Let's talk about Google Chrome and ads, and getting around Google's ad enforcing tactics (manifestv3)

rob200@lemmy.cafe to Technology@lemmy.world – 67 points –

Google has been blocking adblockers, or atleast trying to for some time now. Notably on Youtube.

I barely feel the impact of this because I use Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube and other services that don't have ads.

Unlike your traditional website, these services federate, with each other over this Fediverse thing we all know about.

What's good about this is if, some severs wants to be greedy against it's users, users can easily just change servers and not have to worry about losing familiarity with the platforms user interfaces that they grew accustomed to.

Legally the largest Mastodon, Peertube servers and other can't do anything to smaller servers as the software used for the Fediverse platforms, generally are open source and federated with each other with help from activity pub which is also open source.

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Firefox just seems like the easy solution.

Youtube makes it harder to use when you block their ads despite which browser, for example.

Peertube, will run well on most modern web browsers and you don't need a functioning adblocker to block ads on Peertube as by defualt, there are none. But may vary from server to server.

Just don't use Google Chrome. I only use it for one system at work and I blame Microsoft for that not working well with Firefox.

Well, you're right in principle, but with my (old, but current) Mac+Intel configuration Firefox is not as sleek as Chrome and also often Firefox turns the fan on while Chrome doesn't (it may just be that Google is bricking Firefox when you're on YouTube, for example)

Anyhow, I'm trying to use Firefox as much as I can (I've always done so), but it's always been true it was a better experience to use Chrome on my setup (and I've never used Safari)

Edit: why the downvotes? To teach me a lesson? I said he's right, but I do have an actual problem and cannot yet make the full move (and am going to check out the suggestions below. Thanks!)

Firefox turns the fan on while Chrome doesn’t

Does this happen on YT? Enable hw acceleration and install enhanced h264ify.

I finally had a minute to try it out and unfortunately it does not seem to change anything on my 2020 Mac+Intel (the GPU load skyrockets when I watch videos on YouTube)

GPU load should increase when watching videos, even if hardware acceleration is enabled. In about:config, set media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled as true and restart firefox. Additional stuff may be needed for Mac which I don't know.

Firefox turns the fan on while Chrome doesn’t

Does it also happen when you change user-agent to chrome? Google has been worsening the experience of their services on non-Chrome browsers for a solid few years now

Have you considered Orion? It has the sleekness of Safari (and based on WebKit) but gives you plug-ins from Chrome and Mozilla. I love it because it doesn’t have the non-native clunkiness of other browsers.

With the fan turning on, unfortunately it's potentially due to Firefox being a little more resource heavy. Could be Chromium is a bit under the threshold and Firefox is a little over.

Let’s talk about ads in Google Chrome… proceeds to describe how the fediverse works.

What's there to talk about? Just use Firefox or something not chromium-based

If you have no particular reason or limitation for using Chrome specifically, then switching to Firefox with uBO is the easiest way.

I think it will give a rise to blocking ads through intercepting network connections...

I already block a crazy amount of ads with DNS blocklists (and block Google as well) but I’m at a point where I’m about to start intercepting my own HTTPS traffic in order to cache it.

I’m tunneling all my internet traffic through commercial VPNs to a completely different country across the planet with better privacy laws but damn the high latency is exhausting.

Doing some neat HTTP header manipulation with Privoxy would be incredible too.

I think unlock is on v3. It's the best one so I don't think it matters a lot anyway

uBlock Origin has a V3 version, yeah. Been using it for a while, seems to work well. I do miss the ability of adding my own filters, hope they implement that eventually.

That was one my points.

Searx, has no ads, and is federated, And so is Mastodon, Lemmy and so on.

It seems almost as if if you use 3rd party ooen source federated sites, you dont even have to worry about blocking them to begin with.

Searx is federated? I’ll have to read up on that; I use it all the time but had no idea.

In the sense that there are different servers for the same service, but it's not a social platform.

Oh. You just mean there are multiple instances spread out everywhere.

Federated in my mind means the servers are talking to each other, typically via ActivityPub, so I was confused.

That's not what "federated" means. Please do not spread misinformation.

A lot of browsers have inbuilt adblockers that, not bring extensions, are unaffected by MV3. It's literally a non problem.