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Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

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Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#271

Post by dualvariable »

maxloh wrote: post #139
polairscience wrote: post #40

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it w…

Because Mozilla allocates far too much of their budget to executive compensation, which has led to the layoff of many Firefox maintainers, including the entire Servo team. A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.

Well, I'm certainly glad that Google has never given their executives a lot of compensation or done layoffs of their workers.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#272

Post by joe_mamba »

polairscience wrote: post #40

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it w…

>Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed,

Funny how people always blame Mozilla's good faith critics, but they never engage into hearing them out on why so many people rip mozilla to shreds in the first place. With a "stop being mean to my favorite billion dollar corporation" attitude.

Gee, maybe there's valid reasons on why so many people dunk on Mozilla. Hear them out before you snarkily dish on them. And it's Mozilla who should hear them out the most, if they actually cared about FF's market share, but they don't because those Google cheques keep clearing.

>That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars

And where has the EU been all these years on this topic? Where is it now?

They could just easily have blocked google from pushing MV3 on anti consumer and anti competitive grounds alone. End of story. But they didn't.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#273

Post by EbNar »

muvlon wrote: post #19
xienze wrote: post #14

It's obviously not perfect but DNS-level ad blockers like Pihole or Adguard Home still make a dramatic difference, so all is not lost.

If Google ever decides to "close the door" on these too, all they need to do is make Chrome always use DoH instead of classic DNS.

You can block DoH by blacklisting their domains (which is what ControlD and NextDNS do, by the way).

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#274

Post by jrm4 »

m_a_g wrote: post #233
polairscience wrote: post #40

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it w…

There is a reason Mozilla is getting ripped to shreds. I’m using Brave and I’d rather people support a degoogled fork of chromium that supports ublock origin, than keeping Mozilla on life support. And if you don’t like Brave just fork it again.

Brave seems silly theoretically for two reasons:

1) I think it's well established (or perhaps not well established enough) that "non-profit" is the only way to go for base level computing things like this. Profit motive (as distinguishable from "keep the lights on money," e.g. with Wikipedia) makes you do unnecessary and often harmful experimentation.

2) It's a fork of the thing you're trying to beat. Now, that may not be a deal-killer, but given Chrome's dominance, getting outside of that entirely seems smarter.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#275

Post by skarz »

Insanity wrote: post #254
polairscience wrote: post #40

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it w…

I'm going to advocate for Zen here. https://zen-browser.app/ I've been using it for the past year or so and love using it so far. There's some bugs here and there but nothing that occurs often or breaks my workflow. And it's based on Firefox :)

Why does their website seem like a clone of Anthropic's?

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#276

Post by jrm4 »

jorvi wrote: post #251
Ygg2 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason Brave sucks too. From dabbling into cryptocurrency to charging $60 for Brave origins, it's also a dubious proposal. Edit: Someone on Reddit compiled a list of various fuckups. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...

Of the no-hassle browsers (read: widely support, no snags) it is still the most private browser you can run. It blows Firefox out of the water on adblocking and its adblocking itself doesn't rely on Manifest so it isn't hit by Google's changes.

This is an unadvisable forest-v-trees calculation. At any given time, Firefox is rarely the "best" at any snapshot metric.

It's nonetheless the thing you can overwhelmingly trust the most in the long run.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#277

Post by jrm4 »

rpdillon wrote: post #58
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #16

Firefox is the only sane option. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternatives. Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking. Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.

Brave has an interesting approach where they have added core support for four key MV2 extensions to the core of the browser engine, bypassing MV3 entirely. > Update: As of v1.81, we host the following Manifest V2 (MV2) extensions on Brave’s backend: AdGuard, uBO, uMatrix, NoScript. These extensions operate independently from the equivalent versions that are currently present on the Chrome Web Store, and have to be do…

The complexity here is definitely a point against Brave.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#278

Post by jrm4 »

sheept wrote: post #51
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #16

Firefox is the only sane option. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternatives. Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking. Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.

As you alluded to, many Chromium forks (notable exception is Ungoogled) are backed by tech companies. There's already plenty of intentional changes they maintain in their forks, like Privacy Sandbox,[0] so I don't think preserving support for v2 is a large hurdle for them. [0]: https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/10742158329613-W...

"Backed by tech companies"

Yup, huge red flag. Non-profit is the long-term way to go.

Re: Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

#279

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

barnabee wrote: post #194
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as Firefox keeps up with the standards treadmill, I could be the only person using it, and it really wouldn't affect me any. As of right now, there are vanishingly few sites that earnestly work differently on Firefox than on Chrome. Significantly more sites arbitrarily block non-Chrome User Agents, but that's trivially avoided by just serving a Chrome UA on Firefox. Which makes it trivial to switch. There's r…

Agree. I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.

They recently added web serial so here's hoping they might also do BT and USB.
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