this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024

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Google is Killing uBlock Origin. No Chromium Browser is Safe. (www.quippd.com)

submitted 1 day ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/technology@lemmy.world

219 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We’ve been anticipating it for years, and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.

Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.

I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and it seems to me that we aren’t getting good information about this topic.

This post is me trying to give you that information, to help increase the mind share of an actual alternative. Enjoy!

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[–] helloworld55@lemm.ee 23 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Can I just add a different perspective on this?

My dad is really old (like early baby-boomers), and I am basically the in-family tech support when the home computer starts acting strange.

Well, right after google rolled out this update, my dad clicked on what he thought was an online shopping link. It was actually an ad for a toolbar add-on. Queue like 6+ hours trying to uninstall that add-on and the bundled software.

I never had to worry about that in the past with him because I had u-block origin installed. Now I need to find something else that can run quietly in the background. And probably a better antivirus.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Is there any organization out there that could actually promote an "Acceptable ad standard"? Like, maybe even something within web specs?

A long time ago, ads were slightly irritating, rarely useful, and considered a necessary evil for gently monetizing the web. We've had this slow evolution to draconian tracking nightmares that are genuinely dangerous and often written by malicious untraceable actors. I almost feel like we could pressure back towards decent ads if there was some standard by which they only received basic info about the user, showed basic info about a product, didn't pollute the experience or ruin accessibility, and were registered to businesses by physical address with legal accountability for things like false advertising.

That is...perhaps a vain hope though. It's just hard to picture futures where all websites run off of donations or subscriptions, because advertising is fucking hell now.

[–] Spotlight7573@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

You mean like https://acceptableads.com/ which is only supported so far by Adblock Plus (and its parent company)?

The problem is until there is some kind of penalty for being too annoying or too resource consuming, it will always be a race to the bottom with more, worse ads. As people add ad blockers to their browsers, the user pool that isn't running them begins to dry up and more ads are needed to keep the same revenue. This results in even more people blocking them.

Two of the things I had hope for on the privacy side was Mozilla's Privacy-Preserving Attribution for ad attribution and Google's Privacy Sandbox collection of features for targeting like the Topics API. Both would have been better for privacy than the current system of granular, individual user tracking across sites.

If those two get wide enough adoption, regulation could be put in place to limit the old methods as there would be a better replacement available without killing the whole current ad supported economy of most sites. I get that strictly speaking from a privacy perspective 'more anonymous/private tracking' < 'no tracking' but I really don't want perfect to be the enemy of better.

[–] derpgon@programming.dev 2 points 7 hours ago

Buy a Raspberry PI, install PiHole or AdGuard, change router DNS, and you are good to go. Yes, not perfect, but doesn't rely on a browser extension that can go extinct next time the browser decides it is time for a change.

[–] Lutra@lemmy.world 33 points 10 hours ago

Kids, remember, Google is an advertising company.

[–] WrenFeathers@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

It blows my mind that there are major companies that are actively, and very publicly- working their asses off to undermine the interests of their own customer base. And not only are they still are enabled to exist- they’re profits are constantly growing. Which means, despite their nefarious and intrusive updates to their services…. People are eating it up!

Nothing will change until people do the work to make that change.

Take YouTube for example:

They have screwed people over time and again. From their content creators, to those that enjoy watching them. Yet- those that hate it so much would seemingly never organize themselves to boycott their services on a level that will ever hurt them.

So they continue to do it unstopped.

Nothing changes until something changes. It isn’t ever easy, but if you want it to happen badly enough, it is always worth it.

All it takes is for someone to stand up and take the reins!

(I cannot be that person as I have ADHD and will probably forget that I wrote this come later this afternoon)

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 55 points 15 hours ago

[–] FangedWyvern42@lemmy.world 23 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Yet another reason to never use Chrome

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[–] underthesign@lemmy.world 35 points 19 hours ago (24 children)

Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on, because I'm personally very bored with my kids' schools and related services sending out emails and forms with links that simply won't open in FF but are clearly expecting Chrome or Edge where they work fine. Yes, this is on the lazy developers, but if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups then this is the stuff they must fix.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 6 points 7 hours ago

Yeah, unfortunately the next step will be sites rejecting "unsecure" browsers because they want the ad money.

This is going to get worse, not better.

[–] RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on

Care to share some examples Firefox has trouble with? The only issues I have with websites is due to my aggressive use of Noscript.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

There's some streaming video sites that deliberately block Firefox. It used to be that Firefox didn't support the necessary web standards, but now it does. The site put up blocks telling you to use Chrome, and never got around to taking them down.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

I'm on a Surface Pro, which is a somewhat weaker device. For whatever reason, Microsoft Edge (Chromium) runs YouTube and Twitch much better than Firefox. This might be due to efficiency in the browser, or the site video code itself being built for it.

[–] moon@lemmy.cafe 13 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

What you're talking about is webcompat and is a very complicated issue. Also I've talked to some Mozilla devs who gave me multiple examples of Chromium rendering something wrong, and they'd have to intentionally break Firefox to render it incorrectly too, just so the end user would get a more consistent experience. Of course these issues happen more and more when things are only tested for one browser.

[–] yikerman@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago

This is Chromium monopoly. At this time instead of W3C standards, Chromium itself becomes the standard.

[–] LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 10 hours ago

Maybe there could be some sort of compatibility flag in Firefox which detects non-standard pages designed for Chrome. We could call it... hmm... something like Quirks Mode?

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 points 7 hours ago

It's pretty trivial to just use an alternate browser for the garbage sites that don't support FF.

[–] kava@lemmy.world 9 points 12 hours ago (6 children)

I can't think of a single example where a web page doesn't work on FF.

if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups

Lol. I remember when FF was the most popular browser.

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[–] gerbler@lemmy.world 68 points 17 hours ago (17 children)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If your site doesn't work on Firefox your site doesn't work. As web developers your job is to develop applications for the web not for one specific browser. This goes double for essential services.

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[–] tehmics@lemmy.world 20 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Okay that's fine, but when websites are effectively writing

if user_agent_string != [chromium]
     break;

It doesn't really matter how good compatibility is. I've had websites go from nothing but a "Firefox is not supported, please use Chrome" splash screen to working just fine with Firefox by simply spoofing the user agent to Chrome. Maybe some feature was broken, but I was able to do what I needed. More often than not they just aren't testing it and don't want to support other browsers.

The more insidious side of this is that websites will require and attempt to enforce Chrome as adblocking gets increasingly impossible on them, because it aligns with their interests. It's so important for the future of the web that we resist this change, but I think it's too late.

The world wide web is quickly turning into the dark alley of the internet that nobody is willing to walk down.

[–] dsilverz@thelemmy.club 3 points 10 hours ago

As a developer, I can foresee websites using features other than navigator.userAgent to detect Chrome, because it's easy to change its value. For example: for now, navigator.getBattery is available only in Chromium, and it doesn't need permissions to be checked for its existence through typeof navigator.getBattery === 'function' (also, the function seems to be perfectly callable without user intervention, enabling additional means of fingerprinting). While it's easy to spoof userAgent, it's not as easy to "mock" unsupported APIs such as navigator.getBattery through Firefox.

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[–] Babalugats@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Is duckduckgo chromium based?

I don't use it, just curious.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 20 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

Unluckily, yes.

There are only 3 independent browser engines left: Firefox, Chromium and Safari. And Chromium derives from Safari, so the only true alternative is Firefox.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago

Eh, Chromium's Blink and Safari's WebKit diverged quite some time ago, I think it's fair to consider them separate engines at this point.

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 9 points 10 hours ago

Gecko, blink and webkit

[–] yikerman@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

There is also a developing project Ladybird (with homebrew libweb), although it is far from production-ready.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 2 points 10 hours ago

Yes, of course there are more projects. KHTML itself was a different engine (which Apple took, modified and re-released with the name of Safari). I just mentioned the only three "complete" and production-ready engines.

[–] PrivacyDingus@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

There is also Goanna / Pale Moon: https://www.palemoon.org/

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