Seems Mozilla may have an opening in browser market share, if they allow add blocking extensions.
But how long before sites start blocking Firefox ? Already on some sites have issues when people are using a VPN.
Yes, I did try browsing with out add blockers, and the experience was terrible. Some "mainstream" sites you would think would know better had multiple popups. So blocker on.
I would not mind ads as long as they were not intrusive, but seems it is getting worse and worse.
Skeptical readers will note that this trivial approach blocks one type of Google’s ads, but not every type of Google ads. And that’s certainly true.
And then proceeds to sweep it under some nostalgy. Nice try ;)
To learn what something is about, learn what it does to money. Subj does good to money, so it is for that. Extension security is a lateral positive effect used for marketing. If it was important, MV2 would get upgraded soon after or even before its release.
They didn’t care for all these years, only now it crossed their mind. Sure, sure. And they won’t include the most important project on the web into the standard suite. “No, it’s for everyone, we can’t make exceptions and we’ll remove the page access functionality for other browsers cause that’s uhm… un… unsustainable! Such an accident, ad blocking was so good.”.
That’s a quantum law of bigcorps, there’s nothing under the money layer. Everything beyond money is just an interpretation and a side effect.
I don't think this is the case. Rather, ad-blocking-blocking was the primary motivation, and the undoing of evilness is a byproduct that allows much better marketability.
In reality, extensions are user-installed software. There is ALWAYS a risk with user-installed software on a PC. It's one thing if this is code webpages can automatically serve to you - then, the security is larger concern.
But I, for example, don't see anyone trying to clean up Win32 for security's sake. The closest thing I can think of is Wayland, which is also for security. But - that's desktop wide, for absolutely all software.
The fundamental problem is that centralizing Google (née Doubleclick) considers well-loved libre software and lower-tier surveillance industry malware to be equivalently worthy of trust. It's a reasonable goal to keep Grandma from installing no-name extension #837 (bundled with bottom-market surveillance malware) in spite of herself. But projects like UBO and syncthing have reputations that frankly deserve more trust than Google, itself a top-market player in the surveillance industry.
All of these workarounds are temporary & flimsy --- They will not last long and will certainly not get better, as the rules put in place as well as the tech behind ad delivery are rapidly and constantly changing. We as users & consumers are being abused by these practices, and ads and monthly subscription models are being used as a weapon to get us to pay ridiculous (& arbitrarily increasing) prices for mostly unhelpful services and entertainment now more than ever that still include ads -- It's the beginning of madness & a new form of veiled consumer mass-fleecing. By accepting the ad infiltration and enrolling, we're only funding our own process of shooting ourselves in the foot. They're even getting as bold as to stop sales of physical media (DVDs and CDs) to not allow choices during the worst economy that could possibly exist for consumer opportunity.
The underlying problem is the abusive and untrustworthy way modern ads are being implemented into everything by big business & media companies. They're removing the ability to block ads, because they want to sell a new monthly subscription just to get less ads, and the price will go up until most people can't afford to be on the Internet at all... They're also secretly lobbying to prevent independents from running websites and apps in many ways too. This model was tested on Twitter, where it's gentrified the community now, and driven most past (free) users completely off the platform... Twitter is still highly unprofitable, so it's completely baffling to me as to why companies think this new ad-spam business model will actually work in the long run for their profit. We will also have no options for interaction or entertainment if the Internet goes out, save for a few people with physical media saved from a long time prior to the outage... It's Titanic-Level hubris to buy into this business model.
These ads create such an absolutely jarring experience in navigating sites now, I actually completely avoid implementing them on my sites and apps for that same reason, and to be honest, I never click on them no matter what. With the ways that social apps, and ad content is converging, the Internet, once highly useful for valid information, is now a hellscape of distraction, undesired content, and disinformation meant to drive political overload and consumerism. We need to start asking where the happy medium is in all of this. Not everything should be for-profit, and laced with ads, and the things that have ads can perhaps be less essential to serious need and function.
Microsoft embedding ads into it's OS and office apps is a perfect example of how the frenzy to capture pennies per click has turned on it's head. people are writing secure and private documentation on apps that are willing to place tracking and adware so easily into mission critical applications that it's eroding trust in products altogether. We should expect more from these very large and well profitable companies that are entrusted with mission critical services. Elon scuttling Twitter for his own personal gain was not a crime, but in many ways it was a failure of trust for the service, and I'm honestly still surprised how people are still paying for verification on the platform and buying Teslas to fund his nonsensical ego-maniacal escapades in elitism.
As a consumer economy, we need to shape up and start sending messages to these corporations to shape up and put customer service and respect back at the forefront of their operations at the risk of failure. This model of abusing customers until they pay is NOT in line with a democratic country, and apparently Congress is never going to get it's act together on tech regulation, so we need to vote in more savvy reps that will pay deep attention to tech fleecing and manipulation. Otherwise, by next year, we'll need to watch a video ad between reading each paragraph, and in 5 years we may damn well be required to watch a 3 minute ad before being able to exit our cars.
> Gorhill reports on GitHub that an automated code review by Mozilla flagged problems with uBlock Origin Lite. As a result, he has pulled the add-on from Mozilla's extensions site. The extension's former page now just says "Oops! We can't find that page". You can still install it direct from GitHub, though.
I genuinely think one of the biggest problems in digital society is people being addicted to reading headlines without doing the boring work of reading the article.
I think GP meant that there's a big difference between Mozilla flagging the less-powerful uBlock as a mistake and Google intentionally deprecating the entire mechanism that the more-powerful uBlock depends on, and that you can continue to use the original and more powerful version of uBlock on Firefox for the foreseeable future. Thus, Firefox should be the clear choice for people who want to block ads.
That view is entirely consistent with reading the article, as in-fact the article points this out.
Mozilla is still the better company producing the better browser, in general, but as The Register says, it is now an ad company too.
And the uBO Lite flagging caused more developers to confirm the difficulty of the review process and the minimal value of publishing to the Firefox store. Phrases like "useless time sink expensive", "a real nightmare to work with" and "we just decided to give up" (from three different devs) stand out to me.
Pihole + ublock origin and you have made your browsing experience leagues better. Chrome phasing out Manifest v2 will reignite Firefox transition for many.
I can view the logs in AdGuard Plus, the only time I see an ad in Words With Friends or Flipboard on my iPad is when I'm off my Tailscale VPN (which goes through AGP). Apps that serve their ads directly, like YouTube, are not blocked sadly. But there are multiple workaround apps for that on Android atleast.
Also some apps don't work with the tracking blocked, like Fox Sports, but I just whitelist the minimum amount needed on a per device basis.
At this point I'm so sick of ads and so used to browsing without them, that I think if it comes to choosing, then I'll just give up on much of the internet instead of viewing it with ads.
This is really interesting! I remember gopher from back in the day- I didn't know it still existed even as a protocol.
Wouldn't that be an interesting development, for web browsing shifting to a "have-to" paradigm (for work, for other utilitatarian purposes) from a "want-to" paradigm. Would spam dry up if the web were no longer populated by the masses merely whiling away idle time?
I stopped installing adblockers, instead I don't interact with sites with heavy ads. in fact I didn't read op, because there's like a dozen of ads on that theregister page. I realized that I don't lose much. Danny O'Brien coined the term "hinternet", the bad neighborhoods of the internet that normal, non techie people are forced to interact with (this was back when such a distinction still made sense). a lot of internet is hinternet now, even more so than before, and it's almost liberating to aggressively reject it.
(I'm not going full Richard Stallman about it, sometimes I'll suffer the ads for content, I throw many articles into archive.is, which only shows one ad at the bottom, and I think it's worthwhile to support them, etc.)
> I stopped installing adblockers, instead I don't interact with sites with heavy ads
Or, you know, just install an adblocker.
I have no idea why people would voluntarily not install an adblocker today, you’re just making your life more difficult for no valid reason. No matter how you justify it, your experience without an adblocker is strictly worse than my experience with an adblocker.
You’re rejecting less by allowing some ads to get through than rejecting all ads in bulk.
or, you know, instead I'm going to continue with my strategy, but you do you. I can't believe it's 2024, and we have to have a conversation about personal preferences, so odd, right?
> in fact I didn't read op, because there's like a dozen of ads on that theregister page
Huh? Unless they are serving you a vastly different page than they serve me that's not the case.
UBlock Origin blocks 4 things right away, 3 of which seem to be ads and the logging or analytics. Then sitting on the page over the next few minutes that rises to 7, with the new ones all seeming to be logging or analytics.
Refreshing the page several times to see different ads, they were always either short banners that spanned the page or a square in the middle of the column about 2/3 of the column width.
Most of the time they were not animated. The only animated ones I saw just had an animated fade in which lasted maybe half a second and then it was static.
I overexagerated, it feels like dozen of ads by the real estate they take up. you're technically and precisely correct by your definition. I just don't go to most news paper and magazine websites.
Excellent news, we should see a rapid revitalization of third-party browsers. Allowing the ad delivery network to control browser development was a bad idea from the start.
I'd like to remind everyone that you can still block ads with such Chromium browsers that are deprecating Manifest V3. Extensions include AdGuard and uBlock Origin Lite.
What this changes is that (adblocking) extensions are losing some permissions (like manually picking out elements to block, web requests to update the block lists, etc).
>So, if you use Chrome, or a Chrome-based browser
Seems Mozilla may have an opening in browser market share, if they allow add blocking extensions.
But how long before sites start blocking Firefox ? Already on some sites have issues when people are using a VPN.
Yes, I did try browsing with out add blockers, and the experience was terrible. Some "mainstream" sites you would think would know better had multiple popups. So blocker on.
I would not mind ads as long as they were not intrusive, but seems it is getting worse and worse.
Manifest v2 → v3 isn't really about allowing or disallowing adblockers. https://textslashplain.com/2024/10/13/content-blocking-in-ma... has a 12-line ad blocker that's pretty effective against Google's own ads.
Ad blockers suffer more or less by accident. v2 was too easy to use for evil extensions.
Skeptical readers will note that this trivial approach blocks one type of Google’s ads, but not every type of Google ads. And that’s certainly true.
And then proceeds to sweep it under some nostalgy. Nice try ;)
To learn what something is about, learn what it does to money. Subj does good to money, so it is for that. Extension security is a lateral positive effect used for marketing. If it was important, MV2 would get upgraded soon after or even before its release.
They didn’t care for all these years, only now it crossed their mind. Sure, sure. And they won’t include the most important project on the web into the standard suite. “No, it’s for everyone, we can’t make exceptions and we’ll remove the page access functionality for other browsers cause that’s uhm… un… unsustainable! Such an accident, ad blocking was so good.”.
That’s a quantum law of bigcorps, there’s nothing under the money layer. Everything beyond money is just an interpretation and a side effect.
I don't think this is the case. Rather, ad-blocking-blocking was the primary motivation, and the undoing of evilness is a byproduct that allows much better marketability.
In reality, extensions are user-installed software. There is ALWAYS a risk with user-installed software on a PC. It's one thing if this is code webpages can automatically serve to you - then, the security is larger concern.
But I, for example, don't see anyone trying to clean up Win32 for security's sake. The closest thing I can think of is Wayland, which is also for security. But - that's desktop wide, for absolutely all software.
The fundamental problem is that centralizing Google (née Doubleclick) considers well-loved libre software and lower-tier surveillance industry malware to be equivalently worthy of trust. It's a reasonable goal to keep Grandma from installing no-name extension #837 (bundled with bottom-market surveillance malware) in spite of herself. But projects like UBO and syncthing have reputations that frankly deserve more trust than Google, itself a top-market player in the surveillance industry.
All of these workarounds are temporary & flimsy --- They will not last long and will certainly not get better, as the rules put in place as well as the tech behind ad delivery are rapidly and constantly changing. We as users & consumers are being abused by these practices, and ads and monthly subscription models are being used as a weapon to get us to pay ridiculous (& arbitrarily increasing) prices for mostly unhelpful services and entertainment now more than ever that still include ads -- It's the beginning of madness & a new form of veiled consumer mass-fleecing. By accepting the ad infiltration and enrolling, we're only funding our own process of shooting ourselves in the foot. They're even getting as bold as to stop sales of physical media (DVDs and CDs) to not allow choices during the worst economy that could possibly exist for consumer opportunity.
The underlying problem is the abusive and untrustworthy way modern ads are being implemented into everything by big business & media companies. They're removing the ability to block ads, because they want to sell a new monthly subscription just to get less ads, and the price will go up until most people can't afford to be on the Internet at all... They're also secretly lobbying to prevent independents from running websites and apps in many ways too. This model was tested on Twitter, where it's gentrified the community now, and driven most past (free) users completely off the platform... Twitter is still highly unprofitable, so it's completely baffling to me as to why companies think this new ad-spam business model will actually work in the long run for their profit. We will also have no options for interaction or entertainment if the Internet goes out, save for a few people with physical media saved from a long time prior to the outage... It's Titanic-Level hubris to buy into this business model.
These ads create such an absolutely jarring experience in navigating sites now, I actually completely avoid implementing them on my sites and apps for that same reason, and to be honest, I never click on them no matter what. With the ways that social apps, and ad content is converging, the Internet, once highly useful for valid information, is now a hellscape of distraction, undesired content, and disinformation meant to drive political overload and consumerism. We need to start asking where the happy medium is in all of this. Not everything should be for-profit, and laced with ads, and the things that have ads can perhaps be less essential to serious need and function.
Microsoft embedding ads into it's OS and office apps is a perfect example of how the frenzy to capture pennies per click has turned on it's head. people are writing secure and private documentation on apps that are willing to place tracking and adware so easily into mission critical applications that it's eroding trust in products altogether. We should expect more from these very large and well profitable companies that are entrusted with mission critical services. Elon scuttling Twitter for his own personal gain was not a crime, but in many ways it was a failure of trust for the service, and I'm honestly still surprised how people are still paying for verification on the platform and buying Teslas to fund his nonsensical ego-maniacal escapades in elitism.
As a consumer economy, we need to shape up and start sending messages to these corporations to shape up and put customer service and respect back at the forefront of their operations at the risk of failure. This model of abusing customers until they pay is NOT in line with a democratic country, and apparently Congress is never going to get it's act together on tech regulation, so we need to vote in more savvy reps that will pay deep attention to tech fleecing and manipulation. Otherwise, by next year, we'll need to watch a video ad between reading each paragraph, and in 5 years we may damn well be required to watch a 3 minute ad before being able to exit our cars.
At this point it’s hard to have much sympathy when Firefox is literally right there, for free.
> Gorhill reports on GitHub that an automated code review by Mozilla flagged problems with uBlock Origin Lite. As a result, he has pulled the add-on from Mozilla's extensions site. The extension's former page now just says "Oops! We can't find that page". You can still install it direct from GitHub, though.
I genuinely think one of the biggest problems in digital society is people being addicted to reading headlines without doing the boring work of reading the article.
I think GP meant that there's a big difference between Mozilla flagging the less-powerful uBlock as a mistake and Google intentionally deprecating the entire mechanism that the more-powerful uBlock depends on, and that you can continue to use the original and more powerful version of uBlock on Firefox for the foreseeable future. Thus, Firefox should be the clear choice for people who want to block ads.
That view is entirely consistent with reading the article, as in-fact the article points this out.
Mozilla is still the better company producing the better browser, in general, but as The Register says, it is now an ad company too.
And the uBO Lite flagging caused more developers to confirm the difficulty of the review process and the minimal value of publishing to the Firefox store. Phrases like "useless time sink expensive", "a real nightmare to work with" and "we just decided to give up" (from three different devs) stand out to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710183
Pihole + ublock origin and you have made your browsing experience leagues better. Chrome phasing out Manifest v2 will reignite Firefox transition for many.
What does pihole block that ublock doesn't?
Every single thing that isn't in your browser.
App ads, all the trackers from Netflix, Plex, Sonos, etc.
You think it does, or you know it does? If the later, where can I read more about it?
Because, e.g., Apple has official support for allowing apps to easily use DoH/DoT for their connections: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10047/
I would be mighty surprised if this was the only such mechanism
I know for a fact it does.
I can view the logs in AdGuard Plus, the only time I see an ad in Words With Friends or Flipboard on my iPad is when I'm off my Tailscale VPN (which goes through AGP). Apps that serve their ads directly, like YouTube, are not blocked sadly. But there are multiple workaround apps for that on Android atleast.
Also some apps don't work with the tracking blocked, like Fox Sports, but I just whitelist the minimum amount needed on a per device basis.
Do you really mean "ublock" rather than Ublock Origin?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin
ublock origin as you've linked.
At this point I'm so sick of ads and so used to browsing without them, that I think if it comes to choosing, then I'll just give up on much of the internet instead of viewing it with ads.
Well we can always go back to gopher:
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi
And/or start using Gemini:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi
I have moved my site to gopher/gemini. It is far easier to maintain and there are a lot of interesting sites sitting there. Just a few:
* gemini://sdf.org
* gemini://gem.sdf.org/
* gopher://sdf.org
* gopher://magical.fish
* gopher://gopher.floodgap.com
This is really interesting! I remember gopher from back in the day- I didn't know it still existed even as a protocol.
Wouldn't that be an interesting development, for web browsing shifting to a "have-to" paradigm (for work, for other utilitatarian purposes) from a "want-to" paradigm. Would spam dry up if the web were no longer populated by the masses merely whiling away idle time?
Yes I've given up on YouTube because of ads. Got tired of fixing Revanced.
I stopped installing adblockers, instead I don't interact with sites with heavy ads. in fact I didn't read op, because there's like a dozen of ads on that theregister page. I realized that I don't lose much. Danny O'Brien coined the term "hinternet", the bad neighborhoods of the internet that normal, non techie people are forced to interact with (this was back when such a distinction still made sense). a lot of internet is hinternet now, even more so than before, and it's almost liberating to aggressively reject it.
(I'm not going full Richard Stallman about it, sometimes I'll suffer the ads for content, I throw many articles into archive.is, which only shows one ad at the bottom, and I think it's worthwhile to support them, etc.)
> I stopped installing adblockers, instead I don't interact with sites with heavy ads
Or, you know, just install an adblocker.
I have no idea why people would voluntarily not install an adblocker today, you’re just making your life more difficult for no valid reason. No matter how you justify it, your experience without an adblocker is strictly worse than my experience with an adblocker.
You’re rejecting less by allowing some ads to get through than rejecting all ads in bulk.
or, you know, instead I'm going to continue with my strategy, but you do you. I can't believe it's 2024, and we have to have a conversation about personal preferences, so odd, right?
> in fact I didn't read op, because there's like a dozen of ads on that theregister page
Huh? Unless they are serving you a vastly different page than they serve me that's not the case.
UBlock Origin blocks 4 things right away, 3 of which seem to be ads and the logging or analytics. Then sitting on the page over the next few minutes that rises to 7, with the new ones all seeming to be logging or analytics.
Refreshing the page several times to see different ads, they were always either short banners that spanned the page or a square in the middle of the column about 2/3 of the column width.
Most of the time they were not animated. The only animated ones I saw just had an animated fade in which lasted maybe half a second and then it was static.
I overexagerated, it feels like dozen of ads by the real estate they take up. you're technically and precisely correct by your definition. I just don't go to most news paper and magazine websites.
Excellent news, we should see a rapid revitalization of third-party browsers. Allowing the ad delivery network to control browser development was a bad idea from the start.
Will there be any good chromium alternatives that allow Ublock to continue working? Or do we have to go to Firefox?
I'd like to remind everyone that you can still block ads with such Chromium browsers that are deprecating Manifest V3. Extensions include AdGuard and uBlock Origin Lite.
What this changes is that (adblocking) extensions are losing some permissions (like manually picking out elements to block, web requests to update the block lists, etc).
Why do you feel the need to remind people about a poor alternative?
I feel the need to correct a misconception, of course. Yes I am aware of the Firefox and uBlock Origin combo.
Brave perhaps.
But even they are going to support MV2 only as long its code remains in Chromium repo, I think.
Related:
"Begin disabling installed extensions still using Manifest V2 in Chrome stable"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41809698
Related:
Chrome Canary just killed uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2 extensions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757178
Safari + AdGuard works fine. Just seems odd that people pretend there aren't other options.
Related:
Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707418
In the never ending war, the people will build better mechanisms for blocking and hiding advertising.