To defend Google a bit, it looks like the change is being put in place so that users would have more privacy – by stopping extensions accessing all active URLs. In essence they are copying what Apple did with Safari and their content blocking APIs. In this model, content blockers provide the browser with a set of blocking rules and the browser executes them against pages during render & load. Ad blocking can occur an…
A question: Would this proposed change mean all Chrome extensions can no longer know what URL I am currently visiting? if so, I guess one company (whose name starts with a S) is gonna be dreading this.
I highly suggest looking into Opera. It is also based on Chromium and therefore backwards compatible with extensions, bookmarks, etc. I switched around 6 months ago and haven't looked back since! They have built in VPN, adblocker, Turbo, screenshot, news, and more! Been really happy with it so far.
Opera is now owned by a Chinese consortium and quite possibly embeds spyware. Check out Brave, instead, which is founded by the inventor of Javascript and extremely privacy-focused.
To defend Google a bit, it looks like the change is being put in place so that users would have more privacy – by stopping extensions accessing all active URLs. In essence they are copying what Apple did with Safari and their content blocking APIs. In this model, content blockers provide the browser with a set of blocking rules and the browser executes them against pages during render & load. Ad blocking can occur an…
So Google is going to help me have more privacy by preventing me from letting extensions I want to run from having access to data I want that extension to have, so it can do a job I want it to do. Meanwhile, Google's software will of course have full access to everything I do online, and most of my data will live on Google servers. And the extension that I want to have access is also downloaded from Google servers. And the extension is open source, so I can totally check it for problems, or believe people I trust who vouch for it. Of course, I can't do that with any of the code on Google's servers, where basically everything I do all day, everything I read, everything I search for, and all my emails and documents are.
Mozilla is really no better than Google... in fact Chromium on my Linux distro vastly outperforms Firefox.
What does performance on a Linux distro has anything to do with Mozilla being better/not better than Google?
Because Firefox doesn't offer any extra security controls over Chromium, in fact I would say they are way worse than vanilla Chromium on Arch. Therefore it makes sense to go with the browser that performs well, rather than one consuming a bunch of resources unnecessarily.
So we have a browser with nearly 70% market share, made by an advertising company that's arguably the most powerful business on the internet, interfering with ad blocking. And of course there is no regulatory body that is able or willing to step in. Great.
"President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general, William Barr, told lawmakers on Tuesday that he would focus attention on the “huge behemoths” in Silicon Valley at the center of a debate over antitrust enforcement. " https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-barr-antitrust/... We can only hope.
This is just a dog whistle for the political claim that search results, curated content, or algorithmic feeds are "biased" against a particular viewpoint of the world that they would prefer. Their intent is to use enforcement and investigative powers to make that case publicly and intimidate. The worst case, in their view, is to raise uncertainty about information sources; or, in the best case, to coerce more favorable rankings for their favored information sources. It's a furtherance of our state of domestic information warfare, while they remain in power.
But the design document only mentions retaining the old API for features that aren't possible with the new API, such as onAuthRequired. So it would still cripple uBlock
What if someone would create a pull request to implement unlock origin natively inside chromium, instead of an extension. If such a PR met all technical criteria, would Chromium project accept it?
To defend Google a bit, it looks like the change is being put in place so that users would have more privacy – by stopping extensions accessing all active URLs. In essence they are copying what Apple did with Safari and their content blocking APIs. In this model, content blockers provide the browser with a set of blocking rules and the browser executes them against pages during render & load. Ad blocking can occur an…
So Google is going to help me have more privacy by preventing me from letting extensions I want to run from having access to data I want that extension to have, so it can do a job I want it to do. Meanwhile, Google's software will of course have full access to everything I do online, and most of my data will live on Google servers. And the extension that I want to have access is also downloaded from Google servers. A…
I used to vouch for AdBlockPlus, sometimes extensions change for the worse. They can he hijacked too. HN readers are a small subset of Chrome users. There are many malicious pages out there that attempt to get you to install malicious extensions and the average user will blindly listen. Most people will not check the source, or even reviews.
One of my concerns is that DNS over HTTP(s) is really just a way to obfuscate DNS queries from the oversight of network level ad blockers like Pi Hole, AdBloka et al.
That's why you use DoH from you pihole, not your computer/phone etc.
Of course, but my concern is that DoH makes it easier for apps (Chrome, etc) to handle their own DNS queries internally rather than relying on the device's network libraries.
MiTM intercepting HTTP(s) traffic on my Android devices is really difficult due to certificate pinning. The only way to quantify how many unexpected requests apps are making was to watch DNS traffic. If, one day, these apps just make a single DNS request to Google's DoH host then encrypt all their traffic from there onwards, I'd have no insight into what's going on in my own device.
Not the person you're responding to, but no. Until uMatrix actually breaks for me, I'm not switching to Firefox. Switching is a pain, and I don't like Firefox's UI/UX. I'd switch if they did this because I value the extension very highly, but I wouldn't be happy about it.
I'm in the same boat. I'm not a fan of Firefox at all. Leadership, code, marketing, UI, etc. I'll probably move to Safari
Isn't Firefox like much better in terms of the technical side of things i.e. faster, uses fewer resources, has better code inspection tools etc?
Network level ad-blocking doesn't work very well. Privoxy (and Proxomitron before it) were doing it 20 years ago, but never caught on because they're a PITA to setup and can't handle inline adverts. Pi-hole is new, but it's even more work to setup, and suffers the same limitations. And as ad-blocking has become more popular the problems only gotten worse. It's unusual that I see any ads any more, but when I do it's a…
Why doesn't it? (Not a leading question, I just don't understand why it doesn't) Isn't the way uBlock and the like work is that they see network requests from a blacklist and not load those resources? Isn't network level blocking just moving that from the local device up a level?
A PiHole only sees the DNS request, which works fine if ads are served from a separate hostname like ads.mydomain.com. But if they're served from the same sub-domain and simply have a different URL (ie, mydomain.com/ads/[...]), then the PiHole won't block it. uBlock/ABP will, because they can filter on entire URLs, not just the domain.