I’m warning Google that Google Chrome may soon be disabled on my devices.
It already is on mine, no trace of chromium or it’s forks.
Discord, slack, bitwarden, steam, Microsoft teams, visual studio code, balena etcher . Anyone else know of any electron apps or heavily modified version of chrome?😄
Teams has switched to Microsoft’s own edition of the same concept, “Edge WebView2”. Now that Edge is just being Chrome wearing a rubber Scooby Doo mask, I don’t expect the differences are vast.
Another fun iteration is Plex’s desktop client, which uses QtWebEngine… however surprise! still the Chromium engine underneath.
Signal’s desktop app is plain old Electron though.
Of the ones on your list, worth noting that Discord and Slack work fine with FirefoxPWA.
Holy shit I had not heard of Firefox PWA but I will use the shit out of this
I use the shit out of Firefox PWA. I just wish Mozilla would get off their asses and make it work out of the box vs having to install a third party app.
I do wish there were more native apps but alternatives to electron is always a good thing in my book.
Except for Microsoft, Microsoft can stop pretending their solution is demonstrably different from electron and chromium.
Discord bitwarden steam and teams all work fine for me in ff, i don’t use the others
https://github.com/gamingdoom/datcord
Works like a charm.
Neat!
Until you do more than warn they don’t care.
Linux Phones and Degoogled Phones surge in response.
Unfortunately for work I may have no choice:-(. Several of our daily work products I’ve tried on Firefox without success. Those also don’t have ads.
I wish there were better alternatives. I may try out LibreWolf but I could not imagine it somehow being easier, though with enough effort put in the end result may be all that matters. Until the first update (possibly forced on the server end even if I don’t on mine) that breaks everything and I cannot do my work for the day, in which case I will absolutely go crawling back to Chrome, bc they have us by the short hairs there.:-(
Use chrome only where you need it.
Prexactly:-)
My company just plain old won’t install Firefox without a good reason.
I’m stuck using chrome or edge. Once the ad block stops working on chrome, I move over.
I really hate the corporate IT.
I was at a job that was slowly transitioning from a medium sized company to a larger one, initially we were allowed just install and use whatever on our machines, but gradually IT started implementing policies where if we wanted to add something it had to go through a request system and usually it would be denied.
As a software developer this was just infuriating, it would hold up work, force us to use shitty software (like Chrome and Edge) and there would often be fuck ups where installing a new version of software would require removal of the old one and installation of a new one - which would trigger the approval process again.
Like - I get it - some people can’t be trusted, but we were some of the key devs for the companies product, we know what we’re doing.
I was rather happy to leave that part of the company behind when I left.
On my work computer I don’t have admin rights but still I could install Firefox with no problems. It installed itself for local user only.
Yeesh… I would reconsider working there if possible, but being able to (checks notes) pay rent and afford food and medical care may just make up for it.:-| Hopefully you don’t need to surf the web much at work.
I went through the same thing with MSIE. Corporate mandates and stuff. Businesses are sometimes wrong.
No, they are always right! (Especially when they are wrong…)
meanwhile firefox lists it as recommended and also lets you use it on firefox mobile.
Almost as if a browser company that’s not also an advertising company has no reason to fight ad blockers.
I’ve got some bad news for you. Mozilla bought an ad company.
i mean they bought a privacy preserving ad company to offer an alternative for companies to google, which is what they should be doing.
because like it or not people depend on ads for their sites.
Wait until people find out you can make the government ban ads - https://www.euronews.com/2014/11/26/grenoble-europe-s-first-ad-free-city/
I like their future (so far).
Ban billboards. Very different. And are there ones owned by the city.
Honestly, not a huge win.
Banning billboards is actually pretty huge. I live in Maine where billboards are banned and the mental break from being constantly forcibly advertised to is so nice. Every time I travel anywhere else I realize what a huge difference it makes.
Sadly that news isn’t how it is right now. Picking a random spot in Grenoble using Google maps and searching for the first tram station, I find 6+ billboards.
You can always fork firefox. People used to use website not requiring javascript at all and it worked well. Some people still use even w3m f.e. when graphics card driver goes bad after update and they need to watch some docs on the internet. Most current browser have most features you would ever need
You can always fork firefox
You could fork Chromium too.
Forking is indeed the way forward when Mozilla loses its way a little more. For myself, I switched to Librewolf about 6 months ago, along with replacing Thunderbird with Betterbird after using it since the Phoenix days.
I cannot remember what prompted the move to Librewolf, it may have been the AI stuff they were pushing at the time, or possibly the update that forced the tabs into my titlebar without having to go into about:config to fix it. Or the fact that Firefox was constantly pushing me to sign up for an account. There were quite a few gripes that added up over time lol
Betterbird restored some removed things I liked pre-supernova as well as a native systray icon under Linux and that was enough motivation to make the switch.
It is time for a new browser to enter the market. Either Ladybird or something built with Servo seems likely.
And my nerd bros try to get me to donate
It has made mobile browsing usable again for me.
Same. Firefox Mobile had been a laggy mess when I used it a few years ago, but a combination of some really aggressive advertising and the announcement of manifest v3 caused me to give it another shot about a year ago. It’s a dramatic improvement in phone browsing.
Google needs to be broken up by government.
It saddens me to agree with this. Who knew Google would become as oppressive as fucking MICROSOFT?
« Don’t be evil »
😬😬😬😬
They ditched that in 2018. It was long overdue. At least somewhat honest about themselves.
Most smart people who understood capitalism did.
I hear the term ‘broken up’ a lot in media and discourse, but it’s never explained. In your eyes, what actually happens when a government ‘breaks up’ a corporation? I mean, what are the steps, objectives, and outcomes?
Not being adversarial, I’m just curious.
Not the person you’re asking, but my general understanding is that different products would be required to be their own companies, so advertising, Android, and Chrome would all be separate businesses.
I envision it like AT&T’s break-up, where the singular Google is broken up into regional companies that will (hopefully) have to compete with each other.
It really wouldn’t change anything in the long run. Any company that creates a browser is gonna need some form of income and people aren’t willing to pay for a browser. What would be their incentive to continue to work on the browser when they aren’t being paid?
Same as Firefox. Let search engines (including google) pay them a fair market rate to make them the default browser.
Adblockers are the largest consumer boycott in history.
Google isn’t just disabling an extension, they’re attacking a boycott comprised of 200,000,000+ people, all around the globe, standing up to forced manipulation of our beliefs and habits by profit-hungry corporations.
If Google presented me with ads for things I might be interested in and in a non-invasive way, wouldn’t mind looking at them at all.
Instead I get ads for the seemingly random shit I have absolutely zero interest in buying. How they are consistently wrong about my spending habits is unbelievable. I have two fucking hobbies! I don’t see ads for anything relating to them. Ever.
Ad blockers block more than just shitty ads. They also block malicious ads.
Also, there’s like 10 per webpage, and then you have the damn pop-ups when you scroll 🤬
Sounds like you need to give Google more private information
I never thought about it that way. Interesting. Thanks!
a boycott comprising* 200,000,000+ people
IT guys will stop using it…
Which means they’ll stop deploying it as the default browser on some large enterprises, it won’t ship as defaults in pre-baked images going forward.
Average joes and janes will use Safari and Edge depending on OS.
Where is their growth going to come from after this change? Chromebooks? lol.
I hope they do it, it will hurt them in the long run.
You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.
You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.
Unfortunately it’s a bigger problem.
Google doesn’t plan to block uBlock Origin itself, but the APIs it uses to integrate into Chrome in order to function. This will effectively disable all adblockers on Chrome. uBlock won’t be removed from the Chrome extension store, it will just have 90% of its functionality removed.
Additionally, this isn’t a Chrome-only change, but a change in the open source Chromium, an upstream browser of Chrome all other Chrome-based browsers use (essentially everything aside from Firefox and Safari themselves).
The change itself is involved in changing the browser’s “Manifest”, a list of allowed API calls for extensions. The current one is called Manifest v2 and the new one was dubbed Manifest v3.
Theorethically Chromium-based browsers could “backport” Manifest v2 due to the open source nature of Chromium. However that is unlikely as it’s projected to take a lot of resources to change, due mostly to security implications of the change.
Vendors of other Chromium-based browsers themselves have little to gain from making the change aside from name recognition for “allowing uBlock”, which most users either wouldn’t care for or already use Firefox, so the loss for Google isn’t projected to be large, just as the gains for other vendors.
TLDR: uBlock won’t be removed from the Chrome extension store, but the mechanisms through which it blocks ads will be blocked. The block isn’t a change in Chrome but in Chromium and affects all Chromium-based brosers (all except Firefox and Safari). Other vendors could change that to allow adblockers but it’s projected to take a lot of time and resources.
There is already a “lite” version of uBlock origin that conforms to the new manifest and will still work.
There are still a few features missing, some can’t be implemented but others will be.
The ‘block element’ picker is the big one that can not be implemented in the lite version.
Also included block lists can’t update unless the extension itself updates.
Those seem like really big hurdles. How can those be worked around?
Is it not possible to trigger a manual block list update?
It’s not something that can be worked around. It’s specifically a design feature of manifest v3 to restrict these types of things.
Your options are to accept this or use a different browser.
Is it by the same author? Nik Rols, iirc?
Raymond Hill (gorhill) is the author of uBlock Origin, uBlock Origin Lite, uMatrix etc.
I remembered… poorly.
IT guys will stop using it…
No, they will not, if they didn’t already. Because convenience it key.
The browser war is over, and humans lost, corporations won. Google and other huge corporations control the biggest websites and most of the access to content on the internet.
They just need to make it inconvenient to use ad-blocking browsers.
They built their business on advertiser gambling, which seem to be flawed concept, because they keep on squeezing that tube for every penny more and more, in a race to the bottom.
But they are still in control of both browers and content so they have options to keep squeezing more.
So you want to use a ad blocker? Well, the browser that supports them might not be white listed (anymore) by the bot detector, and you have to solve captchas on every site you visit, until you come to your senses and use a browser, where ad blocking is no longer possible.
Oh, and all that is ok, because of “security”. Because letting the users be in control of their devices and applications is “in-secure”. They are just doing that to protect you from spam and scams, just trust them! Trust them, because they don’t trust you!
I’m looking into the possibility of moving my organization to FF. Office of about 200 endpoints. The sticky wicket that I don’t fully understand is Auth passthru to 365.
Does this help at all: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/windows-sso
You’re absolutely right.
That said at least I’ll take this as my cue to peace out of the mainstream web and only use Links2.
“IT guys”? Chrome has a 66% market share globally.
Its not the IT guys themselves, its the aggregate influence. One large school campus flips the switch to Firefox on their next image deployment its a drop in a bucket, but when 1000 schools, 2000 government agencies and 5000 businesses all suddenly stop using Chrome the graph starts to move, because laypeople just accept the default.
IT guys are like browser-influencers, they tell their parents what to use, friends, and so on. We all used to recommend Chrome, I don’t anymore.
Thank you Google I hope shitty moves like this drives enough people away to better browsers like Firefox. It desperately needs a bigger market share.
Not only a bigger market share. What’s keeping Firefox alive is the financial support they get from Google. If enough people move from Chrome to Firefox without Firefox also securing finances from elsewhere, Google could easily kill Firefox by just not giving them money and we’d all be left with just Chromium.
I think the real reason Google is funding Firefox is because they’re afraid of being targeted in antitrust lawsuits. As long as Firefox is around, they have someone they can point to, to say they’re not a monopoly.
This 100%. You could maybe argue that Safari exists, but that is Apple exclusive I think, so it would probably not work as an argument.
So, what they’re saying is: Chrome will have severely decreased functionality and users will no longer be able to protect themselves from sketchy ads that contain scams, malware, and other nefarious bullshit (often hosted on Google’s own ad networks)?
What are you expecting, a corp to… ah… uh… not be evil, or something? :-P
Thank you very much for summoning Jeff Goldblum’s voice into my head.
I… uh, found a way:-D.
Google is primarily an ad company
It did not always used to be this way, though it was always headed here.
Sadly I’m far more attached to ad blocking than I am to a browser.
Frankly, at this point I might even be more attached to blocking ads than browsing.
I guess you want the internet to be a place for finding useful information, and/or the entertainment you choose to access, over it being a long uninteruptable stream of infomercials for crap products you have no interest in? Then groogle is not for you. In fact groogle is not for humanity.
That’s a funny way to say “you should uninstall chrome rather than leaving it unused” but I hear you Google. 🫡
Well, I’m forced if I want to use casting to androidTV or chromecast. Edit: fx-cast exists.
Yeah, there isn’t a very good alternative other than occasionally getting lucky that it’s compatible with VLC streaming.
I think it usually works with VLC (but usually not performant), but I don’t think there is an alternative for cast on android (without gapps)
The modern Internet is completely unusable without an ad blocker. Way to remake ie6, Google!
Even with an ad blocker, it gets more unusable every year that goes by
DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT OUR COOKIES OR CUSTOMIZE THESE BULLSHIT OPTIONS???
The only options I want are Girl Scout thin mints or peanut butter cookies
Missing Samoas, those are delicious.
I already know a few people who were just marginally digitally literate, and now they can’t read things like news articles and access several kinds of services anymore, unless someone helps them, because they don’t property know how to close invasive popups and solve captchas.
The internet is literally becoming unusable for some people.
I’m in my mid 60s and know a few people that never even heard the term “browser extension” before. How they tolerate using the web with no ad blocking is beyond me.
Every time I turn off uBlock and reload a webpage I’m like “JFC this is eye cancer”.
Got my boomer mom to finally install an ad blocker. She was tired of looking at a webpage, having an ad give some kind of script run error, and then it reloads back at the top. It’s a big problem on the cooking websites she goes to.
I would rather go back to the days of shitty pop-ups you can just close. These ads are far worse, and none of them even make sense.
the cooking websites she goes to.
https://based.cooking/ doesn’t have everything, but it’s growing and the site is very clean.
What a really interesting initiative. I will try to contribute some things in their repo.
This is amazing and thank you.
Sounds like another reason not to use Chrome.
…Oh, no! Anyway. Just giving people one more reason to finally make the switch to Firefox or something different.
Google Chrome warns about disabling uBlock Origin. I warn Google Chrome that they’re being a little bitch & they’re going to lose users.
Oh no, they are about to lose the $0 that uBlock origin users bring!
They know they will lose users and they don’t care. They will make much more per user selling ads than before. Google is an ad company. They’re not a browser company, or a mobile OS company, or an office suite company. It’s all about ads.
Not necessarily. They still get money from selling user data. So they likely still care about losing users who use adblocking to at least some degree.
Good point, but also it’s not that they will lose all of the user data they sell if people switch off Chrome, just the parts that chrome collects.
If they were blocking ublock users from accessing any google products then it would be purely a ‘we only care about ad revenue’
It would be very interesting to see the internal data they use to make these decisions, but also knowing tech these decisions were probably made by a series of mid level managers sufficiently sucking the air out of the room until a critical mass was hit to make this happen
They absolutely also get data through means other than their browser. But they data they get off of the browser directly is probably a shit load.
but also knowing tech these decisions were probably made by a series of mid level managers sufficiently sucking the air out of the room until a critical mass was hit to make this happen
1000%
I’m sure a bunch of bean counters were involved as well.
They also gain people spreading word of mouth advice to never use chrome
If you also spread the word about uBlock, same rule applies.
Thanks for reaffirming why I refuse to use Chrome.
Could turn out to be a good thing. All power users will dump Chrome practically overnight, a huge boon to the alternatives, that could actually give them enough momentum to compete with Google for a change. I’m sure they’ve considered this, probably an empty treat.
I’m not sure how wide the intersection of power users that use uBO but also haven’t heard of the manifest v3 deprecation coming since like 2019 actually is, but that could be because I’m the type of person to randomly recommend browsers to people and discuss them a lot.
me too. a long time ago i practically forced everyone around me to switch to chrome. now I’m doing the opposite.
I for one have been in denial and probably won’t switch away until it literally stops working. So, there’s hope.
Every browser is either chromium (open source captured by Google) or exists because of a Google search contract (this represents 80% of Mozilla’s revenue), Google can’t lose
That’s pretty optimistic, as tons of power users are still eating that Windows crap, too.
I’m using Firefox or forks.
With the direction FF is taking it’s gonna be forks for now.
The only thing that held me back from using LibreWolf over Firefox was that it disabled (automatic) dark mode on websites. I understand this is part of the “resist fingerprinting” configuration. There’s a workaround now ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1732114).
In about:config update these 3 preferences:
- privacy.resistFingerprinting = false
- privacy.fingerprintingProtection = true
- privacy.fingerprintingProtection.overrides = +AllTargets,-CSSPrefersColorScheme
Dark Reader
