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Posted by DemiGuru 19 hours ago

Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin(www.pcworld.com)
1218 points | 466 commentspage 5
malomalsky 4 hours ago||
God bless Firefox!
kazinator 6 hours ago||
Obligatory:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/137fwhc/the_i...

ChrisArchitect 18 hours ago||
Related:

Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220392

Insanity 16 hours ago|
Edge is just chromium under the hood. So not a surprise there, should be easy lift for them.
self_awareness 4 hours ago||
Lots of browsers have built-in adblockers that use the same lists as uBlock Origin. Why it's important to support the extension? We have adblocking anyway.

But also, be Mozilla: decimate your own plugin ecosystem, kill half of plugins, force to rewrite the other 50%. But a few years later support this 1 extension, and people will remember that you're a good guy.

When they've adoped Chrome plugins, they've effectively gave up their shares of relevance to Chrome and now they're paying for it.

defrost 4 hours ago|
It's not the uBlock Origin extension that needs saving for "better" adblocking, it's the capabilities of the now discontinued by Google / Chrome extension supporting framework known as Manifest V2.

The 'newer' Manifest V3 replaced the V2 webRequest API with a more limited declarativeNetRequest API.

The original allowed the intercept and blocking of network requests in real-time as generated, the replacement allows a limited subset of filter blocking after requests have been sent and returned.

ie: V2 allowed for less network traffic and greater amount of filtering, V3 provides slower page completes and limited filtering.

self_awareness 2 hours ago||
Manifest V2 functionality that has been cut out was used only in adblockers, right?

And we have adblockers built-in in various browsers now.

So since we have built-in adblockers, we don't really need MV2 functionality anymore? Why oppose MV3?

I mean why people want to oppose MV3 instead of simply asking your favorite browser to expose the browser-specific API for missing functionality, like it was done "in the old days"?

If Google wants to block MV3, then let it block it, and ask browsers to expose missing API. Of course this won't happen in Chrome, but back in my days when software was limited, we simply stopped using it in favor of more complete software.

defrost 2 hours ago||
I'd suggest you sleep on that comment and come back with fresh eyes and a clear head; as is, the logic isn't as joined up as you might think.
self_awareness 2 hours ago||
I'm afraid I've already spent many nights sleeping on that exact same view.

If you're more enlightened, then the best you can do is to explain it to lesser beings, not virtue signal that you know better but others are unworthy of your knowledge.

nickthegreek 17 minutes ago||
mv2 can stop tracking in ways mv3 cannot.
PaulDavisThe1st 14 hours ago||
uBO + Steven Black hosts list + firefox. Peace, for now at least.
timetraveller26 17 hours ago||
Firefox, after 20 years, once again has an advantage over the other browsers.

Let's hope for new generations to get tired of so many ads to finally ditch chrome.

matheusmoreira 15 hours ago||
Unfortunately, new generations seem to be completely fine with this. People in general, they're just so completely captured by the dark patterns that I get the impression they cannot even imagine a world without them.

I install uBlock Origin on every browser I come across. Everybody notices. The internet just feels better, somehow. People can't quite explain what changed, but they know.

globular-toast 7 hours ago||
And now you'll no longer be able to wake people up and show them the real world.
BeetleB 15 hours ago|||
It's funny. Over 20 years ago, I got people to switch to Firefox because of the AdBlock extension.

In case people don't know, Firefox was the first major browser to even have extensions.

Izkata 12 hours ago|||
Also, Firebug showed what was possible with developer tools. Inspecting elements or network requests or whatever else wasn't really a thing before that extension.
doubled112 15 hours ago|||
There is only XUL!
inigyou 13 hours ago||
Long dead. Now there is no XUL, only (private user) data (that Mozilla sells for revenue)
KingMob 8 hours ago||
I think they're making a Ghostbusters joke, btw
inigyou 5 hours ago||
Mozilla made the joke themselves, about Firefox. "There is no data, there is only XUL" was an official XUL catchphrase. But now there is no XUL, and Mozilla sells private user data, so it's reversed.
bananamogul 14 hours ago|||
I wonder if new generations will just get better and better at visually blocking off ads when they read. So many layouts are so common that I read a lot of sites and have absolutely no idea what ads they're running because 30-odd years of browsing rendered HTML pages has trained my brain to block off and not process certain areas of the page.

I'm not an advertising apologist, just pointing out that I can remember what ads were on a freemium TV station I watched two nights ago and what ads were on a radio station I listened to this afternoon but I can't remember a single web ad since...I don't know when. This might be because the TV ads have audio and visual, and with radio my alternative at the moment was looking out the window of my car, but web ads just seem very easy to mentally filter.

ImJamal 17 hours ago|||
uBlock Origin Lite works decently on Chrome so I doubt this will help migration to Firefox.
Andrex 14 hours ago||
Exactly. The difference between the two is not qualitatively different for 99% of users.
sys_64738 14 hours ago||
I noticed that UBO Lite doesn't cause the ad boxes to vanish like UBO does. You see this on the likes of the weather.com webpage.
culi 7 hours ago|||
Exactly. The Lite version is basically "hiding" ads rather than blocking. The MV2 version stops the requests themselves from being made which save your bandwidth and battery. The light version lacks those benefits
kevin_thibedeau 12 hours ago|||
That's manifest V3 working as intended.
odidiejdiwjd 15 hours ago||
If only they focused on making Firefox the definitive good browser instead of a platform for their AI efforts.

Firefox will never convince people to leave chrome on philosophy alone. I detest Chrome with a passion and refuse to touch it with a ten-foot pole, but cannot in good faith recommend Firefox to anyone in today’s world. “It kinda works” is about as far a compliment you can give it.

cadamsdotcom 15 hours ago|||
"It kinda works" is factually incorrect.

I have used Firefox exclusively every day on macOS for the past year, several hours a day, and have not one single time had to open another browser. None of the customers of my B2B saas use Firefox. Not once have I needed to test in their browsers except quick smoke testing to prove to myself that the rendering and details are identical. All my other browsing is indistinguishable from before when I used Chrome, and from on mobile where I (tragically) am forced by Apple's monopoly to use Safari.

Do you have evidence to support your false claim?

jjav 14 hours ago||
Agreed, I can't understand where these experiences come from.

I only ever use Firefox, at work, at home, mobile. Since forever, as long as there has been a Firefox (and Mozilla before that, Netscape prior).

There was one time about 8-10 years ago that I encountered a site that didn't work in Firefox, was some weird proprietary training module at work.

So yes, I did encounter one site that didn't work in Firefox in the last ~20 years. One.

sensanaty 12 hours ago||
I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if it was Google astroturfing every single thread relating to FF. Yes, Mozilla isn't perfect and had some questionable decisions, but we're somehow okay with the worse option out of the two? Somehow, Mozilla's decisions are enough to never use FF, but Google's infinitely many horrible ones are acceptable for.... What reason?
Capricorn2481 6 hours ago||
> Somehow, Mozilla's decisions are enough to never use FF, but Google's infinitely many horrible ones are acceptable for.... What reason?

I think these people are real and predate AI. I think it comes down to a fundamental psychology in how the two browsers are marketed online. Firefox users would say "Firefox is better than Chrome." Chrome users would say "Chrome is good." Firefox is touted as a better browser on the principle of the freedom it gives its users, and paradoxically, that draws heavy scrutiny.

I don't think I am doing a Goomba fallacy here. People that claim to care about privacy and browser freedom will express disgust with Mozilla then, in the same breath, say they are opting into Chrome out of spite, which is 100x worse.

jjav 5 hours ago||
> say they are opting into Chrome out of spite, which is 100x worse.

That is what is frustrating, indeed.

Firefox is not perfect. Nothing is perfect. There have been changes in Firefox over the years that I don't like. (I'm still hurting from it moving the tabs to the top, so annoying.)

In a scale of 1 (100% user-hostile) to 10 (absolutely perfect user-centered browser), Firefox only scores a, let's say, eight.

But chrome scores a solid 2, so obviously I'm not going to use it, ever, no matter if Firefox makes the occasional mis-step.

kulahan 15 hours ago||||
What do you think doesn’t work on Firefox? Aside from Google products purposely crippled, everything works just fine in my experience. It’s fast and stable. If there’s a bunch of AI stuff in it, I’ve not seen it. Of course I believe it exists, I just don’t ever read popups anyways. To be fair, I probably use 5% of the browser’s capability (I imagine many are like me). I browse websites and I have UBO installed.
BeetleB 15 hours ago||
In the last few months, I've seen a huge upsurge of sites that simply won't work for me in Firefox.

Not sure if it's the FF + Linux combination. Should probably try with a fresh profile to confirm.

It sucks, but I'm in on FF all the way. If much of the web stops working for me, it just means I have more time on my hands!

Silhouette 15 hours ago|||
Anecdotally my own experience is consistent with this with the same platform+browser combination.

It appears that there are now significant numbers of sites - or at least noticeable parts or features of sites - that rely on Google-specific APIs and haven't been tested on other browsers.

However visiting those sites from Apple devices is often similarly frustrating. I'm not sure this is an anti-Firefox thing. It seems more of a not realising there are other browsers apart from Chromium-based ones thing.

deweywsu 14 hours ago||
I kinda wondered myself if this was some kind of coordinated effort to make Firefox not work. It wouldn't surprise me if it was later discovered that Google paid some Linux subsystem maintainer to slip in some nefarious code somewhere that altered the way Linux implements rendering specifications ever so slightly such that Firefox appeared broken. Just the conspiracy theorist in me.
nickthegreek 15 minutes ago||||
name any of them?
Izkata 11 hours ago||||
Slack "huddles" (video chat) work on everything except Firefox+Linux. Haven't tried changing my user agent yet, only just got onto Slack for work.
kevin_thibedeau 12 hours ago|||
You can change your UA and add Sec-CH-UA to match Chromium if you want to avoid the (non-ADA compliant) browser bias.
jasonpeacock 15 hours ago||||
What doesn’t work? It’s my daily driver and it renders every website I visit.
rwz 14 hours ago|||
I daily Zen (Firefox under the hood) and the only thing that I consistently need to open other browsers for is direct USB support (mouse/keyboard drivers in the browser). Other than that, I don't remember when was the last time something wasn't working in Firefox.
CalRobert 5 hours ago||
Attestion (now via captcha) means that websites will presumably block Firefox and Google’s attempt to murder the web will be complete.
Markoff 6 hours ago||
1. Vivaldi supports uBlock Origin, if you consider Firefox a "major browser" then sure also Vivaldi and Brave are major browsers

2. while I use uBlock Origin on phone (Firefox) and desktop (Vivaldi), it's overrated, AdGuard works under MV3 AND unlike uBlock supports element picker, so if I was on browser not supporting uBO I would switch to AdGuard since I can't live without element picker

b3ing 15 hours ago|
You can also run Ad Nauseum if you want to
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