We’ve been anticipating it for years, and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.
Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.
I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and it seems to me that we aren’t getting good information about this topic.
This post is me trying to give you that information, to help increase the mind share of an actual alternative. Enjoy!
Hardened Firefox, here I come.
Can I just add a different perspective on this?
My dad is really old (like early baby-boomers), and I am basically the in-family tech support when the home computer starts acting strange.
Well, right after google rolled out this update, my dad clicked on what he thought was an online shopping link. It was actually an ad for a toolbar add-on. Queue like 6+ hours trying to uninstall that add-on and the bundled software.
I never had to worry about that in the past with him because I had u-block origin installed. Now I need to find something else that can run quietly in the background. And probably a better antivirus.
You could leverage Kitbogas software in relation to scam/sketchy download protection.
Is there any organization out there that could actually promote an “Acceptable ad standard”? Like, maybe even something within web specs?
A long time ago, ads were slightly irritating, rarely useful, and considered a necessary evil for gently monetizing the web. We’ve had this slow evolution to draconian tracking nightmares that are genuinely dangerous and often written by malicious untraceable actors. I almost feel like we could pressure back towards decent ads if there was some standard by which they only received basic info about the user, showed basic info about a product, didn’t pollute the experience or ruin accessibility, and were registered to businesses by physical address with legal accountability for things like false advertising.
That is…perhaps a vain hope though. It’s just hard to picture futures where all websites run off of donations or subscriptions, because advertising is fucking hell now.
Google would never push this because it would cost them money in the short term, eg, next quarter.
They can’t have that.
You mean like https://acceptableads.com/ which is only supported so far by Adblock Plus (and its parent company)?
The problem is until there is some kind of penalty for being too annoying or too resource consuming, it will always be a race to the bottom with more, worse ads. As people add ad blockers to their browsers, the user pool that isn’t running them begins to dry up and more ads are needed to keep the same revenue. This results in even more people blocking them.
Two of the things I had hope for on the privacy side was Mozilla’s Privacy-Preserving Attribution for ad attribution and Google’s Privacy Sandbox collection of features for targeting like the Topics API. Both would have been better for privacy than the current system of granular, individual user tracking across sites.
If those two get wide enough adoption, regulation could be put in place to limit the old methods as there would be a better replacement available without killing the whole current ad supported economy of most sites. I get that strictly speaking from a privacy perspective ‘more anonymous/private tracking’ < ‘no tracking’ but I really don’t want perfect to be the enemy of better.
Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:
- It’s made by an ad company
- The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
- There are no standards on privacy invasion
uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.
The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.
I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.
Buy a Raspberry PI, install PiHole or AdGuard, change router DNS, and you are good to go. Yes, not perfect, but doesn’t rely on a browser extension that can go extinct next time the browser decides it is time for a change.
… or use Firefox and migrate their bookmarks.
I recently switched back to Firefox, and almost immediately ran into an issue where I couldn’t log into Dropbox. It took me far longer than I’d like to admit, to realize that Firefox as the problem. I popped into edge and logged in immediately no problem.
I’m still gonna will with Firefox, but it’s annoying that it doesn’t work all the time.
Uhh, that doesn’t seem normal at all. Is this a default config? Any extensions in use?
That’s what I ended up doing. It was a weird conversation though, telling him that if it seemed like some website wasn’t working, try it on chrome and it just might work
You’re awesome!
Kids, remember, Google is an advertising company.
It blows my mind that there are major companies that are actively, and very publicly- working their asses off to undermine the interests of their own customer base. And not only are they still are enabled to exist- they’re profits are constantly growing. Which means, despite their nefarious and intrusive updates to their services…. People are eating it up!
Nothing will change until people do the work to make that change.
Take YouTube for example:
They have screwed people over time and again. From their content creators, to those that enjoy watching them. Yet- those that hate it so much would seemingly never organize themselves to boycott their services on a level that will ever hurt them.
So they continue to do it unstopped.
Nothing changes until something changes. It isn’t ever easy, but if you want it to happen badly enough, it is always worth it.
All it takes is for someone to stand up and take the reins!
(I cannot be that person as I have ADHD and will probably forget that I wrote this come later this afternoon)
Hate to break it to you, but you are not Google’s customer. Don’t believe me? How much did you pay for Chrome?
This move is in fact being made with their actual customers in mind.
Sooo… those that buy ads you mean.
Can we ban bot-posted articles with incomplete body text?
Who’s a bot?
Explain your methodology for posting this post, including any edits made to the original post.
What are you a captcha?
I wear many hats. You failed, BTW.
Seriously. We don’t need bot bullshit on Lemmy.
This is the start of the slide for Reddit is just going to be worse here because there are fewer controls to actually detect and do something about bots.
Yet another reason to never use Chrome
for personal needs
Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on, because I’m personally very bored with my kids’ schools and related services sending out emails and forms with links that simply won’t open in FF but are clearly expecting Chrome or Edge where they work fine. Yes, this is on the lazy developers, but if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups then this is the stuff they must fix.
Yeah, unfortunately the next step will be sites rejecting “unsecure” browsers because they want the ad money.
This is going to get worse, not better.
What you’re talking about is webcompat and is a very complicated issue. Also I’ve talked to some Mozilla devs who gave me multiple examples of Chromium rendering something wrong, and they’d have to intentionally break Firefox to render it incorrectly too, just so the end user would get a more consistent experience. Of course these issues happen more and more when things are only tested for one browser.
This is Chromium monopoly. At this time instead of W3C standards, Chromium itself becomes the standard.
Maybe there could be some sort of compatibility flag in Firefox which detects non-standard pages designed for Chrome. We could call it… hmm… something like Quirks Mode?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If your site doesn’t work on Firefox your site doesn’t work. As web developers your job is to develop applications for the web not for one specific browser. This goes double for essential services.
My job requires login to most internal websites via Microsoft Azure AD SSO using Kerberos authentication using passwordless, smart card auth.
This switch happened this week. Up until yesterday I was 100% Firefox until this.
Firefox for MacOS is not able to do this. I spent an hour or so looking for solutions. Chrome on MacOS also doesn’t. Safari does and now I have to fucking use Safari FFS.
Check some of Firefox’s
about:configflags. A number of years ago I enabled something related to Kerberos for my previous company’s (simpler) Microsoft SSO on a Mac, it may still be available and enough to work for you.I did. Unfortunately for the Mac it’s a no-go. It was a good 10 year run :(
Could be worse. You could have to use Chrome.
Internet Explorer has entered the chat.
Eh, I’d still take Chromium anything over the dumpster fire that is Safari
Or use Edge
Why do you hate me
Doesn’t really matter to a regular user, in that case it’s"Firefox doesn’t work"
“ugh just use a normal browser”
- everyone
That’s some BS. You and i both know that Chromium has the largest share in the browser business, so it makes sense from a development perspective to develop websites that will reach the most people. It’s on Firefox to optimise their browser so that it can run these sites as well.
A single company shouldn’t be able to dictate how the web works.
But they said they wouldn’t be evil!
Shit. You got me there. Carry on I guess.
Well too bad, because that’s how things are
Nope
Wrong again, sparky.
On the same line of thought, we should remove sidewalks and bike lanes because cars use the road more
That’s a pretty crooked line of thought
Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on
Care to share some examples Firefox has trouble with? The only issues I have with websites is due to my aggressive use of Noscript.
There’s some streaming video sites that deliberately block Firefox. It used to be that Firefox didn’t support the necessary web standards, but now it does. The site put up blocks telling you to use Chrome, and never got around to taking them down.
And you haven’t turned to piracy yet?
I’m on a Surface Pro, which is a somewhat weaker device. For whatever reason, Microsoft Edge (Chromium) runs YouTube and Twitch much better than Firefox. This might be due to efficiency in the browser, or the site video code itself being built for it.
I can’t think of a single example where a web page doesn’t work on FF.
if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups
Lol. I remember when FF was the most popular browser.
I just need a „install as app“ Feature in Firefox, that is not as pain as the webapp Manager app we currently have
On mobile it’s the three dots then the install button that has an image of a cellphone?
What do you mean “install as app”?
There was a point in time where Firefox had the most market share? When was this?
Around 2009~2011 if I remember correctly. Back then it was either IE or FF. Then Chrome came on the scene with their fancy marketing ads and blew up very quickly to overtake FF.
At the time FF felt bloated compared to Chrome, so Chrome was like the fresh new and faster alternative.
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It’s pretty trivial to just use an alternate browser for the garbage sites that don’t support FF.
Okay that’s fine, but when websites are effectively writing
if user_agent_string != [chromium] break;It doesn’t really matter how good compatibility is. I’ve had websites go from nothing but a “Firefox is not supported, please use Chrome” splash screen to working just fine with Firefox by simply spoofing the user agent to Chrome. Maybe some feature was broken, but I was able to do what I needed. More often than not they just aren’t testing it and don’t want to support other browsers.
The more insidious side of this is that websites will require and attempt to enforce Chrome as adblocking gets increasingly impossible on them, because it aligns with their interests. It’s so important for the future of the web that we resist this change, but I think it’s too late.
The world wide web is quickly turning into the dark alley of the internet that nobody is willing to walk down.
As a developer, I can foresee websites using features other than
navigator.userAgentto detect Chrome, because it’s easy to change its value. For example: for now,navigator.getBatteryis available only in Chromium, and it doesn’t need permissions to be checked for its existence throughtypeof navigator.getBattery === 'function'(also, the function seems to be perfectly callable without user intervention, enabling additional means of fingerprinting). While it’s easy to spoof userAgent, it’s not as easy to “mock” unsupported APIs such asnavigator.getBatterythrough Firefox.
Slack calls disabled for firefox users, but if you change the user agent to chrome it works…
Almost like it does work on Firefox but for some reason they don’t want you using it. Honestly it’s so damn weird, why do that? Is there some incentive for them?
Firefox can’t fix all the broken sites in the world, but they do investigate issues reported to https://webcompat.com
You can help by reporting sites that don’t work for you.
Can you send me an example? I don’t think I ever really encountered those sites and I use FF almost exclusively for ~20 years.
Its a frequency of use thing, and also some required sites. Examples are sites hosted by schools, government, or workplaces.
Although most people using Firefox aren’t aware of spoofing the client to look like chrome, so that might need to be talked about more.
That all said, I don’t have problems with any required usage, the only ones I have an issue with are on my phone, using mull, some sites payment forms won’t load or work correctly. Taco bell is pretty bad for that and then the app wouldnt work either for a while. I also run grapheneos though so its hard to say what’s the cause there.
Hm, okay. Maybe it’s just a US government page thing then. Here in Germany firefox is still at 20% and used to be the standard browser until 5-6 years ago, so maybe pages are still optimized for it here.
It varies state to state here as well. Someone in Georgia might have way more problems than someone in Minnesota. Its hard to generalize the US in that way. Sort of like the EU being a group but each country separate.
I encounter this very infrequently. I think I only have 1-2 examples at work. It’s not a huge deal for me to spin up a chrome for those one or two occasions.
Just make an electron out of those sites 🌚
Sounds interesting, care to expand?
The only concrete one I can actually recollect is generating a quote from our quoting tool in Salesforce. I just ended up running my 100+ Salesforce windows in Chrome because it has a good feature where you can name each window so I can see which customers I’m working on in the taskbar. It’s good to have those cordoned off from my normal browsing anyway. So this one doesn’t bother me. For everything else I use Firefox.
I used this prompt
I want to create an electron app for linux of a third party webapp
How would I do that?
And chatGPT gave me a good instruction, will try that out. Apparently, you only need node, electron and the javascript like this:
const { app, BrowserWindow } = require('electron') function createWindow() { // Create the browser window const win = new BrowserWindow({ width: 800, height: 600, webPreferences: { nodeIntegration: true } }) // Load the third-party web app win.loadURL('https://www.thirdpartyapp.com') // Optionally remove the default menu win.setMenu(null) // Open DevTools (optional for debugging) // win.webContents.openDevTools() } // Run the createWindow function when Electron is ready app.whenReady().then(createWindow) // Quit when all windows are closed app.on('window-all-closed', () => { if (process.platform !== 'darwin') { app.quit() } }) app.on('activate', () => { if (BrowserWindow.getAllWindows().length === 0) { createWindow() } })I still don’t know what this is though? Something Linux specific?
Electron is a tool to bundle a website and a interpreter for that website in an application. That works on many platforms. Official discord desktop app, for example, is an electron app, spotify as well.
I recall I didn’t get some sites working on Chrome either, when Firefox fails me 😅
This is also true. The majority of the time when something doesn’t work on Firefox and I try to go to Chrome, it doesn’t work there too 😂
What to do when the site is not compatible with Firefox: Alt + ←
I just want my modern codecs to function. Why can’t I play .mov or h264??
Honestly I’d say the Internet isn’t safe, and it’s because of Google, fuck you Google. It’s not just the wine I’ve been drinking, it’s true dammit.
Welcome back to Firefox everyone! At least if you’re as old or older than I. 😁
Also Firefox mobile has nearly all of the extensions as the desktop version so it’s more similar across all of your devices. Personally, I use LibreWolf on desktop and Mull on mobile, but they’re just tweaked versions of Firefox with some bloat and telemetry removed and preconfigured to be more private.
Is duckduckgo chromium based?
I don’t use it, just curious.
Unluckily, yes.
There are only 3 independent browser engines left: Firefox, Chromium and Safari. And Chromium derives from Safari, so the only true alternative is Firefox.
Eh, Chromium’s Blink and Safari’s WebKit diverged quite some time ago, I think it’s fair to consider them separate engines at this point.
Gecko, blink and webkit
There is also a developing project Ladybird (with homebrew libweb), although it is far from production-ready.
Yes, of course there are more projects. KHTML itself was a different engine (which Apple took, modified and re-released with the name of Safari). I just mentioned the only three “complete” and production-ready engines.
There is also Goanna / Pale Moon: https://www.palemoon.org/
When was chrome or chromium safe?
Bloated memory hole in the last 10yrs.
The way it goes about Sucking up resources convinced me to switch to Firefox completely long ago.
Yes it was performance that first got me to switch too. But now I have plenty more reasons.
Switch to Firefox
Or a fork :)
Or a spoon
And my axe!
And my bow!
And my mustache!
Free rides!
Free Hat!
We kept Firefox alive for you all these years. You’re welcome.
Didn’t Google paying them loads of money keep FF alive?
Yes, but Google would not have done that if nobody used Firefox
Yes and it’s likely that they will not be allowed to any longer after Google lost their anti-trust case.
