Top
Best
New

Posted by eternalreturn 8 hours ago

Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did(www.theverge.com)
132 points | 133 commentspage 2
poulpy123 6 hours ago|
I honestly don't know how people do without ad blockers. Even with being ok with ads, they are so overwhelming that I could not use internet without blocking them
massysett 4 hours ago||
I don’t use adblockers. If a site has too many ads to be usable, I don’t visit it.
mancerayder 19 minutes ago|||
>I don’t use adblockers. If a site has too many ads to be usable, I don’t visit it.

Excuse me. I take it you don't read any mainstream news (NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ, WSP, etc etc).

garciansmith 2 hours ago||||
It's still a security risk though: you still have to visit those sites to determine if they have ads or not. Why browse without proper protection?
WhyIsItAlwaysHN 4 hours ago|||
So no youtube?
mancerayder 18 minutes ago|||
If you pay for YouTube, there are no ads. [edit] except for those ones that podcasters add in the middle. "[15 minutes in] Alright, now is a great time to tell you about my sponsor tell you about my sponsor!", and you skip ahead, and it shows the product nonetheless.
yndoendo 2 hours ago||||
I find _yt-dlp_ to be the best ad-block solution for Youtube. One can watch it offline and archive it if value has been found.

Web Brower with ad-blocking setup can still have advertisements leak through. When it does and it still does after three refreshes, I just don't watch and move on.

I will always be a sunk-cost for Google.

massysett 4 hours ago||||
YouTube is tolerable with ads. If I found it intolerable, I would pay. Or not visit.
tornikeo 4 hours ago|||
Humans are just so damn different in their tolerance to wasting time. I can't take feeling like I wasted 10 seconds of my time on an ad even when watching an video for recreation.
noman-land 3 hours ago|||
If an ad isn't blocked, I fast forward through it. If I can't fast forward, I mute it. If I can't mute it, I'll mute my computer and change tabs for the duration. If it's a page in a magazine, I flip it quickly. If it's a billboard I'll avert my gaze. If it's in an airplane I take out my headphones and cover the screen.

I find being advertised to so annoying there's no way in hell I will spend my limited time on this planet willingly consuming an ad.

1718627440 2 hours ago|||
Yeah, why should I watch your content? If you want me to watch your crap, please pay me. Otherwise it's my time and attention, you expect to get for free.
cindyllm 2 hours ago||
[dead]
massysett 2 hours ago|||
Or you could not consume the content.
Marsymars 1 hour ago|||
The problem I run into is e.g. if I need to replace the the steering wheel cruise control buttons in my car, a random youtuber doing that is the only reasonable option getting instructions on that, which isn't something a youtube subscription scales to.
noman-land 1 hour ago|||
I'd rather do all the stuff I said.
shakna 2 hours ago||||
If modern ads weren't built to be intentionally manipulative to the nth degree, whilst also extracting a huge amount of private data of the viewer, I might be more tolerant of them.
ndriscoll 3 hours ago|||
It's doubly crazy to me that someone would let a machine take their time like that. An inanimate object, and they give it any amount of respect instead of fixing it to do what they want.
rascul 1 hour ago||||
Lately without an ad blocker YouTube will give me an ad every minute. Basically unusable.
Ylpertnodi 4 hours ago|||
'Rainbow Dome Musick', by Steve Hillagr..glorious soothing music, then 30 mins in, a Barilla pasta advert. Sorry, youtube - I tried.
NeutralWanted 4 hours ago||||
YouTube premium is one of the best subs you can buy if you watch a lot of YouTube. Plus you get Music.
Krssst 4 hours ago||
YT Music would be be better if I did not have to double check every of its suggestion for AI generation. Some accounts to make their AI use public which is nice but there's no way to see their channel info in YT Music to look for that.
NeutralWanted 4 hours ago|||
Cant say I've ever heard any AI generated music on YTM before
hnuser123456 4 hours ago||
This probably depends on if you've used it enough to make some playlists and give it an idea of the real music that you like.
layer8 3 hours ago|||
You can actually tap on the channel name and scroll down to see the About section (at least on iOS).

I never had genAI tracks being suggested on YouTube Music. Though it might be a factor that my account predates genAI music.

Krssst 2 hours ago||
I use the web version and when clicking an artist's name I only see a description for well-known ones. Other channels don't show any description even though the YouTube side has one.

I assume one requirement for getting genAI tracks is being initially fine with hearing music from random channels and also hearing music produced after 2022; if one only cares (for example) about pre-2020 very well-known music they're probably going to be safe.

layer8 2 hours ago||
I regularly listen to recent music, but often tracks I explicitly search for, and autoplay based on those I “liked”. My “Liked Music” playlist has several thousand entries, so I suspect that heavily steers what I’m presented with.
iso1631 1 hour ago|||
You talking about the creators that have ads in their videos?

I tend to skip those, although map men's are good, but I also tend to prefer those who don't have ads.

cake-rusk 6 hours ago|||
Most laypeople I know haven't seen an ad blocker in action ever.
squigz 5 hours ago|||
I install Firefox and uBlock on friends/family devices as often as I can.
jmclnx 4 hours ago|||
I use noscript instead of an ad blocker. I find it blocks the intrusive ads. I do not mind what I view as normal ads (ie: text or link), but these video and popup ads drive me crazy. I find noscript blocks the "bad" ads.
Balinares 5 hours ago||
In case your assumption here is that TFA is about Edge disabling adblockers: it's not. It's just removing ManifestV2 support. ManifestV3 is still supported. Despite what one might assume, MV3 does not seem to measurably diminish the effectiveness of adblockers; if anything, it improves it. (Source: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0027.php)
Larrikin 4 hours ago|||
The only reason anyone knows about the switch between manifest 2 and 3 is that the only meaningful difference is the crippled ad blocking ability. Nobody knows any other difference unless they are an extension developers or worked on making the Internet a worse place.
crazygringo 2 hours ago|||
Right, but there is no meaningful difference in terms of ad blocking ability.

It's all theoretical. In practice, uBlock Origin Lite works amazingly on MV3. In my experience, it blocks all the ads. And I've been using it for a while now.

armadyl 3 hours ago|||
I mean you’re right about the awareness of it due to ad blocking but

> Nobody knows any other difference unless they are an extension developers or worked on making the Internet a worse place.

MV3 comes with a ton of security improvements over MV2, a side effect is the perceived weakening of ad blocking extensions but the benefits outweigh the cons.

MV2 effectively allowed a permanently open RCE pathway.

The browser itself should ideally be handling ad blocking as it’s more effective and efficient at it (Brave, Vanadium, Trivalent).

Safari has already been on an MV3-like extension system for years yet only Chromium draws ire. I mean they got flack at first but it died off and now there’s no real difference.

Marsymars 1 hour ago||||
I've found ad-blockers other than uBlock Origin MV2 to struggle with particularly aggressive anti-adblocking scripts.

I don't particularly notice, but my wife was getting frustrated last night when she was looking for recipes, an ad network was blocked at the DNS level, and despite local ad-blockers, every recipe site she was visiting was redirecting her to a "please disable your ad blocker" page.

LelouBil 5 hours ago|||
Isn't the main issue that for MV3 you can't have a dynamic blocklist ? And so you have to update it with an extension update ?
phire 4 hours ago||
There is a dynamic API too that allows extensions to modify the blocklist at runtime.

I’ve been using UBlock Origin Lite on my iPhone for a while, and that works great, keeping itself updated from EasyList and allowing for custom rules.

In some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse. Sometimes you have to flip it into “complete mode” (and give it full access to modify the current site) to get good blocking.

gruez 4 hours ago||
>In some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse. Sometimes you have to flip it into “complete mode” (and give it full access to modify the current site) to get good blocking.

I don't how this is supposed to be a demerit given that the v2 version had full access to every site you visit. Safari just made that more explicit.

roryirvine 2 hours ago||
uBO 1.7.3 was released just 3 days ago, so it would be more accurate to say "better" rather than "older".
DarkmSparks 3 hours ago||
Vivaldi for the win.
computronus 2 hours ago||
Vivaldi is about to drop support for Manifest V2 as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1urieed/com...

I'd been using it solely for GMail / Google Drive / etc. at work, for whatever improved compatibility a Chromium browser might provide over Firefox, which I use for everything else. I got the warning that UBlock Origin won't work, and I immediately ditched Vivaldi. I'm sad about it, I think Vivaldi otherwise is a good browser.

g8oz 3 hours ago||
I love Vivaldi, but it also uses Chromium. If an extension is not in the Chrome Web store Vivaldi will not be able to install it.

Firefox seems to be the only reasonably mainstream option for proper ad blocking.

KetoManx64 2 hours ago||
Vivaldi has ad blocking built into it, and has no issue with you enabling developer settings and sideloading extensions from a file you download from Github Releases.
tredre3 1 hour ago||
Vivaldi is still dropping support for MV2, which means no more uBlock Origin (non-lite). Being able to side-load extensions doesn't matter if the API is gone.
Danox 1 hour ago||
No surprise they want to serve ads everywhere…
KronisLV 2 hours ago||
For what it's worth, I daily drive Edge on my Windows machine and it's an okay browser, haven't had a reason to install Chrome in ages (though did run Firefox for a while due to liking their dev tools better, it's still on my MacBook cause I like the UI more than Safari).

Even when my Intel Arc B580 has its drivers freeze the browser, I can just kill the GPU rendering process and it picks back up with no data loss, whereas with Firefox I had to restart the whole thing. Seems related to video decode, changing ANGLE backends or whatever in the browsers didn't really help and disabling hardware acceleration makes the experience suck more than it otherwise should.

If not for that, I'd still probably be on Firefox fully, despite Mozilla not exactly being the most sane of companies, though maybe trying to fund developing a browser and a whole org is a bit crazy as it is.

Brave was okay but nothing special. Maybe I should look at Vivaldi again, but it's an odd position to be in, when upstream is pushing changes on you, so it probably doesn't matter what they do or don't want to support long term, same as with every other Chromium derived browser.

Bummer about Chromium fucking over people who dislike ads.

supermatou 56 seconds ago|
>I can just kill the GPU rendering process

>and it picks back up with no data loss,

>whereas with Firefox I had to restart the whole thing

about:processes > kill the GPU process without having to restart Firefox.

ck2 1 hour ago||
all the forks in the world won't have widevine support

only Firefox is left which is fine by me

raverbashing 8 hours ago||
I guess it still will be the best browser to download Firefox
anticrymactic 1 hour ago||
> I guess it still will be the best browser to download Firefox

```cmd winget install Mozilla.Firefox ``` Should always work out-of-the-box now.

Marsymars 1 hour ago||
Good as long as you don't want the EME-free version.
biglyburrito 7 hours ago|||
It always was.
jmclnx 4 hours ago||
Lets hope it stays that way :)

But if offered enough $, I fear it will join that no-bocker bandwagon.

NeutralWanted 4 hours ago||
Running Unbound on my gateway with a curated adblock list. Easy setup, network-wide ad blocking on every device / browser.
gruez 4 hours ago||
DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.
NeutralWanted 2 hours ago|||
I'd rather have 100% of devices on my network have near 90% of all ads effectively ad blocked than deal with installing ad blockers on all possible clients. Sure, I use an ad blocker on my personal machine with firefox, but none of the phones besides mine does. None of the family that visits do. Barely any of my friends that come over do. None of the TVs and streaming devices and whatnot do. I am blocking more ads from ever reaching my network than the majority of people who only use browser based adblockers do.
c0_0p_ 1 hour ago||
I'm surprised to hear that it's so successful beyond banner ads. I figured most platforms would use the same domain for their ads as their content. I'm pretty sure YouTube and my "smart" TV do that. Plus I'd prefer to use DNS over HTTPS instead of using unencrypted DNS.
tredre3 1 hour ago||
> Plus I'd prefer to use DNS over HTTPS instead of using unencrypted DNS.

Running unbound or a pi-hole on your network doesn't preclude that.

Your devices talks to the gateway/router/pi-hole on the network, who will then use your chosen DoH providers for upstream requests.

hnuser123456 4 hours ago|||
I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections? That DNS blocking is actual blocking, while the extension can only do filtering after the connections are made.
gruez 4 hours ago|||
>I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections?

No. See:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...

>The chrome.declarativeNetRequest API is used to block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules. This lets extensions modify network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content, thus providing more privacy.

Daedren 3 hours ago|||
They can block, it just has to be declarative unlike before. It's better than DNS adblockers since you can still do content filtering, CSS/JS injections and whatnot.
cmeacham98 4 hours ago||
Some ads (e.g. I know YT ads used to be this way, haven't looked recently) can't be blocked at the network level because they are served from the same domain/servers as the content.
NeutralWanted 4 hours ago||
Sure, but have YT Premium for the family. Don't know how anyone can use YT without it. And it blocks 90% of ads, the rest are tolerable / go mostly unnoticed.
Cider9986 2 hours ago|||
>Don't know how anyone can use YT without it.

With an adblocker..

Why would you need yt premium with an adblocker?

soniczentropy 2 hours ago||||
The funniest part of this is that you're paying to still see 10% of the ads. I use Firefox and see 0% of the ads for free
microtonal 3 hours ago||||
I use a browser with a built-in blocker (Brave Origin) and I don't see ads in YouTube.
Izkata 1 hour ago||
Same with ublock origin on firefox, been years since I've seen any ads. There was a period where they tried to break through the blocking and occasionally I'd see one, but it kinda seems like they gave up.
layer8 3 hours ago|||
You’re just saying that 90% of your internet usage is YouTube?
rdx-amw 3 hours ago||
I wonder if this is from efforts to maintain the difference between upstream and Edge - such that Edge is trying to simplify development by following Chrome/Chromium closer.
More comments...