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!
I hope Lina Kahn goes after them for this BS. They have a monopoly on the browser market and they’re exploiting that to further their own interests in the advertising industry.
This is a pretty textbook definition of monopoly abuse.
I can’t see them keeping control of chrome as this goes forward.
Finally made the switch to Firefox just 2 days ago. Great so far.
No, HVEC / H.265 codec support so no modern 4K security camera or plex/jellyfin etc high quality video support.
Jellyfin
Use the desktop client or jellyfin-mpv-shim and you’ll get HEVC support and superior image quality.
Probably no ads on your self-hosted frigate/jellyfin pages though, so you can just keep using chrome for that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
looks like the bigger issue is hvec itself. Also the support is extremely spotty with all the other browsers as well, with it still only having limited support in Chrome as well depending on your hardware.
Or just use av1 instead. I’ve literally never run into this as an issue before lol.
According to caniuse.com, it works now in the Nightly builds and can be enabled in other builds via the
media.wmf.hevc.enabledpref inabout:config.I use Firefox Dev Edition and I think it’s enabled there. But either way, you can enable it on stable.
Night, windows only, and needs to be enabled with about: config… ie it almost has some support maybe. Also doesn’t work via webrtc so it doesn’t actually help me with the viewing the security cam feeds.
champagne problems.
Core web app compatibility vs … “enhanced” ad blocking. MS teams and some other business tools also don’t support Firefox but work fine in Chrome and Safari.
It is something the Firefox team needs to work on again. I used Firefox from when it was released until Chrome came out and mopped the floor with it. At the time Firefox became the bloated beast and went through a reset.
Unfortunately trying to have a firm stance on not implementing HVEC when they no longer had the largest market share was a bad move and they seem to be slowly back tracking on that.
MS Teams not working as well in Firefox is a “we want you using Edge or Chrome” Microsoft issue, not a Firefox issue.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of enterprise-sector MS websites that have went from works fine on Firefox to completely broken on anything but Chrome and Edge very quickly after Edge became Chrome with a lick of paint.
I work in IT I am well aware.
plex/jellyfin etc high quality video support
H265 isn’t the only option there. AV1 is great and fully supported by Jellyfin (and I imagine Plex?)
H.265 is the defecto standard on Security cameras, and I am not going to migrate content to AV1 that is already in H.265.
Use VLC to view the video feed for your cams, better experience overall for that
Not when you are using an NVR with scrubbing and everything in the web UI. https://frigate.video/
All in all it would be an inconvenient workaround for something that already works seamlessly across Safari, Edge, Chrome etc.
damn dude, all you do is bitch. maybe get a different camera setup.
Na man I have modern 4k cameras, I need a modern browser… They have literally build chipsets around this and many standards call for h.264 or h.265. That isn’t changing.
Mozilla decided over 8 years ago not to support HVEC because of patents…
How is giving a sober and straightforward explanation of why he can’t use Firefox “bitching”? The simple fact is “switch to Firefox” isn’t a solution for everyone in every case. Burying your head in the sand about that benefits nobody.
Jellyfin can handle the transcoding to AV1 where needed. Albeit that’s a bit less ideal than direct play as you need the hardware to transcode.
Not spending hundreds to upgrade my server to support 4K to 4K transcoding. Even accelerated on a VERY recent CPU or GPU Encoding in AV1 is costly while at the same time decoding H.265.
Again Essentially every major browser supports HVEC now, other than Firefox.
If it’s a personal machine in which you have a choice on browser why not just use one of the native Jellyfin apps?
major browser supports HVEC now, other than Firefox.
Every other major browser is an overcommercialized pile of crap (or built atop the same) that can afford to pay for the licenses to use HEVC or has no qualms shipping proprietary code with their software that they don’t control.
Also apparently on Windows you can enable experimental HEVC hardware decoding support. You’ll need to install “HEVC Video Extensions” (from Microsoft themselves) ($0.99) in the Windows App Store and toggle “media.wmf.hevc.enabled” in about:config.
be sure to check out the extensions, there’s several that are game changers.
What are some of the game changing extensions?
“I don’t care about cookies” although it does occasionally break some websites
Camelizer, will give you price history for anything on amazon.
probably different for everyone, for me i use Adblocker Ultimate Ublock Origin Enhancer for Youtube DeArrow Stylebot Buster Context play/pause
Christ on a bike, you’d think they’d give it a more succinct name
(Either leave a blank line between lines, or put two spaces at the end of each word)
You used a comma once. You could have used it again …
Looking at the source of the comment, OP only hit enter once per extension name they entered, and that’s why they’re showing up as if they’re one long run-on sentence. @[email protected] probably didn’t know that you have to double enter for things to show up on separate lines.
I went ahead and found links for all of them, for anyone curious to check em out. I don’t personally know any of them, besides uBlock and Stylebot:
thanks Riot, it looked fine in Voyager when i was creating it. hitting enter once for carriage return has been correct for a century, whats with the double enter system?
As far as I know, that’s just always how it’s been for markdown, which is what Lemmy uses. So in order to be sure that your comment looks the way you want it to, it’s a good idea to use the Preview function, which Voyager thankfully also has under the 3 dots menu in the lower right.
@[email protected] also mentioned that you can put two spaces at the end of each word, and then it’ll count the one enter as a proper line break.
Like this. You can also do as I did, and just put a dash in front of everything, and then it’ll turn into an unordered list.
Oh thanks! Dearrow looks interesting
Vimium. Allows you to use your keyboard to navigate instead of needing to always reach for the mouse.
New tab tools.
You can even do a trick to make it your home tab
For me, it was multi-account containers. All Meta properties open in their own independent, sandboxed tabs now. Xwitter opens in a different independent, sandboxed tab. It makes their tracking cookies useless, plus it also lets you be logged into the same service with multiple accounts simultaneously.
Ad nauseum
Underrated
Libredirect
We’ll, uBlock 😎
Listen here, you little shit
Listen here, you little shit
Is duckduckgo chromium based?
I don’t use it, just curious.
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.
There is also a developing project Ladybird (with homebrew libweb), although it is far from production-ready.
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.
There is also Goanna / Pale Moon: https://www.palemoon.org/
Gecko, blink and webkit
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.
I think Brave said they arent affected by this
Why would anyone use that browser though? Besides all the rounds of shit it went through, the CEO seems like a nutcase. First he does anti-lgbt political donations, not just once, and has to resign from Mozilla among outrage after only 21 days as the CEO. Then he tweets uninformed shit about covid and has his staff remove criticism on reddit. Sounds like a real champ.
I mean I write Javascript, also his crestion so theres that.
I know some gay people who love Javascript and its always funny to remind them what the original creator of Javascript did
Does he currently get money if you use JavaScript like the Brave CEO gets for his products?
It’s addressed in the article. The brave CEO has stated they will continue to support manifest v2 as long as the needed code remains in Chromium. He made no promises what happens when it is removed, though (“I don’t write checks of unknown amount and sign them”)
So that means they are just supporting it as long as it is easy to do, and that they are not brave enough to fork chromium.
They’re already a fork of Chromium… Also it doesn’t matter much since they use the Google extension store, which disabled uBO.
You could probably install and handle a manifest V2 extension by installing the xpi file manually. But as a developer, the users who would actually do this is a small fraction of the previous user base.
So how do you justify your limited manpower to be spent on that increasingly obscure user base? It may as well be removed anyways at that point.
Also like Brave has their own adblocker, I dont think you need ublock origin in Brave
Nice pun 😄👌🏻
And guess how soon Chromium will break compatibility with v2…
Ha! Ha! The browser name is “Brave” and yet they all have nuts the size of raisins!
You can make a windows registry change to have Chrome let you keep using uBlock Origin, with the V2 manifest. It will buy you six more months, basically the enterprise support period.
There was a handy shortcut created by the Security Now podcast you can use as a one-click file to update the policy. The show notes also give a more detailed breakdown of what’s going on.
The relevant section in the notes is page 10. The link to the file is page 12. https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-995-notes.pdf
Or just use Firefox and not deal with that.
Also Firefox mobile has nearly all of the extensions as the desktop version so it’s more similar across all of your devices. Personally, I use LibreWolf on desktop and Mull on mobile, but they’re just tweaked versions of Firefox with some bloat and telemetry removed and preconfigured to be more private.
Opera GX has promised to keep MV2 in their code. So I’ll just keep using that until I see something different. The other thing is that Opera GX has built in ad-blocker which is pretty much on par with third parties.
Firefox is not the “great browser” you think it is. It has had its fair share of fuckups and failures over the years, like laxed security certificate updates leaving users in limbo.
Google didn’t come and just out do Firefox. It was the other way around, firefox fucked themselves with poor management and failure after failure, and people left. Chrome was the new boy in town, and that is why firefox is where it is today.
Also, I would never use firefox, if I do need an alternative browser renderer, I use WATERFOX which is far more privacy compliant than firefix ever has been.
brave i think has that too which is a controversial browser as well waterfox is a great browser tho.
here are the reasons you shouldnt use opera or even operagx btw: https://rentry.co/operagx and braveHoly fuck, I knew about Brave, but not Opera… I’m glad I never even tried it.
Yw dude :)
Doesn’t opera gx have horrible privacy issues?
yeah but it’s GAMER so it’s okay
Opera GX has promised to keep MV2 in their code. So I’ll just keep using that until I see something different. The other thing is that Opera GX has built in ad-blocker which is pretty much on par with third parties.
I couldn’t find a source for either of these claims. Can you help me out?
Chrome, now with added crypto and homophobia
Vivaldi has that, too, without the cryptobro People owning the browser.
I switched to Zen, personally as any chromium seems to be doomed unless someone manages to fork the base project and take it away from Google
Vivaldi is closed source. Brave isn’t. Even with all its very real problems, Brave is the best option aside from Firefox, especially once you turn off all the weird stuff
vivaldi has components open source but the ui is non-free
That’s essentially the same as not being open source considering the only part that’s open source is the engine code, which is mostly just chromium
i am talking about this, You cannot compile it from source tho.
this is why vivaldis ui is not open sourceYes, I’m aware, that’s what I was talking about too. As much as I love Vivaldi and want to trust them, i don’t think i can trust them as easily as Brave
idk if this blog is right or wrong correct me:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/why-vivaldi-will-never-create-thinkcoin/That’s explicitly making clear how bad of an idea crypto is?
It’s their opinion on crypto
Yeah - and they explain why they’ll never do a crypto currency. I don’t see how this is challenging anything I said before
Alr
Crypto stuff in Brave is opt-in. So just don’t turn it on.
personally as any chromium seems to be doomed unless someone manages to fork the base project and take it away from Google
ungoogled-chromium (windows version) is that.
When was chrome or chromium safe?
Bloated memory hole in the last 10yrs.
The way it goes about Sucking up resources convinced me to switch to Firefox completely long ago.
Yes it was performance that first got me to switch too. But now I have plenty more reasons.
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)
Hate to break it to you, but you are not Google’s customer. Don’t believe me? How much did you pay for Chrome?
This move is in fact being made with their actual customers in mind.
Sooo… those that buy ads you mean.
Google is an advertising company. Vertical integration ftw?
You’re correct, but your argument is bad. I also paid $0 for Linux.
And look how many Linux distro producing companies there are that are the size of Google or that earn even a significant fraction of what Google earns.
Linux is a totally different ballgame. It started out with open source and free access in mind. Linux distros are often made by volunteer developers who do it for the love of the game, non-profit companies, or companies that have found some way to monitize it like RHEL. And companies certainly pay for support, standardization, and exhaustive stability validation. There’s also the commercial use of Red Hat’s customizations, and arguably faster responses to patching vulnerabilities.
Well said. Also maybe you forgot you wrote the comment by the afternoon, but it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to finally research more into adhd for better managing it, so thanks!
I still hope as part of the antitrust ruling, they rip chrome from Google and undo this crap.
I’ve had good luck with uBlock Lite.
(Yes I could swap browsers but nah).
Just swap from Chrome, it’s not gonna change your life to use Firefox
Just bite the bullet.
We kept Firefox alive for you all these years. You’re welcome.
Didn’t Google paying them loads of money keep FF alive?
Yes, but Google would not have done that if nobody used Firefox
Yes and it’s likely that they will not be allowed to any longer after Google lost their anti-trust case.
Am I going to die?
We all do.
Some sooner than others.
I have been using a fork of Firefox called Floorp and so far pretty happy with it. Chrome and any variant of it has essentially a monopoly on the browser and Firefox will just follow what Google says anyway so I wouldn’t recommend native firefox. It would be nice if Safari(WebKit) was more stable and available as an alternative.
Anyway: https://floorp.app/
It kills the full version of uBlock but there is a lite version that has fewer functions as well.
For now. And Google super mega promises to never rug pull that one.
Oh great. Back to sucking Google’s teat for me then!
