Google is Killing uBlock Origin. No Chromium Browser is Safe.

yoasif@fedia.io to Technology@lemmy.world – 660 points –
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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!

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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.

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.

Doesn't really matter to a regular user, in that case it's"Firefox doesn't work"

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.

Could be worse. You could have to use Chrome.

Eh, I'd still take Chromium anything over the dumpster fire that is Safari

why? safari is faster and far less bloatad? chrome is literally a fork off safari.

Check some of Firefox's about:config flags. 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 :(

"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.

firefox uses the standard, chrome are adding some non-standard crap to be anti-competitive. same shit microsoft did with internet explorer and caused it to eventually be replaced by chrome waybackwhen once law finally told them to back off.

it's not up to firefox, it's up to the law to step in and prevent google from doing anti-competitive non-standard shit.

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.

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.userAgent to detect Chrome, because it's easy to change its value. For example: for now, navigator.getBattery is available only in Chromium, and it doesn't need permissions to be checked for its existence through typeof 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 as navigator.getBattery through 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?

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 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

What do you mean "install as app"?

Install PWA so that you can start those as normal native apps without it looking like a website in a browser (remove unnecessary window decorations) and cache js for ever, so that the PWA can be used offline, if features are not dependant on API calls

On mobile it's the three dots then the install button that has an image of a cellphone?

I guess, I only know the way on iPhone using “add to homescreen”

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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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 😂

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.

What to do when the site is not compatible with Firefox: Alt + ←

It's pretty trivial to just use an alternate browser for the garbage sites that don't support FF.

If I create a blank HTML file, every single web browser will open it perfectly fine. If I add browser-specific things that firefox doesn't have, it is my responsibility to create an alternative that keeps the site working. A user shouldn't have to switch browsers due to incompetence of webdevs.

I just want my modern codecs to function. Why can't I play .mov or h264??

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