Google is weakening ad blockers as part of their MV3 extension standard and this will trickle down into all Chromium browsers. Built in ad blockers lack features compared to uBlock Origin as well.
Duh, Firefox. This is not a problem.
Anyone know how/if this affects Opera GX? I’ve been curious about it for a while but with MV3 it makes me curious if they will do anything at all. Or honestly if Opera GX even could block ad’s and such, I never checked
Firefox and its other forks are the best option right now
Has been for as long as I can remember.
Highly recommend setting up a PiHole. It may not be quite as comprehensive as uBlock, but it cuts the ads way down, and it’s not something that browsers can easily bypass. You do have to make sure to shut of DNS over HTTPS, or setup a separate solution for that to tunnel into PiHole.
I know that ploum blog post gets cited way too often on Lemmy, but this is a situation where I think Google has either intentionally or inadvertently executed a variation of the “embrace, extend, extinguish” playbook that Microsoft created.
They embraced open source, extended it until they’ve practically cornered the market on browser engine, and now they are using that position to extinguish our ability to control our browsing experience.
I know they are facing a possibly “break up” with the latest ruling against them.
It would be interesting to see if they force divestiture of chrome from the ad business. The incentives are perverse when you do both with such dominance and its a massive conflict of interest.
Make no mistake, what Google is doing is absolutely dangerous. Malvertisements are definitely a thing. Back in 2010, I got a virus from an ad on a meme site that just went through and trashed my hard drive.
It’s unfortunate that there are use cases out there where Chrome is absolutely required. Firefox can’t display large directories, for instance. It’ll lock up while chromium browsers work fine.
Fuck Google.
Dammit, Sam. 🤦🏽♂️
Google is not killing uBlock Origin. It’s changing how Chrome works. uBlock Origin will continue to work in my Firefox and other browsers.
They’re changing how chrome works… …in a way that just coincidentally makes ad blockers a lot less functional.
They’re an advertising company, no conflict of interest there at all
This is a shit take. Manifest v3 is like activex. As of right now, it shuts down extensions they don’t want. Going forward, it sets up a system for extensions that are publisher-approved. When internet explorer took over the market I could still use Netscape until I couldn’t. I’m hoping Firefox doesn’t reach the same end
Who is the Lemmy user not aware of this? Show yourself!
I switched to Firefox about a month ago for personal use. It’s nearly impossible for me to quit using Chrome, though, due to work.
I don’t hate Firefox, but it does absolutely do some stupid shit that I don’t like.
What kind of stuff?
As someone who uses Vivaldi, which has a significant number of power user and customization features, the fact this is no longer a thing is fucking bonkers to me
I can turn on an unsupported flag to make the UI a little cleaner for me
To me, it’s wild that the browser for the user decided to deprecate an option like that. Since they dropped XUL support I have very few options on customizing my browser outside of a theme or just writing my own CSS
From there, I’d just point to:
Firefox pulls in like 500 million dollars a year from Google. Barely any of those features exist in Firefox
I started with Firefox. I used it from day one, when it was an experiment coming out of the Mozilla suite.
I want to use it day to day so bad
But it’s become “how do we chase chrome”
And occasionally they get wins like this. And it no longer feels like
“How can we be best?”
You can customize the Firefox UI with CSS, if you’re looking for really advanced customization capabilities.
I’ve made a one-line theme as my ‘compact’ mode of choice, where URL bar and tabs are all on one row, but you can find lots of pre-made themes out there.
See !firefoxcss@lemmy.world for more info and help.And well, you shouldn’t compare Firefox and Vivaldi from a monetary side.
Mozilla develops their own browser engine, which is really important for the web, whereas Vivaldi only really develops that customizable UI. If Google stops publishing the source code of Chromium, Vivaldi is dead in a few months.Have I got a pleasant surprise for you: Zen Browser is to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chromium: a feature-rich powerhouse.
- It’s not super simple to setup multiple, completely separate profiles like it is in Chrome
- I never, ever visit google.com while I do visit gmail.com at least daily. Yet, when I type ‘g’ the suggestion is always google.com
- I visit m.fark.com on my phone quite frequently. Firefox on my phone randomly decides I want to do a google search for ‘m.fark.com’ instead of visit the site
- I don’t want the recently closed tabs to be tracked and listed, yet there is no way to turn that off
- If the menu bar is displayed the the first browser tab is left aligned. If the menu bar is turned off then the first browser tab is indented for no obvious reason.
- I don’t think I can clear my history without it closing all of my Firefox instances and making me reopen everything.
There’s no one thing that is a show-stopper… just little annoyances.
It’s not firefox’s fault, but I still use music.youtube.com and google hangouts and there’s no option to treat them like standalone apps like there is with chrome.
You have way more requirements than me!
For profiles, from memory it’s --profile-manager
about:profiles
I don’t think I can clear my history without it closing all of my Firefox instances and making me reopen everything.
That’s not true - are you using always private mode?
No, I’m using the ‘Forget about some browsing history’ button. You can selectively remove some entries just from history, but that still leaves them in your recent tabs list. If you just want the last 5 minutes of browsing gone then you have to do the rewind and that closes all tabs/instances.
Why not just open private browsing windows if you don’t want your browser remembering those pages? Are you deciding afterwards that you want to forget those pages?
Are you deciding afterwards that you want to forget those pages?
Frequently, yes… There’s also some pages/content on sites where you have to be logged in. Yeah, you could go private and login, but that’s just more steps. I just want to hit a button and have it nuke the last 5 minutes of my browsing without closing my current tabs/browsers.
Not trying to be obtuse here, but why are you pruning your history in the first place? Is someone auditing your browsing history? I’m personally not interested in removing my browser history for the most part - and certainly not frequently enough to notice this limitation.
For me, it’s mostly that the Android app doesn’t have a tab bar, even on tablet (just a stretched out phone ui), and i want a browser i can sync across all my devices, so that issue with the tablet ui is enough for me to use a different browser (the amazing Vivaldi) everywhere.
I prefer the DDG browser for android.
MS Teams does not work properly on Firefox for example (I’m forced to use it once in a while for work). Same with other web-apps that often don’t function correctly.
On Android Chrome manages to stay open while multitasking while Firefox will close the tab 90% of the time requiring reloading the page. That’s especially annoying during check-out or logins when I need to switch to a 2FA app.
Ah teams. Yes, yuck.
Vivaldi (and Brave I think) are safe until July 2025.
“Safe until” = not safe
Yes
No, it’s safe “for now” You have time to find a better solution
Any chromium browser is with a flag enabled.
Just switch to Firefox or a derivative already guys.
LibreWolf or mullvad browser both FF based.
Chromium
No
Gonna stick with Vivaldi until its last breath, love this browser
What makes you say this? Brave is my primary and doesn’t need uBlock to effectively block ads
My comment is specifically around v2 Manifest support for addons. uBlock Origin requires v2 manifest. If you’re fine without it, you can’t ignore all of this discussion. However, uBlock Origin can block more than ads.
Yeah I will probably need to switch over to firefox if Brave is gonna break. Are the blockers in Brave V2 do you know?
I don’t know. I’m not a Brave user. I saw the v2 Manifest comments elsewhere when looking at Vivaldi info, and it was also mentioned Brave was following the same July 2025 as Vivaldi for v2 manifest (old school addon format) support.
Happy pfSense + pfBlockerNG user here. It even blocks ads on some of my streaming services.
Turning off auto updates on chrome was convoluted. I assume everything will break when they force this update even with auto updates off.
It’s probably going to prevent security updates too and that’s worse than ad tracking.
looking at the 4“ woman poledancing in the bottom right corner of my windows vista screen
Huh?
VirtuaGirls?
Or use UBO-Lite? MV3 has some limitations but I’m tired of people acting like it ruins ad blocking when it doesn’t.
For situations where you’re forced to use chromium browsers it’s better than nothing, but abandoning chromium browsers is the right thing to do. An example of a situation where you can’t is an IT policy preventing you from using Firefox.
Abandoning Chromium browsers does nothing to improve security or privacy. I certainly encourage people to try Firefox and other browsers as they become available, but it’s mostly just a matter of preference in what features you want. If you want maximum privacy with Chromium or Firefox then you’re going to use policies, flags, etc. Otherwise both are prone to telemetry.
Afaik, UBO lite only updates filter lists when the extension updates, has no element zapper/picker, no per site switches, and no dynamic filtering.
If you can live without these features, then good for you. But there’s no need to get frustrated about our claims just because we need better ad-blocking and privacy functions than you.
Then build them. There is nothing about MV3 that stops you from improving things. I don’t blame you from wanting good ad blocking, as do I. But I also don’t want every MV2 extension being able to read my network traffic.