While I'm less than enthusiastic about Mozilla's recent entrance into the ad-tech industry, it's worth noting that uBlock Origin is not just still available on Firefox and by far its most popular browser extension, but it's also officially recommended. [1]
IMO uBlock Origin has become an integral part of the Firefox experience. Chrome killed uBlock Origin? Firefox can't kill uBlock Origin. It can only kill Firefox.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?sort=users
That's good, at least more and more people will move away from Chrome.
In terms of HN probably. In terms of all users, probably very few
The real reason it's good is because adblock enables people to steal from websites without "paying", it is effectively theft. No browsers should have adblock and marketplaces should ban adblock.
See: people who use uBlock on YouTube and refuse to buy YouTube premium.
My computer will do whatever I wish with the content that is sent to it, including removing ads, it is not stealing.
I refuse to pay for YouTube Premium primarily due to their forced bundling of YouTube Music.
>I refuse to pay for YouTube Premium primarily due to their forced bundling of YouTube Music.
I'm the opposite, I get youtube premium as a side effect of paying for youtube music.
That kind of just makes sense though. YouTube has music on it, giving you access to the UI that plays it a bit nicer than the regular YouTube frontend doesn’t cost them extra.
I would expect the licensing situation to be very different for music than for normal YouTube uploads. YouTube sometimes[0][1] offers "YouTube Premium Lite" in some countries, which doesn't include YouTube Music. This heavily suggests the music licensing adds cost. Unfortunately, it's not available where I live (New Zealand), looks to still have banner ads (easily deal with by an ad blocker, but still kind of insulting to have banner ads on a paid product), and doesn't even include background play on non-music videos (not that it actually matters in my case, since I only watch on my Mac).
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1d0d1sg/premium_li...
Why? So you can keep your job? Screw big tech
Ublock doesn’t work for YouTube ads and never has.
When I access a site I’m downloading some markup. I’m free to render that markup in any way I desire. It’s my machine. My software. My experience. Nothing else should be able to dictate that to me.
Ads are harmful. They are used to spy on and build profiles of people across the internet, gaining knowledge along the way that is intrusive, without consent from who it’s spying on.
Sites are free to make money off their content. There are ways besides ads. Paywalls, subscriptions, donations, etc.
Point is, they can make money in ways that doesn’t require telling their users how to do things on their own computers and doesn’t involve forcing malware and spyware onto their users. Nothing is being stolen. The html document was delivered on the public web internet with no restrictions. It was even delivered with the code to run ads. It was given to the world. How the world renders that document cannot somehow change that into a theft.
> Ublock doesn’t work for YouTube ads and never has.
ublock has always worked for YouTube ads, until the very recent crusade against adblocking.
> Ublock doesn’t work for YouTube ads and never has.
Either you are misinformed, or you are flatout lying. I literally just tried it on Firefox with uBlock and after 10 videos, received 0 ads. See here for more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1etvawp/youtu... A simple Google Search of "does ublock origin block YouTube ads" disproves you.
Maybe something on my end is broken but I’ve ran ublock origin for years and never once has it stopped any preroll or mid roll ad on Yt. Weird.
Oh please. There is no "stealing" or "theft" of any kind going on here. What's happening is your server sent us a free web page and we deleted parts of it. We can rip out and trash the ads from magazines and newspapers too.
If you don't like that, then don't send people free web pages when they make HTTP requests. Make your web server return 402 Payment Required instead. If you send us free stuff with garbage included, don't blame us for deleting the garbage.
Every browser should have uBlock Origin. It should be literally built into the browser in fact, only conflicts of interest prevent that.
I have heard that the real underlying problem concerned resource usage (ten thousand regexp matches etc). But only now do I wonder why the browser's reaction is to remove an API instead of to limit the amount of CPU extensions can use.
The browsing experience is dramatically faster with uBlock. The thousands of regexps don't come close to the CPU or memory load of ads.
A 386 could handle a regexp fine. Compare that to audio or video decoding for ads. Not the same ballpark by orders of magnitude.
It's dead because Google makes money from ads. I shifted to Firefox ages ago.
I traced the CPU usage on my wife's laptop many years ago. That wasn't a fast machine, but it wasn't a 386 either. The ad blockers were her performance problems, alone.
If the browser maintainers have seen a couple of machines with similar problems and maintainers of regexp-using add blockers simply insisted that their code was fast, "a 386 could handle" etc, I can easily see how the browser maintainers might lose patience. Don't need to assume ill will.
No competent content blocker tests "ten thousand regexp matches" for each request URL to match, this is not how it works.
To simplify, and speaking from uBO's perspective, consider that nine distinct tokens can be extracted from the URL in the address bar for the current webpage:
https
news
ycombinator
com
reply
id
41758007
goto
item%3Fid%3D41757178%2341758007
This is the overall simplified explanation of how it really works, in reality it's a bit more complex because there are a lot of other optimizations on top of this.
There is a built-in benchmark tool in uBO, accessible through the dashboard, _Support_ pane, _More_ button, _SNFE: Benchmark_ button[1].
When running the benchmark against a set of 230,364 URLs, I get an average of 11-12 µs per request to perform a match test against the default filter lists in uBO.
* * *
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-settings#ben...
uBlock is one of the good ones, but for the rest of extensions, the majority of them are literal malware. Usually originally developed by someone decent, and then sold off to someone else who uses them maliciously.
It looks like the recent changes are all about slowly locking down what extensions can do because it’s currently a free for all where random anonymous extension owners have full access to everyone’s browsers.
I use Firefox so I'm fine.
But what should I do with the not so tech savvy family members and friends that use Chrome and I installed Ublock origin? Install the lite version? Other alternative?
I'm sorry to say that will be impossible to make them switch to Firefox.
So the ideal browser is a concept that is every day more and more elusive.
For my private use, I am using an older Mac with some memory consumption issues, so until I upgrade, I am using safari because it's the most lightweight, and while the extension support is the smallest of all, at least for very major things you are still covered.
For work, the Mac I am using is way more powerful, and yet I find strange issues. Vivaldi dies if I open more than 60-70 tabs at once but it doesn't even really matter, because all the Chromium based browsers that have said "don't worry, we will keep maintaining Manifest V2" feel like they are on a "danger zone" to me.
And then, I try to use Firefox and while the extension support is the most complete, many times I am finding unresponsive pages (usually tools like Google Meet, which I need to use because of work) or even worse: profile files get messed up and I start getting an error "There was an error, that's all we know" every time I try to log into any service using Google SSO.
So to summarize, at this rate I will have to migrate to Qutebrowser... or Lynx.
How old is the Mac? Does it have soldered RAM?
>For work, the Mac I am using is way more powerful, and yet I find strange issues. Vivaldi dies if I open more than 60-70 tabs at once but it doesn't even really matter, because all the Chromium based browsers that have said "don't worry, we will keep maintaining Manifest V2" feel like they are on a "danger zone" to me.
WRT ad blocking, any serious Chromium-based browser that has vowed continued V2 support already has a performant ad blocker in its native code to cover their ass on this point you're making here (see: Brave; though also Orion, of the ones that I know, which is a Webkit browser). Of course, effective dynamic ad blocking isn't the only thing lost with Manifest V3 but definitely the most noticeable.
Isn't Chromium open source? How hard would it be to fork and restore Manifest V2? I'd expect the functionality to be fairly isolated so that easily tracking upstream becomes manageable.
Brave is a Chrominum fork that has pledged to keep supporting manifest V2 (at least partially) beyond the removal in 2025: https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
Brave's shady crypto strategies [1] and history of injecting headers and affiliate codes in your navigation [2] makes it an untrustworthy browser to me.
[1] https://coinfomania.com/brave-browser-users-monthly-bat-rewa...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...
They don't have a separate addon marketplace. The browser may still support the API but distributing the addon will be a problem.
We need an altstore
I think you underestimate how complex browsers are, it's not as if it's just an isolated part of the browser, it's huge and full of moving parts, good luck maintaining your own fork of Chrome especially if you want to also get security updates.
I honestly think this is the right step forward. If the web is going to be sustainable, we should move away from adblock to stop stealing bandwidth from websites like YouTube and CNN.
Back in my day, adblock wasn't a thing and the web was a vibrant place because of it because people can actually afford to run businesses because no one would block ads, it was a valuable stream of revenue.
Now, in the name of privacy, people are freeloading off sites.
Except it doesn’t work like that. We pay for many things and after a while, ads creep in because of “growth”
The solution unfortunately is ALWAYS freeloading (or piracy in music, movies and probably also software)
At a certain point “they” go too far
If they can't handle not sending me garbage, then perish.
This is a revisionist and blatant lie.
I’ve been online longer than some on here have been alive and at no point was this ever true for any meaningful period of time.
Adblocking the web has been available since the 90s in some form. Popup blockers and image blocking was not terribly uncommon. Some ISPs even tried blocking this at their level as a means to help make dialup feel faster!
So please tell me, when was this “vibrant place”?