This is the right answer, and more people (especially technical people like frequent HN) should be pointing this out.
"What ads? Oh you must be running Chrome" needs to be the common refrain.
Really hope this ends up being a surprising tide shift. Firefox has dipped really hard in marketshare, but there's no reason it can't start to gain again/grow steadily.
It's really too bad the Firefox tent wasn't big enough for all the alternative browsers that exist (though of course they're not scratching the surface of real usage either). I skipped the whole Arc wave and I'm glad I did -- it's a distraction from Firefox.
its got stronger privacy out of the box than stock firefox, modern design, big fan of vertical tabs myself and it now has basic tab folders if enabled by flags. ubo/bpc both work nicely.
I left Firefox a few months ago because there was a bug in their shader cache, so a lot of stuff was laggy. I was willing to put up with until I got a 360 camera and videos were playing at like 2 fps. This was about six months ago, it’s possible that it’s been fixed, I haven’t checked.
I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.
That doesn't solve the issue of ManifestV2 being removed though, Brave will have it removed at the same time as Chrome, when it's pulled from the code base
nar001 is right. Once it is pulled from Chromium, Brave can no longer support it. Although, Brave's adblocking is just as good out if the box IMO, and it is implemented without the need for Manifest V2, so it will continue to function
They absolutely can continue to support it, that is the entire point of open source. What Chrome or Chromium does by default may make it more difficult, but doesn’t mean it is something that “can no longer” be supported.
I'm not sure that that's realistic. A browser in 2025 is arguably more complicated than an operating system, and requires fairly large and expensive teams of engineers to maintain and grow.
Google has billions and billions of dollars to throw at Chromium; I doubt Brave has anywhere near that kind of money. The longer it stays fully forked from core Chromium, the harder it's going to be to pull in updates, and the more expensive it will be to maintain.
I really am curious if that will hold up once bigger refactorings make the necessary internal APIs for ManifestV2 unavailable. Then Brave needs to maintain those APIs themselves, and every time downporting changes from the open source base becomes harder and thus more expensive in time and money.
I agree fully. We need to keep the idea of fully branching off from an open source project alive. But I also suspect that Google has incentives to make it extra complicated and difficult to maintain a fork of their codebase with adblocking implemented on top of it, over time. Resources are often very limited in open source and often comes down to one or a few people.
Sure, but there is a limit to bullshit I'm willing to put up with. When that bullshit level is past its threshold I don't think you can blame someone for jumping ship.
These days the term "woke" has lost almost all meaning. It used to mean being "awake" i.e. aware of socio-economic factors in society. Today, as far as I can tell, it simply refers to whatever the big corporations/alt-right doesn't like. Just like how they refer to anything left of oligarchy as "communism". To me them calling themselves "very woke" reads as "we are against anti-human behavior", which is a good thing.
I never had firefox pop up and tell me to attend a drag show or that I need to surf more diverse websites than my usual sports and news sites. how is it woke? I don't care what mozilla the org does. They jsut took a big revenue hit because of the decision against google, they won't have much money for any political endeavors other than maybe privacy and free speech on the web very soon
It crashes every few days for me and has since the last several major releases... enough that I can't rely on it anymore. (UG) Chromium has never crashed on me once.
Did you look at the FAQ page they created afterwards?
'do not sell user data' is too broad legally. It's a challenge in some jurisdictions. So they removed that. But it's not because they sell the data. They do have partnerships (like they did Pocket for example). In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
> In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
Correction, they said personal data, which if you go by the EU's definition means "any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual".
Which wouldn't be "anonymous stats", and can you give an example of a jurisdiction where sharing "anonymous stats" would go under selling personal data?
And is "doesn't sell your data to advertisers" also too broad? Because they removed that part too.
There are many cases where "anonymous" data can be de-anonymized, mostly if the stats contain outliers or multiple small groups that can be combined to uniquely identify an individual. "Any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual" (emphasis mine) implies that if there exists a way to de-anonymize any individual in the dataset then the dataset is PII.
> It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Specifically,
> Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love.
If you consider GDPR, even the suggestions on the new tab could send data to third parties and wouldn't be okay with this.
Any request done to a third party server, would send them your IP which is PII under GDPR.
> Why go by EU's definition when it's used globally? If it was a single location, or a single law like GDPR, that'd be easy to reword.
I tried to look up Mozilla's definition for "personal data" first but could only find "personal information":
> For us, "personal information" means information which either directly identifies you (like your name, email address, or billing information) or can be reasonably linked or combined to identify you (like an account identification number or IP address).
And again, what's a jurisdiction where sharing anonymous stats would conflict with "we don't sell your personal data"?
They mentioned CCPA as an example but they define a sale as the "selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration"
But they define "personal information" as "personal information includes any data that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked to you or your household, directly or indirectly" so "anonymous stats" wouldn't conflict with that, would it?
But Firefox is so dependent on google (money, code) that it's absolutely impossible they won't also remove manifest v2. It will just take a little while, for appearances...
About a year ago FF said they had no current plans to remove V2 support, and if they did, they'd give at least 12 month notice. Which to me is basically language saying they absolutely will remove it at some point, otherwise they'd just say "no we'll never remove it, fuck google".
> Just as before, Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy will continue to be exempt from any browser changes until at least June 2025. Starting in June, the branch for Chrome 139 will begin, in which support for Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from Chrome. Unlike the previous changes to disable Manifest V2 extensions which gradually rolled out to users, this change will impact all users on Chrome 139 at once. As a result, Chrome 138 is the final version of Chrome to support Manifest V2 extensions (when paired with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability key). You can find the release information about Chrome 138 and 139, include ChromeOS's LTS support, on the Chromium release schedule
The plausible deniability reason is that Manifest V2 gave way too much power to extensions, which is true.
... except that we already execute remote JavaScript on our browsers constantly. And we do it, usually, unconsentually. Versus extensions, which are a deliberate thing you need to install.
HN was so hyped when chrome came out. Pushing it hard. A few people were saying, um guys, chrome is made by a company that sells ads, this is not going to work out well.
Chrome launched in an era where IE didn't stop the gazillion pop ups and crashed pretty often losing dozens of windows, before tabbed browsing and with no restore. Firefox was a resource hog due to memory fragmentation.
Google was also the company that espoused, "Do no evil" and contributed a bunch to open source. A lot has changed since then.
Children who were born when Chrome came out can vote in the midterms next year. If your prediction takes as long to mature as a newborn baby, it's maybe _too_ prescient.
Seems everyone is releasing a browser nowadays. (Not literally, this is a figure of speech.)
Perhaps uBlock/uMatrix needs its own browser.
Mozilla is "all in" on surveillance advertising. From its press releases and strategic initiatives (for lack of a better term), it appears to believe online advertising is essential for the www to exist. Whereas, it has never stated that "ad blockers" are essential for the www to exist.
Yeah but it's always a fork of firefox or chrome. I have seen nothing to indicate they are not all in on surveillance advertising. They are looking into "anonymous group advertising" by interest, now can someday reverse engineer that and figure out that you like boutique spicy pickles? maybe? I have my doubts.
Among the neater features of the full-featured uBO is its ability to load userscripts from external sources.
While there's much talk about uBlock Origin with Mv2 other losses include the last remaining Javascript managers for Chromium like ScriptSafe that have no Mv3 counterpart.
Has anyone made the switch to firefox? I’d be sad to lose my nice google profile integration to chrome and the password manager. And whenever I try Firefox it feels a little bit jankier and slower, but that might just be in my head
I did, a few months ago when they disabled uBlock on my Chrome.
The experience has been a delight. It runs smoothly, I can customize it more than Chrome (compact mode being one example [1]), and with the official iCloud Passwords extension I get to use the same password manager I use on my iPhone.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Best part being, if I need something that Chrome provides and Firefox doesn’t, I can potentially implement it myself, and contribute to a proper open source project while I’m at it.
I gave Firefox a try for a month, but ran into enough issues that I ended up switching back to Chrome about a week ago. Here are some of the problems I encountered that I can recall at the moment and doesn't include the many issues I managed to fix:
Copying content doesn’t always work on certain sites. For example, you can't copy an image from Photopea.com, which I rely on frequently. Saving the image to a file instead slows down my workflow too much. This is a known bug which has been around for a long time.
Password autofill was inconsistent. It didn’t work on some sites, like when accessing a Pi-hole dashboard. Maybe there’s an about:config tweak to fix this, but by that point I had already spent a lot of time troubleshooting other issues.
The bookmark menu closes after opening a single bookmark. If you like opening multiple bookmarks in a row, you have to keep reopening the menu and navigating to the next one each time, which is frustrating.
Twitch videos loaded slowly. I managed to fix this by deleting a specific file, re-creating it as a blank file, and setting it to read-only. This appears to be a known bug the developers are aware of.
Loading custom extensions is inconvenient. You can only load them temporarily unless you launch Firefox with a command-line option for each extension.
You will lose the password manager, but switch to 1Password -- it's way better anyway. Also, if you use Android, Firefox Mobile, with ad-blocking there, is the real killer advantage of Firefox.
It's a little bit slower, but I've been using Firefox on all my personal machines for ten years and finally switched my work web dev machine when Firefox introduced tab groups recently.
It's fine. My issues with it are few and far between. It's a little worse on android but small price to pay for ublock and dark reader imo
I've used Firefox for a few months now and it's generally fine, but noticeably slow and janky compared to Chrome. Several websites just didn't work right and required Chrome. The dev tools seem unreliable, with the network tab often failing to capture requests correctly.
You can export your passwords from chrome as a CSV and then import them into Firefox's password manager. Although, best would be using an external password manager that always keeps your passwords encrypted, like bitwarden. Remember to delete the file (shred even) and reboot so your passwords aren't hanging around in disk/memory. Same goes for bookmarks, although those are less sensitive.
Yes. Firefox has its own password manager and profile system. Once I copied the chrome settings to firefox, I closed chrome and rarely open it these days.
Sure, years ago, and it's been great. I do keep Vivaldi around as a Chrome-variant for those sites that need it, and appreciate their general approach. However, Firefox has the things I need, e.g.:
- Various integrations, such as password managers.
- uBlock Origin
- Temporary containers - so even those sites that save cookies, are really saving them ephemerally until that container closes.
I hear this and I also hear the lack of experience with enterprise (let alone commercial) software development.
Five lines of code still requires one dev, one PM, and one manager. It still requires security reviews, audits, and so on. There are no free lines of code in a commercial code base.
It’s the principle. When they’ve shown they’ll jank one extension because it doesn’t align with their business model, they’ve shown they’ll jank any extension in the future as they see fit.
Same. I didn't even enable complete blocking just default one. I'm not too concerned about invisible trackers, I use meta products daily. Just the visible ads.
I fucking love how they are not just deleting it from my addons, but FORCING ME TO DELETE. They just dropped pop up "uhm.... it's unsafe, so... WE RECOMEND TO DELETE IT", and then won't let me to turn it on again.
You might as well use uBlock Origin Lite. The point is that all of these options are less powerful because of the limitations of manifest v3. Instead of downgrading the effectiveness, they’ve opted to release a separate less powerful option so that it’s clear to the end user that it’s less effective than what was available with manifest v2.
I tried to move to brave, but I'm really disappointed in it. It frequently crashes, and it's slow to create new tabs/windows. The only reason I stick to it is due to the browser having ad block built in
Yeah this report is a bit hard to believe, I have hundreds of tabs open in brave constantly and they have a native tab suspend/hibernate that works great for tabs you haven’t accessed in a while. And my favorite small feature ‘force paste’ for all those inputs with janky paste blocking “security” features
Firefox is still there, but Mozilla is adding AI slop to it too. I’d love to see an extension to disable all that stuff, or ideally get rid of it and make it an extension
No worries! We'd only ever be discussing this if governments hadn't provided a way to access their services, most of which are only available on the internet.
Can you imagine just how stupid it would be for governments not to provide another software for accessing it? If they didn't provide something, internet giants would be able to dictate their only means to communicate with citizens. Influence elections. Even lock out governments from their own countries. How moronic would a government need to be to risk that happening? Plus it would be unrealistically cruel as well, because it would of course deny access to the poor.
So no worries. Governments care about people. That's what they keep saying. So they have surely prevented something like this from happening, or provide an alternative.
Moved to firefox and I am glad I did, I want to use a browser that respects my privacy choices
This is the right answer, and more people (especially technical people like frequent HN) should be pointing this out.
"What ads? Oh you must be running Chrome" needs to be the common refrain.
Really hope this ends up being a surprising tide shift. Firefox has dipped really hard in marketshare, but there's no reason it can't start to gain again/grow steadily.
It's really too bad the Firefox tent wasn't big enough for all the alternative browsers that exist (though of course they're not scratching the surface of real usage either). I skipped the whole Arc wave and I'm glad I did -- it's a distraction from Firefox.
Sadly more than just ads. my ublock/pihole rules is mostly tracking ( +80% ) and very little ad rules.
Highly recommend Zen Browser: https://github.com/zen-browser
What do you like about it?
its got stronger privacy out of the box than stock firefox, modern design, big fan of vertical tabs myself and it now has basic tab folders if enabled by flags. ubo/bpc both work nicely.
…yet another Chromium browser though - supporting the Google browser monopoly.
I left Firefox a few months ago because there was a bug in their shader cache, so a lot of stuff was laggy. I was willing to put up with until I got a 360 camera and videos were playing at like 2 fps. This was about six months ago, it’s possible that it’s been fixed, I haven’t checked.
I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.
That doesn't solve the issue of ManifestV2 being removed though, Brave will have it removed at the same time as Chrome, when it's pulled from the code base
Brave have not promised to continue to support uBlock Origin ?
nar001 is right. Once it is pulled from Chromium, Brave can no longer support it. Although, Brave's adblocking is just as good out if the box IMO, and it is implemented without the need for Manifest V2, so it will continue to function
They absolutely can continue to support it, that is the entire point of open source. What Chrome or Chromium does by default may make it more difficult, but doesn’t mean it is something that “can no longer” be supported.
I'm not sure that that's realistic. A browser in 2025 is arguably more complicated than an operating system, and requires fairly large and expensive teams of engineers to maintain and grow.
Google has billions and billions of dollars to throw at Chromium; I doubt Brave has anywhere near that kind of money. The longer it stays fully forked from core Chromium, the harder it's going to be to pull in updates, and the more expensive it will be to maintain.
I really am curious if that will hold up once bigger refactorings make the necessary internal APIs for ManifestV2 unavailable. Then Brave needs to maintain those APIs themselves, and every time downporting changes from the open source base becomes harder and thus more expensive in time and money.
I agree fully. We need to keep the idea of fully branching off from an open source project alive. But I also suspect that Google has incentives to make it extra complicated and difficult to maintain a fork of their codebase with adblocking implemented on top of it, over time. Resources are often very limited in open source and often comes down to one or a few people.
Brave has a built in ad blocker.
I know, but for some reason I am adding uBlock Origin as well.
This is a good reason to stick with LTS vesions of firefox
Every browser has occasional big issues. If you haven't seen one yet in (insert browser name here) then you just haven't been around long enough.
Sure, but there is a limit to bullshit I'm willing to put up with. When that bullshit level is past its threshold I don't think you can blame someone for jumping ship.
Would it be possible to just look at the videos in a different browser?
Of course I could but I don’t really want to do that.
I wish Firefox would at least implement a basic adblocker on iOS.
Without it, browsing is unbearable. I wonder if they're not allowed to do so because of their contract with Google?
I agree; i use Firefox on all my Desktop devices. But on iOS it’s the worst. I never use it, except to quickly check for a (synced) bookmark.
Ditto!
NextDNS [0] has proven very useful for me on iOS. Firefox is 99% ad-free. Only for YouTube do I switch to Brave Browser.
I use Firefox on other devices and use the sync functionality so prefer to use it where possible.
My home router (Draytek) is also configured to force any connected devices to use NextDNS too.
Definitely worth the €20 annual subscription.
[0] https://nextdns.io
Firefox Focus can be used as an ad-blocker.
Go with Pale Moon, if you want a privacy-respecting fork of Firefox.
I like librewolf, but it has made similar choices as a fork
Apparently no one remembers when Firefox changed their terms of service literally this year to become adversarial toward their own users.
Librewolf is the way to go now.
The binaries aren't signed… :’(
Also, it seems quite vague to me exactly who/what company/entity is behind it.
No thanks. Their own devs have gladly called the project "very woke", and a "certainly quite political project".
Wow, a political free software project? Who could imagine such a thing.
Anyway sounds like you're trying to convince me to use it
You’ll find that has absolutely nothing to do with the way you choose to use the free software they produce for your benefit.
These days the term "woke" has lost almost all meaning. It used to mean being "awake" i.e. aware of socio-economic factors in society. Today, as far as I can tell, it simply refers to whatever the big corporations/alt-right doesn't like. Just like how they refer to anything left of oligarchy as "communism". To me them calling themselves "very woke" reads as "we are against anti-human behavior", which is a good thing.
I never had firefox pop up and tell me to attend a drag show or that I need to surf more diverse websites than my usual sports and news sites. how is it woke? I don't care what mozilla the org does. They jsut took a big revenue hit because of the decision against google, they won't have much money for any political endeavors other than maybe privacy and free speech on the web very soon
so? is the browser any good?
It crashes every few days for me and has since the last several major releases... enough that I can't rely on it anymore. (UG) Chromium has never crashed on me once.
Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration? I've heard some graphics drivers can be crashy when apps push the boundaries.
I have had crashes with Firefox in a long time.
^have not
Errrr....https://winaero.com/mozilla-has-removed-the-do-not-sell-user...
Did you look at the FAQ page they created afterwards?
'do not sell user data' is too broad legally. It's a challenge in some jurisdictions. So they removed that. But it's not because they sell the data. They do have partnerships (like they did Pocket for example). In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
> In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
Correction, they said personal data, which if you go by the EU's definition means "any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual".
Which wouldn't be "anonymous stats", and can you give an example of a jurisdiction where sharing "anonymous stats" would go under selling personal data?
And is "doesn't sell your data to advertisers" also too broad? Because they removed that part too.
There are many cases where "anonymous" data can be de-anonymized, mostly if the stats contain outliers or multiple small groups that can be combined to uniquely identify an individual. "Any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual" (emphasis mine) implies that if there exists a way to de-anonymize any individual in the dataset then the dataset is PII.
> which if you go by the EU's definition
Why go by EU's definition when it's used globally? If it was a single location, or a single law like GDPR, that'd be easy to reword.
From the page they launched, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
> It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Specifically,
> Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love.
If you consider GDPR, even the suggestions on the new tab could send data to third parties and wouldn't be okay with this.
Any request done to a third party server, would send them your IP which is PII under GDPR.
> Why go by EU's definition when it's used globally? If it was a single location, or a single law like GDPR, that'd be easy to reword.
I tried to look up Mozilla's definition for "personal data" first but could only find "personal information":
> For us, "personal information" means information which either directly identifies you (like your name, email address, or billing information) or can be reasonably linked or combined to identify you (like an account identification number or IP address).
And again, what's a jurisdiction where sharing anonymous stats would conflict with "we don't sell your personal data"?
They mentioned CCPA as an example but they define a sale as the "selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration"
But they define "personal information" as "personal information includes any data that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked to you or your household, directly or indirectly" so "anonymous stats" wouldn't conflict with that, would it?
But Firefox is so dependent on google (money, code) that it's absolutely impossible they won't also remove manifest v2. It will just take a little while, for appearances...
It seems disingenuous to penalize a company for something that hasn't happened and is based on an assumption of interest.
In the same way we should chastise the platforms that choose to enshitify, we should praise those that hold out.
About a year ago FF said they had no current plans to remove V2 support, and if they did, they'd give at least 12 month notice. Which to me is basically language saying they absolutely will remove it at some point, otherwise they'd just say "no we'll never remove it, fuck google".
I've moved to LibreWolf personally
There's still a way to load it under Chrome 138, but when Chrome 139 lands, that's when MV2 will finally be removed.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
> Just as before, Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy will continue to be exempt from any browser changes until at least June 2025. Starting in June, the branch for Chrome 139 will begin, in which support for Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from Chrome. Unlike the previous changes to disable Manifest V2 extensions which gradually rolled out to users, this change will impact all users on Chrome 139 at once. As a result, Chrome 138 is the final version of Chrome to support Manifest V2 extensions (when paired with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability key). You can find the release information about Chrome 138 and 139, include ChromeOS's LTS support, on the Chromium release schedule
In current chromium source, it seems still possible to force manifest v2 extensions with `kAllowLegacyMV2Extensions` feature flag?
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
This however is a good time to export any extension preferences, because once it's removed you won't be able to access them.
Advertising company forcibly disables software that stops the spread of malware.
Why would they do that?
The plausible deniability reason is that Manifest V2 gave way too much power to extensions, which is true.
... except that we already execute remote JavaScript on our browsers constantly. And we do it, usually, unconsentually. Versus extensions, which are a deliberate thing you need to install.
Users clicks feed the creation of value
BRB, training an AI to find the optimal cat photos to promote to maximize ARPU.
Firefox is still a great browser with probably the best devtools.
Can you expand on the "best devtools" comparing to Chrome's?
HN was so hyped when chrome came out. Pushing it hard. A few people were saying, um guys, chrome is made by a company that sells ads, this is not going to work out well.
Chrome launched in an era where IE didn't stop the gazillion pop ups and crashed pretty often losing dozens of windows, before tabbed browsing and with no restore. Firefox was a resource hog due to memory fragmentation.
Google was also the company that espoused, "Do no evil" and contributed a bunch to open source. A lot has changed since then.
Children who were born when Chrome came out can vote in the midterms next year. If your prediction takes as long to mature as a newborn baby, it's maybe _too_ prescient.
Everyone was hyped when Chrome came out. This is hard to believe but the world was different 20 years ago
It's been a good 16 years, though.
Seems everyone is releasing a browser nowadays. (Not literally, this is a figure of speech.)
Perhaps uBlock/uMatrix needs its own browser.
Mozilla is "all in" on surveillance advertising. From its press releases and strategic initiatives (for lack of a better term), it appears to believe online advertising is essential for the www to exist. Whereas, it has never stated that "ad blockers" are essential for the www to exist.
I’m sure ublock keeps gorhill busy enough already. Maintaining a browser fork is a gargantuan task.
Yeah but it's always a fork of firefox or chrome. I have seen nothing to indicate they are not all in on surveillance advertising. They are looking into "anonymous group advertising" by interest, now can someday reverse engineer that and figure out that you like boutique spicy pickles? maybe? I have my doubts.
Not to defend chrome or chromium, there is a way for chrome users to use manifest v2 in version 138 and above. See the link below.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29...
For me, I choose not to manually update my ungoogled chromium to version 138 and above.
Made a switch to FF/Brave. I did try to embrace ads for a bit but that attempt expired within minutes.
Among the neater features of the full-featured uBO is its ability to load userscripts from external sources.
While there's much talk about uBlock Origin with Mv2 other losses include the last remaining Javascript managers for Chromium like ScriptSafe that have no Mv3 counterpart.
Has anyone made the switch to firefox? I’d be sad to lose my nice google profile integration to chrome and the password manager. And whenever I try Firefox it feels a little bit jankier and slower, but that might just be in my head
I did, a few months ago when they disabled uBlock on my Chrome.
The experience has been a delight. It runs smoothly, I can customize it more than Chrome (compact mode being one example [1]), and with the official iCloud Passwords extension I get to use the same password manager I use on my iPhone.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Best part being, if I need something that Chrome provides and Firefox doesn’t, I can potentially implement it myself, and contribute to a proper open source project while I’m at it.
1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...
I gave Firefox a try for a month, but ran into enough issues that I ended up switching back to Chrome about a week ago. Here are some of the problems I encountered that I can recall at the moment and doesn't include the many issues I managed to fix:
Copying content doesn’t always work on certain sites. For example, you can't copy an image from Photopea.com, which I rely on frequently. Saving the image to a file instead slows down my workflow too much. This is a known bug which has been around for a long time.
Password autofill was inconsistent. It didn’t work on some sites, like when accessing a Pi-hole dashboard. Maybe there’s an about:config tweak to fix this, but by that point I had already spent a lot of time troubleshooting other issues.
The bookmark menu closes after opening a single bookmark. If you like opening multiple bookmarks in a row, you have to keep reopening the menu and navigating to the next one each time, which is frustrating.
Twitch videos loaded slowly. I managed to fix this by deleting a specific file, re-creating it as a blank file, and setting it to read-only. This appears to be a known bug the developers are aware of.
Loading custom extensions is inconvenient. You can only load them temporarily unless you launch Firefox with a command-line option for each extension.
You will lose the password manager, but switch to 1Password -- it's way better anyway. Also, if you use Android, Firefox Mobile, with ad-blocking there, is the real killer advantage of Firefox.
No, switch to something open source like bitwarden or you'll just end up locked into a bad situation again.
I recommend Vaultwarden as a bitwarden server. It's pretty quick to set up and completely open source.
https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
It's a little bit slower, but I've been using Firefox on all my personal machines for ten years and finally switched my work web dev machine when Firefox introduced tab groups recently.
It's fine. My issues with it are few and far between. It's a little worse on android but small price to pay for ublock and dark reader imo
I've used Firefox for a few months now and it's generally fine, but noticeably slow and janky compared to Chrome. Several websites just didn't work right and required Chrome. The dev tools seem unreliable, with the network tab often failing to capture requests correctly.
I miss Chrome but won't go back without UBlock.
Hoping Kagi's Orion browser gets better.
You can export your passwords from chrome as a CSV and then import them into Firefox's password manager. Although, best would be using an external password manager that always keeps your passwords encrypted, like bitwarden. Remember to delete the file (shred even) and reboot so your passwords aren't hanging around in disk/memory. Same goes for bookmarks, although those are less sensitive.
Yes. Firefox has its own password manager and profile system. Once I copied the chrome settings to firefox, I closed chrome and rarely open it these days.
Sure, years ago, and it's been great. I do keep Vivaldi around as a Chrome-variant for those sites that need it, and appreciate their general approach. However, Firefox has the things I need, e.g.:
- Various integrations, such as password managers. - uBlock Origin - Temporary containers - so even those sites that save cookies, are really saving them ephemerally until that container closes.
Switching from chrome password manager to bitwarden is as easy as clicking export and then import.
uBlock Origin Lite is still there
Librewolf works fine for me. Comes with uBlock Origin installed.
Google. The Advertising Company.
Is edge also following suit?
In the past Microsoft said they would. It would be a large engineering effort to preserve Manifestv2
For microsoft its a joke to support. We are talking about _one hook_ into Chrome internals for declarativeNetRequest to work.
I hear this and I also hear the lack of experience with enterprise (let alone commercial) software development.
Five lines of code still requires one dev, one PM, and one manager. It still requires security reviews, audits, and so on. There are no free lines of code in a commercial code base.
This means Chrome is finally dead among most of the tech-savvy users.
yup, switched to firefox this morning
And unfortunately not a single great alternative as the better chromium forks don't plan to support it either...
I moved to, and pay for, Vivaldi. I want to be the customer.
what service by Vivaldi did you pay for?
I think uBO Lite works just fine for 99% of users.
It’s the principle. When they’ve shown they’ll jank one extension because it doesn’t align with their business model, they’ve shown they’ll jank any extension in the future as they see fit.
I’m voting with my feet.
They didn't yank an extension.
They yanked many, technically
Same. I didn't even enable complete blocking just default one. I'm not too concerned about invisible trackers, I use meta products daily. Just the visible ads.
Yeah, I switched a while ago and it’s has 0 impact on my browsing.
I fucking love how they are not just deleting it from my addons, but FORCING ME TO DELETE. They just dropped pop up "uhm.... it's unsafe, so... WE RECOMEND TO DELETE IT", and then won't let me to turn it on again.
Try Waterfox (if not Firefox), and UBlock Origin Lite if staying on Chrome.
so i use adguard in chrome now
You might as well use uBlock Origin Lite. The point is that all of these options are less powerful because of the limitations of manifest v3. Instead of downgrading the effectiveness, they’ve opted to release a separate less powerful option so that it’s clear to the end user that it’s less effective than what was available with manifest v2.
adguard is a way to go. their app kills these ads perfectly
Strange, still enabled and working for me.
Chrome 138.0.7204.101 uBlock Origin 1.65.0
It dies in 139
Social Fixer is gone too. What to do?
Install Firefox and add Social Fixer on there.
Brave?
I tried to move to brave, but I'm really disappointed in it. It frequently crashes, and it's slow to create new tabs/windows. The only reason I stick to it is due to the browser having ad block built in
What OS? I use it under Windows 10 and it's never crashed or been slow. I';ve never had more than six tabs open, though.
Yeah this report is a bit hard to believe, I have hundreds of tabs open in brave constantly and they have a native tab suspend/hibernate that works great for tabs you haven’t accessed in a while. And my favorite small feature ‘force paste’ for all those inputs with janky paste blocking “security” features
Firefox is still there, but Mozilla is adding AI slop to it too. I’d love to see an extension to disable all that stuff, or ideally get rid of it and make it an extension
Zen browser is pretty minimal in terms of bloat carried from FF
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41303974
How come Zen looks a lot like Arc? https://arc.net/
Inspired by arc, but still supported.
It's heavily inspired by Arc
Just use LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox on Android.
They basically strip out all the anti-privacy, anti-user "features" from Firefox.
+1 for Librewolf, but this is the first time I've heard about Ironfox.
https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox
You can use Librewolf, or the Firefox-based browser from Swedish VPN company Mullvad.
No worries! We'd only ever be discussing this if governments hadn't provided a way to access their services, most of which are only available on the internet.
Can you imagine just how stupid it would be for governments not to provide another software for accessing it? If they didn't provide something, internet giants would be able to dictate their only means to communicate with citizens. Influence elections. Even lock out governments from their own countries. How moronic would a government need to be to risk that happening? Plus it would be unrealistically cruel as well, because it would of course deny access to the poor.
So no worries. Governments care about people. That's what they keep saying. So they have surely prevented something like this from happening, or provide an alternative.
Right?
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@dang this looks like a spam. I saw 2 more posts
Ladybird ladybird
I’m excited to see what Ladybird becomes, but it’s not exactly ready to be a daily driver.
Ladybird doesn't support ublock origin either, nor does it even allow for ad blockers extentions like Chrome still does.