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

yoasif@fedia.io to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 295 points –
quippd.com

We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...

51

I hope they end up killing Chrome.

I think you're being optimistic about the number of people who both use adblockers and who care enough to switch browsers.

Yeah I fear society will get to the point in corporate autocracy, or corporate-feudalism where Google sues uBlock Origin out of existence (for lost revenue).

...and that'll be a dark day, and it will be hard not to blame the people who just put up with ads and a loss of privacy. Who can just stomach Surveillance Capitalism's incredibly flawed and one sided nature.

Those people are laying bricks for the foundation of a society I don't agree with, and don't want to participate in.

Based on every browser statistic page I can find, about 2/3 of mobile traffic is through Google Chrome. There's no ad blocker on that.

And mobile traffic is significant nowadays - it comprises around half of all traffic anywhere, despite requiring the viewer to be hunched over a phone or tablet.

Not that many people use real computers any more. At work, you may need to use a computer, but you probably can’t change the browser. At home, you have the PCMR folks who use a computer and probably also care about browsers. Everyone else just uses a tablet or a phone for browsing the web.

Speaking of the web, most people interact with specific websites through an app and an API, so they don’t even launch the mobile browser until they have to visit a site that doesn’t have an app. The world has changed and browsers aren’t as relevant as they used to be.

Are there raw numbers on how many people use web browsers in general? Firefox releases a report, and it's definitely been dipping, but that dip might be accounted for by a switch to other browsers (based on its percent of market share).

I'd be curious if you had any good sources for this, because my searches are mostly yielding crappy listicle blogs.

I don’t have numbers that would directly address that. However, there are lots of statistics on the number of mobile users vs desktop users when it comes to the traffic in general. This trend has been clearly visible for about 15 years now.

Here’s something I found on a short notice. link

What? They’re not going to kill their own browser that they virtually exclusively control. Why would they kill one of their biggest cash cows? Google is an ad company, and they want control of the client software that we use which they pump ads to and exfiltrate our identities from.

Whoosh

I think they were talking about Chrome becoming obsolete. Unlikely but not impossible

I moved back to Firefox a few years ago on desktop and mobile. It's perfectly fine and seems less laggy that Chrome.

Yeah we’ve known this was coming ever since Manifest V3 was a done deal. We’ve had years of foreshadowing and months of warning to get off Chromium.

I've scene posts about Firefox enterprise from a business perspective. I wonder if we will see Firefox suddenly show up more in the business world. Ublock origin can save you from phishing links and malwarertizing

My company allow the usage of Firefox, Chrome and Edge and these browsers are mandatory installed on our corporate computers. But, our users just pick the Chrome and Edge.

Vivaldi is including its own adblock outside of the manifest system that uses many of the same blocklists that uBlock does (although at this point you have to add them manually) and hopes to get near the same functionality by the time it is pulled and Mv3 is implemented. They originally had plans to offer a Mv2 compliant area but after seeing how Mv3 was going to be implemented, they changed there plans to many users dismay.

I don't think many people use Vivaldi. Also it is mostly proprietary so that's a hard pass for me.

Roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open source coming from Chromium, 3% is open source coming from us, which leaves only 5% for our UI closed-source code.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/

Only the UI part is not open source.

Partially proprietary still means proprietary.

What's the point of keeping part of the UI closed source?

I've seen their reasoning, but I don't agree with it. The biggest counterexample to their concerns are other browsers: Firefox is no trouble maintaining its IP, and Brave is fully open source yet has not been formed once AFAIK.

In my personal experience, and with great regret, I must say that Brave does a better job with its built-in ad blocking than Vivaldi has. Even after I did my damnedest to tweak the ad blocker settings (adding more lists from more sources, removing the "allow some ads" list, etc).

Brave itself is filled with ads. Crypto wallets, BAT, VPNs. I just want a browser.

I'm very aware of its built-in bloat, but the ad blocking still seems to perform more like an MV2 ad blocker than an MV3 one (more is blocked even when using the same lists), and it allows you to natively select individual elements to block yourself.

Well that is because Brave has been doing it longer, and Vivaldi only has about 30 devs across all the platforms, which is a fraction of Brave, although Brave has its issues as well, just not in the adblock department. I have found that if you use the uBlock block lists it is most of the way there, but it is not ready yet and I think that Vivaldi will have to consider picking up some dedicated devs. Also it is a 'Vivaldi Thing' to launch things piece mail and get those pieces working fully before adding on the rest of it. Then over time it gets good. But Vivaldi has come a LONG way when it comes to aggressive adblock detection.

That being said right now YouTube is detecting it and it is dumping the most manpower and money into this. When it does work you can pretty much use it across the web and the few cases that it doesn't work usually OK just to pause it for a while and you won't get too many ads.

However if Mv3 comes out and they haven't gotten their act together I am going to Firefox or Brave, as much as I don't like how they do business. Then there will be the Google Search thing running through the courts and we will see how Fx and Br come out and change their model.

Total ignorant question: how hard would it be to fork (and mostly maintain) chromium keeping manifest V2 support?