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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).
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I downloaded Librewolf today - the privacy oriented fork of Firefox!
Good to see there are browser variants that aren’t just Chrome.
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.
And no, FOSS doesn’t need money behind it. FOSS needs a dedicated community behind it
how do you imagine a Linux-sized community getting built around firefox in a few days? and even that is a bad example, because a lot of linux devs are paid by their employer from a company anywhere on the world
Until you actually need a chromium based browser. I get so annoyed when this happens.
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.
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.
I’ve had that once, as well as some websites running inexplicably slow on FF.
I changed my user agent to a recent Chrome one and that solved it issue.
Moral of the story? Websites are discriminating.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.
Vivaldi isn’t entirely open source, if that matters to you.
Brave would be my recommendation, I just disable the crypto stuff.
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.
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.
this reads like a yo mama joke
I’m sorry, but that is an instance of separating the art from the artist, I really don’t care.
I see Vivaldi, I upvote.
I have no idea why people are downvoting it.
I’m already mad about having to potentially abandon my highly customized Vivaldi should ublock lite not work up to my standards
Is a combo of ublock lite and Vivaldi’s own blocker insufficient? They made updates to allow custom lists, I think. What about a network wide blocker like a pihole or adguard.
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 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.
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.
Flashing ESPhome devices. I just had to re-flash one via serial the other day and it requires chrome AFAIK.
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?
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.
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.
constantly, to be honest
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
Oh? I noticed that issue last couple of days using invidious on librewolf, and thought it was YT doing invidious shenanigans again.
We’re going to have a serious problem on our hands soon with compatibility. I’m a software dev and I’m already seeing a few issues here and there where Chrome is being treated as the default expected browser and features don’t work on Firefox.
Firefox doesn’t support a fair few Chrome features because of security and privacy reasons, such as WebHID, WebUSB, etc.
Devs, please stop using those features. I know it’s tempting, but they’re basically bribes to encourage you to sell out to Google. Don’t do it.
We’re going to have a serious problem on our hands soon with compatibility. I’m a software dev and I’m already seeing a few issues here and there where Chrome is being treated as the default expected browser and features don’t work on Firefox.
It’s basically IE6 and ActiveX all over again.
Most “Chrome-only” web applications I have to use I can get around just by changing my user agent string and everything works fine. I try not to use that stuff when I can, though.
This is my experience. They are just taking your default agent and throwing up a message because they can’t be assed to do minimal testing in FF.
Some of the older stuff is indeed that way, but there are more and more features which Firefox can’t support. Web-based custom keyboard configuration tools, tools to flash phone firmware, and one niche MiniDisc tool all are chrome-only things I’ve had to open Chrome to use
we are really really better off without features that grant any website such deep access to our systems just by a single click, trust me. this is a security nightmare, especially looking at people who don’t understand computers and those who instant allow permissions by reflex.
tools to flash phone firmware
Yep. Forgot I had to use Chrome on Windows to flash GrapheneOS.
you don’t have to, there’s no need for that. they have a normal flashing tool too
Wait is this real? That’s hilarious
https://grapheneos.org/install/web#prerequisites
Technically it works on Linux, but I didn’t feel like installing a Chromium browser to do it at the time.
Firefox doesn’t support a fair few Chrome features because of security and privacy reasons, such as WebHID, WebUSB
I’m very serious about my opinion that we are better off without them. If the feature does not exist, it cannot be activated by a bug in the permission system, and also the lesser technically inclined people won’t allow them by reflex/accident
I just don’t use services that don’t work with Firefox. Easy.
Yep. There are plenty of other ways to do something that don’t require selling out.
I’m using Firefox as my only browser. If everything works in Firefox that’s fine for me.
That’s the best advantage of only making websites / web applications for fun (for friend groups, video games, family etc)
Yeah, but that’s my point, not everything works in Firefox now - even though admittedly it’s relatively niche stuff - and my prediction is that if we continue on our current course Firefox will either have to compromise their commitment to privacy and security or will become more and more unusable.
I saw this quote a while back “if you only make code that works in chrome you aren’t a web developer, you are a google developer.”
Teams calls for example :( I have chromium on my Debian only for teams.
Teams works in Firefox, I sadly have to use it almost every day interacting with clients who use teams for comms.
One of my company’s customers is a DoD contractor that uses the government version of Teams, which does require Chromium, unfortunately. Or at least, I haven’t found a way to make it work on Firefox yet.
I’ve not had either of those issues on my laptop, using teams through Firefox. I wonder if there is something else going on there.
But you can’t turn on camera with Teams on Firefox iirc
There’s no need to wait. Just switch to Firefox now. All the cool kids have already done it.
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?
bad changes aren’t really happening in the renderer, are they?
No, but Librewolf and Iceweasel and all the other forks are ultimately wholly dependent on Mozilla and Firefox continuing to exist. If Mozilla techbros themselves into imploding entirely and goes bankrupt, for instance, all of those other fork projects are also by association toast.
Some of us never left.
Some of us switched to Chrome when it was legitimately better, but are back now.
i switched to chrome when I was too young to understand anything, and I’m not even sure if it was better for any extent. have switched back 5+ years ago
people who used Firefox since high school😎😎
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.
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.
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.
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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, again the point being is that there are more problems with me using Firefox as a primary browser than ad blocking benefits.
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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.
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guessing you want that codec for a reason
It is the default most widely used codec for devices and video 4K and higher resolution. It is just what nearly all new / modern cameras come with. You don’t really get a choice.
It’s good that I use Firefox and will continue to be ad free then, eh?
I sure hope so. I’ve been on team Mozilla for a long time, but right at this critical moment they are starting to wobble. Their CEO seems to be steering them in a direction that I don’t agree with.
(I still believe Firefox is the best option right now; but I’m a little concerned for the future.)
I switched to Firefox over the summer and have been mostly happy with my decision.
However, there have been a LOT of issues with video playback on certain sites and I really don’t know how to fix them. Searches have been just about useless in regards to finding a fix. The worst one is Nebula. The video often just freezes while the audio just keeps trucking along like nothing is wrong. This has happened to a more limited extent with some YouTube videos as well. And the TAB crash on some sites is quite infuriating.
And we started with “Don’t be evil”
I believe their new slogan is “Fuck em’, what they gonna do!?”.
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.
It wasn’t hard to foresee. We knew these kind of things could happen. The internet used to be very out spoken about it. That ethos is long gone. What’s equally disappointing is tech nerds selling out for bigger paychecks.
That’s because the OG visionaries of tech are gone, and have been replaced by MBAs and techbros.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not Google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
Man fuck google
While this will drive some users to Firefox, we all know it won’t be enough. Too many people simple don’t know, or don’t care, it won’t affect their lives in any meaningful way, or so they will believe. Google will be harming the tech illiterate and normies (sorry for the slur) because money, bullshit, and to drive the stake deeper into the monopoly. If you have older family members using chrome, sit them down and explain to them the dangers of the internet without adblock.
It gets me thinking. Tech literate people are the types to install blockers, and would be the same type of people both motivated and knowledgeable about how to switch browsers. On the line of thinking it seems like it is just going to drive them away from Chrome. Tech illiterate people remain unaffected since they are getting ads anyway.
But then on the other hand, if someone is tech literate then why are they even still using Chrome? Does such a person value whatever advantage Chrome theoretically provides over their ad-blocking?
as a chromium browser user - i’ve been meaning to switch to firefox, and i know it’ll take me maybe a day, but it feels like so much workkkk. In a similar fashion i’ve been meaning to switch to Linux for ages too. I guess it just hasn’t gotten bad enough for me to take action
as long as my adblockers & script blockers work, i’m not forced to upgrade to win11, and win10 still has security updates i don’t think it’s pushing on my discomfort buttons strong enough. I know the day will come, but like with a lot of things in my life - why do something today when i can do it tomorrow?
if that helps, switching browsers is a lot easier than switching your OS. the automatic import brings over most of your data (bookmarks, passwords, history, …), and you only need to handle the addons, if you had any, and the browser settings if you need anything from there
I use Opera for myself, but I have to use Chrome for work reasons (user profiles for different work areas based on whatever email is being used at the company computer). Thing is, Firefox also lacks the feature that makes me use Opera: speed dial. My Opera starting page is my speed dials, and speed dials are 10x better than just bookmarks, and I wouldn’t want to go through all the trouble of transfering literally hundreds of saved pages to standard bookmarks. But, if ublock fully stops working, guess I’ll have no choice.
That’s some procrastination going on. Sometimes you should force yourself to start doing something for a minute or so and things will eventually change.
I feel you. It’s vey much a convenience thing, and sitting down with something you’re used to.
What do you mean “work”? What is it that needs to move?
You just fire up Firefox and start using it. It’ll even scrape your chrome setup to move bookmarks and stuff over.
It’s not an OS. It’s an application.
i don’t use chrome itself. i have a lot of saved things, roughly a million tabs open at every moment, and passwords saved which i do not remember
There’s extensions to export all your open tabs and then a similar extension to import those tabs and open them as a session in Firefox. Source: I, too, have a million tabs open at every moment, and had to do that to transition myself. Same for exporting/importing passwords.
This is all mostly automatically transfered over… I don’t know about passwords though
I’m not sure if Firefox pulls passwords when you import your data, but you can manually export passwords from Chrome and import them into Firefox.
If you have tabs like that, they’re not “open”. They are crumbs left as you wandered the internet. You’re not going back to them. Do yourself a favour and close them.
It’s like having thousands of unread emails in your inbox. At some point you have to stop kidding yourself you’re going to read them.
Chrome devtools and debugger are awesome
If you have older family members, you could try just installing Firefox for them and tell them it’s their internet now. This worked for me parents.
I don’t understand seemingly intelligent people who still blindly use chrome at this point…
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 all my containers, extensions, and 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).
Yeah I work in tech and I’m the only one that cares enough to use Firefox. All my colleagues use chrome or chrome with makeup.
Maybe ad blocking will be what broke the camel’s back, but I doubt more than a few will care enough to switch.
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.
And the creepiness. Advertisers can deduce many habits based on the information you give them. Some techniques can tell when people are pregnant before they do based on their pathing inside the store, for instance.
And yet, all they continue to sell me is a dryer when I just bought one a month ago.
It used to be worse. Pop up ads are mostly a thing of the past. The web used to be an advertisement shit hole and there were no ad blockers back then.
Regardless, you’re right. I don’t understand why or how people could be ignorant of the existence of adblock in 2024 unless they’re boomers.
Since ads began, there have been ad-blockers. You just didn’t know about them.
Most people are stupid, myopic imbeciles that arent bothered by anything until it personally affects them.
Then they’ll howl like wolves at the moon about the great injustice of it all, and how could anyone allow this to happen.
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.
when you ask them, don’t only mention ublock, but the privacy aspects of only allowing the browser of the largest data collection fueled ad company
Honestly, our IT peeps aren’t idiots. They’d probably agree with me. It’s admin who make the overall decisions. I might be able to swing “also Firefox” to be included when they inevitably update the repo.
And the only place I can think of where uBlock is not getting neutered anytime soon is in LibreWolf.
Firefox is fucking with uBlock Origin, too? I was not aware.
I didn’t say anything about Firefox fucking with uBlock Origin, but was merely suggesting to try LibreWolf as its a hardened Firefox fork that comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled.
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.
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.
I’m only using it atm for extensions that are, ironically enough, blocked on Firefox… Though thats only one website in particular.
blocked? that sounds weird, can you give a few examples?
Unrelated one- https://www.neowin.net/amp/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-firefox-store-support-slams-mozilla-for-hostile-reviews/
The two in I use are for twitter-
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blue-blocker/ - Blocked in Firefox since after 0.3.5, which makes it useless since 0.3.5 was prior to the forced change to x, iirc.
https://github.com/dimdenGD/OldTwitter - Removed from Firefox entirely. Still available on Chrome.
Combined those two make the site look like old twitter, lets me save videos with a right click, and blocks twitter blue users automatically.
Wasn’t there just an article about how Mozilla is claiming ublock origin shouldn’t be supported anymore and another one claiming they’re starting a focus on ads?
I feel like we’re entering a really shitty time for the Internet… Tie that in with Microsucks Recall feature and computing in general is going to suck…
I don’t want to go touch grass!!
The closest I can find is
Which is only the “lite” version (which really has no reason to be used in firefox) and was likely based on an improper scan. Which happens constantly and is usually an email and a few days of waiting rather than immediately going to the press.
If you can find something about Mozilla actually being anti-adblock or disabling manifest v2 that would be incredibly useful. But maybe be aware of what is going on before vaguely making major claims?
IIRC Mozilla doubled down on their v2 support when Chrome announced the shift to v3. But then the Chrome monopoly judgment came down and with it a lot of speculation on Google dropping their funding of Mozilla, so maybe Mozilla could be changing its tune to either protect or find a replacement for that funding? Nothing of substance is happening yet, it’s still all speculation, but I do hope nothing like that does happen.
Mozilla has been diversifying for ages, it’s what stuff like buying pocket was all about. They should be making around 100m off the side hustles by now, plenty to keep the lights on, but still a small sum compared to the 500m they get from selling the default search engine spot.
Also, just as a reminder: Mozilla doesn’t exist to make money for Firefox, Firefox exists to make money for Mozilla’s general internet charity work.
In fact, uBlock Origin is one of the officially recommended extensions by Mozilla
uBO Lite was incorrectly flagged as violating policy by someone at Mozilla, but rather than appeal that decision in any capacity at all, the developer just removed the add-on entirely without responding to Mozilla. The original decision was almost certainly just an error.
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.
Good thing I’m on LibreWolf that comes with uBlock Origin.
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~laughs in firefox~
