter the US's state-sponsored terrorism via Israel?

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

#185
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a glimpse of that antitrust future on the horizon with the previous admin. This spooked all the big tech weirdos so much that they put their weight behind the other guy and, well, they won. Antitrust is dead for another generation. Yay.

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.

There’s a partisan floor¹ that’s in the neighborhood of 25–30% where people will vote for their party no matter what. The 2004 Illinois Senate election was a good test case where when the Republican nominee went down in self-inflicted flames and was hurriedly replaced with Alan Keyes, who had no in-state constituency and, being Black (which, no doubt was the cynical reason for his recruitment), eliminated the racist choice. He gained a mere 27% of the vote which is likely the floor for a major party candidate in a contested broad-population election (smaller-level partisan elections, whether for single congressional seats or in small states, generally have demographically skewed populations which can result in wider margins).

1. Although as I think about it, this may only be valid on the right side of the spectrum given the data points.

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

#186
post #147
post #85

Google for me died when they banned my many years old gmail account out of blue. Because i used vpn to access it. It was such a big hit to my online life to lose my email like that. Their appeal system is fully automated, impossible to get a human to look at your case. This is warning to any reader of this comment, do not depend on your google account to be forever.

This exact issue is why I have been paying for my e-mails for the last 5 years.

It's nice to be the customer, instead of the product.

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

#187
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.

I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.

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

#188

I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone. But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.

I use firefox on all devices, but there are two notches against it in my book: Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default. Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile: >Worst of all…

I have never had any scrolling lag issues on Firefox (in the form of Fennec from F-Droid) on GrapheneOS.

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

#189
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is especially true for projects like Firefox which have access to massive funding since these attract the sort of people who consider those funds 'wasted' because they can be used to do so much for 'the common good'. Mitchell Baker - the utterly incompetent CEO - considered Firefox an afterthought because what the world needed was more NGO activism and what she needed was 400% more money for herself [1]. Wikipedia…

Wikimedia might be not perfect, but Wikipedia is still one of the most visited websites in the world and source of a lot of humanity knowledge in general. Firefox on other hand is just something only nerds like us care about and only alive because Alphabet / Google is scared of antitrust legal action possibility.

And wikipedia runs off a tiny tiny fraction of what they raise. Almost all of the good on wikipedia comes in-spite of the organisation that owns it. Without the community pouring hundreds of thousands of hours into the project (unpaid) a year, wikipedia would be dead immediately. And if there was ever a time in its life that the project needed good leadership and innovative thinking, it would be now when AI is seriously threatening its survival. If people stop going to the site and instead go to the chat bots that scrape the site, there will be less and less incentive for the power users to continue maintaining wikipedia.

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

#190
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a glimpse of that antitrust future on the horizon with the previous admin. This spooked all the big tech weirdos so much that they put their weight behind the other guy and, well, they won. Antitrust is dead for another generation. Yay.

If only the DNC was interested in promoting candidates that work for the people and aren't just interested in lip service while mostly maintaining the status quo. Things could have been different. Imagine what 8 years of Bernie and a functioning Congress might have accomplished.

Terrible narrative. Lina Khan under Biden was more than willing to go after big companies. She was forced out because the American people voted Trump into office.

Eight years of Sanders would have left us with a far more gridlocked country. The man has virtually no political talent.

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