I don't "bypass" Chrome when they want to melt my brain with their business model, I use Firefox. I don't "bypass" Windows when they want to melt my brain with their business model, I use Linux. No idea why so many "hackers" doing "bypasses" can't instead take action that is simpler, long lasting, and easier. Do people need to jerked around 50 times for 20 years before realizing it will keep happening and their "bypasses" are just temporary bandaids?
Even if bigs exists to work around what Google is doing, that isn’t the right way forward. If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers). Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.
A monopoly achieved thanks to everyone that forgot about IE lesson, and instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application.
> instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application
I am confused.
- The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article.
- The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps instead of learning web standards; but react apps work equally well (or poorly) in all major browsers.
- Finally, how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.
Safari is also pretty user-hostile, which is why Apple is getting sued by the DOJ for purposely hobbling Safari while forbidding any other browser engine on IOS. They did this so that developers are forced to write native apps, which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.
Excuse me. If it's on MDN, I'm going to use it if it's useful for my app. Not my fault if not all browsers can keep up!
Half JK. If I get user complaints I'll patch them for other browsers but I'm only one person so it's hard and I rely on user feedback. (Submit bug reports y'all)
Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:
- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"
- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)
- Google search is the default search
- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search
- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser
- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services
- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising
- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android
- Made Google accounts the default
- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer
- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google
- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)
- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues
- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results
- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise
- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android
... and that's just scratching the surface.
Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.
Yeah, this was my thought process. I get the appeal, but I don't think a million-user open-source extension is gonna start relying on a clear bug to function.
>the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome
History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another. The only few examples of ostensible outcomes were critically meaningless and necessitate zero-friction alternatives, like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently — wow, really showed them!!
The key difference between South Africa and Israel is that South Africa didn’t have the U.S. Government and its allies actively propping it up, and punishing anyone who tried to boycott it.
Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome. I've done the pure firefox forray recently but after 6 months it gets tiresome to have 2 browsers and 3 weeks ago Ive admitted defeat for the second time and went full chrome. Who am I lying to -- market cornered, ggwp. It's like trying to eat food without paying a cent to cargill.
Treat it as isolating banking from the rest of your browsing, there are enough CVEs coming out for Chromium in spite of (or maybe because of) Google pouring billions into it.
> Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome.
What countries banks?
I am in New Zealand and have not had that problem in years.
15 years ago I had to edit my user agent string to look like IE (IIRC) for the University of Otago's website (PricewaterhouseCoopers getting lots of money for doing a really bad job)
Makes me wonder have you tried that trick? Less tiresome than switching browsers....
I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier. It's only been a couple of months, but I can't imagine going back to a browser without multi-account containers.
The only time I've used anything but firefox for the last. Well probably since netscape honestly? I am so old. Is to get the in flight entertainment to work on american, but firefox has worked for that for a few years now. People say chrome is faster and in the early 2000s I might have agreed, but now I really don't understand why anyone not on a mac or iphone isn't using Firefox. It is great.
You have a point about iPhones, though. It's almost pointless, but not quite: it does get a few features, like cross-platform sync. "Real" Firefox is one of the things that keeps me on Android.
I tried to use Orion as my daily driver on Mac OS (instead of Firefox) but I couldn't get the simplelogin extension to work (it wouldn't authenticate to my account). Also, it was slower than FF (I know, everything says that it is super fast, but that wasn't my experience).
After a month or so, I gave up and switched back to FF.
I recently discovered that my jetkvm won't work on chrome, firefox or safari in macos, even after trying various workarounds to enable webrtc. The fix was to boot up Fedora in parallels and use Firefox there. In fact I'm thinking about shifting all my browsing to that combination just for further isolation.
Can you still get real Firefox on mac? I thought they forced chromium on there now too? The only time I got MacBook I put linux on it within a few months.
Yep, you can run Firefox on every Mac released for the past couple of decades. (Maybe more?)
Most of them also work with Linux, although it's a little more spotty on the more recent ARM-based ones ("apple silicon").
Macs are essentially "real computers" that you can run whatever software you want on, whereas iPhones and iPads are much more locked down. (Even when they have the same CPU.)
1) Apple would never force "Chromium" on any of their platforms. You might be mistaking it for WebKit, but browsers are not required to use Apple's shipping version of WebKit on a Mac either.
2) Firefox on every single platform not on the iPhone & iPad uses and has always used Gecko. I'm not aware of any other exceptions besides those two platforms, but the Mac definitely isn't one of them.
The last macbook I owned had an Ethernet port, so I wasn't sure how much had changed in the interim. I knew that had added some lockdown and I wasn't sure how much. That seems like a reasonable compromise.
> I really don't understand why anyone not on a mac or iphone isn't using Firefox
I'm on a mac and happily use Firefox. Have done for over a decade. It would take a lot to encourage me to move to a proprietary browser (Edge, Chrome, Safari).
Maybe I'm out of touch, but the attachment to Chrome that some people seem to have (despite the outright privacy abuse) is baffling to me. I mean, ffs, are a couple of minor UI compromises (not that I experience any - quite the opposite) enough to justify what I consider a frankly perverted browser experience? I'm inclined to conclude that some people have little self respect - being so willing to metaphorically undress for the big G's benefit.
You really shouldn't double up on ad/tracking blockers. That can cause problems for the predefined filters. Go with one or the other. I prefer uBlock Origin personally.
I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox. But not nearly enough to keep me from using it on my personal machines. (My employer doesn't allow any browser except Chrome and Edge). For me, the most important feature of a browser is the web experience. I guess it should be security but I try to be careful about what I do online, regardless of what browser I'm using.
Many years ago I used to run the Firefox NoScript extension exclusively. For sites that I trusted and visited frequently I would add their domains to an exceptions list. For sites that I wasn't sure about I would load it with all scripts disabled and then selectively kept allowing scripts until the site was functional, starting with the scripts hosted on the same domain as the site I wanted to see/use.
Eventually I got too lazy to keep doing that but outside of the painstaking overhead it was by far the best web experience I ever had. I started getting pretty good at recognizing what scripts I needed to enable to get the site to load/work. Plus, uBlock Origin and annoyances filters got so good I didn't stress about the web so much any more.
But all this got me thinking, why not have the browser block all scripts by default, then have an AI agent selectively enable scripts until I get the functionality I need? I can even give feedback to the agent so it can improve over time. This would essentially be automating what I was dong myself years ago. Why wouldn't this work? Do I not understand AI? Or web technology? Or are people already doing this?
> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox.
Sometimes this is simply because the site preemptively throws an error on detecting Firefox because they don't want to QA another browser with a smaller market share. Usually those sites work fine if you just change the user agent Firefox reports to look like Chrome (there are add-ons for that).
> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox.
find that hard to believe. but even if you find something using an api not implement by firefox, chances are you definitely do not want that feature anyway, the firefox gave in to really awful stuff and only drew the line on obviously egregious privacy violation ones.
That's nice for you, but the monopoly is still there. In fact, you've strengthened Google's side in antitrust proceedings where they pretend they are not a monopoly because a small number of people use Firefox.
What do you propose then? Be a browser accelerationist, let Google do whatever the hell they want on your computer, and hope for big daddy government to tell them to stop?
I prefer Brave to Firefox, just because Mozilla is a pretty questionable company when it comes to ethics and censorship. That said, switching away from chrome is clearly the way to go imo
Mozilla is more questionable than Google? By using Brave you're still staying within the Google ecosystem, sending them the signal that their Chromium internet is the better one.
I swear - people have such a hard on for hating Mozilla because it fails to live up to an impossibly high standard, while giving all the other corporations doing actual harm a free pass.
I'll bite - if you dont use Firefox because of "questionable ethics", then I am quite surprised you decided to use Brave, considering their controversies. Also Brave is still based on Chrome's engine, and I dont think they'll be able to maintain their fork long-term, so if the reason to switch was to break the Chrome monopoly, then I'm not sure this switch really counts.
I'm sure Eich has political opinions, but he doesn't use the Brave blog to push them and he doesn't impose them on his contractors or customers in the way Mozilla does.
The main thing holding me back is lack of pwa support, since there are a few apps that i need to use that only exist as progressive web apps on Linux. And using another browser for pwa has shown to be a bit cumbersome.
I don't know, I switched to Safari and it was painful for like two hours and then I stopped thinking about it. The only thing I somewhat miss is the built-in page translate, but I don't need it often enough to be bothered much.
I find switching from chrome to safari essentially doing nothing. If you switched to a non-big-company owned browser, it would make sense but Apple has plenty of lock in which is as bad as chrome lock in.
This is not accurate. Safari had webRequestBlocking functionality from 2010 to 2019 and indeed a version of uBlock Origin for Safari. What is true is that Safari was the first browser to ditch webRequestBlocking, replaced by its Apple-specific static rule content blocker API.
Otherwise, though, Safari still supports MV2. Everyone seems to think webRequestBlocking is the only relevant change in MV3, but it's not. Equally important IMO is arbitrary JavaScript injection into web pages, which MV2 allows but MV3 does not.
MV3 is so locked down that you can't even use String.replace() with a constructed JavaScript function. It's really a nightmare.
Google's excuse is that all JavaScript needs to be statically declared in the extension so that the Chrome Web Store can review it. But then the Chrome Web Store allows a bunch of malware to be published anyway!
Orion is the only viable option on iOS IMO. The fact that, to this day, Safari has no way to block ads on iOS means it's just awful. Before Orion, I avoided using my web browser like the plague, because the experience was just bad.
Now I'm on Android, and Ironfox is pretty good and Firefox is also available. The browser story on Android is leaps and bounds ahead of iOS.
Actually there are several adblockers available for Safari on iOS; the functionality was introduced in 2015. Adblock Plus and Adguard are some of the larger extensions available, and now uBlock Origin Lite is now being beta tested for Safari on iOS.
I find the "switch to Safari" talk amusing because the adblockers available for Safari are functionally equivalent to the MV3 API that everyone's complaining about. The problem with the "static list of content to block" approach that Safari and MV3 use is that you can't trick the site into thinking that ads have been loaded when they haven't, like MV2 allows via Javascript injection. The effect of this is that you'll run into a lot of "disable your ad blocker to continue" pop-ups when using an adblocker with Safari, while you won't see them at all when using an adblocker with Firefox.
I don't think in this case your argument is as clear cut and the use cases that people have today arent solved by the choices out there.
George Carlin: "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it."
The interests of APPLE (who makes money on hardware, and credit card processing) don't align with the interests of Google (who makes money on ad's). I am all for open source, I'm all for alternatives. But honestly if you own an iPhone and a Mac then safari makes a lot of sense. I happen to use safari and Firefox on Mac and am happy to bounce back and forth.
I also keep an eye on ladybird, but it isnt ready for prime time.
And I'm still going to have a chrome install for easy flashing of devices.
I'm aware of this, but in my experience it's pretty bad. It doesn't even cover all European languages, never mind the rest of the world. For the languages it does support, it's always a lottery whether it works with that specific site or not. I've tried using it a few times, but it's not even remotely close to what Chrome does.
A lot of people seem to believe that switching to a de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough. I think that's a psyop promoted by Google themselves. Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome. Brave, custom Chromium builds, Vivaldi, etc. are all very similar to Google Chrome, they just don't have Google spy features.
The argument that "Google still controls Chromium so it's not good enough" is exactly the kind of FUD I'd expect to back up this kind of psyop, too.
> Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome
I find this notion completely baffling. I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari more or less daily cause I test in all 3, and other than Safari feeling clunkier and in general less power-user friendly, I can barely tell the difference between the 3, especially between chrome and FF (well, other than uBlock working better in FF anyways).
I agree, there's little to no friction in switching to Firefox and I have never, not even once, noticed a difference with websites. The same is not true for Safari.
There are definitely sites which block firefox, even though they work fine in firefox. Most of the time, the block can be bypassed with simple user-agent spoofing.
I'm sure they exist, I've just never seen them. I use banking and websites like Netflix, too. And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.
I think it's a case of yes, it does work, but web developers don't think so, so they implement checks just for kicks.
> And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.
Indeed, even in the codebase at $JOB that I'm responsible for, we have had some instances where we randomly check if people are in Chrome before blocking a browser API that has existed for 2 decades and been baseline widely available. These days 99% of features that users actually care about are pretty widely supported cross-browser, and other than developer laziness there's literally no reason why something like a banking app shouldn't work in any of the big 3.
I guarantee you that if you set your `userAgent` to a Chrome one (or even better yet, a completely generic one that covers all browsers simultaneously, cause most of the time the implementation of these `isChrome` flags is just a dead simple regex that looks for the string `chrome` anywhere in the userAgent), all problems you might've experienced before would vanish, except for perhaps on Google's own websites (though I've never really had issues here other than missing things like those image blur filters in Google Meet, which always felt like a completely artificial, anti-competitive limitation)
What part of the Verizon website doesn’t work on Firefox? I am curious if it’s actually the browser or its the aggressive privacy options.
> a well known kindergarden
I am baffled by the choice to include this laughably obscure example alongside a major telecom. Surely there are better options less likely to be the fault of a random lazy web developer.
Youtube, for example seems deliberately hampered on non-chrome browsers.
I get serious slowdown with multiple (3--5) youtube tabs open in firefox, but not chrome. Seems to happen when tabs are open for a long time (weeks), so probably some leak. Lots of others mention it on forums.
Firefox has multiple, user-affecting, memory leaks related to Youtube (unconfirmed if just youtube), going back at least 7 years. Tab scrollbar as no option to be disabled, so I had to write CSS to get tabs into a form close to what I would like similar to chrome. Tab mute icon has no (working) option to disable the click event, so I had to write CSS to remove it.
I made some other changes, but I forget what. At least FF still has the full uBlock Origin.
If this is even true, in the end it's still "so what?" Meaning, the alternative is even worse so, let's say granted there is this problem. Where is the better alternative that does not have this problem? Chrome doesn't have other equivalent or worse memory problems? Even if not leaking, it simply uses so much it's the same end result.
I've never consciously noticed a problem with youtube so if there is a problem, it's not one that necessarily matters.
Firefox now has vertical tabs built in. Not as feature filled of course though tab groups and vertical tabs together replaces all the functionality I needed from Tree Style Tabs.
The stuff INSIDE the viewport is pretty much the same across them all, but on the daily it makes a big difference how your other services integrate with the browser. Someone who is all-in with iCloud, macOS, iOS etc might find it annoying to use Firefox without their personal info like password and credit cards and bookmarks. And the same would be true I guess for Google fans switching to Safari and not having those things.
Isn't that the exact argument behind the Serenity project? I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers. Control over virtually all media consumption mustn't be in the hands of a corporation.
> I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers.
Aside from Ladybird and Servo, it mostly is one wallet. Chrome and Firefox are both funded by Google, and Apple also receives significant funding from Google for being the default search engine in Safari.
Btw, some informal estimates at team sizes (full-time employees) of the various browsers (by people who have worked on them / are otherwise familiar):
Chrome: 1300
Firefox: 500
Safari: 100-150
Ladybird/Servo: 7-8 (each)
Which gives you an idea of why Chrome has been so hard to compete with.
The argument just doesn't hold water, though. That's like saying Y Combinator shouldn't be the only company paying for our tech forum. It's perfectly fine unless Y Combinator decides to ruin HN it somehow. And, if they did, wouldn't people just switch to one of the many HN clones overnight? That's what's known as FUD - "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". FUD is often spread about the present, but it's often just as useful to spread it about the future. "Don't use product X, the company that owns it could make it unusable someday". Part of me thinks Google keeps threatening to disable adblocking (but never actually does it) as part of a grand strategy. But part of me thinks it's just a coincidence that Google isn't capable of pulling off such a tricky psychological operation.
Users were supposedly massively exiting Reddit when that cesspool imploded, but if you find one of those threads through any search engine and click around on usernames who were leaving their "last messages ever, fuck reddit, I'm out", I'd estimate about 95% of them never left.
Do it if you have 10 minutes to waste, it's easy to check and changes your opinion about how much people are willing to endure to avoid actually doing anything.
The HN comparison doesn’t really hold water. There are a lot of options for tech news and forums. Lots of platforms, self-hosting options, with many business models, or simply self-funded.
That is very different than a world where every browser relies on Google for the core of their browser… and those who don’t rely on Google for funding (as they pay a lot of money to be the default search option in major browsers). Even Microsoft gave up on making their own browser, and now depends on Google. They used to own the entire market not so long ago.
People are saying this is a psyop, but I’m not sure what Google stands to gain from giving off the impression that they are seeking to control the entire market so they can steer the direction of the web for their own profit. That doesn’t make them look like the good guy, and should keep them neck deep in anti-trust filing from various governments. Where’s the upside? People feeling like they don’t have an option, so they give up and settle like Microsoft? Is that the angle?
Somewhat related - is Microsoft Edge a set of patches on top of the latest Chromium release or is Microsoft running a hard fork from a X years old version?
I once made a comment along these lines (de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough, as it supports the browser monoculture and inevitably makes Chrome as a browser better) and got a reply from from Brendan Eichner himself.
His point was that there isn't enough time to again develop Firefox (or ladybird) as a competitive browser capable of breaking the Chrome "monopoly". I don't know if I really agree.
Evidently, Google feels like the time is right to make these kinds of aggressive moves, limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers.
The internet without ad blockers is a hot steaming mess. Limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers makes people associate your browser (Chrome in this case) with this hot steaming mess. It is difficult to dissociate the Chrome software from the websites rendered in Chrome by a technical lay person. So Chrome will be viewed as a hot steaming mess.
I guess we will soon see if people will stay on Chrome or accept the small initial pain and take the leap to a different browser with proper support for ad blockers. In any case the time is now for a aggressive marketing campaign on the side of mozilla etc.
I am in no way affiliated with Google. So if you still think this is a PsyOp, please consider Hanlon's Razor:
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Although, please also consider that Hanlon's Razor itself was coined by a Robert J. Hanlon, who suspiciously shares a name with a CIA operative also from Pennsylvania. It is not unimaginable that Hanlon's Razor it in itself a PsyOp. ;)
Though his brave is a relatively small company, they have enough resources to have developed, and continue maintaining their own low-level ad blocker, which IME has been just as effective as uBO, but is supposedly more efficient (since it's written in the R-word language and compiled into native code integrating deeply inside the browser):
I can't imagine what hoops Google would have to jump through to block third parties from integrating their own ad blockers. You don't need MV2 for that AFAIK.
Keep chrome installed and fall back iff forced to. That way the majority of usage statistics show up as other browsers so when developers are making guesses at which browser to support, those statistics will push them away from chrome.
Additionally: you would be surprised how infrequently you have to switch to chrome
There's one site I have to switch to Firefox for. And it's a big one that handles a lot of money, so that's kind of surprising. Can't log into their site in chrome, no matter how hard I try. Nor edge.
Find who is responsible for such sites and send them strongly-worded emails. If it's a commerce site, tell them they just lost a potential customer. In my experience it's usually the trendchasing web developers who have drunk the Goog-Aid and are trying to convince the others in the organisation to use "modern" (read: controlled by Google) features and waste time implementing these changes --- instead of the "deprecated" feature that's been there for decades and will work in just about any browser, and the management is usually more driven by $$$ so anything that affects the bottom line is going to get their attention. I've even offered to "fix" their site for free to make it more accessible.
Switched (back) to Firefox from Chrome years ago and haven’t looked back. Between uBlock and Privacy Badger my web experience is pretty good despite the endless assault on end users.
Never realized anything was happening as I was on Firefox, until I saw ads as my wife was browsing youtube despite installing ublock for her years ago.
I'd be shocked if anyone actually believes them. This article starts with the obvious conflict of interest. Of course letting an extension know what websites you visit and what requests are made is an insecure lifestyle. But I still do it because I trust uBO more than I trust the ad companies and their data harvesters.
I wish I could browse the web kinda like this but minus the human:
Make Signal video call to someone in front of a laptop, provide verbal instructions on what to click on, read to my liking, and hang up to be connected with someone else next time.
(EFF’s Cover Your Tracks seems to suggest fresh private tabs w/iCloud Private Relay & AdGuard is ineffective. VMs/Cloud Desktops exist but there are apparently telltale signs when those are used, though not sure how easily linkable back to acting user. Human-in-the-loop proxy via encrypted video calls seems to solve _most_ things, except it’s stupid and would be really annoying even with an enthusiastic pool of volunteers. VM + TOR/I2P should be fine for almost anybody though I guess, just frustrated the simple commercial stuff is ostensibly partially privacy theater.)
One of the main goals of MV3 seems to be nullifying protection against tracking URLs. Most of the discussion about adblocking technically "still working" under MV3 misses this point. It doesn't matter if you're actually served ads or not, when when your underlying habits can still easily be collected from the combination of fingerprints and tracking URLs.
> Most of the discussion about adblocking technically "still working" under MV3 misses this point.
Because it's a dishonest point. Ad blocking still works. All the same ads can still be removed from the page. Tracker blocking doesn't. This is still a huge problem for privacy. But while nearly everyone dislikes seeing ads that interrupt your content, people who actually care about tracking privacy are a much smaller group. The latter group are trying to smuggle concern for the latter issue by framing it as the more favorable issue to garner more support from the former.
I believe them. The restrictions are reasonable and appropriate for nearly everyone. Extensions are untrusted code that should have as little access as possible. If restrictions can be bypassed, that's a security bug that should be fixed because it directly affects users.
I also think uBlock Origin is so important and trusted it should not only be an exception to the whole thing but should also be given even more access in order to let it block things more effectively. It shouldn't even be a mere extension to begin with, it should be literally built into the browser as a core feature. The massive conflicts of interest are the only thing that prevent that. Can't trust ad companies to mantain ad blockers.
> Extensions are untrusted code that should have as little access as possible.
It's entirely possible to manually vet extension code and extension updates in the same way that Mozilla does as part of their Firefox recommended extensions program.
> Firefox is committed to helping protect you against third-party software that may inadvertently compromise your data – or worse – breach your privacy with malicious intent. Before an extension receives Recommended status, it undergoes rigorous technical review by staff security experts.
Why am I not allowed to trust an extension just as much as I trust the platform it is running on? This is the same logic behind mobile OSes creators deciding what apps can do.
Would that rip off the how-do-we-fund-the-web bandaid, forcing new solutions? Worry about the interim where some publishers would presumably cease to exist. And who would remain afloat—those with proprietary apps, as Zucky as they are, I’d guess…
UBO is absolutely incredibly important. Figure you might know more than me about how journalists and reviewers and the like can still earn a keep in a world with adblockers built in to every browser.
> Would that rip off the how-do-we-fund-the-web bandaid, forcing new solutions?
Absolutely. The web is mostly ad funded. Advertising in turn fuels surveillance capitalism and is the cause of countless dark patterns everywhere. Ads are the root cause of everything that is wrong with the web today. If you reduce advertising return on investiment to zero, it will fix the web. Therefore blocking ads is a moral imperative.
> Worry about the interim where some publishers would presumably cease to exist.
Let them disappear. Anyone making money off of advertising cannot be trusted. They will never make or write anything that could get their ad money cut off.
People used to pay to have their own websites where they published their views and opinions, not the other way around. I want that web back. A web made up of real people who have something real to say, not a web of "creators" of worthless generic attention baiting "content" meant to fill an arbitrary box whose entire purpose is to attract you so that you look at banner ads.
I get what you mean and I think we align here, but I trust the uBlock team infinitely more than I trust Google to make my own extension decisions. I know there's a subset of regular users who fall for all manner of scam, but Manifest V3 doesn't even solve any of those issues, the majority of the same attack vectors that existed before still exist now, except useful tools like uBlock can no longer do anything since they got deliberately targeted.
Besides, there's ways of having powerful extensions WITH security, but this would obviously go against Google's data harvesting ad machine. The Firefox team has a handful of "trusted" extensions that they manually vet themselves on every update, and one of these is uBlock Origin. They get a little badge on the FF extension store marking them as Verified and Trusted, and unless Mozilla's engineers are completely incompetent, nobody has to worry about gorhill selling his soul out to Big Ad in exchange for breaking uBlock or infecting people's PCs or whatever.
I agree that would change things but I can't picture an open-source extension with millions of users pivoting to rely on something that's clearly a bug.
Said bypass would exist for maybe a day max before getting nuked from orbit by Google. If anything, there was a non-zero chance OP would've gotten paid and he took it. I don't blame him.
I don't agree with this conclusion. Google is fully responsible for MV3 and its' restrictions. There's no reason to shift blame away from them.
Let's do a thought experiment: if OP hasn't reported it, what do you think would happen then? Even if different ad blockers would find it later and use it, Google would have still removed this. Maybe they'd even remove extensions that have (ab)used it from Chrome Web Store.
Perhaps a hobbyist would code “MV2-capable” MV3 adblocker for the fun of it, forking UBO or something, as a proof-of-concept. How much time would anyone spend on its development and who would install it when the max runway’s a few days, weeks, or months?
Really? You think Google is that dumb? As soon as any ad blocker that people actually use implements it, it'll be patched. It's not something you can exploit once and benefit from it forever.
Sometimes you get $0, sometimes you get more. I would like to mention this stuff on my college applications, and even if I tried to gatekeep it, it'd eventually be patched. Not sure what your argument is here.
Are you guys honestly arguing like the zero day industry would, for a vector that couldn’t be used by any ad blocking extension since Google has them under an electron microscope 24/7? To pick on a very young, enthusiastic programmer? What the hell??
> Adblockers basically need webRequestBlocking to function properly. Pretty convenient (cough cough) for a company that makes most of its revenue from ads to be removing that.
Why does this keep getting repeated? It's not true.
Anyone can use uBlock Origin Lite with Chrome, and manifest v3. It doesn't just work fine, it works great. I can't tell any difference from the old uBlock Origin in terms of blocking, but it's faster because now all the filtering is being done in C++ rather than JavaScript. Works on YouTube and everything.
I know there are some limits in place now with the max number of rules, but the limits seem to be plenty so far.
It depends on how you interpret the word "properly". There are ads and adblocker-detection techniques that can't be blocked by MV3-style static filtering.
If "properly" means "can block all ads" then you're wrong. If it means "can block some ads" then you're right. If it means "can block most ads" then you're currently right, but likely to become wrong as adtech evolves around the new state of play.
Don't forget Chrome launched with built-in popup blocking. Now we just have popunders, in-page popups, back-button hijacking etc. Ads, uh... find a way.
So your argument is that if an extension could block even a single ad with MV3, it means that ad blockers function properly in MV3? Do you not agree that "properly" means "having all the functionality they had with MV2"?
> Whether or not ublock lite is missing functionalities because of MV3 is irrelevant to the original statement that adblockers need webRequestBlocking.
It can be relevant depending of how you define properly. If it depends on any of those functionalities that are missing, then it’s relevant.
One of the most frustrating things about these discussions is that it-works-on-my-machine effect. Anecdotal evidence is easily surpassed by a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that are changing. Here's what the author of uBlock Origin says about its capabilities in Manifest V3 versus Manifest V2.
> About "uBO Lite should be fine": It actually depends on the websites you visit.
Not all filters supported by uBO can be converted to MV3 DNR rules, some websites may not be filtered as with uBO. A specific example in following tweet.
You can read about the specific differences in the FAQ:
My personal take is if you're a pretty unsophisticated user and you mostly don't actually interact with the add-ons at all, Manifest V3 will probably be fine.
If you understand how ads and tracking work and you are using advanced features of the extension to manage that, then Manifest V2 will be much, much better. Dynamic filters alone are a huge win.
I agree with crazygringo that uBlock Origin Lite seems to work fine for me as far as blocking ads on the websites I visit.
I also agree that these discussions can be frustrating. In my opinion, that's because people claiming that Lite isn't good enough only seem to post super vague stuff, like links to the FAQ that list a bunch of technical details about what it can't do, when I don't understand the practical upshot of those things. Or vague assertions that it's not doing something which is allegedly important, where it's never actually explained what that thing it's not doing is and why it's important.
I have yet to see anybody show a specific example of a website where Lite doesn't actually work well enough. Or of any other specific thing it's not doing. I don't think I should have to read a series of 20 web pages dense with specialized technical details to understand what it's supposedly not doing. If it can't be explained simply and clearly what it's not doing that's so important, maybe it's not actually missing anything important at all.
I suppose I am a unsophisticated user of web browsers. I never got around to understanding or interacting with all the details of what "proper" uBO can do. Yet I still seem to browse the web just fine, and even build webapps sometimes, and I don't see any ads. So what's this great thing that I'm missing?
> super vague stuff, like links to the FAQ that list a bunch of technical details
Not being able to block remote fonts is a vague technicality? It's a feature I use, a user-facing setting, not an under-the-hood technicality. (Budding web designers have a tendency to pick overly thin fonts because it looks fancy/unique at a glance and being interested in the actual text on the webpage was not their job description)
I'm less familiar with the other things. Clicking one experimentally, it mentions:
>> The primary purpose of dynamic URL filtering [is] to fix web page breakage
Webpages break on adblocking not infrequently. I'm not a blocklist developer so I can't say how useful this particular function is, but I'm also not going to assume that, just because I don't know the technical details, that it's just handwavey technical details nobody needs to care about and everything will be the same regardless of what the most qualified person on the topic is saying
> I don't think I should have to read a series of 20 web pages dense with specialized technical details to understand what it's supposedly not doing
Consider that you're not paying for someone to produce marketing material; it's a free thing. Sometimes that means that finding out information requires reading source code, or in this case, it's probably data files that contain these dynamic thingies so you could see the list of what mitigations will stop being possible and on what kinds of sites those are. If you (or someone else) do a writeup that fills the information gap you are looking for, I'm sure a lot of other people also appreciate that existing
Its called Lite because it has tons of missing functionality from the not-Lite version that make the not-Lite version more effective as a content blocker.
It's not "tons of missing functionality". It still blocks all the ads in practice.
Maybe it's less effective in some theoretical case, but not anything I've seen. People talk as if it's only blocking 10% of the ads it used to, when the reality seems to be 99.999% or something. And it's faster now.
And they removed stuff like the element zapper but that has nothing to do with Manifest v3. It's because they literally wanted it to minimize resources. You can install a dedicated zapper extension if you want that.
I genuinely don't understand where this narrative of "adblockers don't work anymore on Chrome" is coming from. Again, it's just not true, but keeps getting repeated like it is.
I think the ultimate fix is to make it a felony to pay someone to say a message as if it's his own (meaning an actor Ford pays to be in an ad needs to say "Ford paid me to say ..." at the start of every sentence uttered which states an opinion, if that is not the true opinion of the actor). It must also be a felony for someone to accept money in exchange for stating provided opinions as if they were his own. Customers in ads giving true testimonial reviews must state they are being paid (if so) at the beginning of their statements in the ad. Only quantitative and qualitative content about the product or service advertised should be allowed, anything which sets tone, vibe, or otherwise emotionally communicates to the viewer needs to be banned. This also goes for food product boxes, with the additional rule that 75% of the non-barcode front label area must be nutrition and ingredients, while logo/brand work and propaganda is limited to the remaining 25%. Back label is an exact (maybe B&W) copy of the front. Ads should also mostly be found in directories where people go looking for services or things, and NOT plastered everywhere ready to rape brains for quick nickels. We need an advertising censorship board that keeps records on both ad makers and client businesses, so that chronic offenders get smacked down hard.
Once advertising is dead, you will see a much more free and level internet.
I believe that another change is that ad blockers cannot update as quickly now? If that is true, since ad blocking is a cat and mouse game, doesn't that make ad blocking with a delay less functional?
I find Brave even more annoying than Chrome, and that's ignoring Brendan Eich's hateful hands in the code. It's got even more buzzaord trash than Chrome does now. Brave Shields you can't actually turn off, crypto scams baked into the product, web app download buttons you can't turn off, all sorts of UI trash you just can't get rid of.
Hate can be popular but that still doesn’t make it right. He knew that he was spending money hoping to take away rights from people he knew, to tell some of them that their marriages shouldn’t be allowed, and did it anyway. That’s hateful regardless of how many other people joined him.
The point is you don't need to worry about manifest v3 interfering with ad blockers, because Brave has an ad blocker built into the browser. Also makes it a good Chromium-based option for mobile, since you can't install extensions on Chrome mobile at all.
In the "cons" column, Brave is still a for-profit and has a bunch of features that continue to give some people the ick. In the "pros" column, there's a bunch of "how to debloat Brave" content showing how to improve the default kitchen-sink confifguration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6cKFliWW6Q
Heh, funny, Twitch was the primary reason I installed Brave because it was being glitchy on Firefox (at the time years ago - no longer the case). I've never had trouble with Twitch on Brave.
It's the top of the list because it works so well. I forget it's a different browser most of the time. I was able to turn off everything extraneous that I was concerned about. Brave is also Open Sourced.
I really don't care about crypto stuff. If you do, I can understand why that's a dealbreaker for you. But for me, it doesn't matter at all. I just turn the crypto features off and continue on my way.
Maybe take a look at Vivaldi, it's a continuation of the old Opera, with basically the same development team. It's the most user-friendly and configurable option at this moment, they're very responsive to feedback, and are the only organization that doesn't have some horrible privacy violations in the past (maybe excluding Apple, I don't know and don't care, 90% of users on this planet can't run Safari).
Also they are in Norway if you care about that sort of thing.
Luckily I only need to use chrome on my work laptop, I use Firefox everywhere else. Still sad to see uBlock origin stop working which was useful to keep a cleaner experience when browsing the web for work reasons (research, documentation, etc).
Your comment is pretty meaningless without more specifics.
I switched to Firefox again back in 2017, I have 0 issues with it. If anything it's faster and less resources hungry than chrome in my usage. The extension ecosystem is now arguably better with MV3 being rolled out to chrome.
Probably the only annoying thing was learning where the buttons are in the devtools. They're all still there, just laid out differently. It took about a week to get to grips with that.
More seriously, I'm a Firefox user since ~2006 but I'm about equally surprised by the statement that Firefox should blow Chrome/ium out of the water as that Firefox supposedly sucks. They're both browsers. I think Chromium is a bit faster in page rendering, whereas Firefox is more open, privacy-friendly, and customizable. Similar to how I wish consumers would not choose an anti-consumer organization (anyone who values a free market and general computation1 should not choose iOS), I think nobody should choose Chrome but, still, I can understand if someone does choose it because they've gotten used to how it works and they're not willing to change. It's about equal in practical functionality that 95% of people use, wouldn't you say? Or in what way is Firefox blowing Chrome out of the water?
This blogpost covers a workaround they discovered that would have let MV3 extensions access important functionality that was not normally available, only in MV2.
This workaround was fixed the same year in 2023 and yielded a $0 payout, on the basis that Google did not consider it a security vulnerability.
The conclusion then is that uBO (MV2) stopped working for me today after restarting my computer, I suppose.
Microsoft supposedly aligned with deprecating MV2 back when Google announced it but they've indefinitely postponed it. The KB about it still says "TBD", and there's zero mention of it around the actual browser. IMO it's a good alternative, if you trust Microsoft (I do).
The little I've read bout this says that maintaining MV2 might be something as well.
If other chromium based browsers didn't have this issue, that would be great, but likely in time Youtube won't support browsers that don't have MV3. Probably still have some time though.
Are they still funded to the tune of a billion a year by Google so that Google can pretend they don't have a monopoly? Are they still intent on redefining as an ad company?
The google money isn't any great gotcha. It's wrong of them to have grown to be so dependant but so what? All it means is that some day the funded development will stop, just like all the forks are already.
Let them take google money for as long as it flows. You can switch to librewolf at any time if FF itself ever actually goes bad in any critical way. But there's not a lot of reason to do so until the minute that actually happens. Go ahead and take the funded work and updates as long as it exists.
If you're going to switch you should switch to a better option. I've been using librewolf for years since Firefox doesn't have the best track record either.
Google using YouTube to block non-MV3 browsers, would be Google picking a fight with Firefox - who they use in court documents to say that they're not a monopoly. Their legal team will have a few words to say about it.
Would love to give Firefox a chance but one thing that stops me (apart from occasional website loading bugs) is inability to install PWAs. Not sure why it’s not implemented like it has been for a long time in Chrome and all its forks.
I have found a 3rd party extension that claims to facilitate this (0) but still feel uncomfortable to use this for privacy reasons.
If you really care, it's ok to just Firefox for the majority of your web browsing activities but use Chrome or a fork for PWA.
Although using Firefox increasingly means a worse experience, including:
* infinite loop of Cloudflare verification
* inferior performance compared to Chrome (page loading, large page scrolling)
* subtle bugs (e.g. audio handling)
* WebUSB support
I have personally run into all of them. Some are under Firefox's control but others are not. I do still use Firefox for most websites unless it's technically not possible, but unfortunately the exception is happening more and more.
1) A lot of ads are terribly overdone and even sometimes actively malicious (malware or tracking). It makes no sense to aggressively try to stamp it out like Google is doing
2) Aside from the Page/Brin stealing tech salaries thing (yeah it really did happen) what happened to Google? They've always been a bit incompetent but their behavior (ie Chrome and increasing censorship on Google/Youtube the last few years) has been really bad, I thought they were basically founded off idealism
As an exclusive Firefox user, with really great ad blocking features, I didn’t notice that Chrome got worse on this front. I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps it’s time for a change. Best of luck.
I got downvoted for commenting this, why can't we make a ManifestV2-like framework using .DLLs ? This can enable network control for ad blockers and Google can do nothing about it.
I think the trouble is that certain adblocking features (like skipping ads on YouTube, Twitch, etc) require modifying the page you're viewing in your browser; just filtering network requests isn't enough. So right now a browser extension is the most natural choice for an adblocker, but honestly that might change if browsers keep being so hostile towards them.
I was able to bypass the chrome changes by installing firefox. Honestly it's better than I thought it would be, and I have no serious complaints, or broken sites. Yay web standards.
> But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023. It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions usin
Author here, sorry. I don't think any open-source extension (especially large adblockers with millions of users) could actually get away with using this bug, because Google is paying close attention to them. It would've been patched immediately either way.
Signed up to complain about this. YT is no longer worth watching ads for. Anything that is worth paying for, the money needs to go via Patreon so the publisher isn't demonetized at a whim. The rest is brain-rot, utter shit and a lot of damaging misinformation. I hope it dies. While it remains easy to do so, I will "steal" with yt-dlp and proudly watch it ad-free on VLC on my computer. If they break that then I'm no longer interested.
When this became adversarial, which was a battle that lasted the last year of inconvenience I ended up dumping every Google thing I have. So the Pixel is GrapheneOS now with no Google crap. Browser is Firefox. Email has moved from Gmail to Fastmail with a domain.
My Google account is closed after 20 years. The relationship is dead. They can do what they want. I don't care any more.
Initially the increase in frequency of the advertising on Android youtube app. Followed by uBlock being broken in Chrome. Followed by uBlock being tarpitted in Firefox. Followed by FreeTube client getting 403 IP forbidden requests and DRM content shovelled down which could not be rendered.
They just did everything to make sure I watched the ads and burn all my bandwidth, which can be somewhat limited and expensive as I travel a lot.
Even ignoring the adblock issues, Chrome isn't worth it... Google themselves spy on you with it. Cockblocking adblock just puts extra emphasis on what you should have already known.
I tried paying for YouTube premium then they fucked around by not giving me all the features I paid for when I was visiting another country. There's no winning with these people.
I've been paying for YouTube premium for probably 2 years now. Never had any inserted ads. Only the "this video is sponsored by" stuff, which you can just skip over.
I can't possibly go back to non-Premium YouTube, and if they mess around with Premium I'll probably be moving on from YouTube.
Netflix and other streaming sites have ads on some paid subscriptions. First they start with ad free subs, then introduce ads and introduce a higher priced tier to get rid of ads
So if one supermarket sold expired food, we should avoid another supermarket that has not been doing that for 10 years? Google/Youtube doesn't own Netflix. If anything, the reasonable response would be to unsub Netflix and sub its competitors, like, uh, Youtube.
That's good to know. I was hoping for a reply like yours. I will subscribe. YouTube is an amazing resource for human kind and I agree those of us who can afford it should pay to support it.
Don't let everyone responding gaslight you. YouTube Premium is absolutely stuffed with ads[0] (sorry, 'promoted content' / 'sponsorship'). The only probable explanation I have for this is that Google has successfully boiled the frog and people mentally don't even register these things as ads anymore.
And that's not to mention pretty much every single creator stuffing sponsored sections into their videos now. We have Sponsorblock for now, but I imagine Google will try to introduce random offsets at some point which will render Sponsorblock mute. Maybe an AI blocker will rise up in the future?
At any rate, fight fire with fire. Just use every bit of adblocking on desktop, Revanced on Android and hope that Revanced or Youtube++ comes to iOS 3rd party stores at some point.
Edit: since people are too lazy to click on the link and instead ram the downvote button in blind rage, image 1 and 4 contain straight up ads, unconnected to creators.
I think people just decided it doesn't count as ads when it's the creator doing it. And it feels more tolerable since the money is going to the creator that they probably like instead of megacorp Google.
I'm honestly baffled why anyone who objects to ads would still want to use any of the official YouTube clients. Whether or not they show ads to you on YouTube, they still track your every move and use it to improve their profile of you so that they can show you ads on any of their other platforms, sell your data, or whatever other shady business they do behind the scenes to extract value from it.
Adtech cannot be trusted. I refuse to support their empire whether that's financially or with my data and attention.
Youtube isn't free, and unlike a simple blog, requires tons of infrastructure and content creation. None of that is free, and people wanting that to be free is why we're in adscape hell.
Edit: I'd love for a competitor to youtube, but there isn't. Rumble isn't a real competitor, and none of my favorite channels place their content there either.
I wish there was a youtube alternative that was more of a federation, but every attempt I've seen of federations have been mess.
Then charge for it like the other streaming services. If they send me ads, I'll block and delete them, manually or automatically, and I won't lose a second of sleep over it.
> requires tons of infrastructure and content creation
Not our problem. It's up to the so called innovators to come up with a working business model. If they can't, they should go bankrupt.
That’s quite a stretch. I loathe ads as much as anyone else here, but I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind (is my mind even sacrosanct, such that it could be violated?) it’s just something I don’t like.
And yes, attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things. Like any other voluntary transaction, no one is entitled to my attention unless we both voluntarily agree to it.
That implies voluntarily paying attention to adverts, as an informal contractual obligation. You aren't allowed on Youtube any more because you haven't been allowing the adverts to influence you enough. You can't look away or think about something else, that's cheating on the deal.
Advertisements have been proven countless times to be a form of psychological manipulation, and a very potent one that works very well. After all, if it didn't work we wouldn't be seeing ads crop up literally every-fucking-where, including these days even in our very own night sky in the form of drone lightshows. The ad companies have huge teams of mental health experts in order to maximize the reach & impact of their advertisements on the general populace.
Ads are so powerful that they've even managed to twist the truth about plenty of horrific shit happening to the point of affecting the health and safety of real people, sometimes literally on a global scale. Chiquita bananas, De Beers, Nestle, Oil & Gas companies, and must I remind you of Tobacco companies (and surprise surprise, the same people who were doing the ads for Big Tobacco are the ones doing ad campaigns for O&G companies now)? There have been SO MANY examples from all these companies of using advertisements to trick and manipulate people & politicians, oftentimes just straight up lying, like the Tobacco companies lying about the adverse health effects despite knowing for decades what the adverse health effects were, Or Oil & Gas companies lying about climate change via comprehensive astroturfing & advertisement campaigns [1].
This all barely scratches the surface, too, especially these days where you have platforms like Google and Meta enabling genocides, mass political interference and pushing things like crypto scams, gambling ads and other similarly heinous and harmful shit to the entire internet.
The TL;DR of all of this is that yes, advertisements absolutely are psychological warfare. They have been and continue to be used for absolutely vile and heinous activities, and the advertisers employ huge teams of people to ensure that their mass influence machine runs smoothly, overtaking everyone's minds slowly but surely with nothing but pure lies fabricated solely to sell people products they absolutely do not, and will never need.
> I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind
I do. I think it's a form of mind rape. You're trying to read something and suddenly you've got corporations inserting their brands and jingles and taglines into your mind without your consent. That's unacceptable.
> attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things
No. Attention is a cognitive function. It has none of the properties of currency.
These corporations are sending you stuff for free. They are hoping you will pay attention to the ads. At no point did they charge you any money. You are not obligated to make their advertising campaigns a success.
They are taking a risk. They are assuming you will pay attention. We are entirely within our rights to deny them their payoff. They sent you stuff for free with noise and garbage attached. You can trash the garbage and filter out the noise. They have only themselves to blame.
If you are a paying subscriber, you are self-identifying as (likely) a higher net-worth. The problem for ad platforms allowing paid opt-out is that the most valuable users leave the network.
Then they have to go to advertisers and say, “advertise on our network where all the wealthier people are not.” A brand like Tiffany’s or Rolex (both huge advertisers) aren’t going to opt into that.
It's a decent chunk of change for the sole purpose of avoiding ads on a single platform that barely pays the people actually producing the content. If you're looking to access premium content and YouTube Music, it's a slightly better value proposition (but only slightly, because YTM sucks, especially compared to what GPM used to be). For that ~$120 a year, you could buy a bunch of Steam games to occupy the same amount of time as your YT habit. Or you could buy a sub to services like Nebula which actually pay content creators decently. Or you could buy an external hard drive, install yt-dlp, and embrace Talk Like A Pirate Day, Groundhog Day-style.
I mean, yeah, if you don’t actually get much use out of YouTube, then it might not be worth it to you. But that’s the same for all streaming services. And I wasn’t commenting on whether it’s worth it or not, which of course is subjective, but on how big an expense it is in absolute terms. The former doesn’t relate to the “higher net worth ads” argument, the latter does.
Personally I do like YouTube Music, due to all the user-uploaded content that isn’t available on other platforms.
$12 is a week of chicken thighs, man. It's enough gas to make $60-$80 running UberEats orders. In America. In "absolute terms", it's $100+ dollars a year to turn off ads on a single platform for content the creators are compensated pennies for.
People who choose that without much thought - because it's barely an expense for them - are definitely tending towards "higher net worth" nationally, let alone globally. A lot of those people just don't realize it, because the entire point of seeking that kind of status is so that they can enter a socioeconomic bubble and not have to care about annoyances (like advertising).
Because by paying you are demonstrating you have more than enough disposable income to waste on their extortion. You're paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the richer echelons of the market. You're basically doing their marketing job for them and paying for the privilege.
At some point some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to sit down and notice just how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to paying customers like you. It's simply a matter of time.
Take a third option. Don't pay them and block their ads. Block their data collection too. It's your computer, you are in control.
You gotta love the mental gymnastics people will go through to convince themselves that not paying and blocking ads is the morally correct thing to do.
If you truly have those beliefs the right moral action is to not use YouTube at all but god forbid you'd have to make any sort of sacrifice.
I don't use Youtube at all, but I keep thinking I'm missing out and should make the effort to find a way to circumvent tracking. I can't see that the morality points to an obligation to absorb adverts. There can be no contract on the basis of what your mind must do.
Edit: let's step through this. If I use a towel placed over the computer to block ads, that's morally the same as using blocking software, I think? If I block the ads by putting my fingers in my ears and staring at the ceiling, also the same thing, morally. If I block them by watching them in a negative frame of mind, saying that I dislike ads and won't do what they suggest, I'm still doing the bad thing, the same as using an ad blocker - if it is a bad thing. My obligation, if it is an obligation, is to be receptive. Otherwise what, it's a sort of mind-fraud?
Adding: advertisements use as many hacks as possible to grab your attention. You could broadly categorize things that behave in this way as akin to a) a baby's cries (attention-seeking by something that absolutely requires your assistance), b) an alarm (attention-seeking by something that seeks to warn you), or c) being accosted (attention-seeking by something that seeks to harm you for its own benefit). Which are advertisements most closely aligned with? Is it the same across all advertisements, or do intentions vary? People likely assign varying levels of morality to the above examples; does advertising inherit the morality of the most closely aligned example?
There is nothing immoral about this at all. They're the ones who chose to send people videos for free, gambling on the notion that people would look at the ads. Nobody is obligated to make their unwarranted assumptions a reality. They are as entitled to our attention as a gambler is entitled to a jackpot.
If someone gives you an ad filled magazine, you can rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash, leaving only the articles you actually want to read. Same principle applies here. If some random person on the street gives you a propaganda pamphlet, are you obligated to read it just because some businessman paid for it? Of course not.
The point is most people will never pay. That makes the Adblock/anti-adblock war inevitable for them. If you can afford it, you sidestep it. If you can’t or won’t, you don’t. Pretending there is some point where those folks would pay is a little delusional in my view.
I'm not pretending. I know most people won't pay. The point is it doesn't matter.
They're giving their stuff away for free instead of charging money for it. They gambled on the notion that people would "pay" by watching ads. Unfortunately for them, attention is not currency to pay for services with. We will resist their attempts to monetize our cognitive functions. The blocking of advertising is self defense.
They have absolutely nobody but themselves and their own greed to blame. Instead of charging money up front like an honest business, they decided to tap into that juicy mass market by giving away free sfuff. Their thinking goes: if I give them free videos with ads, then they will look at the ads and I will get paid. That's magical thinking. There is no such deal in place. We are not obligated to look at the ads at all. They don't get to cry about their gamble not paying off.
> They have absolutely nobody but themselves and their own greed to blame
They’re one of the most profitable media platforms on the planet. They’ll be fine. Nobody is crying. There are just willing participants—as you say, on both sides—in what I consider a pretty silly battle one can opt out of with a small amount of money.
You also give money to the creators you watch by watching ads or watching with YouTube premium.
You also can't block ads on iPhones, which a majority of the developed world uses. My girlfriend has never watched a YouTube video on something other than an Apple device for example.
>You also can't block ads on iPhones, which a majority of the developed world uses. My girlfriend has never watched a YouTube video on something other than an Apple device for example.
People really live like this... ? Like those who watch movies on their phones lmao.
Also, Brave works on iphone -> m.youtube.com adfree :)
Then again I went years not using conditioner and moisturiser for my skin, only deo... We all need tips from people who know better you know. (Im white.)
I don't think you're normalizing ad-supported content when running an ad blocker
As for paying for the content you consume, most of the costs aren't on Google's side. I can understand paying for Youtube as a shortcut to hopefully giving some pennies to each person you watch, though, at least for those with no moral objection to making Google's/Youtube's monopoly in online video stronger
I'm not aware that you can pay for Google Search. That they have a paid tier for Youtube is probably to cater to another group of people rather than to "align with your values" and encourage people to actually pay for things online
If you care about whether content is ad supported or not, then Google are behind most of the world's ad supported content, and need to change, irrespective of your own transaction, unless you think transactions like that will change them. That's why I asked. It would be nice if it worked.
I was a bit surprised to find that Patreon also keeps a pretty large commission. But, yeah, at least it's not owned by Google and what else are you going to do when most creators list this as their only option. I'm just confused when there's easy options like sending cash directly to their IBAN or using a nonprofit like Liberapay (they just have their own donation page and, instead of taking a cut, make money that way: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay)
Folks be adopting all sorts of irrational arguments just so they can defend their habits. Do you also prefer having middlemen in other areas such as healthcare and education?
Creators can just as easily pop a Patreon or BuyMeACoffee these days in a few clicks. In fact, most creators constantly admit that Google pays them peanuts for their view counts. But support the leviathan for reasons unknown I guess.
I also back people on patreon. Isn't it irrational to expect something for free? If you don't like the service or it doesn't align with your values, simply don't use it.
Also, isn't patreon also a middleman by your definition?
They rolled out the Chrome "kill adblockers" update globally then unleashed the new wave of YouTube "anti-adblock" a month later. While in a literal losing court case thats suggesting Chrome be split out from Google as a whole. They must be so confident nothing can touch them.
I pay for YouTube premium for my family and there haven’t been any injected ads at all. Only the ones that the video themselves have in, which are also very annoying.
I can’t speak for the future, but I’ve had this for probably 5 years and I haven’t seen a single ad, only the videos that I’ve asked to see.
It works amazingly well provided a video's been out for at least a half hour or so. It also has the option to skip the "like and subscribe" parts too.
I also tried the https://dearrow.ajay.app/ extension to replace clickbait titles, but decided I'd rather know when a channel/video is too clickbait-y so I can block/unsubscribe.
If you simply add a `-` (en-dash) between the `t` & 2nd `u` in the URL, your viewing experience automatically skips all external ads, without login/premium.
Syntax: www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w
This also works for playlists, and auto-repeats.
edit: is this getting downvoted because it works and people are worried this service might disappear should this bypass become too popular..? Just curious.
There is also an argument to be made that adblocking is immoral. I think the idea is pervasive enough to fill a team of willing people, especially if you pay them 100k/year to at least go along with it for the time being
I haven't made up my own mind about it yet, just that this might be a factor in why one would move the facilitating technology backwards in this way (and forwards in other ways, apparently: some people in the thread are reporting that uBlock Lite is faster. Not that I can tell the difference between a clean Firefox without add-ons (I regularly use that for work reasons) and a Firefox with uBlock Origin (my daily driver) except if the page is bogged down from all the ads)
I don't think ads are immoral but I think the way FAANG does ads and tracking is immoral. Google does not do enough to vet ads for malicious activity such as scams and viruses. The FBI in recent years has started recommending an adblocker for that reason.
Author here, thank you! A lot of the comments here are more general arguments about MV3 and Google (which I kinda expected) but I'm glad see someone who liked my post :)
Our ideals do not simply change the fact that chrome and its derivatives are the most used browser by a big margin at this moment. And, looking at how this came to be and how things were with IE before it, they are going to stay a bit longer still. Stop being in denial about the way most people function: they don't care, they will eat the most convenient slop they are being served and not question it much. Because it doesn't matter as long as it allows you to browse your socials.
I hate to use this word but this is a huge amount of projection in response to the comment you replied to, which did not seem to make any of the points you ascribed to it.
I don’t think they need to for there to be value. Sure, maybe there’s spyware in free software that they haven’t found. But we know that these advertising companies are putting e-stalking code into all their products right now. Trading that certainty for an unknown is a net benefit.
Tracking typically works through fingerprinting. Using free software alone won't magically protect you against this, every website's a program with JavaScript on. Lots of free software is also multiplatform. You'll want to apply additional defensive measures, but you can apply those even on Windows, running Firefox or Chrome. Mind you, you'll then stand out for using those defensive measures.
I generally appreciate source code access and independent auditability, and I do have an appreciation for the intent. But the way people discuss these topics is downright embarrassing, which is what I was hoping to shake out of this. "Just install Linux bro, it's better than pussy bro. What, u still got dat spyin machine goin on?? [links a 30 minute Mutahar video with him faffing about with some technologically trivial bollocks he visibly barely understands]" Please. I think it's pretty agreeable at least that this about as far removed from well supported decision making as one can casually get to be.
Most people switching to Linux and free software alternatives in hopes of better privacy do so based on vibes, not on any rigorous research. And that's fine. Just wish they didn't pretend it wasn't the case.
I don't think they enable me to inspect e.g. my CPU's firmware, or that they're able to provide any guarantees about the hardware itself.
So it still just makes for a large shopping bag sized trust-me-bro box executing hundreds of billions of instructions a second. But now with a false sense of comfort.
I'm more than happy to concede on this being overly dramatic though, provided you concede on having been engaging in a similarly unserious hyperbole of your own.
I don’t think that free software is an unserious hyperbole, actually. (It really does exist, even though big tech wants you to think it does not). But yes of course the hardware must be free too, at least insofar as it does not impede on our freedom to understand what it is doing to the software we run on it, and the firmware must also be free software
> I don’t think that free software is an unserious hyperbole, actually.
Me neither, considering that doesn't even work grammatically. Very clearly I was referring to "unless you're still using the spying machine" being the unserious hyperbole.
> It really does exist, even though big tech wants you to think it does not.
I must have been continually missing "big tech's" efforts on that front. They do engage in other efforts that go against either the spirit or the proliferation of software freedom, but what you describe I legitimately have not witnessed at all.
Changing your hosts file helps but it would only block hostnames primarily used for ads and trackers - it wouldn't address those trackers and ads loaded from hostnames shared with actual content. The more sophisticated sites will proxy their tracking and ads through their main app:
E.g. www.cnn.com/ads.js
I prefer having multiple layers just in case anything drops off:
1. VPN DNS / AdGuard local cached DNS
2. uBlock Origin
It's like wearing two condoms (but it feels better than natural).
Chrome full on blocked uBlock Origin (and others) this week. There is still four flags [1] you can play with that will allow you to re-enable it again, but this is a losing battle of course. The inevitable is coming.
Nothing comes close to Safari battery life on MacOS, followed by chrome, followed by firefox in last place (with all its other issues - those claiming otherwise have stockholm syndrome). I've tried taking Orion for a spin which should offer the battery life of Safari with the flexibility of running FF and chrome extensions - but it hasn't stuck yet. As much as I'd like to use FF, I really don't want to shave 10-20% (?) off a battery charge cycle when I spend 90% of my day in the browser.
That difference in battery, if it exists, doesn't actually materially manifest anywhere. But the difference between FF and anything else matters basically every minute all day.
On top of that, even if I ever did actually run into the difference, needing to plug in before I would have anyway, it's an annoyance vs a necessity. The ability to control my own browser is frankly just not negotiable. It doesn't actually matter if it were less convenient in some other way, it's simply a base level requirement and anything that doesn't provide that doesn't matter what other qualities it might have.
You might say "a computer that's dead doesn't work at all" but that never actually happens. I'd need an 8 hour bus ride with no seat power to get to the point where that last missing hour would actually leave me with no computer for an hour, and that would need to be a commute that happens twice every day for it to even matter.
This should lead to a full-on antitrust breakup of Google. Period.
They own the web.
I can build my business brand, own my own dot com, but then have to pay Google ad extortion money to not have my competitors by ads well above my domain name. And of course the address bar now does search instead of going to the appropriate place.
I don't "bypass" Chrome when they want to melt my brain with their business model, I use Firefox. I don't "bypass" Windows when they want to melt my brain with their business model, I use Linux. No idea why so many "hackers" doing "bypasses" can't instead take action that is simpler, long lasting, and easier. Do people need to jerked around 50 times for 20 years before realizing it will keep happening and their "bypasses" are just temporary bandaids?
Even if bigs exists to work around what Google is doing, that isn’t the right way forward. If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers). Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.
A monopoly achieved thanks to everyone that forgot about IE lesson, and instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application.
> instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application
I am confused.
- The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article.
- The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps instead of learning web standards; but react apps work equally well (or poorly) in all major browsers.
- Finally, how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.
Consumers never really pick products for ideological reasons, no matter how galling that is to ideologues
IE was far less user-hostile than Chrome.
Only because Microsoft got slapped on the wrist way back when.
Google should get slapped too, and they might be headed that way...
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/20/nx-s1-5367750/google-breakup-...
Safari is also pretty user-hostile, which is why Apple is getting sued by the DOJ for purposely hobbling Safari while forbidding any other browser engine on IOS. They did this so that developers are forced to write native apps, which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.
Excuse me. If it's on MDN, I'm going to use it if it's useful for my app. Not my fault if not all browsers can keep up! Half JK. If I get user complaints I'll patch them for other browsers but I'm only one person so it's hard and I rely on user feedback. (Submit bug reports y'all)
Why not only use features that are compatible with all browsers? You don’t need to use every bleeding edge feature to make a website.
Chrome was made to fracture, and everything started with the aptly named “Atom” editor (they “invented” Electron).
Everybody choose convenience over efficiency and standards, because apparently nobody understood what “being lazy” actually is.
Not everyone. Some of us used Firefox all along and didn't just go with the "default" invasive thing.
The answer is antitrust.
The FTC / DOJ should strip Google of Chrome.
Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:
- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"
- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)
- Google search is the default search
- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search
- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser
- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services
- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising
- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android
- Made Google accounts the default
- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer
- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google
- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)
- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues
- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results
- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise
- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android
... and that's just scratching the surface.
Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.
Yes to everything except the first statement:
> The answer is antitrust.
Anti-trust is crucial to make the capitalist economy work prperly, I agree
But another answer is "Firefox"
Most complainers are hypocrites who are complaining for the sake of complaining, too lazy to do anything and just come up with excuses to avoid this.
This wasn't really the point of the article, which in fact says the workaround was patched in Chrome 118.
Because the author reported it. Personally I would have told the ublock origin developers instead of google.
To what end? So Google can see how it works and still patch it?
Yeah, this was my thought process. I get the appeal, but I don't think a million-user open-source extension is gonna start relying on a clear bug to function.
>the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome
History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another. The only few examples of ostensible outcomes were critically meaningless and necessitate zero-friction alternatives, like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently — wow, really showed them!!
There's no detour for politics.
> History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another
The South African apartheid regime was brought down by boycotts.
The Israeli genocide regime will suffer the same fate if there is any justice left in the world.
Boycotts are very powerful. Users boycotting ads is dismantling the surveillance web.
The key difference between South Africa and Israel is that South Africa didn’t have the U.S. Government and its allies actively propping it up, and punishing anyone who tried to boycott it.
Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome. I've done the pure firefox forray recently but after 6 months it gets tiresome to have 2 browsers and 3 weeks ago Ive admitted defeat for the second time and went full chrome. Who am I lying to -- market cornered, ggwp. It's like trying to eat food without paying a cent to cargill.
Treat it as isolating banking from the rest of your browsing, there are enough CVEs coming out for Chromium in spite of (or maybe because of) Google pouring billions into it.
Why not switch banks or move to a credit union?
Really? I've been FF only for years and everything works reliably, including banking sites (Australia & New Zealand).
> Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome.
What countries banks?
I am in New Zealand and have not had that problem in years.
15 years ago I had to edit my user agent string to look like IE (IIRC) for the University of Otago's website (PricewaterhouseCoopers getting lots of money for doing a really bad job)
Makes me wonder have you tried that trick? Less tiresome than switching browsers....
> Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.
Because that has worked so well so far...
Ditching Chromium for Firefox isn’t much better since Firefox sells user data.
Next would be Safari.
Its not happening
I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier. It's only been a couple of months, but I can't imagine going back to a browser without multi-account containers.
The only time I've used anything but firefox for the last. Well probably since netscape honestly? I am so old. Is to get the in flight entertainment to work on american, but firefox has worked for that for a few years now. People say chrome is faster and in the early 2000s I might have agreed, but now I really don't understand why anyone not on a mac or iphone isn't using Firefox. It is great.
Firefox is great on Mac too.
You have a point about iPhones, though. It's almost pointless, but not quite: it does get a few features, like cross-platform sync. "Real" Firefox is one of the things that keeps me on Android.
Orion browser using Firefox plugins I have found to work quite well on iOS
I tried to use Orion as my daily driver on Mac OS (instead of Firefox) but I couldn't get the simplelogin extension to work (it wouldn't authenticate to my account). Also, it was slower than FF (I know, everything says that it is super fast, but that wasn't my experience).
After a month or so, I gave up and switched back to FF.
I recently discovered that my jetkvm won't work on chrome, firefox or safari in macos, even after trying various workarounds to enable webrtc. The fix was to boot up Fedora in parallels and use Firefox there. In fact I'm thinking about shifting all my browsing to that combination just for further isolation.
Can you still get real Firefox on mac? I thought they forced chromium on there now too? The only time I got MacBook I put linux on it within a few months.
Yep, you can run Firefox on every Mac released for the past couple of decades. (Maybe more?)
Most of them also work with Linux, although it's a little more spotty on the more recent ARM-based ones ("apple silicon").
Macs are essentially "real computers" that you can run whatever software you want on, whereas iPhones and iPads are much more locked down. (Even when they have the same CPU.)
So a couple of things.
1) Apple would never force "Chromium" on any of their platforms. You might be mistaking it for WebKit, but browsers are not required to use Apple's shipping version of WebKit on a Mac either.
2) Firefox on every single platform not on the iPhone & iPad uses and has always used Gecko. I'm not aware of any other exceptions besides those two platforms, but the Mac definitely isn't one of them.
macOS isn't locked down like iOS. There are things like SIP which prevent some hacking/customising of the system, but:
1. These can all be disabled by advanced users (largely without consequence)
2. They dont prevent things like installing apps or even gaining root access in the first place.
The very fact that you can install Linux is evidence of the different approach taken with macs (you can't easily install Linux of ios devices)
The last macbook I owned had an Ethernet port, so I wasn't sure how much had changed in the interim. I knew that had added some lockdown and I wasn't sure how much. That seems like a reasonable compromise.
I assume that, by Chromium, you mean WebKit. At any rate, how or why would they have blocked Firefox on a machine where you can compile your own code?
> Can you still get real Firefox on mac?
I have always been able to.
You can use whatever you want on macos
> I really don't understand why anyone not on a mac or iphone isn't using Firefox
I'm on a mac and happily use Firefox. Have done for over a decade. It would take a lot to encourage me to move to a proprietary browser (Edge, Chrome, Safari).
Maybe I'm out of touch, but the attachment to Chrome that some people seem to have (despite the outright privacy abuse) is baffling to me. I mean, ffs, are a couple of minor UI compromises (not that I experience any - quite the opposite) enough to justify what I consider a frankly perverted browser experience? I'm inclined to conclude that some people have little self respect - being so willing to metaphorically undress for the big G's benefit.
They just don’t know. If you show them internet without ads they are amazed that something like that is possible.
Multi-account containers are brilliant. I recommend the following extensions:
You really shouldn't double up on ad/tracking blockers. That can cause problems for the predefined filters. Go with one or the other. I prefer uBlock Origin personally.
I also love Multi-Account containers, but the UI is a bit of a mess. I get annoyed each time I have to futz with it.
Extensions are potential sources of future vulnerabilities. The less the better.
If you choose Firefox, you can take advantage of the security vetting extensions must go through to become one of their recommended extensions.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox. But not nearly enough to keep me from using it on my personal machines. (My employer doesn't allow any browser except Chrome and Edge). For me, the most important feature of a browser is the web experience. I guess it should be security but I try to be careful about what I do online, regardless of what browser I'm using.
Many years ago I used to run the Firefox NoScript extension exclusively. For sites that I trusted and visited frequently I would add their domains to an exceptions list. For sites that I wasn't sure about I would load it with all scripts disabled and then selectively kept allowing scripts until the site was functional, starting with the scripts hosted on the same domain as the site I wanted to see/use.
Eventually I got too lazy to keep doing that but outside of the painstaking overhead it was by far the best web experience I ever had. I started getting pretty good at recognizing what scripts I needed to enable to get the site to load/work. Plus, uBlock Origin and annoyances filters got so good I didn't stress about the web so much any more.
But all this got me thinking, why not have the browser block all scripts by default, then have an AI agent selectively enable scripts until I get the functionality I need? I can even give feedback to the agent so it can improve over time. This would essentially be automating what I was dong myself years ago. Why wouldn't this work? Do I not understand AI? Or web technology? Or are people already doing this?
> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox.
Sometimes this is simply because the site preemptively throws an error on detecting Firefox because they don't want to QA another browser with a smaller market share. Usually those sites work fine if you just change the user agent Firefox reports to look like Chrome (there are add-ons for that).
> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox.
find that hard to believe. but even if you find something using an api not implement by firefox, chances are you definitely do not want that feature anyway, the firefox gave in to really awful stuff and only drew the line on obviously egregious privacy violation ones.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I definitely run into pages broken in firefox desktop or especially firefox mobile. Extra especially on proofs of concept advertised here on HN.
It's rare. But it does happen. Razer had this problem until recently. Looks like they fixed it because I just checked and it seems fine now.
That's nice for you, but the monopoly is still there. In fact, you've strengthened Google's side in antitrust proceedings where they pretend they are not a monopoly because a small number of people use Firefox.
What do you propose then? Be a browser accelerationist, let Google do whatever the hell they want on your computer, and hope for big daddy government to tell them to stop?
Yeah I'm surprised Google isn't imposing the same policies on Firefox. They ought to have considerable influence on Mozilla.
I prefer Brave to Firefox, just because Mozilla is a pretty questionable company when it comes to ethics and censorship. That said, switching away from chrome is clearly the way to go imo
Mozilla is more questionable than Google? By using Brave you're still staying within the Google ecosystem, sending them the signal that their Chromium internet is the better one.
I swear - people have such a hard on for hating Mozilla because it fails to live up to an impossibly high standard, while giving all the other corporations doing actual harm a free pass.
The Mozilla foundation is overtly political. The fact that they also support a browser is secondary.
How much do you know about Brendan Eich?
I'll bite - if you dont use Firefox because of "questionable ethics", then I am quite surprised you decided to use Brave, considering their controversies. Also Brave is still based on Chrome's engine, and I dont think they'll be able to maintain their fork long-term, so if the reason to switch was to break the Chrome monopoly, then I'm not sure this switch really counts.
Brave = Chrome
Brave seems much more questionable concerning ethics, given Eich's history
I'm sure Eich has political opinions, but he doesn't use the Brave blog to push them and he doesn't impose them on his contractors or customers in the way Mozilla does.
The main thing holding me back is lack of pwa support, since there are a few apps that i need to use that only exist as progressive web apps on Linux. And using another browser for pwa has shown to be a bit cumbersome.
I know pwa is coming back to Firefox soon-ish.
Firefox on Windows has PWA support at least
Some of us never left !
Ditto - I’m on Zen browser a FF fork, it’s a clone of Arc and quite love it. No way I’m going back to chrome or any chromium browsers.
I don't know, I switched to Safari and it was painful for like two hours and then I stopped thinking about it. The only thing I somewhat miss is the built-in page translate, but I don't need it often enough to be bothered much.
switching to safari because chrome disabled the good adblockers is completely counter-productive. safari has never supported the good adblockers.
I find switching from chrome to safari essentially doing nothing. If you switched to a non-big-company owned browser, it would make sense but Apple has plenty of lock in which is as bad as chrome lock in.
It's especially silly in this case because Safari extensions have always been equivalent to MV3 functionality.
This is not accurate. Safari had webRequestBlocking functionality from 2010 to 2019 and indeed a version of uBlock Origin for Safari. What is true is that Safari was the first browser to ditch webRequestBlocking, replaced by its Apple-specific static rule content blocker API.
Otherwise, though, Safari still supports MV2. Everyone seems to think webRequestBlocking is the only relevant change in MV3, but it's not. Equally important IMO is arbitrary JavaScript injection into web pages, which MV2 allows but MV3 does not.
MV3 is so locked down that you can't even use String.replace() with a constructed JavaScript function. It's really a nightmare.
Google's excuse is that all JavaScript needs to be statically declared in the extension so that the Chrome Web Store can review it. But then the Chrome Web Store allows a bunch of malware to be published anyway!
I'm a huge fan of Orion by Kagi: you should have a look! It's a little rough around the edges but the extension support on iOS is amazing.
Orion is the only viable option on iOS IMO. The fact that, to this day, Safari has no way to block ads on iOS means it's just awful. Before Orion, I avoided using my web browser like the plague, because the experience was just bad.
Now I'm on Android, and Ironfox is pretty good and Firefox is also available. The browser story on Android is leaps and bounds ahead of iOS.
Actually there are several adblockers available for Safari on iOS; the functionality was introduced in 2015. Adblock Plus and Adguard are some of the larger extensions available, and now uBlock Origin Lite is now being beta tested for Safari on iOS.
I find the "switch to Safari" talk amusing because the adblockers available for Safari are functionally equivalent to the MV3 API that everyone's complaining about. The problem with the "static list of content to block" approach that Safari and MV3 use is that you can't trick the site into thinking that ads have been loaded when they haven't, like MV2 allows via Javascript injection. The effect of this is that you'll run into a lot of "disable your ad blocker to continue" pop-ups when using an adblocker with Safari, while you won't see them at all when using an adblocker with Firefox.
A Safari content blocker can be combined with an MV2 Safari extension in one app for JavaScript injection.
I've never used these, but if I had to guess: these probably don't have the same power as full Manifest V2 extensions.
Also names like "Adblock Plus" scare me. I don't want someone I don't trust getting my web activity.
I don't use any Apple product, so no Orion for me
I don't think in this case your argument is as clear cut and the use cases that people have today arent solved by the choices out there.
George Carlin: "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it."
The interests of APPLE (who makes money on hardware, and credit card processing) don't align with the interests of Google (who makes money on ad's). I am all for open source, I'm all for alternatives. But honestly if you own an iPhone and a Mac then safari makes a lot of sense. I happen to use safari and Firefox on Mac and am happy to bounce back and forth.
I also keep an eye on ladybird, but it isnt ready for prime time.
And I'm still going to have a chrome install for easy flashing of devices.
Apple isn’t selling my data, and they make the best consumer hardware, so at this point there aren’t many downsides to Apple lock in.
> Apple isn’t selling my data
Sorry to break it to you, but yes, they are.
https://ads.apple.com/
The greatest trick the Ad ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist.
No company sells your data. They sell access to you based on the data they have about you. Apple is no different
The lock in is a downside.
Safari has had built-in page translate for years now. It’ll detect different languages and show a translate option in the site tools menu. Works well.
I'm aware of this, but in my experience it's pretty bad. It doesn't even cover all European languages, never mind the rest of the world. For the languages it does support, it's always a lottery whether it works with that specific site or not. I've tried using it a few times, but it's not even remotely close to what Chrome does.
It definitely is, buy I think the silent majority just don't care all that much. Is that what you're referring to?
It happened before, multiple times.
A lot of people seem to believe that switching to a de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough. I think that's a psyop promoted by Google themselves. Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome. Brave, custom Chromium builds, Vivaldi, etc. are all very similar to Google Chrome, they just don't have Google spy features.
The argument that "Google still controls Chromium so it's not good enough" is exactly the kind of FUD I'd expect to back up this kind of psyop, too.
> Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome
I find this notion completely baffling. I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari more or less daily cause I test in all 3, and other than Safari feeling clunkier and in general less power-user friendly, I can barely tell the difference between the 3, especially between chrome and FF (well, other than uBlock working better in FF anyways).
I agree, there's little to no friction in switching to Firefox and I have never, not even once, noticed a difference with websites. The same is not true for Safari.
There are definitely website that do not support Firefox, especially in the US.
Whole portions of the Verizon website, for example. Or the website of a well known kindergarden I was researching recently.
There are definitely sites which block firefox, even though they work fine in firefox. Most of the time, the block can be bypassed with simple user-agent spoofing.
I'm sure they exist, I've just never seen them. I use banking and websites like Netflix, too. And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.
I think it's a case of yes, it does work, but web developers don't think so, so they implement checks just for kicks.
> And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.
Indeed, even in the codebase at $JOB that I'm responsible for, we have had some instances where we randomly check if people are in Chrome before blocking a browser API that has existed for 2 decades and been baseline widely available. These days 99% of features that users actually care about are pretty widely supported cross-browser, and other than developer laziness there's literally no reason why something like a banking app shouldn't work in any of the big 3.
I guarantee you that if you set your `userAgent` to a Chrome one (or even better yet, a completely generic one that covers all browsers simultaneously, cause most of the time the implementation of these `isChrome` flags is just a dead simple regex that looks for the string `chrome` anywhere in the userAgent), all problems you might've experienced before would vanish, except for perhaps on Google's own websites (though I've never really had issues here other than missing things like those image blur filters in Google Meet, which always felt like a completely artificial, anti-competitive limitation)
Where did "check feature, not browser name" go?
What part of the Verizon website doesn’t work on Firefox? I am curious if it’s actually the browser or its the aggressive privacy options.
> a well known kindergarden
I am baffled by the choice to include this laughably obscure example alongside a major telecom. Surely there are better options less likely to be the fault of a random lazy web developer.
Youtube, for example seems deliberately hampered on non-chrome browsers.
I get serious slowdown with multiple (3--5) youtube tabs open in firefox, but not chrome. Seems to happen when tabs are open for a long time (weeks), so probably some leak. Lots of others mention it on forums.
Firefox has multiple, user-affecting, memory leaks related to Youtube (unconfirmed if just youtube), going back at least 7 years. Tab scrollbar as no option to be disabled, so I had to write CSS to get tabs into a form close to what I would like similar to chrome. Tab mute icon has no (working) option to disable the click event, so I had to write CSS to remove it.
I made some other changes, but I forget what. At least FF still has the full uBlock Origin.
The average user does not notice any of these things.
Except the YouTube thing but that's because I'm not even sure what you're talking about: I leave YouTube windows open in Firefox for weeks.
"memory leaks related to Youtube"
News to me.
If this is even true, in the end it's still "so what?" Meaning, the alternative is even worse so, let's say granted there is this problem. Where is the better alternative that does not have this problem? Chrome doesn't have other equivalent or worse memory problems? Even if not leaking, it simply uses so much it's the same end result.
I've never consciously noticed a problem with youtube so if there is a problem, it's not one that necessarily matters.
Just bite the bullet and use Tree Style Tabs or Sideberry.
I didn't, for decades, but it was a mistake.
Firefox now has vertical tabs built in. Not as feature filled of course though tab groups and vertical tabs together replaces all the functionality I needed from Tree Style Tabs.
Me too. On mac, FF and chrome basically look and feel identical. Only devtools are quite different.
The stuff INSIDE the viewport is pretty much the same across them all, but on the daily it makes a big difference how your other services integrate with the browser. Someone who is all-in with iCloud, macOS, iOS etc might find it annoying to use Firefox without their personal info like password and credit cards and bookmarks. And the same would be true I guess for Google fans switching to Safari and not having those things.
Isn't that the exact argument behind the Serenity project? I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers. Control over virtually all media consumption mustn't be in the hands of a corporation.
> I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers.
Aside from Ladybird and Servo, it mostly is one wallet. Chrome and Firefox are both funded by Google, and Apple also receives significant funding from Google for being the default search engine in Safari.
Btw, some informal estimates at team sizes (full-time employees) of the various browsers (by people who have worked on them / are otherwise familiar):
Chrome: 1300
Firefox: 500
Safari: 100-150
Ladybird/Servo: 7-8 (each)
Which gives you an idea of why Chrome has been so hard to compete with.
The argument just doesn't hold water, though. That's like saying Y Combinator shouldn't be the only company paying for our tech forum. It's perfectly fine unless Y Combinator decides to ruin HN it somehow. And, if they did, wouldn't people just switch to one of the many HN clones overnight? That's what's known as FUD - "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". FUD is often spread about the present, but it's often just as useful to spread it about the future. "Don't use product X, the company that owns it could make it unusable someday". Part of me thinks Google keeps threatening to disable adblocking (but never actually does it) as part of a grand strategy. But part of me thinks it's just a coincidence that Google isn't capable of pulling off such a tricky psychological operation.
Users were supposedly massively exiting Reddit when that cesspool imploded, but if you find one of those threads through any search engine and click around on usernames who were leaving their "last messages ever, fuck reddit, I'm out", I'd estimate about 95% of them never left.
Do it if you have 10 minutes to waste, it's easy to check and changes your opinion about how much people are willing to endure to avoid actually doing anything.
The HN comparison doesn’t really hold water. There are a lot of options for tech news and forums. Lots of platforms, self-hosting options, with many business models, or simply self-funded.
That is very different than a world where every browser relies on Google for the core of their browser… and those who don’t rely on Google for funding (as they pay a lot of money to be the default search option in major browsers). Even Microsoft gave up on making their own browser, and now depends on Google. They used to own the entire market not so long ago.
People are saying this is a psyop, but I’m not sure what Google stands to gain from giving off the impression that they are seeking to control the entire market so they can steer the direction of the web for their own profit. That doesn’t make them look like the good guy, and should keep them neck deep in anti-trust filing from various governments. Where’s the upside? People feeling like they don’t have an option, so they give up and settle like Microsoft? Is that the angle?
Somewhat related - is Microsoft Edge a set of patches on top of the latest Chromium release or is Microsoft running a hard fork from a X years old version?
It's just a set of patches on top of Chromium, as any other Chromium rebuild.
They use the same numbering scheme and go in lockstep:
> The trigger for Beta and Stable major releases is an equivalent Chromium release.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-...
I once made a comment along these lines (de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough, as it supports the browser monoculture and inevitably makes Chrome as a browser better) and got a reply from from Brendan Eichner himself.
His point was that there isn't enough time to again develop Firefox (or ladybird) as a competitive browser capable of breaking the Chrome "monopoly". I don't know if I really agree.
Evidently, Google feels like the time is right to make these kinds of aggressive moves, limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers.
The internet without ad blockers is a hot steaming mess. Limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers makes people associate your browser (Chrome in this case) with this hot steaming mess. It is difficult to dissociate the Chrome software from the websites rendered in Chrome by a technical lay person. So Chrome will be viewed as a hot steaming mess.
I guess we will soon see if people will stay on Chrome or accept the small initial pain and take the leap to a different browser with proper support for ad blockers. In any case the time is now for a aggressive marketing campaign on the side of mozilla etc.
I am in no way affiliated with Google. So if you still think this is a PsyOp, please consider Hanlon's Razor:
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Although, please also consider that Hanlon's Razor itself was coined by a Robert J. Hanlon, who suspiciously shares a name with a CIA operative also from Pennsylvania. It is not unimaginable that Hanlon's Razor it in itself a PsyOp. ;)
Though his brave is a relatively small company, they have enough resources to have developed, and continue maintaining their own low-level ad blocker, which IME has been just as effective as uBO, but is supposedly more efficient (since it's written in the R-word language and compiled into native code integrating deeply inside the browser):
I can't imagine what hoops Google would have to jump through to block third parties from integrating their own ad blockers. You don't need MV2 for that AFAIK.
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
“Sorry, we don’t support any browsers other than Chrome”
I agree exploiting a bug isn’t a sustainable solution. But it’s also unrealistic to think switching is viable.
Keep chrome installed and fall back iff forced to. That way the majority of usage statistics show up as other browsers so when developers are making guesses at which browser to support, those statistics will push them away from chrome.
Additionally: you would be surprised how infrequently you have to switch to chrome
Can't remember the last time I actually had to open a website on chrome for compatibility reasons. Is that still a thing?
The F1TV site didn't work on Firefox earlier this year but send to be fixed now, other than that I haven't had any issues.
I only have to switch to chrome for e-transfers. Everything else seems to work
There's one site I have to switch to Firefox for. And it's a big one that handles a lot of money, so that's kind of surprising. Can't log into their site in chrome, no matter how hard I try. Nor edge.
Btw, the 'website requires chrome browser' problem is often solved if you just make Firefox user agent say it is Chrome.
The problem is this needs to be a standard Firefox feature.
Find who is responsible for such sites and send them strongly-worded emails. If it's a commerce site, tell them they just lost a potential customer. In my experience it's usually the trendchasing web developers who have drunk the Goog-Aid and are trying to convince the others in the organisation to use "modern" (read: controlled by Google) features and waste time implementing these changes --- instead of the "deprecated" feature that's been there for decades and will work in just about any browser, and the management is usually more driven by $$$ so anything that affects the bottom line is going to get their attention. I've even offered to "fix" their site for free to make it more accessible.
By that logic attempting to change anything at all is not viable; e pur si muove.
For me “switching” is to start using something else rather than Firefox, so switching from Chrome is viable.
Most sites let you ignore that, but just keep like Ungoogled Chromium around as a backup
The best bypass is to use Firefox. uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Switched (back) to Firefox from Chrome years ago and haven’t looked back. Between uBlock and Privacy Badger my web experience is pretty good despite the endless assault on end users.
Never realized anything was happening as I was on Firefox, until I saw ads as my wife was browsing youtube despite installing ublock for her years ago.
>They decided it wasn't a security issue, and honestly, I agree, because it didn't give extensions access to data they didn't already have.
So they admit that MV3 isn't actually any more secure than MV2?
I'd be shocked if anyone actually believes them. This article starts with the obvious conflict of interest. Of course letting an extension know what websites you visit and what requests are made is an insecure lifestyle. But I still do it because I trust uBO more than I trust the ad companies and their data harvesters.
I wish I could browse the web kinda like this but minus the human:
Make Signal video call to someone in front of a laptop, provide verbal instructions on what to click on, read to my liking, and hang up to be connected with someone else next time.
(EFF’s Cover Your Tracks seems to suggest fresh private tabs w/iCloud Private Relay & AdGuard is ineffective. VMs/Cloud Desktops exist but there are apparently telltale signs when those are used, though not sure how easily linkable back to acting user. Human-in-the-loop proxy via encrypted video calls seems to solve _most_ things, except it’s stupid and would be really annoying even with an enthusiastic pool of volunteers. VM + TOR/I2P should be fine for almost anybody though I guess, just frustrated the simple commercial stuff is ostensibly partially privacy theater.)
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html section "How I use the internet" ?
It must be exhausting to be Stallman!
Hey Richard Stallman uses Invidious
One of the main goals of MV3 seems to be nullifying protection against tracking URLs. Most of the discussion about adblocking technically "still working" under MV3 misses this point. It doesn't matter if you're actually served ads or not, when when your underlying habits can still easily be collected from the combination of fingerprints and tracking URLs.
https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/302
> Most of the discussion about adblocking technically "still working" under MV3 misses this point.
Because it's a dishonest point. Ad blocking still works. All the same ads can still be removed from the page. Tracker blocking doesn't. This is still a huge problem for privacy. But while nearly everyone dislikes seeing ads that interrupt your content, people who actually care about tracking privacy are a much smaller group. The latter group are trying to smuggle concern for the latter issue by framing it as the more favorable issue to garner more support from the former.
I've started assuming bad intent after WEI, even though it was dropped.
I believe them. The restrictions are reasonable and appropriate for nearly everyone. Extensions are untrusted code that should have as little access as possible. If restrictions can be bypassed, that's a security bug that should be fixed because it directly affects users.
I also think uBlock Origin is so important and trusted it should not only be an exception to the whole thing but should also be given even more access in order to let it block things more effectively. It shouldn't even be a mere extension to begin with, it should be literally built into the browser as a core feature. The massive conflicts of interest are the only thing that prevent that. Can't trust ad companies to mantain ad blockers.
> Extensions are untrusted code that should have as little access as possible.
It's entirely possible to manually vet extension code and extension updates in the same way that Mozilla does as part of their Firefox recommended extensions program.
> Firefox is committed to helping protect you against third-party software that may inadvertently compromise your data – or worse – breach your privacy with malicious intent. Before an extension receives Recommended status, it undergoes rigorous technical review by staff security experts.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
Other factors taken into consideration:
Does the extension function at an exemplary level?
Does the extension offer an exceptional user experience?
Is the extension relevant to a general, international audience?
Is the extension actively developed?
Why am I not allowed to trust an extension just as much as I trust the platform it is running on? This is the same logic behind mobile OSes creators deciding what apps can do.
Would that rip off the how-do-we-fund-the-web bandaid, forcing new solutions? Worry about the interim where some publishers would presumably cease to exist. And who would remain afloat—those with proprietary apps, as Zucky as they are, I’d guess…
UBO is absolutely incredibly important. Figure you might know more than me about how journalists and reviewers and the like can still earn a keep in a world with adblockers built in to every browser.
> Would that rip off the how-do-we-fund-the-web bandaid, forcing new solutions?
Absolutely. The web is mostly ad funded. Advertising in turn fuels surveillance capitalism and is the cause of countless dark patterns everywhere. Ads are the root cause of everything that is wrong with the web today. If you reduce advertising return on investiment to zero, it will fix the web. Therefore blocking ads is a moral imperative.
> Worry about the interim where some publishers would presumably cease to exist.
Let them disappear. Anyone making money off of advertising cannot be trusted. They will never make or write anything that could get their ad money cut off.
People used to pay to have their own websites where they published their views and opinions, not the other way around. I want that web back. A web made up of real people who have something real to say, not a web of "creators" of worthless generic attention baiting "content" meant to fill an arbitrary box whose entire purpose is to attract you so that you look at banner ads.
An extension I trust is by definition trusted code. What is trusted is for the user to decide, not the broswer developer.
I trust ublock infinitely more than anything written by Google, a literal spyware company.
I get what you mean and I think we align here, but I trust the uBlock team infinitely more than I trust Google to make my own extension decisions. I know there's a subset of regular users who fall for all manner of scam, but Manifest V3 doesn't even solve any of those issues, the majority of the same attack vectors that existed before still exist now, except useful tools like uBlock can no longer do anything since they got deliberately targeted.
Besides, there's ways of having powerful extensions WITH security, but this would obviously go against Google's data harvesting ad machine. The Firefox team has a handful of "trusted" extensions that they manually vet themselves on every update, and one of these is uBlock Origin. They get a little badge on the FF extension store marking them as Verified and Trusted, and unless Mozilla's engineers are completely incompetent, nobody has to worry about gorhill selling his soul out to Big Ad in exchange for breaking uBlock or infecting people's PCs or whatever.
>finds way to make adblockers work on MV3
>snitches to Google
cool, thanks man
People like this are enemies of freedom and should be called out publicly.
I do not condone harrassment, although I will not be surprised if others should feel obligated to practice the First Amendment copiously on him.
The exact wording was:
> But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023.
So why not go to someone that does know how to make a blocker? Nice snitch.
Well, in his defense it would have been patched immediately after the first adblocker used it, and he would have gotten nothing at all out of it.
Oh wait he got nothing at all anyway ;)
Would be quite different if they patched it and broke important extensions, possibly facing serieous outcry and bad publicity.
I agree that would change things but I can't picture an open-source extension with millions of users pivoting to rely on something that's clearly a bug.
Important extensions like, dunno, uBlock Origin?
Yeah, surely if chrome broke important extensions people will get mad and switch.
That's what they already did.
Not really, this sort of fame farming is what makes candidates stand out in infosec interviews. A bug in Google systems is good for his future career.
The post says they had another bug with a large bounty in the same year, so it doesn't seem very useful for CV padding either
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So OP got Google to patch a harmless "issue" that could've been used by addon devs to bypass MV3 restrictions. Hope it was worth the $0.
Said bypass would exist for maybe a day max before getting nuked from orbit by Google. If anything, there was a non-zero chance OP would've gotten paid and he took it. I don't blame him.
I don't agree with this conclusion. Google is fully responsible for MV3 and its' restrictions. There's no reason to shift blame away from them.
Let's do a thought experiment: if OP hasn't reported it, what do you think would happen then? Even if different ad blockers would find it later and use it, Google would have still removed this. Maybe they'd even remove extensions that have (ab)used it from Chrome Web Store.
Indeed.
Perhaps a hobbyist would code “MV2-capable” MV3 adblocker for the fun of it, forking UBO or something, as a proof-of-concept. How much time would anyone spend on its development and who would install it when the max runway’s a few days, weeks, or months?
It seems someone's already done it. It requires some extra setup, but I managed to get it working on my machine.
https://github.com/r58Playz/uBlock-mv3
Associated Show HN post from 5 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44543094
> Maybe they'd even remove extensions that have (ab)used it from Chrome Web Store.
So now it's abuse to make the user's browser do what the user wants, for the user's benefit, to protect the user from, you know, actual abuse.
Well, I don't think so — hence the parenthesis. Although, I am pretty sure that's how Google looks at it, given all MV3 changes.
Really? You think Google is that dumb? As soon as any ad blocker that people actually use implements it, it'll be patched. It's not something you can exploit once and benefit from it forever.
Yeah, that was my take as well. OP did some free work for a megacorp and made the web a little bit worse, because "security, I guess" ?
Good job.
Sometimes you get $0, sometimes you get more. I would like to mention this stuff on my college applications, and even if I tried to gatekeep it, it'd eventually be patched. Not sure what your argument is here.
Incredibly impressive to do this sort of work before applying to college!
The author claims to be 8 years old in 2015. So that makes them still a teenager. It is pretty cool IMO.
Are you guys honestly arguing like the zero day industry would, for a vector that couldn’t be used by any ad blocking extension since Google has them under an electron microscope 24/7? To pick on a very young, enthusiastic programmer? What the hell??
Google would have found this bug if any extensions tried to rely on it and patched it instantly anyway.
> Adblockers basically need webRequestBlocking to function properly. Pretty convenient (cough cough) for a company that makes most of its revenue from ads to be removing that.
Why does this keep getting repeated? It's not true.
Anyone can use uBlock Origin Lite with Chrome, and manifest v3. It doesn't just work fine, it works great. I can't tell any difference from the old uBlock Origin in terms of blocking, but it's faster because now all the filtering is being done in C++ rather than JavaScript. Works on YouTube and everything.
I know there are some limits in place now with the max number of rules, but the limits seem to be plenty so far.
It depends on how you interpret the word "properly". There are ads and adblocker-detection techniques that can't be blocked by MV3-style static filtering.
If "properly" means "can block all ads" then you're wrong. If it means "can block some ads" then you're right. If it means "can block most ads" then you're currently right, but likely to become wrong as adtech evolves around the new state of play.
Don't forget Chrome launched with built-in popup blocking. Now we just have popunders, in-page popups, back-button hijacking etc. Ads, uh... find a way.
It is true though. Like, literally. Why do you think it is called Lite?
The statement was: "Adblockers basically need webRequestBlocking to function properly. "
This is demonstrably false, ublock lite proves that adblockers can work without it.
Whether or not ublock lite is missing functionalities because of MV3 is irrelevant to the original statement that adblockers need webRequestBlocking.
> This is demonstrably false, ublock lite proves that adblockers can work without it
uBO Lite is missing plenty of features: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
So your argument is that if an extension could block even a single ad with MV3, it means that ad blockers function properly in MV3? Do you not agree that "properly" means "having all the functionality they had with MV2"?
> Whether or not ublock lite is missing functionalities because of MV3 is irrelevant to the original statement that adblockers need webRequestBlocking.
It can be relevant depending of how you define properly. If it depends on any of those functionalities that are missing, then it’s relevant.
> It is true though. Like, literally.
Doesn't seem true to me. If it's true, then why is uBlock Origin Lite functioning properly as an adblocker for me?
> Why do you think it is called Lite?
Because it's simpler and uses less resources. And they had to call it something different to distinguish it from uBlock Origin.
One of the most frustrating things about these discussions is that it-works-on-my-machine effect. Anecdotal evidence is easily surpassed by a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that are changing. Here's what the author of uBlock Origin says about its capabilities in Manifest V3 versus Manifest V2.
> About "uBO Lite should be fine": It actually depends on the websites you visit. Not all filters supported by uBO can be converted to MV3 DNR rules, some websites may not be filtered as with uBO. A specific example in following tweet.
You can read about the specific differences in the FAQ:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
My personal take is if you're a pretty unsophisticated user and you mostly don't actually interact with the add-ons at all, Manifest V3 will probably be fine.
If you understand how ads and tracking work and you are using advanced features of the extension to manage that, then Manifest V2 will be much, much better. Dynamic filters alone are a huge win.
I agree with crazygringo that uBlock Origin Lite seems to work fine for me as far as blocking ads on the websites I visit.
I also agree that these discussions can be frustrating. In my opinion, that's because people claiming that Lite isn't good enough only seem to post super vague stuff, like links to the FAQ that list a bunch of technical details about what it can't do, when I don't understand the practical upshot of those things. Or vague assertions that it's not doing something which is allegedly important, where it's never actually explained what that thing it's not doing is and why it's important.
I have yet to see anybody show a specific example of a website where Lite doesn't actually work well enough. Or of any other specific thing it's not doing. I don't think I should have to read a series of 20 web pages dense with specialized technical details to understand what it's supposedly not doing. If it can't be explained simply and clearly what it's not doing that's so important, maybe it's not actually missing anything important at all.
I suppose I am a unsophisticated user of web browsers. I never got around to understanding or interacting with all the details of what "proper" uBO can do. Yet I still seem to browse the web just fine, and even build webapps sometimes, and I don't see any ads. So what's this great thing that I'm missing?
> super vague stuff, like links to the FAQ that list a bunch of technical details
Not being able to block remote fonts is a vague technicality? It's a feature I use, a user-facing setting, not an under-the-hood technicality. (Budding web designers have a tendency to pick overly thin fonts because it looks fancy/unique at a glance and being interested in the actual text on the webpage was not their job description)
I'm less familiar with the other things. Clicking one experimentally, it mentions:
>> The primary purpose of dynamic URL filtering [is] to fix web page breakage
Webpages break on adblocking not infrequently. I'm not a blocklist developer so I can't say how useful this particular function is, but I'm also not going to assume that, just because I don't know the technical details, that it's just handwavey technical details nobody needs to care about and everything will be the same regardless of what the most qualified person on the topic is saying
> I don't think I should have to read a series of 20 web pages dense with specialized technical details to understand what it's supposedly not doing
Consider that you're not paying for someone to produce marketing material; it's a free thing. Sometimes that means that finding out information requires reading source code, or in this case, it's probably data files that contain these dynamic thingies so you could see the list of what mitigations will stop being possible and on what kinds of sites those are. If you (or someone else) do a writeup that fills the information gap you are looking for, I'm sure a lot of other people also appreciate that existing
Its called Lite because it has tons of missing functionality from the not-Lite version that make the not-Lite version more effective as a content blocker.
It's not "tons of missing functionality". It still blocks all the ads in practice.
Maybe it's less effective in some theoretical case, but not anything I've seen. People talk as if it's only blocking 10% of the ads it used to, when the reality seems to be 99.999% or something. And it's faster now.
And they removed stuff like the element zapper but that has nothing to do with Manifest v3. It's because they literally wanted it to minimize resources. You can install a dedicated zapper extension if you want that.
I genuinely don't understand where this narrative of "adblockers don't work anymore on Chrome" is coming from. Again, it's just not true, but keeps getting repeated like it is.
I think the ultimate fix is to make it a felony to pay someone to say a message as if it's his own (meaning an actor Ford pays to be in an ad needs to say "Ford paid me to say ..." at the start of every sentence uttered which states an opinion, if that is not the true opinion of the actor). It must also be a felony for someone to accept money in exchange for stating provided opinions as if they were his own. Customers in ads giving true testimonial reviews must state they are being paid (if so) at the beginning of their statements in the ad. Only quantitative and qualitative content about the product or service advertised should be allowed, anything which sets tone, vibe, or otherwise emotionally communicates to the viewer needs to be banned. This also goes for food product boxes, with the additional rule that 75% of the non-barcode front label area must be nutrition and ingredients, while logo/brand work and propaganda is limited to the remaining 25%. Back label is an exact (maybe B&W) copy of the front. Ads should also mostly be found in directories where people go looking for services or things, and NOT plastered everywhere ready to rape brains for quick nickels. We need an advertising censorship board that keeps records on both ad makers and client businesses, so that chronic offenders get smacked down hard.
Once advertising is dead, you will see a much more free and level internet.
>>It's not "tons of missing functionality"
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
Okay. Sure.
Element zapper functionality is returning: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/325
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41871873
I believe that another change is that ad blockers cannot update as quickly now? If that is true, since ad blocking is a cat and mouse game, doesn't that make ad blocking with a delay less functional?
Haven't missed Chrome once since switching to https://brave.com/
I find Brave even more annoying than Chrome, and that's ignoring Brendan Eich's hateful hands in the code. It's got even more buzzaord trash than Chrome does now. Brave Shields you can't actually turn off, crypto scams baked into the product, web app download buttons you can't turn off, all sorts of UI trash you just can't get rid of.
>Brendan Eich's hateful hands
LOL California Proposition 8 was pretty mainstream opinion back then. Maybe stop with the ex post facto persecution?
Hate can be popular but that still doesn’t make it right. He knew that he was spending money hoping to take away rights from people he knew, to tell some of them that their marriages shouldn’t be allowed, and did it anyway. That’s hateful regardless of how many other people joined him.
Shields can be turned off right from the url bar as needed.
Really? I turned off the crypto buttons once several years ago and it’s been just fine since.
It's the same Blink engine underneath. Talk about lipstick.
I'm not aware of a Blink-based browser that isn't dropping manifest V2. That would be a soft fork, and wouldn't survive long.
The point is you don't need to worry about manifest v3 interfering with ad blockers, because Brave has an ad blocker built into the browser. Also makes it a good Chromium-based option for mobile, since you can't install extensions on Chrome mobile at all.
https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
In the "cons" column, Brave is still a for-profit and has a bunch of features that continue to give some people the ick. In the "pros" column, there's a bunch of "how to debloat Brave" content showing how to improve the default kitchen-sink confifguration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6cKFliWW6Q
I do turn off the wallet, VPN, AI and other bloat, but it's a minor inconvenience for a better browser.
https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
Brave runs of Chromium, it's the same thing as Chrome.. Manifest V3 will eventually be implemented.
Not being able to run Twitch on it has me switch for brief periods.
Heh, funny, Twitch was the primary reason I installed Brave because it was being glitchy on Firefox (at the time years ago - no longer the case). I've never had trouble with Twitch on Brave.
From my experience (as a Brave user), using a User-Agent switching extension and setting it to Firefox for twitch.tv gets around that :)
You're personally unable to look at twitch on it?
The adblock causes a twitch stream error. I can watch until the first ad. This is annoying, so I switch to vanilla chrome.
You can turn off the adblock per site.
Do you even try to use software you are using? Click shield icon and turn off...
> Do you even try to use software you are using?
GL with whatever.
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Of all the browsers you could be using, giving your data away to sketchy crypto bros should really not be at the top of the list.
It's the top of the list because it works so well. I forget it's a different browser most of the time. I was able to turn off everything extraneous that I was concerned about. Brave is also Open Sourced.
I really don't care about crypto stuff. If you do, I can understand why that's a dealbreaker for you. But for me, it doesn't matter at all. I just turn the crypto features off and continue on my way.
Might as well edit and add some suggestions
Maybe take a look at Vivaldi, it's a continuation of the old Opera, with basically the same development team. It's the most user-friendly and configurable option at this moment, they're very responsive to feedback, and are the only organization that doesn't have some horrible privacy violations in the past (maybe excluding Apple, I don't know and don't care, 90% of users on this planet can't run Safari).
Also they are in Norway if you care about that sort of thing.
It's not FOSS, though, at least for now.
Luckily I only need to use chrome on my work laptop, I use Firefox everywhere else. Still sad to see uBlock origin stop working which was useful to keep a cleaner experience when browsing the web for work reasons (research, documentation, etc).
You bypass it by installing Firefox.
Firefox is awful. Both as a browser itself and as a base for other browsers. Such a shame that Zen didn't use Chromium :(
Your comment is pretty meaningless without more specifics.
I switched to Firefox again back in 2017, I have 0 issues with it. If anything it's faster and less resources hungry than chrome in my usage. The extension ecosystem is now arguably better with MV3 being rolled out to chrome.
Probably the only annoying thing was learning where the buttons are in the devtools. They're all still there, just laid out differently. It took about a week to get to grips with that.
What exactly makes you say it's an awful browser?
Weird, Firefox blows Chrome out of the water. What do you smoke?
The smoke on the water!
More seriously, I'm a Firefox user since ~2006 but I'm about equally surprised by the statement that Firefox should blow Chrome/ium out of the water as that Firefox supposedly sucks. They're both browsers. I think Chromium is a bit faster in page rendering, whereas Firefox is more open, privacy-friendly, and customizable. Similar to how I wish consumers would not choose an anti-consumer organization (anyone who values a free market and general computation1 should not choose iOS), I think nobody should choose Chrome but, still, I can understand if someone does choose it because they've gotten used to how it works and they're not willing to change. It's about equal in practical functionality that 95% of people use, wouldn't you say? Or in what way is Firefox blowing Chrome out of the water?
¹ https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-coming-war-on-general...
So what’s the conclusion? Can we use a different Chrome based browser and avoid MV3? What’s the decision for privacy after this has happened?
This blogpost covers a workaround they discovered that would have let MV3 extensions access important functionality that was not normally available, only in MV2.
This workaround was fixed the same year in 2023 and yielded a $0 payout, on the basis that Google did not consider it a security vulnerability.
The conclusion then is that uBO (MV2) stopped working for me today after restarting my computer, I suppose.
Microsoft supposedly aligned with deprecating MV2 back when Google announced it but they've indefinitely postponed it. The KB about it still says "TBD", and there's zero mention of it around the actual browser. IMO it's a good alternative, if you trust Microsoft (I do).
The little I've read bout this says that maintaining MV2 might be something as well.
If other chromium based browsers didn't have this issue, that would be great, but likely in time Youtube won't support browsers that don't have MV3. Probably still have some time though.
Switched to Firefox yesterday, I suggest you do the same.
Are they still funded to the tune of a billion a year by Google so that Google can pretend they don't have a monopoly? Are they still intent on redefining as an ad company?
The google money isn't any great gotcha. It's wrong of them to have grown to be so dependant but so what? All it means is that some day the funded development will stop, just like all the forks are already.
Let them take google money for as long as it flows. You can switch to librewolf at any time if FF itself ever actually goes bad in any critical way. But there's not a lot of reason to do so until the minute that actually happens. Go ahead and take the funded work and updates as long as it exists.
When the billion began Chrome wasn't even a browser yet.
If you're going to switch you should switch to a better option. I've been using librewolf for years since Firefox doesn't have the best track record either.
That's a good reminder to update Firefox.
I tend to oscillate back and forth every few years gradually.
Lately not Chrome proper, there are some neat browser takes worth trying out like Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, etc that are Chromium based.
Google using YouTube to block non-MV3 browsers, would be Google picking a fight with Firefox - who they use in court documents to say that they're not a monopoly. Their legal team will have a few words to say about it.
Using ebpf to block ads would be fun !! Need a way to translate rules into blocking rules for ebpf
Would love to give Firefox a chance but one thing that stops me (apart from occasional website loading bugs) is inability to install PWAs. Not sure why it’s not implemented like it has been for a long time in Chrome and all its forks.
I have found a 3rd party extension that claims to facilitate this (0) but still feel uncomfortable to use this for privacy reasons.
(0) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire...
If you really care, it's ok to just Firefox for the majority of your web browsing activities but use Chrome or a fork for PWA.
Although using Firefox increasingly means a worse experience, including:
* infinite loop of Cloudflare verification * inferior performance compared to Chrome (page loading, large page scrolling) * subtle bugs (e.g. audio handling) * WebUSB support
I have personally run into all of them. Some are under Firefox's control but others are not. I do still use Firefox for most websites unless it's technically not possible, but unfortunately the exception is happening more and more.
1) A lot of ads are terribly overdone and even sometimes actively malicious (malware or tracking). It makes no sense to aggressively try to stamp it out like Google is doing
2) Aside from the Page/Brin stealing tech salaries thing (yeah it really did happen) what happened to Google? They've always been a bit incompetent but their behavior (ie Chrome and increasing censorship on Google/Youtube the last few years) has been really bad, I thought they were basically founded off idealism
As an exclusive Firefox user, with really great ad blocking features, I didn’t notice that Chrome got worse on this front. I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps it’s time for a change. Best of luck.
Just use uBlock Origin Lite.
Try Safari, Firefox, or any other non-Chrome browser.
I got downvoted for commenting this, why can't we make a ManifestV2-like framework using .DLLs ? This can enable network control for ad blockers and Google can do nothing about it.
I think the trouble is that certain adblocking features (like skipping ads on YouTube, Twitch, etc) require modifying the page you're viewing in your browser; just filtering network requests isn't enough. So right now a browser extension is the most natural choice for an adblocker, but honestly that might change if browsers keep being so hostile towards them.
Why not use DuckDuckGo?
I was able to bypass the chrome changes by installing firefox. Honestly it's better than I thought it would be, and I have no serious complaints, or broken sites. Yay web standards.
> But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023. It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions usin
Well, thanks for nothing?
Author here, sorry. I don't think any open-source extension (especially large adblockers with millions of users) could actually get away with using this bug, because Google is paying close attention to them. It would've been patched immediately either way.
You’re right, and good on you for paying attention to the human/business context behind the code.
Just use Firefox with ublock origin. On Android too. Nightly has tabs on tablet.
At work I use Edge (MS integration w SSO and all). Edge has some nice features like vertical tabs and copilot. (yes, email writing with AI is nice)
We are allowed Chrome and FF so have those too with ublock on FF. Chrome is 3rd choice if a site really needs it and for testing.
Firefox has had vertical tabs (and tabs groups) for few months now
Indeed. I love the FF vertical tabs too, I should say.
Too bad the work one is still locked to 128 ESR :(
Signed up to complain about this. YT is no longer worth watching ads for. Anything that is worth paying for, the money needs to go via Patreon so the publisher isn't demonetized at a whim. The rest is brain-rot, utter shit and a lot of damaging misinformation. I hope it dies. While it remains easy to do so, I will "steal" with yt-dlp and proudly watch it ad-free on VLC on my computer. If they break that then I'm no longer interested.
When this became adversarial, which was a battle that lasted the last year of inconvenience I ended up dumping every Google thing I have. So the Pixel is GrapheneOS now with no Google crap. Browser is Firefox. Email has moved from Gmail to Fastmail with a domain.
My Google account is closed after 20 years. The relationship is dead. They can do what they want. I don't care any more.
You didn't really mention what aggravated you.
Initially the increase in frequency of the advertising on Android youtube app. Followed by uBlock being broken in Chrome. Followed by uBlock being tarpitted in Firefox. Followed by FreeTube client getting 403 IP forbidden requests and DRM content shovelled down which could not be rendered.
They just did everything to make sure I watched the ads and burn all my bandwidth, which can be somewhat limited and expensive as I travel a lot.
Did you consider YouTube Premium? It works really well and no ads. Seems like a pittance for the service YouTube provides
https://getfirefox.org
Even ignoring the adblock issues, Chrome isn't worth it... Google themselves spy on you with it. Cockblocking adblock just puts extra emphasis on what you should have already known.
And FF + UBO also works great on Android
Google is running an experiment: how much ads crap users are willing to tolerate before they switch supplier.
Somebody should probably fork chromium.
I remember when Firefox was getting traction, it had a killer feature: speed.
A chromium fork could come with a simple killer feature: bringing back the possibility of blocking requests.
I’m pretty sure it would quickly gain traction.
I’ve been happy with Orion on macOS. I get it’s WebKit but at least it’s not Chrome. Brave was also good if you must have chromium.
Safari + Wipr2 FTW!
> It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions using opt_webViewInstanceId actually had WebView permissions
soo will this still just work if we give uBo webview permission?
Unfortunately extensions can't have webview perms :(
"'webview' is only allowed for packaged apps, but this is a extension."
:( but maybe Vivaldi and Brave could remove this check just for fun.
I'd gladly pay for YouTube without ads if I trusted that it would remain ad free, but the track record from various companies on this is not good.
I tried paying for YouTube premium then they fucked around by not giving me all the features I paid for when I was visiting another country. There's no winning with these people.
I paid premium a few months, then they added shorts and there was no way to block them, so I installed a blocker and stopped paying for it.
I've been paying for YouTube premium for probably 2 years now. Never had any inserted ads. Only the "this video is sponsored by" stuff, which you can just skip over.
I can't possibly go back to non-Premium YouTube, and if they mess around with Premium I'll probably be moving on from YouTube.
Youtube premium has been ad-free for 10 years. What kind of track record do you need? 20 years? 100 years?
Netflix and other streaming sites have ads on some paid subscriptions. First they start with ad free subs, then introduce ads and introduce a higher priced tier to get rid of ads
Can't you just stop subscribing when that happens? You aren't signing a 5 year contract.
So if one supermarket sold expired food, we should avoid another supermarket that has not been doing that for 10 years? Google/Youtube doesn't own Netflix. If anything, the reasonable response would be to unsub Netflix and sub its competitors, like, uh, Youtube.
I just pay them until it works, and I'll reconsider once it changes. Don't worry about track record, you can stop paying anytime.
So pay now and stop paying if they introduce ads? It's not like it's a lifetime subscription.
I've been paying for it for a year+ for my girlfriend who was watching more ads than content and we've never seen ads since.
That's good to know. I was hoping for a reply like yours. I will subscribe. YouTube is an amazing resource for human kind and I agree those of us who can afford it should pay to support it.
Totally, there's not a lot of places to vote with your dollars to get rid of interruptions like Ads, and also get back a lot of time of your life.
Don't let everyone responding gaslight you. YouTube Premium is absolutely stuffed with ads[0] (sorry, 'promoted content' / 'sponsorship'). The only probable explanation I have for this is that Google has successfully boiled the frog and people mentally don't even register these things as ads anymore.
And that's not to mention pretty much every single creator stuffing sponsored sections into their videos now. We have Sponsorblock for now, but I imagine Google will try to introduce random offsets at some point which will render Sponsorblock mute. Maybe an AI blocker will rise up in the future?
At any rate, fight fire with fire. Just use every bit of adblocking on desktop, Revanced on Android and hope that Revanced or Youtube++ comes to iOS 3rd party stores at some point.
[0]https://imgur.com/a/3emEhsF
Edit: since people are too lazy to click on the link and instead ram the downvote button in blind rage, image 1 and 4 contain straight up ads, unconnected to creators.
I think people just decided it doesn't count as ads when it's the creator doing it. And it feels more tolerable since the money is going to the creator that they probably like instead of megacorp Google.
1 and 4 contain straight up ads.
I'm honestly baffled why anyone who objects to ads would still want to use any of the official YouTube clients. Whether or not they show ads to you on YouTube, they still track your every move and use it to improve their profile of you so that they can show you ads on any of their other platforms, sell your data, or whatever other shady business they do behind the scenes to extract value from it.
Adtech cannot be trusted. I refuse to support their empire whether that's financially or with my data and attention.
Paying to avoid ads just makes your attention even more valuable to them. Always block them unconditionally and without any payment.
Ads are a violation of the sanctity of our minds. They are not entitled to our attention. It's not currency to pay for services with.
Or rather, don't use YouTube without paying.
Youtube isn't free, and unlike a simple blog, requires tons of infrastructure and content creation. None of that is free, and people wanting that to be free is why we're in adscape hell.
Edit: I'd love for a competitor to youtube, but there isn't. Rumble isn't a real competitor, and none of my favorite channels place their content there either.
I wish there was a youtube alternative that was more of a federation, but every attempt I've seen of federations have been mess.
> Youtube isn't free
Then charge for it like the other streaming services. If they send me ads, I'll block and delete them, manually or automatically, and I won't lose a second of sleep over it.
> requires tons of infrastructure and content creation
Not our problem. It's up to the so called innovators to come up with a working business model. If they can't, they should go bankrupt.
That’s quite a stretch. I loathe ads as much as anyone else here, but I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind (is my mind even sacrosanct, such that it could be violated?) it’s just something I don’t like.
And yes, attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things. Like any other voluntary transaction, no one is entitled to my attention unless we both voluntarily agree to it.
That implies voluntarily paying attention to adverts, as an informal contractual obligation. You aren't allowed on Youtube any more because you haven't been allowing the adverts to influence you enough. You can't look away or think about something else, that's cheating on the deal.
Advertisements have been proven countless times to be a form of psychological manipulation, and a very potent one that works very well. After all, if it didn't work we wouldn't be seeing ads crop up literally every-fucking-where, including these days even in our very own night sky in the form of drone lightshows. The ad companies have huge teams of mental health experts in order to maximize the reach & impact of their advertisements on the general populace.
Ads are so powerful that they've even managed to twist the truth about plenty of horrific shit happening to the point of affecting the health and safety of real people, sometimes literally on a global scale. Chiquita bananas, De Beers, Nestle, Oil & Gas companies, and must I remind you of Tobacco companies (and surprise surprise, the same people who were doing the ads for Big Tobacco are the ones doing ad campaigns for O&G companies now)? There have been SO MANY examples from all these companies of using advertisements to trick and manipulate people & politicians, oftentimes just straight up lying, like the Tobacco companies lying about the adverse health effects despite knowing for decades what the adverse health effects were, Or Oil & Gas companies lying about climate change via comprehensive astroturfing & advertisement campaigns [1].
This all barely scratches the surface, too, especially these days where you have platforms like Google and Meta enabling genocides, mass political interference and pushing things like crypto scams, gambling ads and other similarly heinous and harmful shit to the entire internet.
The TL;DR of all of this is that yes, advertisements absolutely are psychological warfare. They have been and continue to be used for absolutely vile and heinous activities, and the advertisers employ huge teams of people to ensure that their mass influence machine runs smoothly, overtaking everyone's minds slowly but surely with nothing but pure lies fabricated solely to sell people products they absolutely do not, and will never need.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v1Yg6XejyE
> I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind
I do. I think it's a form of mind rape. You're trying to read something and suddenly you've got corporations inserting their brands and jingles and taglines into your mind without your consent. That's unacceptable.
> attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things
No. Attention is a cognitive function. It has none of the properties of currency.
These corporations are sending you stuff for free. They are hoping you will pay attention to the ads. At no point did they charge you any money. You are not obligated to make their advertising campaigns a success.
They are taking a risk. They are assuming you will pay attention. We are entirely within our rights to deny them their payoff. They sent you stuff for free with noise and garbage attached. You can trash the garbage and filter out the noise. They have only themselves to blame.
Not mind rape, actual rape.
Can you elaborate a bit? Why would that make my attention more valuable than other's?
If you are a paying subscriber, you are self-identifying as (likely) a higher net-worth. The problem for ad platforms allowing paid opt-out is that the most valuable users leave the network.
Then they have to go to advertisers and say, “advertise on our network where all the wealthier people are not.” A brand like Tiffany’s or Rolex (both huge advertisers) aren’t going to opt into that.
A YouTube subscription doesn’t exactly break the bank. Being able to afford it doesn’t make you wealthy.
Apart from that, you can bet that YouTube is pricing it in a way that they aren’t losing out compared to ad revenue.
It's a decent chunk of change for the sole purpose of avoiding ads on a single platform that barely pays the people actually producing the content. If you're looking to access premium content and YouTube Music, it's a slightly better value proposition (but only slightly, because YTM sucks, especially compared to what GPM used to be). For that ~$120 a year, you could buy a bunch of Steam games to occupy the same amount of time as your YT habit. Or you could buy a sub to services like Nebula which actually pay content creators decently. Or you could buy an external hard drive, install yt-dlp, and embrace Talk Like A Pirate Day, Groundhog Day-style.
I mean, yeah, if you don’t actually get much use out of YouTube, then it might not be worth it to you. But that’s the same for all streaming services. And I wasn’t commenting on whether it’s worth it or not, which of course is subjective, but on how big an expense it is in absolute terms. The former doesn’t relate to the “higher net worth ads” argument, the latter does.
Personally I do like YouTube Music, due to all the user-uploaded content that isn’t available on other platforms.
$12 is a week of chicken thighs, man. It's enough gas to make $60-$80 running UberEats orders. In America. In "absolute terms", it's $100+ dollars a year to turn off ads on a single platform for content the creators are compensated pennies for.
People who choose that without much thought - because it's barely an expense for them - are definitely tending towards "higher net worth" nationally, let alone globally. A lot of those people just don't realize it, because the entire point of seeking that kind of status is so that they can enter a socioeconomic bubble and not have to care about annoyances (like advertising).
Because by paying you are demonstrating you have more than enough disposable income to waste on their extortion. You're paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the richer echelons of the market. You're basically doing their marketing job for them and paying for the privilege.
At some point some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to sit down and notice just how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to paying customers like you. It's simply a matter of time.
Take a third option. Don't pay them and block their ads. Block their data collection too. It's your computer, you are in control.
You gotta love the mental gymnastics people will go through to convince themselves that not paying and blocking ads is the morally correct thing to do.
If you truly have those beliefs the right moral action is to not use YouTube at all but god forbid you'd have to make any sort of sacrifice.
I don't use Youtube at all, but I keep thinking I'm missing out and should make the effort to find a way to circumvent tracking. I can't see that the morality points to an obligation to absorb adverts. There can be no contract on the basis of what your mind must do.
Edit: let's step through this. If I use a towel placed over the computer to block ads, that's morally the same as using blocking software, I think? If I block the ads by putting my fingers in my ears and staring at the ceiling, also the same thing, morally. If I block them by watching them in a negative frame of mind, saying that I dislike ads and won't do what they suggest, I'm still doing the bad thing, the same as using an ad blocker - if it is a bad thing. My obligation, if it is an obligation, is to be receptive. Otherwise what, it's a sort of mind-fraud?
Adding: advertisements use as many hacks as possible to grab your attention. You could broadly categorize things that behave in this way as akin to a) a baby's cries (attention-seeking by something that absolutely requires your assistance), b) an alarm (attention-seeking by something that seeks to warn you), or c) being accosted (attention-seeking by something that seeks to harm you for its own benefit). Which are advertisements most closely aligned with? Is it the same across all advertisements, or do intentions vary? People likely assign varying levels of morality to the above examples; does advertising inherit the morality of the most closely aligned example?
It is still my right to murder to uphold your lack of morals
There is nothing immoral about this at all. They're the ones who chose to send people videos for free, gambling on the notion that people would look at the ads. Nobody is obligated to make their unwarranted assumptions a reality. They are as entitled to our attention as a gambler is entitled to a jackpot.
If someone gives you an ad filled magazine, you can rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash, leaving only the articles you actually want to read. Same principle applies here. If some random person on the street gives you a propaganda pamphlet, are you obligated to read it just because some businessman paid for it? Of course not.
The point is most people will never pay. That makes the Adblock/anti-adblock war inevitable for them. If you can afford it, you sidestep it. If you can’t or won’t, you don’t. Pretending there is some point where those folks would pay is a little delusional in my view.
I'm not pretending. I know most people won't pay. The point is it doesn't matter.
They're giving their stuff away for free instead of charging money for it. They gambled on the notion that people would "pay" by watching ads. Unfortunately for them, attention is not currency to pay for services with. We will resist their attempts to monetize our cognitive functions. The blocking of advertising is self defense.
They have absolutely nobody but themselves and their own greed to blame. Instead of charging money up front like an honest business, they decided to tap into that juicy mass market by giving away free sfuff. Their thinking goes: if I give them free videos with ads, then they will look at the ads and I will get paid. That's magical thinking. There is no such deal in place. We are not obligated to look at the ads at all. They don't get to cry about their gamble not paying off.
> They have absolutely nobody but themselves and their own greed to blame
They’re one of the most profitable media platforms on the planet. They’ll be fine. Nobody is crying. There are just willing participants—as you say, on both sides—in what I consider a pretty silly battle one can opt out of with a small amount of money.
Youtube premium has remained adfree as far as I know.
Best to try it out yourself. I can't watch Youtube with Ads ever anymore.
If a 100% Ad-free youtube premium at the current price point ever went away, something would have to change about the ads.
Nah, Firefox with ublock origin is better than giving money to google.
You also give money to the creators you watch by watching ads or watching with YouTube premium.
You also can't block ads on iPhones, which a majority of the developed world uses. My girlfriend has never watched a YouTube video on something other than an Apple device for example.
I'd rather send money to the people I want to support than fund a middleman
> which a majority of the developed world uses
... the USA? It's not a majority in any other country that I'm aware of
I've got a Eurocentric view though, I have e.g. no idea if Singapore or China has a majority of Apple users or where you draw the line on 'developed' (critique on the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Factfulness&oldid...)
>You also can't block ads on iPhones, which a majority of the developed world uses. My girlfriend has never watched a YouTube video on something other than an Apple device for example.
People really live like this... ? Like those who watch movies on their phones lmao.
Also, Brave works on iphone -> m.youtube.com adfree :)
Then again I went years not using conditioner and moisturiser for my skin, only deo... We all need tips from people who know better you know. (Im white.)
I get an ad-free YouTube experience for $0 with software. Why do you pay for it?
Because I want to actually support content creators. I also want it to be more normalized to pay for things vs having ad supported content.
I don't think you're normalizing ad-supported content when running an ad blocker
As for paying for the content you consume, most of the costs aren't on Google's side. I can understand paying for Youtube as a shortcut to hopefully giving some pennies to each person you watch, though, at least for those with no moral objection to making Google's/Youtube's monopoly in online video stronger
Do you think giving money to the world's largest ad agency will encourage them to change their business model?
Their business model is already in line with my values. I give them money and in exchange I get an ad-free experience. They don't need to change.
I'm not aware that you can pay for Google Search. That they have a paid tier for Youtube is probably to cater to another group of people rather than to "align with your values" and encourage people to actually pay for things online
If you care about whether content is ad supported or not, then Google are behind most of the world's ad supported content, and need to change, irrespective of your own transaction, unless you think transactions like that will change them. That's why I asked. It would be nice if it worked.
Then subscribe to their Patreon instead of paying YouTube.
I was a bit surprised to find that Patreon also keeps a pretty large commission. But, yeah, at least it's not owned by Google and what else are you going to do when most creators list this as their only option. I'm just confused when there's easy options like sending cash directly to their IBAN or using a nonprofit like Liberapay (they just have their own donation page and, instead of taking a cut, make money that way: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay)
Folks be adopting all sorts of irrational arguments just so they can defend their habits. Do you also prefer having middlemen in other areas such as healthcare and education?
Creators can just as easily pop a Patreon or BuyMeACoffee these days in a few clicks. In fact, most creators constantly admit that Google pays them peanuts for their view counts. But support the leviathan for reasons unknown I guess.
I also back people on patreon. Isn't it irrational to expect something for free? If you don't like the service or it doesn't align with your values, simply don't use it.
Also, isn't patreon also a middleman by your definition?
Patreon and BuyMeACoffee are middlemen...
Plus you can block shorts. You can't do that with premium.
I got fed up and stopped paying for premium, now I get no shorts and no ads, it's a win-win.
They rolled out the Chrome "kill adblockers" update globally then unleashed the new wave of YouTube "anti-adblock" a month later. While in a literal losing court case thats suggesting Chrome be split out from Google as a whole. They must be so confident nothing can touch them.
I pay for YouTube premium for my family and there haven’t been any injected ads at all. Only the ones that the video themselves have in, which are also very annoying.
I can’t speak for the future, but I’ve had this for probably 5 years and I haven’t seen a single ad, only the videos that I’ve asked to see.
That's what sponsorblock is for
Same experience.
The family plan is nice to share with family to reduce how much everyone's exposed to ads.
In-Video sponsorships are a pain, sometimes they are chaptered out enough and can be skipped.
If I could pay for an ad-free google search I probably would. Off the shelf, not doing API calls.
<cough> SponsorBlock (https://sponsor.ajay.app/) <cough>
It works amazingly well provided a video's been out for at least a half hour or so. It also has the option to skip the "like and subscribe" parts too.
I also tried the https://dearrow.ajay.app/ extension to replace clickbait titles, but decided I'd rather know when a channel/video is too clickbait-y so I can block/unsubscribe.
I wish many of these suggestion worked for casting.
Browser extensions don't fix a chromecast skipping ads, for example. It'd have to be written into the casting client, I'd presume.
Yeah, this can be a consideration, and also a non-issue with Youtube Premium
If you simply add a `-` (en-dash) between the `t` & 2nd `u` in the URL, your viewing experience automatically skips all external ads, without login/premium.
Syntax: www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w
This also works for playlists, and auto-repeats.
edit: is this getting downvoted because it works and people are worried this service might disappear should this bypass become too popular..? Just curious.
No judgement but I would love to hear from Google employees who worked on this. Do they believe they are improving the internet in any way?
There is also an argument to be made that adblocking is immoral. I think the idea is pervasive enough to fill a team of willing people, especially if you pay them 100k/year to at least go along with it for the time being
I haven't made up my own mind about it yet, just that this might be a factor in why one would move the facilitating technology backwards in this way (and forwards in other ways, apparently: some people in the thread are reporting that uBlock Lite is faster. Not that I can tell the difference between a clean Firefox without add-ons (I regularly use that for work reasons) and a Firefox with uBlock Origin (my daily driver) except if the page is bogged down from all the ads)
I don't think ads are immoral but I think the way FAANG does ads and tracking is immoral. Google does not do enough to vet ads for malicious activity such as scams and viruses. The FBI in recent years has started recommending an adblocker for that reason.
"Job's shit but pays a lot"
[dead]
I use Safari.
I honestly thought reading this blog post was quite refreshing and I had a little smirk at the caption of the photo. Thank you for sharing!
Author here, thank you! A lot of the comments here are more general arguments about MV3 and Google (which I kinda expected) but I'm glad see someone who liked my post :)
[flagged]
Our ideals do not simply change the fact that chrome and its derivatives are the most used browser by a big margin at this moment. And, looking at how this came to be and how things were with IE before it, they are going to stay a bit longer still. Stop being in denial about the way most people function: they don't care, they will eat the most convenient slop they are being served and not question it much. Because it doesn't matter as long as it allows you to browse your socials.
I hate to use this word but this is a huge amount of projection in response to the comment you replied to, which did not seem to make any of the points you ascribed to it.
> unless you're still using the spying machine
So a computer?
If you use a free operating system https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html then you have less chance of being spied on. At least you can check
Yes you can, but do you?
I don’t think they need to for there to be value. Sure, maybe there’s spyware in free software that they haven’t found. But we know that these advertising companies are putting e-stalking code into all their products right now. Trading that certainty for an unknown is a net benefit.
Tracking typically works through fingerprinting. Using free software alone won't magically protect you against this, every website's a program with JavaScript on. Lots of free software is also multiplatform. You'll want to apply additional defensive measures, but you can apply those even on Windows, running Firefox or Chrome. Mind you, you'll then stand out for using those defensive measures.
I generally appreciate source code access and independent auditability, and I do have an appreciation for the intent. But the way people discuss these topics is downright embarrassing, which is what I was hoping to shake out of this. "Just install Linux bro, it's better than pussy bro. What, u still got dat spyin machine goin on?? [links a 30 minute Mutahar video with him faffing about with some technologically trivial bollocks he visibly barely understands]" Please. I think it's pretty agreeable at least that this about as far removed from well supported decision making as one can casually get to be.
Most people switching to Linux and free software alternatives in hopes of better privacy do so based on vibes, not on any rigorous research. And that's fine. Just wish they didn't pretend it wasn't the case.
If I say yes, you’ll just call me an extremist and make fun of me. If I say no, you’ll call me a hypocrite. So I refuse to answer
> At least you can check
I don't think they enable me to inspect e.g. my CPU's firmware, or that they're able to provide any guarantees about the hardware itself.
So it still just makes for a large shopping bag sized trust-me-bro box executing hundreds of billions of instructions a second. But now with a false sense of comfort.
I'm more than happy to concede on this being overly dramatic though, provided you concede on having been engaging in a similarly unserious hyperbole of your own.
I don’t think that free software is an unserious hyperbole, actually. (It really does exist, even though big tech wants you to think it does not). But yes of course the hardware must be free too, at least insofar as it does not impede on our freedom to understand what it is doing to the software we run on it, and the firmware must also be free software
> I don’t think that free software is an unserious hyperbole, actually.
Me neither, considering that doesn't even work grammatically. Very clearly I was referring to "unless you're still using the spying machine" being the unserious hyperbole.
> It really does exist, even though big tech wants you to think it does not.
I must have been continually missing "big tech's" efforts on that front. They do engage in other efforts that go against either the spirit or the proliferation of software freedom, but what you describe I legitimately have not witnessed at all.
I did not even realize my ublock origin was turned off. My HOST FILE script did the same service: https://expatcircle.com/cms/privacy-advanced-ublock-origin-w...
More concerning is that social fixer was turned off: https://socialfixer.com/
MFGA Make Facebook Great again ;-)
Changing your hosts file helps but it would only block hostnames primarily used for ads and trackers - it wouldn't address those trackers and ads loaded from hostnames shared with actual content. The more sophisticated sites will proxy their tracking and ads through their main app:
E.g. www.cnn.com/ads.js
I prefer having multiple layers just in case anything drops off:
1. VPN DNS / AdGuard local cached DNS 2. uBlock Origin
It's like wearing two condoms (but it feels better than natural).
Why the downvote?
Chrome full on blocked uBlock Origin (and others) this week. There is still four flags [1] you can play with that will allow you to re-enable it again, but this is a losing battle of course. The inevitable is coming.
Nothing comes close to Safari battery life on MacOS, followed by chrome, followed by firefox in last place (with all its other issues - those claiming otherwise have stockholm syndrome). I've tried taking Orion for a spin which should offer the battery life of Safari with the flexibility of running FF and chrome extensions - but it hasn't stuck yet. As much as I'd like to use FF, I really don't want to shave 10-20% (?) off a battery charge cycle when I spend 90% of my day in the browser.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1lx59m0/resto...
>>with all its other issues - those claiming otherwise have stockholm syndrome
What issues? Works just as well as Chrome ever did (before they started blocking extensions at least) for me.
And I value FF way more than an hour of battery.
All day every day my computer works fine.
That difference in battery, if it exists, doesn't actually materially manifest anywhere. But the difference between FF and anything else matters basically every minute all day.
On top of that, even if I ever did actually run into the difference, needing to plug in before I would have anyway, it's an annoyance vs a necessity. The ability to control my own browser is frankly just not negotiable. It doesn't actually matter if it were less convenient in some other way, it's simply a base level requirement and anything that doesn't provide that doesn't matter what other qualities it might have.
You might say "a computer that's dead doesn't work at all" but that never actually happens. I'd need an 8 hour bus ride with no seat power to get to the point where that last missing hour would actually leave me with no computer for an hour, and that would need to be a commute that happens twice every day for it to even matter.
For me that's just not the reasonable priority.
This should lead to a full-on antitrust breakup of Google. Period.
They own the web.
I can build my business brand, own my own dot com, but then have to pay Google ad extortion money to not have my competitors by ads well above my domain name. And of course the address bar now does search instead of going to the appropriate place.
Google is a scourge.