Clearly, Google is serious about trying to oust ad blockers from its browser, or at least those extensions with fuller (V2) levels of functionality. One of the crucial twists with V3 is that it prevents the use of remotely hosted code – as a security measure – but this also means ad blockers can’t update their filter lists without going through Google’s review process. What does that mean? Way slower updates for said filters, which hampers the ability of the ad-blocking extension to keep up with the necessary changes to stay effective.
(This isn’t just about browsers, either, as the war on advert dodgers extends to YouTube, too, as we’ve seen in recent months).
At any rate, Google is playing with fire here somewhat – or Firefox, perhaps we should say – as this may be the shove some folks need to get them considering another of the best web browsers out there aside from Chrome. Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has vowed to maintain support for V2 extensions, while introducing support for V3 alongside to give folks a choice (now there’s a radical idea).
You must log in or register to comment.
Man fuck google
When new fearures added to V3, will Mozilla port it to V2 too?
educated guess: since firefox is implementing v3 support alongside their v2 extensions, there shouldn’t be any issues running v2 and v3 extensions side by side in the foreseeable future
I’ve fully switched to Firefox everywhere. The only thing I’m missing is a lightweight browser which is not based on chromium for my potato tablet. jQuarks viewer is a good one but can be dumb sometimes, it opens image instead of the link for eg.
Waiting for Mozilla to shoot their own foot again
Make sure to shit on them every fucking time anyone says the name “Mozilla”, that’ll help us not have anything except Chrome in a couple years.
Didn’t they just announce recently that they were going to work more with advertisers? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/
How to improve online advertising: Step 1: remove all online advertising
They just did, they are gonna work more with advertisers.
again?
Before chrome became massively popular, Firefox was very popular. ie was still the most used browser back then
I don’t understand seemingly intelligent people who still blindly use chrome at this point…
The problem here is not just Chrome (as in Google Chrome) but Chromium, the web engine behind many browsers out there (such as Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, among many many others). For now there are two main web engines available, those being Chromium and Gecko (Firefox, Palemoon and many other Firefox forks). The deprecation of Manifest v2 is a Chromium change that includes (and focuses on) Chrome.
It’s not about intelligence it’s about what keeps you up at night. Most people aren’t bothered by cookies and ads, somehow.
this is something i cannot understand. my brain would fking die from the seizures the modern, ad infested web induces.
You’d be amazed at what seemingly intelligent people will do or say or believe.
I know people who I thought brilliant until they said they were voting for trump. Way to shatter my opinion of you, jagoff.
For those of us who work in (or love) tech - we (myself included) grossly overestimate how much the general public cares about, or cares to be informed about, this stuff. Heck, even people in tech who know better.
I wish it wasn’t the case but look how long and hard Microsoft moved on Internet Explorer and ActiveX back in the early days of the web.
Google and Chrome is just another bit of history repeating.
As an aside, I’ve been using Zen for about a week and it’s been wonderful. Easy transition from Firefox because it largely is Firefox, so anll my containers, extensions, annd settings carried over. Zen’s workspaces provide exactly the promise I’d hoped “tab groups” brought with Safari (but never worked right). I just wish there was an equivalent to the Hush plug-in on Safari (even after a year of full-timing FF, consent-o-matic is quite poor).
I kinda have to at work. Our classroom computers reset between classes and Chrome is the only browser installed. I might ask IT about that, moving forward, given uBlock getting neutered soon.
If only banks and government websites moved their asses and stopped mentioning Internet Explorer for one more time…
When is this happening? I’ve been telling my wife and kid that they need to stop using chrome for a year, but ublock is still working for them and blocking YouTube ads. They are the type that won’t switch until it becomes a problem for them.
I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.
I remember the internet before Google, and how game changing it was to have all of the internet indexed in one place (even if that wasn’t actually quite true back then). If you had asked me 15, 10, even 5 years ago if I would be cheering its downfall and yearning for a return to a simpler, far less centralized internet, I would have called you crazy. And yet here we are.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
There’s no need to wait. Just switch to Firefox now. All the cool kids have already done it.
I was pretty sure manifest v3 had already happened - but when I knew it was coming, I went ahead and switched ahead of time. Came with the extra bonus that now I’m ad free on mobile too! Mobile websites are absolutely filthy with popovers and 2 sentence paragraphs with an ad between every paragraph. I’m sick of it. And unfortunately I spend so much more time browsing the web from my phone these days than my desktop - so when I swapped on pc to Firefox, it was such a relief to have browser extensions on my phone now too.
Some of us never left.
Some of us switched to Chrome when it was legitimately better, but are back now.
people who used Firefox since high school😎😎
The cool kids are switching to Librewolf because whatever is happening at Mozilla is increasingly concerning by the day.
Uh-huh. Which uses Mozilla’s renderer. So, all those upstream commits in Libewolf’s code base are coming from where, exactly?
I downloaded Librewolf today - the privacy oriented fork of Firefox!
Good to see there are browser variants that aren’t just Chrome.
I’ve been using librewolf for a several months. Be careful because streaming doesn’t always work on it due to DRM features, and YouTube has been spotty AF. With YouTube it might start the video a couple seconds into it, buffer for no discernable reason, or just skip a few random seconds.
I use firefox but I have to change my useragent string to chrome with an extension to get YouTube working.
Might be worth having a look to see if it fixes your issues
yep firefox with arkenfox for me, same deal as librewolf. And Mull on mobile.
Switched about 2-3 months ago thinking it might be difficult or impact me negatively or something but its been easy and great.
You know the problem I have with Librewolf? – Fuckall nobody knows how to spell it.
The beauty of Firefox is that even the densest idiot knows how to spell those two words. And with attention spans the equivalent of a gnat, people need to have things simplified for them as much as humanly possible.
Fortunately enough, Firefox is about the only one with a renderer that isn’t controlled by Google, but - even now they’re shifting to a pro-advertising stance and backing off of the privacy orientation that they took just a year or two ago.
Yes, and we will drop Mozilla when it drops uBlock as well. We will all get behind whatever open-source browser stops ads, and it will very quickly become the most widely used browser. Why? Because everybody despises fucking ads and you can’t curb-stomp them into liking ads, that’s why.
Google can spend all the money it likes trying to piss on users and tell them it’s raining but at the end of the day, a new king will be crowned and if it isn’t Chrome and it isn’t Firefox, then it will be something else.
And no, FOSS doesn’t need money behind it. FOSS needs a dedicated community behind it. Assertions to the contrary are FUD constantly being seeded by Google, Microsoft and their ilk to destroy competition. This is an existential necessity for Google, you can bet they are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.
Until you actually need a chromium based browser. I get so annoyed when this happens.
Almost 20 years and I’ve never needed a Chromium browser for anything. I’m sorry you were forced to use such garbage ass software.
I have chromium installed for the sole reason to cast some streams to my remote TVs. Otherwise it stays closed. I tried some work around with FF, but I couldn’t get it to work. It’s only once or twice a week for live sporting events, so I can stomach it.
I understand where you’re coming from. It’s never happened to me, but if a website didn’t work with Firefox, I would just assume it’s a shit site ran by rookies who know nothing, and move on to a different site. I understand most people don’t have that kind of principle though.
It’s not that the site doesn’t work in FF, it’s that casting the stream from that site to a remote TV in the house is only possible in chromium, at least with my current device setup. If I just watch on my computer, I watch in FF.
Ah, you did say that. I’m sorry for my misunderstanding. I’ve never tried that, and you’re the first I’ve seen to mention it. I concede to your argument.
I’m in the slow process of replacing devices with HTPCs then I won’t need to cast anything. Unfortunately computers and time don’t grow on trees.
In what situation do you need one?
I’ve been using Firefox for over a decade and have literally never once needed to open a different web browser. For anything, ever. This is a very common complaint that tons of people seem to have that I have never seen happen even once out in the wild.
I use Librewolf on desktop and Mull on mobile. I have a few extensions on both, which could definitely contribute to issues. When I have issues (usually government sites or financial stuff, sometimes DRM-related stuff for media) it’s easier to just use a Chromium-based browser with no extensions than try to troubleshoot specifically what’s causing the issues. I keep Falkon (desktop) and Vanadium (mobile) installed for this purpose.
I get the feeling a lot of issues people are having in Firefox might be due to extensions or settings, which gets “fixed” by using another browser (which happens to be Chromium-based because most browsers are) and they blame the issue on Firefox itself.
I also use Firefox on my work computer, I need to quickly authorize a login in the browser before the local “app” opens (“app” because it’s just a webpage pretending to be an app) and I just recently got a notification that slack won’t support Firefox anymore so please switch to chrome. The fucking animals.
Sounds like Salesforce acting like Salesforce.
Several government websites for the state of Pennsylvania complain and refuse to work if they detect that you aren’t using chrome/edge/safari.
You can spoof your useragent to appear as chrome. And you should as it makes your browser less “unique”
While you can do this, it’s not clear to me that you should. There are a number of additional laws having to do with perjury and misusing goverment sites and while I would undoubtedly agree with you, were you to assert the application of those laws to the utilization of a user agent switcher is a ridiculous overreach, I am just as certain I have no desire to be in the hot-seat on the day we all find out.
Oh wow I didn’t know that. I’ll have to double check for the states that are relevant for me.
I imagine many people naively install a privacy extension and unknowingly have altered useragents
Imagine the government coming after someone, demanding they give Google their fair share
Do the sites work if you use an extension that lies to them about what browser you are using?
Flashing ESPhome devices. I just had to re-flash one via serial the other day and it requires chrome AFAIK.
Firefox is getting so small it’s starting to disappear out of the testing matrix. Confluence has issues with it, you can’t always log into Vanguard on Firefox, many news website layouts have overlapping elements on Firefox, quite a few shopping websites too (H&M in Europe has a long-standing but with putting stuff in the shopping basket until they revamped their website a couple of months ago). Etc etc. I see it ALL the time.
As if installing and using something else means you can’t have Chrome lying around for that one stupid website.
And I do. Sometimes I’ll just fire up Edge if Chrome isn’t installed since it’s chromium based.
Chromium isn’t as problematic as Chrome.
If people used other browsers, then the market share would change and this would become less and less of a problem.
I already use Firefox full time and recommend others do as well.
There’s still Vivali which is Chromium based and still supporting V2 extension (like uBlock) until June 2025. Its not a full fix, but its a stay of execution. That said, I’m a FF primary user.
I see Vivaldi, I upvote.
I’m already mad about having to potentially abandon my highly customized Vivaldi should ublock lite not work up to my standards
Vivaldi isn’t entirely open source, if that matters to you.
Brave would be my recommendation, I just disable the crypto stuff.
Brave’s CEO is so anti-gay, he dished out 4-figure checks to fight gayness.
I’m not a fan of that, and Brave has issues with being Chromium-based, like Vivaldi.
constantly, to be honest
Browsers with in built adblocker or system wide AdGuard.
Or Firefox?
DNS ad blockers are not sufficient to block all ads and often overly broad. So they have much higher rate of false positives and negatives compared to in-browser ad blockers. Differentiating between ads and useful content based on domain names will become more and more difficult. Both might use some url from the same cloud provider, and blocking those breaks a lot of stuff.
AdGuard is not a DNS blocker
It’s both a browser extension and a DNS filter.
https://adguard-dns.io/kb/general/dns-filtering/#how-does-dns-filtering-work
Edit: It seems the apps can act as a VPN to filter traffic.
deleted by creator
porque no los dos? I use both and there are things uBlock can catch/block that AdGuard Home doesn’t seem to be able to. That said AdGuard makes mobile pages readable, when most these days are a complete nightmare of ads
I was talking about AdGuard, not AdGuard Home.
I misread system wide as network wide. My mistake. FWIW, I still prefer a network wide and browser plugin (ublock and privacy badger) combo.
Those are trash and DNS adblocking does not work on YT either. Garbage advice 0/10
No, you’re wrong.
“Might.”
Right? I don’t think anyone using Chrome with adblockers is just gonna be like “oh well, guess we got ads now”
I’d be really, really surprised if a bunch don’t bother doing anything. Maybe most.
I know this is probably true, but I love to fantasize about people being less complacent
What’s a good YouTube downloader these days?
yt-dlp is the gold standard. Not only for YouTube either. Check out the man page, the amount of shit it can do is insane.
yt-dlp is what i normally use, tho its only got a command line interface. I think someone’s made a GUI for it, but I’ve never tried it.
theres seal on android, ive used it on waydroid but thats pretty silly
On Android you can use Seal
Hell yeah. Another vote for Seal!
if youre just looking for a downloader website with zero setup of your own there’s cobalt
yt-dlp continues to be the best option for me.
A great privacy focused client for YouTube is FreeTube. Uses a native API or Invidious for playback, and you can download and share videos from it. Doesn’t give any identifying info to Google/YouTube and I’ve never once dealt with an ad. For mobile, Grayjay and NewPipe are similar apps.
Screen capture while the video is running, like the VCR days of yore
Nah, man. I point a Betamax camcorder on a tripod at my 4K, 16bpp graphics workstation monitor to make sure I really capture all those pixels.
The lack of HVEC/h.265 support is kind of a deal breaker in firefox (windows nightly builds don’t count as done). I need it to view h.265 security cameras and the occasional movie streamed via browser.
Edit: For those suggesting multiple browsers I could just use Edge if I wanted to… still better compatibility as it is essentially chromium.
I have a list of other things that don’t work reliably in Firefox such as various video conferencing tools so no, I am not going to switch to Firefox as my primary browser again anytime soon.
I was a Firefox user for many years but there are too many daily things I use to now prevent me from using it as a primary browser for work and causal use.
Use Chromium for the security cameras, and use something sensible for all your normal browsing usage?
I guess, but the comment is a direct assertion against Firefox growing from this change. You sort of prove my point by suggestion another sub variant of the chrome ecosystem.
I guess when edge stops supporting v2 you’ll just look at ads then
I won’t
Ad block lite does a good enough job without me changing to be honest, gain the point being is that there are more problems with my using Firefox as a primary browser than ad blocking benefits.
Cool thing is you can run multiple browsers. So just use Chrome for your cameras and Firefox for everything else.
Why would I use multiple browsers if I can achieve nearly everything in one? I would much rather use Edge or Safari for everything than Firefox plus another browser.
Because Edge has also moved to Manifest V3 and Safari uses WebKit which doesn’t have the same degree of blocking. I mean, you do you, enjoy your ads.
True, but the other argument is just try adblock lite, it works fine… It isn’t as powerful but I would rather have a fully functional daily browser than one with lesser video playback and conferencing functions.
deleted by creator
~laughs in firefox~
