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uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

chromewebstore.google.com

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Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#921

Post by nine_k »

buzer wrote: post #834
nine_k wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not have to be the majority. It would suffice to produce enough funds to continue developing Firefox, with full-time engineers, infrastructure, etc. The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Let's assume that half of it was dedicated to Firefox; e.g. $60M/y. It would take 500k users paying $120/y (aka $10/mo) to support their favorite browser. The current audience o…

> The whole Mozilla foundation budget oscillated around $100-120M/y for last few years. Firefox is under corporation, not foundation. Mozilla Corporation expenses are $400M+, not $100M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances (I don't enough knowledge about freemium economics to figure out if the stated numbers would work out or not)

Thank you for the correction!

If we adjust to these numbers, we need to quadruple the number of paying users, up to some 1.2% of the total user base. Let's add a safety margin, and bump it to 2%.

Still does not look impossible to attain.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#923

Post by freedomben »

bravoetch wrote: post #95
freedomben wrote: post #16

I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions, unlike the locked-down and hobbled Chromium ecosystem. I suspect they do realize this because they've been really leaning into extensions recently, but over the years I've worried that Mozilla's committment to Firefox isn't as serious as I would like. Regardless, I'd love to s…

It would be enough if Apple realized the same thing. They're in a position to have the best browser, and coast along ignoring the opportunity.

Unfortunately this would only be helpful to Apple customers, which itself comes with significant downsides IMHO. I'd much prefer a cross-platform solution

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#924

Post by glenstein »

lolinder wrote: post #797
AlotOfReading wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VPN service is probably the most sensible thing they could lean into. It's basically all margin and it works nicely with the privacy messaging.

> It's basically all margin Is it? Do you have a citation for this? From what I understand it's a white labeled Mullvad VPN, and I haven't been able to find numbers for what percentage of the revenue is taken by Mozilla and what percentage goes to Mullvad.

Previously the argument was that the VPN was an example of "throwing money into open firepits", but now we're talking about the extent to which it generates revenue.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#925

Post by sneak »

eszed wrote: post #369
sneak wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to. Let’s not pretend this was done unto them. Anyone can stop using gmail at any time.

Indeed. I'd like to. Except Google also make it nigh impossible for anyone hosting their own email (the original-internet ideal) to get email into gmail reliably enough to be useful. I have my own address on my own domain, but can't rely on it (yes, DKIM and DMARC and SPF are properly set up) not to be marked "spam" for opaque reasons, so gmail remains my "main" address. It's a network-effect problem: once enough peo…

This used to be true, but isn’t now. I self-host and can deliver to gmail just fine without being part of the deliverability cartel.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#926

Post by BizarroLand »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #875
ac29 wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are they not up in arms internally because of how awful the web is without ad blocker? Chrome still has many ad blockers. While I use chrome/chromium fairly little, ublock origin lite has worked well for me when I do. I'm aware older manifest V2 extensions are theoretically superior at blocking a wide variety of undesired content but if your main concern is not seeing ads, that is absolutely doable.

The core issue is that those ad blockers are easy to defeat. The only reason ad companies haven't invested energy in defeating them (yet) is because they're not popular enough. Once they are the only option in Chrome, it's just a matter of time until Chrome becomes largely useless at blocking ads.

ublock origin lite is mv3 compatible and not nearly as good at blocking ads as the original, for instance.

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#927

Post by bichiliad »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #846
bichiliad wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees can disagree with their employers.

The list of things that can be done is way bigger than the liat of things that are in fact done in real life. A Google employee could voluntarily put his hands over an open flame, but it's just very improbable.

Google employees have quite literally protested decisions of Google’s in the past, which sometimes cost them their jobs.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/google-fires-employees-p...

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#928

Post by Alifatisk »

jordanb wrote: post #188
freedomben wrote: post #16

I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions, unlike the locked-down and hobbled Chromium ecosystem. I suspect they do realize this because they've been really leaning into extensions recently, but over the years I've worried that Mozilla's committment to Firefox isn't as serious as I would like. Regardless, I'd love to s…

> I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions, The problem is that Mozilla's customers are not Firefox's users. Mozilla's customer is Google. They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground. I think it's pretty clear that the TOS change basically coincided with the rem…

> They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.

I am trying to understand how this works? If they pay Mozilla to exist, yet their intention is to destroy their competitor, why even pay for them to begin with?

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#929

Post by culi »

crazygringo wrote: post #896
culi wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol yeah with a max number of rules being 50 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... But declarativeNetRequest is the alternative to the webRequest API which Chrome is removing. Using declarativeNetRequest means you have to rely on static rules instead of the dynamic logic that the webRequest API allowed. This is extremely trivial to bypass. So much so that it's basically nothing at all. Espec…

I try to assume good intentions, but at this point you seem to be simply trying to spread misinformation, and I don't know why. The maximum number of rule sets is 50, not rules, as your own link clearly and unambiguously states. The actual minimum (not maximum) number of supported rules is 30,000: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... In reality, Chrome supports over 10x that. And UBOL doesn…

Thanks for the correction. you're correct it's 50 rulesets. Originally the limit was 5,000 rules but it seems the Chrome team backed away from that

Regardless it doesn't change the fact that these are static rules. It's trivial for anti-adblockers to dynamically get a url that is not in a ruleset. Without the dynamic logic that is allowed by the webRequest API we are completely dependent on static rulesets that need to be updated by updating the entire extension itself

The size of the rulesets is a distraction from the fact that adblockers can no longer run dynamic logic to filter web requests and block tracking

Re: uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

#930

Post by Sparkyte »

ethan_smith wrote: post #729
bearjaws wrote: post #4

Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit... I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy, a joke coming from Google. Then the excuse was "well it improves performance", which they could easily do by marking extensions as low performance. If Google wanted to improve this they have an entire search engine where they could re-ran…

Been using uBlock Origin for so long I forgot what the raw internet actually looks like. Spent 3 minutes without an ad blocker last week when setting up a new machine and nearly lost my mind. Google knows exactly what they're taking away from us - a usable web. They've just decided that our sanity is less valuable than their ad revenue. https://programmerhumor.io/programming-memes/browsing-withou... I feel really bad…

Makes you feel naked. I am running Firefox now, but there is a debacle on that now.
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